If it's April, remember Crockett's passing.
Samuel Rutherford Crockett remembered.
In S.R.Crockett’s best known novel, the hero Patrick Heron is given a piece of advice by his father: ‘Mind a’ that ye see, but forget a’ that folk say aboot ye.’ These are sage words and apposite to Crockett’s own situation as a writer both in life and death.
Born plain Samuel Crocket on 24th September 1859 (not 1860 as virtually all his obituaries, and indeed the inscription on his memorial state) Samuel Rutherford Crockett died in April 1914. He ‘acquired’ the Rutherford at some time in the 1880s while at college.
His death saw the flurry of many obituaries, some of which are reproduced here. Obituaries are perhaps designed to flatter, and indeed often tell more about the author of the piece or the perspective of their publication than they do about the subject. However, they have a value, especially with an author so overlooked and little known in the 21st century. I present them with comment limited to contextualisation. There were doubtless many more obituaries written about him; these are simply those which I have managed to obtain from my own present research. I think they offer a representative sample of contemporary opinion and of course they reveal the central role of error, perspective and opinion in such writing.
The Kalgoorie Miner (Western Australia, April 22 1914) shows that Crockett was known globally, and states:
MR. S. R. CROCKETT.
The death is announced, at the age of 53 of the well-known novelist Mr. Samuel Rutherford Crockett. (Mr. Crockett was born in Galloway in 1860, and was educated, in Edinburgh and Heidelberg- He entered the Free. Church of Scotland in 1886, and was for some years Minister at Penicuik; after which he became an author and journalist. His first novel. ''The Stickit Minister," was published in 1893, and after that he wrote numbers of novels most of which soon became popular. Among his earlier novels were 'The Raiders,' 'The Lilac Sunbonnet,' 'The Men of the Moss Hags,' 'Cleg Kelly,' ‘TheRed Axe," and "Joan of the Sword Hand," all published by 1900. After that his popularity per-haps somewhat declined, but he always found a wide reading public.)
Closer to home, the Manchester Guardian of 22nd April offered this report:
Death of the well known Scottish Novelist.
We regret to announce the death, in his 54th year, of Mr S.R.Crockett, the most prolific of the Scottish novelists of what is best known as the ‘Kailyard’ school.
In ‘Kit Kennedy’ Mr Crockett describes the boyhood of the hero spent in Galloway, with home hours of each school-day given to farm work; and also the years of opening manhood passed in Edinburgh, where he attended the University classes. There is probably an autobiographical note in this novel, as the author not only moved from a Galloway school to Edinburgh University, but also won his way, through perserverence, to his place in the ministry of one of the Scottish churches. The record is that at Balmaglie, in Galloway, in 1860, Samuel Rutherford Crockett was born; and that after his school education he proceeded to the University of Edinburgh, where in 1879 he graduated M.A. and that he entered as a student at the University of Heidelberg and at New College, Oxford. He also attended the New College, Edinburgh in preparation for the ministry of the Free Church of Scotland. A travelling tutorship gave him the opportunity, during several year, of being like R.L.Stevenson’s Scotsman ‘in mony a foreign pairt’ Mr Barrie, Mr Crockett and ‘Ian Maclaren’, were students at Edinburgh University at different periods, and though the last stood out as a notable youth, neigher Barrie nor Crockett did much beyond taking a degree.
Mr Crockett made his appearance in the world of letters as a poet when in 1886 ‘Dulce Cor’ was published. The author here showed some lyrical power. He proved, too, that he had humour and ingenuity, as well as lyric power when he contributed nonsense verse to the pages of ‘Punch.’ ‘The Stickit Minister’ which helped to make Mr Crockett famous, was published in 1893. It is a series of short stories which first appeared in periodicals; and for the story which gives the title to the volume the author received a few shillings. The book is full of pathos and humour, and we are shown the humanity of men and women amidst commonplace surroundings, the romance and tragedy which weave the web of life for some of those who are never-styled heroes and heroines. The volume passed through many editions – more editions than have fallen to the lot of any of its author’s other writings.
Stevensonian Romance.
