Robert William Service

Robert William Service (January 16, 1874 – September 11, 1958) was a British-Canadian poet and writer, often called "the Bard of the Yukon". The middle name 'William' was in honour of a rich uncle. When that uncle neglected to provide for him in his will, Service dropped the middle name.

Born in Lancashire of Scottish descent, he was a bank clerk by trade, but spent long periods travelling in the west in the United States and Canada, often in poverty. When his bank sent him to the Yukon, he was inspired by tales of the Klondike Gold Rush, and wrote two poems, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee", which showed remarkable authenticity from an author with no experience of gold-mining, and enjoyed immediate popularity. Encouraged by this, he quickly wrote more poems on the same theme, which were published as '' Songs of a Sourdough'' (re-titled ''The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses'' in the U.S.), and achieved a massive sale. When his next collection ''Ballads of a Cheechako'' proved equally successful, Service could afford to travel widely and live a leisurely life, basing himself in Paris and the French Riviera.

Partly because of their popularity, and the speed with which he wrote them, his works were dismissed as doggerel by the critics, who tended to say the same of Rudyard Kipling, with whom Service was often compared. This did not worry Service, who was happy to classify his work as “verse, not poetry”.

Life

Early life

Service was born in Preston, Lancashire, England, the third of ten children. His father, also Robert Service, was a banker from Kilwinning, Scotland, who had been transferred to England.

When he was five, Service was sent to live in Kilwinning with his three maiden aunts and his paternal grandfather, the town's postmaster. There he is said to have composed his first verse, a grace, on his sixth birthday:

At nine, Service re-joined his parents who had moved to Glasgow. He attended Glasgow's Hillhead High School.Extended Biography
" RobertWService.com, July 21, 2003, 1. Web, Apr. 4, 2011

After leaving school,David Evans,
Service, Robert William
," ''Canadian Encyclopedia'' (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1988), 1981–1982. Service joined the Commercial Bank of Scotland which would later become the Royal Bank of Scotland.Poetry – Robert W. Service
" ElectricScotland.com, Web, Apr. 22, 2011. He was writing at this time and reportedly already "selling his verses". He was also reading poetry: Browning, Keats, Tennyson, and Thackeray.

When he was 21, Service travelled to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, with his Buffalo Bill outfit and dreams of becoming a cowboy. He drifted around western North America, "wandering from California to British Columbia," taking and quitting a series of jobs: "Starving in Mexico, residing in a California bordello, farming on Vancouver Island and pursuing unrequited love in Vancouver.""
Robert Service: Under the Spell of the Yukon
'" by Enid Mallory, YukonBooks.com, Web, Apr. 4, 2011 This sometimes required him to leech off his parents' Scottish neighbours and friends who had previously emigrated to Canada.

In 1899, when Service was a store clerk in Cowichan Bay, British Columbia, he mentioned to a customer that he wrote verses. The customer was Charles H. Gibbons, editor of the Victoria ''Daily Colonist''), who invited Service to submit his work. By July 1900, six poems by "R.S." on the Boer Wars had appeared in the ''Colonist''Peter J. Mitham, Introduction to "Mossback Minstrelsy: Th
British Columbia Verse of Robert W. Service
" ''Canadian Poetry'' No. 39, UWO, Web, Apr. 5, 2011. – including " The March of the Dead", which would later appear in his first book. (Service's brother, Alick, was a prisoner of the Boers at the time. He had been captured on November 15, 1899, alongside Winston Churchill.)

The ''Colonist'' also published Service's " Music in the Bush" on September 18, 1901, and " The Little Old Log Cabin" on March 16, 1902.

