Robert W. Service

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Robert William Service (January 16, 1874-58), a British-Canadian poet and writer, was often referred to as "the Bard of the Yukon." He was born in Lancashire of Scottish descent but lived in Western America and Canada for long stretches of poverty.

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 had a remarkable authenticity from an author with no knowledge of gold mining and enjoyed immediate success.

Inspired by this, he wrote more poems on the same subject, which were published as Songs of a Sourdough (re-titled The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses in the United States). (which resulted in a huge sell.)

Service could afford to travel widely and live a leisurely life in Paris and the French Riviera when his new collection, Ballads of a Cheechako, was assufa. His books were dismissed by the critics partly because of their fame and speed with which they were written. They were compared to Kipling, who was frequently compared.

This did not bother Service, who was content to describe his work as "verse, not poetry" in his description.

Life

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

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

Service re-joined his parents who had migrated to Glasgow at the age of nine. He attended Hillhead High School in Glasgow.

After leaving school, Service joined the Commercial Bank of Scotland, which would later become the Royal Bank of Scotland. He was writing at the time and is reportedly already "selling his words." Browning, Keats, Tennyson, and Thackeray were among his poems.

With his Buffalo Bill suit and aspirations of becoming a cowboy, Service traveled to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in 1991. "He went from California to British Columbia," he said, "starting in Mexico, farming on Vancouver Island, and searching for unrequited love in Vancouver." He had to leech off his parents' Scottish neighbours and relatives who had previously immigrated to Canada.

When Service was a store clerk in Cowichan Bay, British Columbia, he told a customer that he wrote verses. Charles H. Gibbons, editor of the Victoria Daily Colonist, was commissioned by Service to submit his work by the customer. "R.S." wrote six poems by July 1900. The Boer Wars had appeared in the Colonist, including "The March of the Dead," which would later appear in his first book. Alick, the service's brother, was a prisoner of the Boers at the time.) (He and Winston Churchill were captured on November 15, 1899)

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

Enid Mallory's 2006 book Under the Spell of the Yukon revealed that Service had fallen in love during this period. When he first encountered Constance MacLean, she was visiting her uncle" in Duncan, B.C., he was working as a "farm labourer and store clerk." MacLean was born in Vancouver, mainland China, so he sued her by mail. "MacLean, despite being smitten, was looking for a man of education and means to assist her" so she wasn't all concerned. He attended Victoria College at McGill University, but it was not enough to please her.

Service was recruited by a Canadian Bank of Commerce branch in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1903, down on his luck, using his Commercial Bank letter of reference. "Watched him, gave him a raise, and sent him to Kamloops, British Columbia's middle. He lived over the bank with a hired piano and dressed for dinner in Victoria. He played polo in Kamloops, horse country. The bank took him to their Whitehorse branch in Yukon in 1904, during the fall of 1904. With the money he saved himself, he bought himself a raccoon coat."

"More than a third of the poems in his first collection were written before moving north in 1904," Service continued writing and saving his verses.

Whitehorse was a small town less than ten years old. It was established in 1897 as a prospector camp on their way to Dawson City to join the Klondike Gold Rush. The White Pass and Yukon Route, which Service rode in on, had only been to Whitehorse in 1900.

"Service aspired and listened to the tales of the great gold rush," the narrator begins. He also "belonged to the Whitehorse social life." He recited at concerts, including 'Casey at the Bat' and 'Gunga Din,' but they were getting stale."

He met E. J. one day (Service later) while pondering what to recite at a forthcoming church concert. The Whitehorse Star's editor, "stroller" White, calls him "stroller" White. "Why don't you write a poem about it?" White wondered. Give us a glimpse of our own planet. We'd sure love it. Someone is dragged into work on a good payload.

Why don’t you go in and stake it?"

One Saturday night, returning from a walk, Service heard the sounds of revelry from a saloon, and the phrase "A bunch of the boys were whooping it up" leapt out at him. Inspired, he went to the bank to write it down (almost being shot as a robber), and by the next morning, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" was complete.

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

Other verses were followed quickly. "I have gazed on naked grandeur where there's nothing else to focus on" in the early spring, he hammered out a complete poem, "The Call of the Wild." Service began to write about things he hadn't seen (some of which hadn't even happened) as well as locals. He did not set foot in Dawson City until 1908, ten years after the Gold Rush, when his renown as a writer was already established.

After gathering enough poems for a book, Service "sent the poems to his father, who had migrated to Toronto, and asked him to find a printing house so they could make it into a book." He enclosed a cheque to pay the bills and planned to give these booklets to his Whitehorse friends for Christmas. His father gave the manuscript to William Briggs in Toronto, whose employees adored the book. "Which was recalled by the foreman and printers as they worked." When they first came off the typesetting machines, a salesman read the evidence out loud. In advance orders from galley proofs, an "enterprising salesman" sold 1700 copies. Robert was "sent back to him and the publisher gave him a ten percent royalty commission for the novel."

Songs of a Sourdough, a service's book that was more Jack London-ish called The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses in the United States, was "an immediate success." Even before the official launch date, it went through seven printings. Briggs was only 15 impressions in 1907, but she was destined to be an artist in 1907. In New York, Philadelphia, and London, the same year as the previous year, there was a version. In 1910, T. Fisher Unwin, a London publisher, published his twentieth edition and thirteen more by 1917. "Service eventually earned in excess of $100,000 for Songs of a Sourdough alone" (equal to about $2.9 million today after inflation).

"When paper copies of the book arrived in Whitehorse, Robert's own minister led him aside to inform him how twisted were his tales were." In shame, the service was incongruence. But, this summer, visitors from the south arrived in Whitehorse to look for the famous poet; in fact, he autographed several of his books."