Having tried short stories and gained distinction in the attempt, Mr Crockett ventured to write a long novel. ‘The Raiders’ increased his fame. It bears traces of the influence of R.L.Stevenson, and shows, especially, that the character and wanderings of David Balfour were well known to him; but it had sufficient merit of its own to win applause. It is a good story, full of striking incident, with some unconventional characters and scenes of hearty and healthy love-making. A palpable hit was made in the Galloway environment, which was to Crockett what Thrums was to Barrie and Drumtochty to ‘Ian Maclaren.’ Book after book now appeared and Mr Crockett became one of the most prolific and popular of novel-writers. In almost every language in Europre there is a translation of one or other of his stories, and there was talk of the reproduction of one of them in Arabic. When his vogue as a novelist was secured he resigned his position as Free Church minister of Penicuik. Early in his ministerial life he had shown himself a hero in the work of rescuing victims of a terrible mining disaster in the parish in which he lived, and his people greatly deplored his loss.
One of the most notable characteristics of Mr Crockett’s literary work is its variety. He did not confine himself to Galloway, though his name is specially associated with that district. ‘The Lilac Sunbonnet’ is a love story, ‘Sweetheart Travellers’ is a charming romance for children; while ‘The Men of the Moss Hags’ deals with the Covenanters. The hero of ‘The Raiders’ is really quite a different youth from the hero of ‘Cleg Kelly’ and that uncommonly clever boy has nothing in common with the hero of ‘Kit Kennedy.’
His work on the Covenanters.
His declination of the Scottish Covenanters is to be ranked among the best work which Mr Crockett has done. Scott as a chronicler, in ‘The Tales of a Grandfather’ told a story of the Covenanters very different from that which he narrated as a novelist. ‘Old Mortality’ is a false or imperfect representation of these men, though the story is excellent beyond praise. Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, published ‘The Brownie of Bodsbeck: A Tale of the Covenanters’ which, though possessing interest as a story of mystery and incident, is of no value as an historical presentment of the cause of the Covenanters. Galt, some of whose books are named among Scottish classics, proved himself a poor champion of the men of whom he wrote in ‘Ringhan Gilzhaize; or The Covenanters.’ Since the days of Galt much has been written regarding the Covenanters. Histories, stories and ballads of their times, with tales of their sufferings, have appeared, but Mr Crockett was the first novelist of note who has done justice to their cause in ‘The men of the Moss Hags.’ The pictures of Covenanting times are drawn with skill and they touched R.L.Stevenson, when he wrote from his exile in Vailima: ‘If I could only be buried in the hills, under the heather, and a table tombstone like the martyrs, where the whaups and plovers are crying!’
Outside of his literary work there are few incidents to be recorded in Mr Crockett’s career. During his ministry at Penicuik he married a daughter of Mr George Milner of Manchester. The happiness of his home life, and his fondness for children, are reflected in his ‘Sweetheart Travellers.’ The sweethearts are himself and his little daughter, and it would be difficult to find a prettier picture of a loving father and child than in this record of the road. He was pre-eminently a true-hearted man, doing his works with all his might, and full of strong and ready sympathy. The severance of his official tie to Penicuik in no way weakened his interest in the people there and until recently he served as an elder in the congregation of which he had been minister. He delighted in outdoor life and exercise, in cricket during early days and in climbing later, and his tall stalwart figure was a familiar one on the St Andrews links. Everywhere he was welcomed as a genial guest, full of humour, racy remark and anecdote, although his extreme assiduity in writing kept him from taking a large part in social life. In the prime of life, and in the fullness of his powers he was smitten with a lingering malady, against which he struggled bravely, never abating his labours.
He has left behind him an appreciable addition to the literature of Scottish life and to those who knew and loved him the memory of a strong, purposeful man, a kind and constant friend.
In its April 25th ‘literary Gossip’ section ‘The Atheneum’ (a magazine which was often critical of Crockett’s style) wrote:
Mr Samuel Rutherford Crocket, the novelist, has died suddenly at Avignon, whither he had gone for the sake of his health. He was born at Little Duchrae, Kirkcudbrightshire; studied for four years at Edinburgh University; and, as a youth under 20, came to London to try his hand at journalism. In this he was unsuccessful and after an interval occupied by a travelling tutorship, returned to Scotland, where he settled down for some time as minister of the Free Church at Penicuik, and took to writing stories.
His material came, to begin with, from a country and from people that he knew well – that belonged to him as he to them; hence his early books have a welcome originality and freshness, and it is not suprising that they gained for him a large and eager circle of readers. Thus encouraged, he plied his pen with a diligence which, though it enabled him to produce as many as 50 volumes in 21 years, must be regretted by his more discerning admirers, since it put upon his powers a strain to which they were certainly not equal. He was compelled to go further afield for material, and in dealing with historical events, and with scenes not radically familiar to him, inevitably lost the truthfulness and directness, which had been his chief distinction, though he retained his verbal dexterity and the knack of vivacity, and was careful to keep them in play. In virtue of these he remained to the end a workmanlike and clever writer, and no doubt he has to his credit a greater number of hours of pleasure conferred on his fellow-creatures than many novelists of his generation.
The Atheneum is notable for damning with faint praise with regard to S.R.Crockett’s work and this is in no small part due to its position regarding the divide between literature and fiction which I shall discuss elsewhere. But even as a ‘critical’ review, it cannot deny his popularity or his skill in his chosen style.
By contrast, the obituary in ‘Bookman’ perhaps takes some poetic licence in its description. ‘Bookman’ was a magazine Crockett both contributed to early in his career and which was generally ‘friendly’ to his work being, as it was, edited by William Robertson Nicoll who was partly responsible for ‘discovering’ Crockett. Indeed Crockett wrote the obituary for R.L.Stevenson in Bookman (see here). I don’t know who wrote the ‘Bookman’ obituary, but it might have been Nicoll himself. Here it is from June 1914.
Realism and romance are matters of temperament. Some men are born with a desire to wring the strange, bitter truth out of things; the ordinary, wholesome truth does not satisfy them. Others wish to extract from life its picturesque and wilder beauty. They too are discontented with the homely, work-a-day look on the world. Starve a boy’s awakening power of imagination of beautiful works of art, and it he has the creative faculty he will develop into a fond lover of romance, and if he has the critical faculty he will become a violent realist. As our modern industrial civilisation does not feed the general mind with things of beauty, all our art is a vehement swing to either extreme. The romantic movement lasted longer in our country than it did in France, because we were too lazy of intellect to criticise, while the French were so busy analysing their feelings that they could not find time to give them full play.
Mr S.R.Crockett began to look about him during the last phase of our romantic movement, when its poetic eddies were travelling to Ireland to stir the genius of Mr Yeats, Mr Synge and Mr George Russell, and when its prose eddies were circling up to Scotland to touch Andrew Lang with a yearning that he was never able to fully express, to set on fire the diletattante temperament of R.L.Stevenson, and to die away in a play on tender sentiment and fancy in Sir James Barrie. It was from Barrie and Stevenson that Crockett directly received the stimulus to express the emotions of romance which were struggling within him. The idyllic influence of Barrie seems to have been the first to reach him, but the influence of Stevenson was more congenial to him: it went deeper and lasted longer.
The strength of the native impulse of romance in Crockett was even stronger than it was in Stevenson. It was an unfastidious, uncritical passion, born of the imprisonment and famishment of a young, eager imagination. Bred on a lonely farm on the rolling Galloway wilderness of heath and rock, the tall, handsome perfervid, red-haired Celt underwent the extreme rigours of ancient Puritanism. The wild waste of heather, in which he was born in 1860 was the last fortress of the bleak fanaticism of the fighting Covenanters, and his people still held to the strange fallacy that all the grace, beauty and splendour of life belonged to the devil and must be avoided as snares to the soul.
To read the plays of Shakespeare was as great an offence as to go to a theatre; and all good poets and novelists were regarded by the Cameronians of Galloway with more severity than the early Puritans had regarded them. The only books the young Crockett was allowed to read were books about the Covenant and stories of the sufferings of the Covenanters. Happily the preachers of the Covenant were men with a noble way of writing. Crockett’s namesake for instance, Samuel Rutherford, whom Milton so bitterly attacked, could handle English prose as finely as the great poet, and there were other men of his school with similar powers of expression. The gleams of gold in Crockett’s romances are reflections of the treasures he discovered in the old Covenanting writers, when he had found a way of putting his few books of religious instruction to a strange, imaginative use. The lonely boy wandered about the craigs and heather, and turned the wild scene into a theatre of romance. He was a hunted Covenanter, pursued by the murderous, ungodly troopers of Claverhouse, and any moving thing on the skyline, a bull, a wind-shaken pine, a cloud-shadow fleeting from the brae – was Claverhouse himself, intent on spilling the blood of the last of the faithful. So the little lad was able to work himself into a frenzy of fear, and give his imagination that bent towards a love of fighting which became his chief characteristic as a novelist.
He began to work on the farm at an early age, as even a child’s hands were useful to the struggling household . He was up at five o’clock, and all through his life he continued to rise at this hour, for early rising was a habit with pleasant memories. One of his cousins was a farmer-ploughman who had been to Canada and acquired larger ideas than the rest of the family; and finding in the boy an unusual play of mind, he used to take him in the fields before the day’s labour began and make him read fine poetry. This illicit pursuit of the pleasures of the imagination led to Crockett smuggling a copy of Shakespeare’s plays into his bedroom and liberating his soul therewith.
Then came the happy meeting, which he has told with some fictitious colouring in ‘Kit Kennedy’ with an admirable classical scholar, by whose help the rough strong, ambitious farmer’s boy was able to win a bursary of £20 a year for four years. At the age of fifteen he went up to Edinburgh University and studied there on nine shillings a week. He had an attic in a house looking on Arthur’s Seat, and he cultivated the muses on a little porridge, according to the best traditions of Scottish learning. Paying annually £11 in fees, he had only £9 left for food, lodging, clothes and books; and finding this insufficient to keep him alive, he worked at journalism, writing on everything and sending articles everywhere. At nineteen, he obtained a travelling tutorship through the kindly offices of Jowett of Baliol, and after wandering through almost all of Europre with his pupil from Chicago, reached Siberia.
This was at the flowering time of his passion for romance. After a long period of solitary study and hard, grinding work on oatmeal and penny buns, he moved, a happy spectator, through a world of picturesque luxury and alien charm. For the rest of his life, first as a minster of the Free Church, and then as one of the most popular novelists of our period, travel in the unspoilt parts of the Continent – Spain in particular – was a necessity to him. By it he renewed his feeling for the romantic. Several of his novels are directly inspired by his rambles in foreign parts. One can see that in each case he aimed at translating into fiction the thrill of strange beauty he felt on his happy holiday tours.
But none of the tales so inspired is equal to his early Galloway romances, such as ‘The Raiders.’ The trouble with him was that he was too ready to respond to any kind of romantic atmosphere. He was like a man who had once suffered so severely from starvation that the sight of any sort of food made his mouth water. He was not critical of his own emotions, but stirred to composition by the slightest wind-ripple of feeling as well as by the deepest current. And as the deep current of his emotion ever set towards the moors and crags, where he had played at being a hunted Covenanter, the full power of his fine imagination was only provoked when he wrote about the scenes of his youth. He was the last of the old Puritans of Galloway, in spite of himself. The influence of Samuel Rutherford was profounder than that of Shakespeare, and it is by such portraits of his own folk as ‘The Stickit Minister’ and by such historic studies of his own race as ‘The Raiders’ that he will live. His romances of foreign inspiration are workmanlike, brilliant compositions, but they are wanting in imaginative vitality. Perhaps he felt this, for in his last work, ‘Silver Sand’ published on the day the news of his death in Avignon was received, he returned to Galloway in the days of the Covenanters and written one more sequel to his best work.
Crockett's funeral, held at Balmaghie on April 24th 1914. was reported in 'The Scotsman' as follows:
‘In an introduction to ‘The Kirk Above Dee Water’ by the Rev H.M.B.Reid (now Professor Reid of Glasgow University) the late Mr S.R.Crockett wrote that when the time came when the Galloway requiem ‘Sae he’s won awa’’ should be said of him, it was in Balmaghie kirkyard he should like to lie ‘among the dear and simple folk I knew and loved in youth.’ His wish was fulfilled and there he was laid to rest yesterday in the churchyard overlooking the Dee, the river he made so famous.
The funeral procession left Castle Douglas Station to which the remains had been taken direct from London, at half past one o’clock, and in the streets through which it passed there was large numbers of people, to many of whom doubtless, the novelist was known in his early years, when Castle Douglas was his home. The cortege having traversed the four miles between the town and the church of Balmaghie, a simple service was held within the unpretentious building. The ministers taking part were the Rev. W.A.Mowat parish minister; the Rev A.B.Craigh, United Free Church, Laurieston, and the Rev J. Mitchell St Andrew’s United Free church, Peebles (the congregation of which Mr Crockett was a member). At the close the mourners, reverently standing, heard the Dead march in ‘Saul’ played by the organist and the body was then borne to its last resting place.