In her 2006 biography, ''Under the Spell of the Yukon'', Enid Mallory revealed that Service had fallen in love during this period. He was working as a "farm labourer and store clerk when he first met Constance MacLean at a dance in Duncan B.C., where she was visiting her uncle." MacLean lived in Vancouver, on the mainland, so he courted her by mail. Though he was smitten, "MacLean was looking for a man of education and means to support her" so was not that interested. To please her, he took courses at McGill University's Victoria College, but failed.Michael Gates,
Robert Service's Secret Love Life
" Dawson City History, CityofDawson.com, Web, Apr. 5, 2011

In 1903, down on his luck, Service was hired by a Canadian Bank of Commerce branch in Victoria, British Columbia, using his Commercial Bank letter of reference.Sam Holloway,
Robert Service and Destiny
" ''The Yukoner Magazine''. Web, Accessed 2008.11.19. The bank "watched him, gave him a raise, and sent him to Kamloops in the middle of British Columbia. In Victoria he lived over the bank with a hired piano, and dressed for dinner. In Kamloops, horse country, he played polo. In the fall of 1904, the bank sent him to their Whitehorse branch in Yukon. With the expense money he bought himself a raccoon coat."Extended [Biography]
" RobertWService.com, July 21, 2003, 2. Web, Apr. 4, 2011

Throughout this period, Service continued writing and saving his verses: "more than a third of the poems in his first volume had been written before he moved north in 1904."Sharon Smulders,
A Man in a World of Men
: The Rough, the Tough, and the Tender in Robert W. Service’s ''Songs of a Sourdough''," ''Studies in Canadian Literature'', 30:1 (2005), UNB.ca, Web, Apr. 5, 2011.

Yukon period

Whitehorse was a frontier town, less than ten years old. Located on the Yukon River at the White Horse Rapids, it had begun in 1897 as a campground for prospectors on their way to Dawson City to join the Klondike Gold Rush. The railroad that Service rode in on, the White Pass and Yukon Route, had reached Whitehorse only in 1900.

Settling in, "Service dreamed and listened to the stories of the great gold rush." He also "took part in the extremely active Whitehorse social life. As was popular at the time he recited at concerts – things such as 'Casey at the Bat' and ' Gunga Din', but they were getting stale."

One day (Service later wrote), while pondering what to recite at an upcoming church concert he met E. J. "Stroller" White, editor of the ''Whitehorse Star''. White suggested: "Why don’t you write a poem for it? Give us something about our own bit of earth. We sure would appreciate it. There’s a rich paystreak waiting for someone to work. Why don’t you go in and stake it?"

Returning from a walk one Saturday night, Service heard the sounds of revelry from a saloon, and the phrase "A bunch of the boys were whooping it up" popped into his head. Inspired, he ran to the bank to write it down (almost being shot as a burglar), and by the next morning "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" was complete.

"A month or so later he heard a gold rush yarn from a Dawson mining man about a fellow who cremated his pal." He spent the night walking in the woods composing "The Cremation of Sam McGee", and wrote it down from memory the next day.

Other verses quickly followed. "In the early spring he stood above the heights of Miles Canyon... the line 'I have gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on' came into his mind and again he hammered out a complete poem, "The Call of the Wild". Conversations with locals led Service to write about things he had not seen (some of which had not even happened) as well. He did not set foot in Dawson City until 1908, arriving in the Klondike ten years after the Gold Rush when his renown as a writer was already established.1905 R. W. Service: Bard of the Yukon
, ''Whitehorse Star'' online archive, September 11, 2008.
," Kilwinning, ThreeTowners.com, Web, Apr. 2011

After having collected enough poems for a book, Service "sent the poems to his father, who had emigrated to Toronto, and asked him to find a printing house so they could make it into a booklet. He enclosed a cheque to cover the costs and intended to give these booklets away to his friends in Whitehorse" for Christmas. His father took the manuscript to William Briggs in Toronto, whose employees loved the book. "The foreman and printers recited the ballads while they worked. A salesman read the proofs out loud as they came off the typesetting machines." An "enterprising salesman sold 1700 copies in advance orders from galley proofs." The publisher "sent Robert's cheque back to him and offered a ten percent royalty contract for the book."

Service's book, ''Songs of a Sourdough'', given the more Jack London-ish title, ''The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses'' in the United States, was "an immediate success." It went through seven printings even before its official release date. Ultimately, Briggs "sold fifteen impressions in 1907. That same year there was an edition in New York, Philadelphia, and London. The London publisher, T. Fisher Unwin, struck a twenty-third printing in 1910, and thirteen more by 1917." "Service eventually earned in excess of $100,000 for ''Songs of a Sourdough'' alone" (equal to about $ today after inflation).