"He was sent outside on mandated paid leave for three months in 1908 after three years in Whitehorse, a common feature among bank workers serving in the Yukon." He went to Vancouver and checked up Constance MacLean, according to Enid Mallory. Now that she knew he was a good writer, she decided to become engaged to him.

Following his departure in 1908, the bank relocated to Dawson, where he worked with veterans of the Gold Rush: "They loved to reminisce, and Robert listened closely and remembered." In 1908, he used their tales to create Ballads of a Cheechako. "It was also a huge success."

When the bank needed Service to be back to Whitehorse as its manager in 1909, he resigned. "He rented a tiny two-room cabin on Eighth Avenue in Dawson City from Mrs. Edna Clarke and began his career as a full-time author after quitting his employment." He "went to work on his book right away." He went for walks that lasted all night, slept into mid-afternoon, and some days didn't get out of the cabin for days. The Trail of '98, a five-month book, was complete, and he took it to a New York publisher. "Immediately became a best-seller" for Service's first novel.

Service, which was newly wealthy, was able to travel to Paris, the French Riviera, Hollywood, and places beyond. He returned to Dawson City in 1912 to write his third book of poetry, Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912). He became a freemason after being led into Yukon Lodge No. 62. Dawson's population is 45.

After Service's departure for Dawson City, it is uncertain what happened between Service and Constance MacLean as there are no published letters between them. "Married Leroy Grant, a surveyor and railroad engineer based in Prince Rupert, in 1912."

In 1912, Dawson City received a free bus pass. He was a reporter for the Toronto Star during the Balkan Wars from 1912 to 1913.

Service moved to Paris in 1913 and spent the next 15 years there. He settled in the Latin Quarter, posing as a painter. He married Germaine Bourgoin, the daughter of a distillery owner, and they bought a summer home in Lancieux, Côtes-d'Armor, France's Brittany region. Germaine Service, who died at the age of 102 in Monte Carlo, Monaco, was thirteen years younger than her husband.

When World War I came out, the service was 40; he attempted to enlist but was refused "due to varicose veins." "was arrested and almost executed in a Dunkirk outbreak of spy hysteria from December 11, 1915, to January 29, 1916," he wrote about the Toronto Star. "He served as a stretcher bearer and ambulance driver with the American Red Cross' Ambulance Corps until his health was impaired." He wrote Rhymes of a Red Cross Man in 1916, a slew of war poetry that was mostly lost in Paris. The book was dedicated to the memory of Lieutenant Albert Service, Canada's infantry, who died in August 1916. Robert Service received three awards for his war service: 1914-1915 Star, British War Medal, and the Victory Medal.

Service "settled down to being a wealthy man in Paris" after the war, with a monocle. He went out in old clothing with his neighbor, a former policeman, to visit the city's lowest dives at night. During his stay in Paris, he was deemed the city's richest author, but he was able to dress as a working man and wander the streets, blending in and watching everything around him. "The poems are taken from an American poet who works as an ambulance driver and an infantryman in Paris, and he will use those experiences in his upcoming book of poetry, Ballads of a Bohemian (1921): "The poems are published in the persona of an American poet who works in Paris as an ambulance driver and an infantryman during the war." The verses are divided by diary entries over a period of four years."

Service began writing thriller books in the 1920s. The Poisoned Paradise, A Romance of Monte Carlo (New York, 1922), and The Roughneck. A Tale of Tahiti (New York, 1923) was converted into silent films later. Service used to live in Nice with his family, including H. G. Wells, A. K. Bruce, Somerset Maugham, Rex Ingram, Frank Scully, Frank Harris, and Frieda Lawrence, who all spent their winters in the French Riviera, and he wrote that he was fortunate to have lunch with Colette.

In 1930, Service in Kilwinning was restored to Kilwinning to erect a memorial to his family in the town cemetery. He also toured the USSR in the 1930s and later wrote a satirical "Ballad of Lenin's Tomb." For this reason, his poetry was never translated into Russian in the USSR, and he was never mentioned in Soviet encyclopedias.

News of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact interrupted a service's second trip to the Soviet Union. Service from Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and the Baltic Sea have migrated to Stockholm. He and his family spent winter in Nice and then moved to Canada from France. The Nazis landed in France just after, and "arrived at his Lancieux home, looking specifically for the poet who had mocked Hitler in newspaper verse."

Service served in California during WWII, "and Hollywood wanted him to help the morale of troops." He died in a Hollywood movie set in San Diego, France. He was also invited to appear himself in the film The Spoilers (1942), alongside Marlene Dietrich, John Wayne, and Randolph Scott. "He was ecstatic to be on a stage with Marlene Dietrich." Service and his wife returned to his house in Brittany, only to discover it was demolished. They rebuilt, and he lived there until his death in 1958, although he wintered in Monte Carlo on the French Riviera. Iris and my mother, who was born in 1946, travelled to the Yukon and saw Whitehorse and Dawson City, which by then had been a ghost town. Service was unable to return and could not bring him back. He liked to remember the place as it had been."

From 1947 to 1958, a service in Monaco served. During his last years, he wrote two volumes of autobiography, Ploughman of the Moon (1945) and Harper of Heaven (1948), as well as six books of verse, which were published from 1949 to 1955. He died in Lancieux and is buried in the local cemetery. A book he wrote in 1956 was published posthumously.

In Service's Monte Carlo apartment, Canadian broadcaster Pierre Berton recorded many hours of autobiographical television interviews for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation not long before Service died. "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "Sam McGee's Cremation" were among these conversations.

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