The pall bearers were Mr Philip Crockett (son) Mr Samuel Crockett (cousin) Mr John Oliver (nephew) Mr William Sproat (brother in law) Mr Malcom McL Harper, Mr Andrew C. Penman, Mr John Maclellan and the Rev A.B.Craig. Mrs Crockett and her two daughters and her niece Miss Gunn, Edinburgh, were also present.
Mr Craig conducted the brief graveside service and Mr Philip Crockett in a few words thanked the company for the respect they had paid to his father’s memory.
Professor Reid, Glasgow, was prevented by unavoidable duties from being present.
If you've never heard of Crockett before, you may rightly be wondering how you've missed him. You're not alone. And Crockett is not alone in being someone who was both held in great esteem, and a celebrity in his day, who has (for whatever reasons) been airbrushed out of history. It is worth, perhaps simply remembering that it is up to each of us to do what we can to keep the legacy of those we love alive. Without us, they fall from memory. That is a shame. The pleasure I have taken from my 'adventures' with Crockett over the past quarter of a century are the main part of what drives me to continue to share my knowledge of him and his work. I believe his legacy is important. Not just to me, but to the people of Galloway, Scotland and all who love reading about places and people now long gone and who can only exist for us in the imagination.
Cally Phillips.
In S.R.Crockett’s best known novel, the hero Patrick Heron is given a piece of advice by his father: ‘Mind a’ that ye see, but forget a’ that folk say aboot ye.’ These are sage words and apposite to Crockett’s own situation as a writer both in life and death.
Born plain Samuel Crocket on 24th September 1859 (not 1860 as virtually all his obituaries, and indeed the inscription on his memorial state) Samuel Rutherford Crockett died in April 1914. He ‘acquired’ the Rutherford at some time in the 1880s while at college.
His death saw the flurry of many obituaries, some of which are reproduced here. Obituaries are perhaps designed to flatter, and indeed often tell more about the author of the piece or the perspective of their publication than they do about the subject. However, they have a value, especially with an author so overlooked and little known in the 21st century. I present them with comment limited to contextualisation. There were doubtless many more obituaries written about him; these are simply those which I have managed to obtain from my own present research. I think they offer a representative sample of contemporary opinion and of course they reveal the central role of error, perspective and opinion in such writing.
The Kalgoorie Miner (Western Australia, April 22 1914) shows that Crockett was known globally, and states:
MR. S. R. CROCKETT.
The death is announced, at the age of 53 of the well-known novelist Mr. Samuel Rutherford Crockett. (Mr. Crockett was born in Galloway in 1860, and was educated, in Edinburgh and Heidelberg- He entered the Free. Church of Scotland in 1886, and was for some years Minister at Penicuik; after which he became an author and journalist. His first novel. ''The Stickit Minister," was published in 1893, and after that he wrote numbers of novels most of which soon became popular. Among his earlier novels were 'The Raiders,' 'The Lilac Sunbonnet,' 'The Men of the Moss Hags,' 'Cleg Kelly,' ‘TheRed Axe," and "Joan of the Sword Hand," all published by 1900. After that his popularity per-haps somewhat declined, but he always found a wide reading public.)
Closer to home, the Manchester Guardian of 22nd April offered this report:
Death of the well known Scottish Novelist.
We regret to announce the death, in his 54th year, of Mr S.R.Crockett, the most prolific of the Scottish novelists of what is best known as the ‘Kailyard’ school.
In ‘Kit Kennedy’ Mr Crockett describes the boyhood of the hero spent in Galloway, with home hours of each school-day given to farm work; and also the years of opening manhood passed in Edinburgh, where he attended the University classes. There is probably an autobiographical note in this novel, as the author not only moved from a Galloway school to Edinburgh University, but also won his way, through perserverence, to his place in the ministry of one of the Scottish churches. The record is that at Balmaglie, in Galloway, in 1860, Samuel Rutherford Crockett was born; and that after his school education he proceeded to the University of Edinburgh, where in 1879 he graduated M.A. and that he entered as a student at the University of Heidelberg and at New College, Oxford. He also attended the New College, Edinburgh in preparation for the ministry of the Free Church of Scotland. A travelling tutorship gave him the opportunity, during several year, of being like R.L.Stevenson’s Scotsman ‘in mony a foreign pairt’ Mr Barrie, Mr Crockett and ‘Ian Maclaren’, were students at Edinburgh University at different periods, and though the last stood out as a notable youth, neigher Barrie nor Crockett did much beyond taking a degree.