"When copies of the book reached Whitehorse, Robert's own minister took him aside to let him know how wicked were his stories. Service hung his head in shame.... But, that summer, tourists from the south arrived in Whitehorse looking for the famous poet; and he autographed many of his books."

"In 1908, after working for the bank for three years in Whitehorse, he was sent outside on mandatory paid leave for three months, a standard practice for bank employees serving in the Yukon." According to Enid Mallory, he went to Vancouver and looked up Constance MacLean. Now that he was a successful author, she agreed to become engaged to him.

Following his leave, in 1908 the bank transferred Service to Dawson, where he met veterans of the Gold Rush, now ten years in the past: "they loved to reminisce, and Robert listened carefully and remembered." He used their tales to write a second book of verse, ''Ballads of a Cheechako'', in 1908. "It too was an overwhelming success."

In 1909, when the bank wanted Service to return to Whitehorse as manager, he decided to resign. "After quitting his job, he rented a small two-room cabin on Eighth Avenue in Dawson City from Mrs. Edna Clarke and began his career as a full-time author." He immediately "went to work on his novel.... He went for walks that lasted all night, slept till mid-afternoon, and sometimes didn't come out of the cabin for days. In five months the novel, entitled ''The Trail of '98'', was complete and he took it to a publisher in New York." Service's first novel also "immediately became a best-seller."

Newly wealthy, Service was able to travel to Paris, the French Riviera, Hollywood, and beyond. He returned to Dawson City in 1912 to write his third book of poetry, ''Rhymes of a Rolling Stone'' (1912). During that time he became a freemason, being initiated into Yukon Lodge No. 45 in Dawson.Robert W. Service
" Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon, Web, Apr. 4, 2011

It is unclear what happened between Service and Constance MacLean as no known letters between them exist after Service's departure for Dawson City. In 1912 she "married Leroy Grant, a surveyor and railroad engineer based in Prince Rupert."

Later life

Service left Dawson City for good in 1912. From 1912 to 1913 he was a correspondent for the ''Toronto Star'' during the Balkan Wars.

In 1913, Service moved to Paris, remaining there for the next 15 years. He settled in the Latin Quarter, posing as a painter. In June 1913, he married Parisienne Germaine Bourgoin, daughter of a distillery owner, and they purchased a summer home at Lancieux, Côtes-d'Armor, in the Brittany region of France.Extended [Biography]
," RobertWService.com, July 21, 2003, 3. Web, Apr. 4, 2011 Thirteen years younger than her husband, Germaine Service survived him by 31 years, dying aged 102 on December 26, 1989 in Monte Carlo, Monaco.

Service was 40 when World War I broke out; he attempted to enlist, but was turned down "due to varicose veins." He briefly covered the war for the ''Toronto Star'' (from December 11, 1915, through January 29, 1916), but "was arrested and nearly executed in an outbreak of spy hysteria in Dunkirk." He then "worked as a stretcher bearer and ambulance driver with the Ambulance Corps of the American Red Cross, until his health broke." Convalescing in Paris, he wrote a new book of mainly war poetry, ''Rhymes of a Red Cross Man'', in 1916. The book was dedicated to the memory of Service's "brother, Lieutenant Albert Service, Canadian Infantry, Killed in Action, France, August 1916." Robert Service received three medals for his war service: 1914–15 Star, British War Medal and the Victory Medal.

With the end of the war, Service "settled down to being a rich man in Paris.... During the day he would promenade in the best suits, with a monocle. At night he went out in old clothes with the company of his doorman, a retired policeman, to visit the lowest dives of the city". During his time in Paris he was reputedly the wealthiest author living in the city, yet was known to dress as a working man and walk the streets, blending in and observing everything around him. Those experiences would be used in his next book of poetry, ''Ballads of a Bohemian'' (1921): "The poems are given in the persona of an American poet in Paris who serves as an ambulance driver and an infantryman in the war. The verses are separated by diary entries over a period of four years."

In the 1920s, Service began writing thriller novels. ''The Poisoned Paradise, A Romance of Monte Carlo'' (New York, 1922) and ''The Roughneck. A Tale of Tahiti'' (New York, 1923) were both later made into silent movies. During the winter season, Service used to live in Nice with his family, where he met British writers, including H. G. Wells

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases