Robert W. Service

Robert William Service (16 January 1874 – 11 September 1958) was an English-born Canadian poet and writer, often called “The Bard of the Yukon" and "The Canadian Kipling". 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 the gold rush or 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."

Robert William 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. Service's second name, "William", was in honour of a rich uncle; after that uncle neglected to provide for him in his will, Service dropped the middle name.

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. After leaving school, Service joined the Commercial Bank of Scotland which would later become the Royal Bank of Scotland. He was writing at this time and reportedly already "selling his verses".^{[citation needed]} 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." 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 – 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 15 November 1899, alongside Winston Churchill.)

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