know that he was born in 1874 of British stock, although there was a strong element of the Scottish in his roots, and the iconic presence of Robert Burns and the border ballads of Sir Walter Scott remained strongly established in his mind. Throughout his life and his writing career, Service maintained a careful reticence about the biographical facts of his life,3 so much so that even some reference works are at a loss as to dates and events of his circumstances. His biographer, Carl Klinck, saw fit to refer to him as “this otherwise unknown man.” What is particularly curious is that even his publishers were either bullied or persuaded to join in this act of authorial privacy and were content to reveal precious little by way of biographical notes or introductory remarks about their markedly prolific author who had managed to draw to his writing if not to himself a large and loyal readership.
The jacket of Bar-Room Ballads (1940).
Robert William Service (the “William” eventually disappeared from the covers and the title pages of his many books) was a Lancashire lad whose family, due to an improved financial situation, moved to Glasgow where Service was educated at Hillhead public school. Thus, dipped into a Scottish environment, Service saw himself as a Scotsman, linked in spirit to the great Scottish bard Robert Burns, and thus inclined to work Scots vernacular into his verse, endowing his best piece of prose writing, the romance The Trail of Ninety-Eight (1910)4 with a Scottish flavour. The question of Service’s national identity would dog him and his biography during his entire career. Most contemporary reference works recognize that Service was British by birth, sometimes being more specific and calling him a British-born Canadian poet. This suggestion of ambiguity would continue to haunt his placement in literature and may explain, if only in part, how poorly he has fared in literary history.
School was not always a happy experience for Service who proved to be independent-minded and a not particularly attentive pupil much given to daydreaming and fantasy and the reading of adventure stories. At the age of fifteen he was expelled from school and forced to enter the world of employment. He first secured an apprentice clerkship in a ship chandler’s office, but soon after found a very junior position with the Commercial Bank of Scotland. Unbeknownst to him, this early experience in banking would serve him especially well and usher him into employment with a Canadian bank and a posting to Canada’s North, but not before, as a newly arrived immigrant, Service would taste hard work as a labourer on a farm near Duncan, British Columbia.
He arrived in Canada on an “emigrant” ship in 1896 and travelled by train westward across great expanses of country, nursing romantic notions about carefree travel and adventure in North America. It was not to be quite the life he had fantasized about as far back as his adolescent days in Scotland. Here Service’s story became a mixture of all the awkwardness, social maladjustment, and difficulty of an immigrant fitting into a seemingly classless new world environment in which Service found himself trying to adapt and to feel at home. He undertook all kinds of work, most of it manual, and seemed to thrive on the sheer physical demands of haying, harvesting, and looking after animals. Some of this appealed to him because it demanded personal fitness, something that became a bit of an obsession with him in later years.
But Service did not settle down or put out roots in the new land. The “drifter” urge that became a powerful undertow in his life pulled him into a kind of benign vagabondism that sent him southward into the United States. What little we know of this fairly extensive period of Service’s life survives as echoes and recollections that went into the making of his later writing. We must bear in mind that Service left Scotland for Canada at the age of twenty-two, and that after arriving in Canada he spent at least half a dozen years as an itinerant labourer and hobo doing odd jobs before he found his way back to Canada, specifically Victoria, British Columbia. There, seriously at loose ends and almost penniless, he was prompted by a stranger to try his luck by applying for a job at the bank across the street from the park bench where he found himself. He applied, and very likely on the strength of his past banking experience in Scotland, he was hired by the Canadian Bank of Commerce, transforming himself, late in 1903, from a guitar-strumming hobo and jack of all trades into a bank clerk with a regular wage. A year later the bank sent him to Whitehorse in Yukon Territory, and his fate and his fiction were, so to speak sealed. Service was locked into a future that would make him widely known as the Bard of the Yukon, even though he had missed the gold rush by some five years. He was thirty years old.
Earlier on, in the course of the years of his so-called vagabondage, Service had heard from time to time of the excitement of the Klondike Gold Rush. The discovery of placer gold in the Klondike River occurred in 1896 and occasioned the gold rush of 1897–98. When Service arrived in Whitehorse in 1904, the tumult and the shouting had pretty much died down, but yarn-spinning old-timers were still about and their stories quickly captivated the young bank clerk. He was struck by the powerful scenery, the sense of brutal adventure, and the rich vein of local lore that fired his imagination. Although most of the prospectors who had made the gold rush such a colourful event in Canadian history had moved on, stories of lucky miners striking it suddenly rich, of gambling on a grand scale, of ruffians, con artists, and harlots, lingered on and were happily told and retold by grizzled northerners given to embroidering their long memories.
The title page of Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916).
Somehow, sometime, someone had mentioned in Service’s hearing that the Klondike needed its own Bret Harte (1836–1902), the American writer who had successfully used the California gold rush of the mid-1800s as material for his stories such as those collected in The Luck of Roaring Camp (1870), with titles like “The Outcasts of Poker Flats,” the tone of which echoed eerily for Service. And, of course, the success of Jack London (1876–1916) with The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), to name only two gripping adventure stories fuelled by London’s experiences in the North when he was one of the thousands who swarmed into the Yukon gold fields, very likely prompted Service to try his hand at his own brand of tales of the Northland (as he liked to call it) — only his would be recounted in strongly rhythmed verse.
Service had discovered a talent for rhyming and versifying at an early age. He had also scribbled and published occasionally what he described self-deprecatingly as newspaper verse during his vagabond travels. Now, established in a steady job, and with not a great deal available as entertainment or diversion, he settled into a cabin and into writing in his free time. Harte and London were near contemporaries, and although Service had not had the benefit of an extensive education, he was a reader and had his literary models in the likes of Rudyard Kipling, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson to draw upon.
After his stint in Whitehorse, Service was transferred to Dawson City, but all in all, he did not have a particularly long stay in the North. A few years in the teller’s cage at the bank, some travel and solitary writing in his Dawson City cabin, resulted in a sheaf of poems about which Service felt good enough to be prepared to pay out of his own carefully husbanded savings for its publication. Although biographically Service is not all that forthcoming, he does tell us something of what his life in the Northland had been like, which gives us an insight into how certain poems came to be written, and the style of life that had occasioned them.
At this point in his life Service was in his thirties, and except for much rambling travel mostly along the Pacific coast and in Mexico, the occasional piece of fugitive verse published somewhere in a newspaper, and work at the bank, Service had neither a profession nor a career to call his own. The saving step would be authorship of some kind duly enshrined in book form. The first stepping stone of what would become a wildly successful career as a writer was a clutch of thirty-three pieces of verse, mostly cast in Service’s idea of what a ballad might be, a form that one attempt at definition described as “the name given to a type of verse of unknown authorship dealing with episodes or simple motifs rather than sustained themes written in stanzaic form more or
