Robert William Service (1874 - 1958)

Biography

Robert W. Service was an English-born Canadian writer and poet known as “the Bard of the Yukon” for his many poems set in northern Canada, including his most famous poem, “The Cremation of Sam McGee” (1907).

Born in Preston, Lancashire, England, he emigrated to Canada in 1896 and worked as a bank clerk for the Canadian Bank of Commerce in Victoria, British Columbia. When his bank sent him to the Yukon, he was caught up in the Klondike Gold Rush and struck literary gold with “The Cremation” and other poems which became immediate successes. Service’s critics often criticized his poems as doggerel; but the financial returns on what he self-effacingly called “verse, not poetry” allowed him to escape poverty and live comfortably for the rest of his life.

Service was born in Preston in 1874,^[1]the third of ten children. His father, also Robert Service, was a banker from Kilwinning, Scotland, who had been transferred to England. His mother was Sarah Parker.

From 1912, he lived in Europe. In June 1913, he married Parisienne Germaine Bourgoin, daughter of a distillery owner. They purchased a summer home at Lancieux, Côtes-d'Armor, in the Brittany region of France. Thirteen years younger than her husband, Germaine Service survived him by 31 years, dying aged 102 on December 26, 1989 in Monte Carlo, Monaco.

Sources

1. ↑ SERVICE, ROBERT WILLIAM PARKER GRO Reference: 1874 M Quarter in PRESTON Volume 08E Page 569

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Service
• https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-w-service
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-W-Service
• https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/robert-william-service

Research Notes

Service, Robert William Born in Preston, Lancashire, in January 1874 of a Scots father and English mother, Robert Service spent most of his formative childhood years in the Ayrshire town of Kilwinning where his father was born and his grandfather was the town's first Postmaster. His great-great-grandfather, Alexander Service, according to family lore ... "achieved the distinction of getting drunk in Irvine with Robert Burns". His early years in Kilwinning were brief but he certainly remembered them and gives a none too flattering picture of the dour place it was for him in his autobiography where he styles it "... the long grey town". A notch on one of the pews of the parish church is pointed out as where he whiled away the time during a once too long sermon! The only hint of a future career as one of the world's leading poets came on his sixth birthday when Service wrote, what he later described as his "first poetic flutter", God bless the cakes and bless the jam; Bless the cheese and the cold boiled ham; Bless the scones Auntie Jeannie makes; And save us all from belly-aches. Amen

Robert Service wrote Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (Toronto: William Briggs, 1912). It is dedicated "to the memory of my Brother, Lieutenant Albert Service, Canadian Infantry, Killed in Action, France, August, 1916."