Robert Service Author

[Theodor Urena]

Hewas compulsive about writing, too. He wrote poetry constantly, and adventure books in prose, volume after volume, from his first poems as a bank clerk in Scotland in the 1880s until his last book of verse, published in 1956. Typically of his genre, it was called Rhymes for my Rags, though long before that date, his writing had made him wealthy.

As a versifier Service was a huge success, both commercially and in the long run culturally through the legacy of his work. He would never have been considered for the Griffin prize if it had existed in his lifetime, but his verse made him popular, wealthy, and famous. He wrote over a thousand poems, several novels, and published forty-five collections of verse. And his legacy has lasted.

William R. Morrison has taught History at Brandon University, Lakehead University, the University of Victoria, Duke University, and the University of Northern British Columbia, where he retired as Professor Emeritus of History. He is author, editor, and co-author of sixteen books on Canadian History and Universities. He lives in Ladysmith, BC.

The Ormsby Review is a journal service for in-depth coverage of B.C. books and authors. The Advisory Board consists of Jean Barman, Robin Fisher, Cole Harris, Wade Davis, Hugh Johnston, Patricia Roy, David Stouck, and Graeme Wynn. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Provincial Government Patron since September 2018: Creative BC

Ten years ago, when I was twenty-one, I spent some months in the company of disgruntled U.S. Viet Nam war vets at sea and in fishing towns on the Alaska coast. I was never out of the company of someone who could recite a poem of Robert Service, and his complete works in verse were for sale by the cash register in every place where you could buy anything at all. When we were lined up to pay for our liquor once on shore, my friend Stan--sorry, we didn't really use last names--saw the book and started to recite Service poems I had never heard. After we had drunk what we had bought he started on his own work, wonderful stuff about Sioux. He told me it was cowboy poetry, and said it all came from his feelings for his family's history in Wyoming. Stan was a drinker in Viet Nam, too, where he told how he had laid an instant steel runway surface, hijacked a beer truck, and woken up once after a drunk outside his perimeter to see his buddy's head stuck on the horn of a water buffalo. Years later when I started to write biographies for a collection of brief lives of U.S. poets, I didn't know whether Service was an American or not, but I knew for sure that the reader who I wanted to use my book would be looking for him there. Stan, for instance. When I got to the library, Service turned out to be an author with a complicated and interesting relation to war and books, as well as to the frontier. The collection won't be out for years, but here is my report on the Bard of the Frozen North:

Robert William Service (1874-1958), a British subject, was born in England and raised in Scotland. He married in Paris and died in Britanny. But it was the verse from his young manhood as an emigrant to Canada, when he hoboed in California and followed the gold miners to the Yukon, that made his reputation.

Service was born on January 16th, 1974 in Preston, Lancashire to Robert and Emily Service of 4 Christian Road. The poet eventually had six brothers and three sisters. His father, a Scot, worked in a bank until his wife, daughter of an English mill-owner, inherited several thousand pounds. He quit work and moved the family back to his native Glasgow.

Young Robert was sent to live in the household of his grandfather John Service, postmaster in Kilwinning, Ayrshire, and raised there in a house full of aunts. Jeanie, Bella, and Jennie took him to Sabbath services, enrolled him in the parish school, and introduced him to the work of Robert Burns. Burns had lived in the area, and Service later claimed that his great grandfather had been a crony of Scotland's national poet.

After a few years, his parents retrieved the boy to their shabby but respectable address in Glasgow. He attended a bad primary school, Church, and was expelled from a good secondary school, Hillhead, in 1888, for insubordination at sports. Like Samuel Johnson, the adult Service observed that he did the bulk of his reading as a boy, "between ten and twenty." His sources were Miss Bell's Circulating Library and the Public Library. He read the British adventure writers: Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, James Reid, Manville Fenn and Talbot Baines Reed.

He spent a summer by the sea, then started work in a shipping office. It didn't take, and in 1889 he apprenticed to the Commercial Bank of Scotland. He stayed at the Stobcross branch until 1896. The work allowed leisure. He read Keats, Tennyson and Browning with appreciation, but was struck more deeply by Owen Meredith, Coventry Patmore, Austin Dobson, William Thackeray, and the American Edgar Allen Poe. He published about twenty poems of love in the Glasgow weeklies.

But his reading turned to Eugene Field and Bret Harte, American roughnecks. He took up sports at the age of seventeen, playing a season each of rugby and cricket. Then he started going to music halls, and following vaudeville. He studied elocution and won bit parts on stage, including second watchman in Macbeth.

Still living at home, he attended college briefly on a part-time basis. He read more widely, taking in Henry Thoreau and George Borrow, Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Victor Hugo, Balzac, and the Goncourt brothers. George Moore's Bohemian tale, Confessions of a Young Man, and Morley Robert's hobo travelogue, Western Avernus, introduced Service to his own great subject, life on the loose.

Taken with the idea of freedom, he read all he could about Canada in the pamphlets of the Emigration Office. A promotion in 1895 allowed Service to save enough money to quit the bank a year later. He sailed steerage in a steamer to Saskatchewan, immediately taking a train for colonists across the continent to Vancouver Island. On the way across, he sold his bags, his suit, his gun and his camera for ready cash, and arrived with only pocket money. One of his few remaining belongings was a copy of Stevenson's An Amateur Emigrant.

Service got work on a farm north of Victoria. He gave over the job to winter in the cabin of a country layabout, where there was a large back stock of Harper's magazines. In the spring of 1897, he found a place at another ranch, working to save enough wages over the summer to go traveling. In December he steamed from Seattle to San Francisco, where he passed up an offer of steady work as a servant. He wanted to stay free, and started his hard times.

A short, hellish job tunneling in San Gabriel Canyon yielded one small paycheck. He discounted it at 50% and took a train south into Los Angeles on Christmas Day. He slept at a church mission and read the days away at the Public Library. After the New Year he roused himself and did day labor. He carried an advertising banner in the city, then picked citrus just outside of town.

He advertised for work for an educated man. He got a position in a genteel whorehouse near San Diego, doing odd jobs. When their old handyman came back, the ladies sent Service away with a gift, a guitar in a traveling case. Service could play music on any instrument, so he hit the road as wandering minstrel. Work in this line was scarce. He drifted down through Mexico, and back up to Los Angeles. He headed out again through Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona, where he lost his guitar off a railroad trestle in the Tehachapi Mountains.

He struck north. He tried a job in a sawmill. But the hard industrial work drove him off, back to a ranch on Victoria. Working with cows at least let him think, and the summertime chores were light. In winter a bull cracked his ribs. While he lay mending, a job opened up at the local store. Service became a clerk again, reading in the office, larking at sports and theater in his leisure time. He kept at it four years.

He left the store in 1903 to get a degree for teaching school. Despite a summer's study, he failed the entrance examination in two subjects, French and math. He dropped the idea of teaching. He took his letter of recommendation from the Commercial Bank of Scotland--carried all those years--to the Canadian Bank of Commerce in Victoria.

It was banking, which Service fled in Scotland, that let him make his name as the poet of the North American roughneck. They took him on in Victoria, 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 White Horse branch in the Yukon. With the expense money he bought himself a raccoon coat, just like in the whiskey ad.

Robert Service lived in the Yukon as a dandy, not a prospector. The big gold strike there had been in 1898, when Service headed south from Vancouver. Now the small miners had gone north to the Alaska strike, and their old claims were being dredged by machine. White Horse had 30,000 people in 1901: in 1910 there would be 9,000. In the ruins of the boom town, Service carried on as he had in Kamloops and Victoria, moving strictly in the upper crust. He skated in the winter, and played midnight tennis in the Arctic summer.

He was saving his money. His laundry, his food, and his lodging were paid for by the bank. The plan was to acquire capital, and try the free life again as a small investor instead of a tramp. He aimed for five thousand dollars, to yield twenty dollars a month at five percent. Service achieved his goal in a grander manner than he planned, through poetry.

He had been writing from time to time. "The Old Log Cabin" appeared in the White Horse Star on May 2, 1902, while Service was still a store clerk in Victoria. "Apart and Together," a poem of love in his Glasgow manner, appeared in Munsey's Magazine in December 1903. His collected verse includes at least one poem, "Song of the Wage Slave" written at the mission in Los Angeles.

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