Mr Crockett made his appearance in the world of letters as a poet when in 1886 ‘Dulce Cor’ was published. The author here showed some lyrical power. He proved, too, that he had humour and ingenuity, as well as lyric power when he contributed nonsense verse to the pages of ‘Punch.’ ‘The Stickit Minister’ which helped to make Mr Crockett famous, was published in 1893. It is a series of short stories which first appeared in periodicals; and for the story which gives the title to the volume the author received a few shillings. The book is full of pathos and humour, and we are shown the humanity of men and women amidst commonplace surroundings, the romance and tragedy which weave the web of life for some of those who are never-styled heroes and heroines. The volume passed through many editions – more editions than have fallen to the lot of any of its author’s other writings.
Stevensonian Romance.
Having tried short stories and gained distinction in the attempt, Mr Crockett ventured to write a long novel. ‘The Raiders’ increased his fame. It bears traces of the influence of R.L.Stevenson, and shows, especially, that the character and wanderings of David Balfour were well known to him; but it had sufficient merit of its own to win applause. It is a good story, full of striking incident, with some unconventional characters and scenes of hearty and healthy love-making. A palpable hit was made in the Galloway environment, which was to Crockett what Thrums was to Barrie and Drumtochty to ‘Ian Maclaren.’ Book after book now appeared and Mr Crockett became one of the most prolific and popular of novel-writers. In almost every language in Europre there is a translation of one or other of his stories, and there was talk of the reproduction of one of them in Arabic. When his vogue as a novelist was secured he resigned his position as Free Church minister of Penicuik. Early in his ministerial life he had shown himself a hero in the work of rescuing victims of a terrible mining disaster in the parish in which he lived, and his people greatly deplored his loss.
One of the most notable characteristics of Mr Crockett’s literary work is its variety. He did not confine himself to Galloway, though his name is specially associated with that district. ‘The Lilac Sunbonnet’ is a love story, ‘Sweetheart Travellers’ is a charming romance for children; while ‘The Men of the Moss Hags’ deals with the Covenanters. The hero of ‘The Raiders’ is really quite a different youth from the hero of ‘Cleg Kelly’ and that uncommonly clever boy has nothing in common with the hero of ‘Kit Kennedy.’
His work on the Covenanters.
His declination of the Scottish Covenanters is to be ranked among the best work which Mr Crockett has done. Scott as a chronicler, in ‘The Tales of a Grandfather’ told a story of the Covenanters very different from that which he narrated as a novelist. ‘Old Mortality’ is a false or imperfect representation of these men, though the story is excellent beyond praise. Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, published ‘The Brownie of Bodsbeck: A Tale of the Covenanters’ which, though possessing interest as a story of mystery and incident, is of no value as an historical presentment of the cause of the Covenanters. Galt, some of whose books are named among Scottish classics, proved himself a poor champion of the men of whom he wrote in ‘Ringhan Gilzhaize; or The Covenanters.’ Since the days of Galt much has been written regarding the Covenanters. Histories, stories and ballads of their times, with tales of their sufferings, have appeared, but Mr Crockett was the first novelist of note who has done justice to their cause in ‘The men of the Moss Hags.’ The pictures of Covenanting times are drawn with skill and they touched R.L.Stevenson, when he wrote from his exile in Vailima: ‘If I could only be buried in the hills, under the heather, and a table tombstone like the martyrs, where the whaups and plovers are crying!’
Outside of his literary work there are few incidents to be recorded in Mr Crockett’s career. During his ministry at Penicuik he married a daughter of Mr George Milner of Manchester. The happiness of his home life, and his fondness for children, are reflected in his ‘Sweetheart Travellers.’ The sweethearts are himself and his little daughter, and it would be difficult to find a prettier picture of a loving father and child than in this record of the road. He was pre-eminently a true-hearted man, doing his works with all his might, and full of strong and ready sympathy. The severance of his official tie to Penicuik in no way weakened his interest in the people there and until recently he served as an elder in the congregation of which he had been minister. He delighted in outdoor life and exercise, in cricket during early days and in climbing later, and his tall stalwart figure was a familiar one on the St Andrews links. Everywhere he was welcomed as a genial guest, full of humour, racy remark and anecdote, although his extreme assiduity in writing kept him from taking a large part in social life. In the prime of life, and in the fullness of his powers he was smitten with a lingering malady, against which he struggled bravely, never abating his labours.
He has left behind him an appreciable addition to the literature of Scottish life and to those who knew and loved him the memory of a strong, purposeful man, a kind and constant friend.
In its April 25th ‘literary Gossip’ section ‘The Atheneum’ (a magazine which was often critical of Crockett’s style) wrote:
Mr Samuel Rutherford Crocket, the novelist, has died suddenly at Avignon, whither he had gone for the sake of his health. He was born at Little Duchrae, Kirkcudbrightshire; studied for four years at Edinburgh University; and, as a youth under 20, came to London to try his hand at journalism. In this he was unsuccessful and after an interval occupied by a travelling tutorship, returned to Scotland, where he settled down for some time as minister of the Free Church at Penicuik, and took to writing stories.
His material came, to begin with, from a country and from people that he knew well – that belonged to him as he to them; hence his early books have a welcome originality and freshness, and it is not suprising that they gained for him a large and eager circle of readers. Thus encouraged, he plied his pen with a diligence which, though it enabled him to produce as many as 50 volumes in 21 years, must be regretted by his more discerning admirers, since it put upon his powers a strain to which they were certainly not equal. He was compelled to go further afield for material, and in dealing with historical events, and with scenes not radically familiar to him, inevitably lost the truthfulness and directness, which had been his chief distinction, though he retained his verbal dexterity and the knack of vivacity, and was careful to keep them in play. In virtue of these he remained to the end a workmanlike and clever writer, and no doubt he has to his credit a greater number of hours of pleasure conferred on his fellow-creatures than many novelists of his generation.
The Atheneum is notable for damning with faint praise with regard to S.R.Crockett’s work and this is in no small part due to its position regarding the divide between literature and fiction which I shall discuss elsewhere. But even as a ‘critical’ review, it cannot deny his popularity or his skill in his chosen style.
By contrast, the obituary in ‘Bookman’ perhaps takes some poetic licence in its description. ‘Bookman’ was a magazine Crockett both contributed to early in his career and which was generally ‘friendly’ to his work being, as it was, edited by William Robertson Nicoll who was partly responsible for ‘discovering’ Crockett. Indeed Crockett wrote the obituary for R.L.Stevenson in Bookman (see here). I don’t know who wrote the ‘Bookman’ obituary, but it might have been Nicoll himself. Here it is from June 1914.
Realism and romance are matters of temperament. Some men are born with a desire to wring the strange, bitter truth out of things; the ordinary, wholesome truth does not satisfy them. Others wish to extract from life its picturesque and wilder beauty. They too are discontented with the homely, work-a-day look on the world. Starve a boy’s awakening power of imagination of beautiful works of art, and it he has the creative faculty he will develop into a fond lover of romance, and if he has the critical faculty he will become a violent realist. As our modern industrial civilisation does not feed the general mind with things of beauty, all our art is a vehement swing to either extreme. The romantic movement lasted longer in our country than it did in France, because we were too lazy of intellect to criticise, while the French were so busy analysing their feelings that they could not find time to give them full play.
Mr S.R.Crockett began to look about him during the last phase of our romantic movement, when its poetic eddies were travelling to Ireland to stir the genius of Mr Yeats, Mr Synge and Mr George Russell, and when its prose eddies were circling up to Scotland to touch Andrew Lang with a yearning that he was never able to fully express, to set on fire the diletattante temperament of R.L.Stevenson, and to die away in a play on tender sentiment and fancy in Sir James Barrie. It was from Barrie and Stevenson that Crockett directly received the stimulus to express the emotions of romance which were struggling within him. The idyllic influence of Barrie seems to have been the first to reach him, but the influence of Stevenson was more congenial to him: it went deeper and lasted longer.
The strength of the native impulse of romance in Crockett was even stronger than it was in Stevenson. It was an unfastidious, uncritical passion, born of the imprisonment and famishment of a young, eager imagination. Bred on a lonely farm on the rolling Galloway wilderness of heath and rock, the tall, handsome perfervid, red-haired Celt underwent the extreme rigours of ancient Puritanism. The wild waste of heather, in which he was born in 1860 was the last fortress of the bleak fanaticism of the fighting Covenanters, and his people still held to the strange fallacy that all the grace, beauty and splendour of life belonged to the devil and must be avoided as snares to the soul.
To read the plays of Shakespeare was as great an offence as to go to a theatre; and all good poets and novelists were regarded by the Cameronians of Galloway with more severity than the early Puritans had regarded them. The only books the young Crockett was allowed to read were books about the Covenant and stories of the sufferings of the Covenanters. Happily the preachers of the Covenant were men with a noble way of writing. Crockett’s namesake for instance, Samuel Rutherford, whom Milton so bitterly attacked, could handle English prose as finely as the great poet, and there were other men of his school with similar powers of expression. The gleams of gold in Crockett’s romances are reflections of the treasures he discovered in the old Covenanting writers, when he had found a way of putting his few books of religious instruction to a strange, imaginative use. The lonely boy wandered about the craigs and heather, and turned the wild scene into a theatre of romance. He was a hunted Covenanter, pursued by the murderous, ungodly troopers of Claverhouse, and any moving thing on the skyline, a bull, a wind-shaken pine, a cloud-shadow fleeting from the brae – was Claverhouse himself, intent on spilling the blood of the last of the faithful. So the little lad was able to work himself into a frenzy of fear, and give his imagination that bent towards a love of fighting which became his chief characteristic as a novelist.
He began to work on the farm at an early age, as even a child’s hands were useful to the struggling household . He was up at five o’clock, and all through his life he continued to rise at this hour, for early rising was a habit with pleasant memories. One of his cousins was a farmer-ploughman who had been to Canada and acquired larger ideas than the rest of the family; and finding in the boy an unusual play of mind, he used to take him in the fields before the day’s labour began and make him read fine poetry. This illicit pursuit of the pleasures of the imagination led to Crockett smuggling a copy of Shakespeare’s plays into his bedroom and liberating his soul therewith.
Then came the happy meeting, which he has told with some fictitious colouring in ‘Kit Kennedy’ with an admirable classical scholar, by whose help the rough strong, ambitious farmer’s boy was able to win a bursary of £20 a year for four years. At the age of fifteen he went up to Edinburgh University and studied there on nine shillings a week. He had an attic in a house looking on Arthur’s Seat, and he cultivated the muses on a little porridge, according to the best traditions of Scottish learning. Paying annually £11 in fees, he had only £9 left for food, lodging, clothes and books; and finding this insufficient to keep him alive, he worked at journalism, writing on everything and sending articles everywhere. At nineteen, he obtained a travelling tutorship through the kindly offices of Jowett of Baliol, and after wandering through almost all of Europre with his pupil from Chicago, reached Siberia.
This was at the flowering time of his passion for romance. After a long period of solitary study and hard, grinding work on oatmeal and penny buns, he moved, a happy spectator, through a world of picturesque luxury and alien charm. For the rest of his life, first as a minster of the Free Church, and then as one of the most popular novelists of our period, travel in the unspoilt parts of the Continent – Spain in particular – was a necessity to him. By it he renewed his feeling for the romantic. Several of his novels are directly inspired by his rambles in foreign parts. One can see that in each case he aimed at translating into fiction the thrill of strange beauty he felt on his happy holiday tours.
But none of the tales so inspired is equal to his early Galloway romances, such as ‘The Raiders.’ The trouble with him was that he was too ready to respond to any kind of romantic atmosphere. He was like a man who had once suffered so severely from starvation that the sight of any sort of food made his mouth water. He was not critical of his own emotions, but stirred to composition by the slightest wind-ripple of feeling as well as by the deepest current. And as the deep current of his emotion ever set towards the moors and crags, where he had played at being a hunted Covenanter, the full power of his fine imagination was only provoked when he wrote about the scenes of his youth. He was the last of the old Puritans of Galloway, in spite of himself. The influence of Samuel Rutherford was profounder than that of Shakespeare, and it is by such portraits of his own folk as ‘The Stickit Minister’ and by such historic studies of his own race as ‘The Raiders’ that he will live. His romances of foreign inspiration are workmanlike, brilliant compositions, but they are wanting in imaginative vitality. Perhaps he felt this, for in his last work, ‘Silver Sand’ published on the day the news of his death in Avignon was received, he returned to Galloway in the days of the Covenanters and written one more sequel to his best work.
Crockett's funeral, held at Balmaghie on April 24th 1914. was reported in 'The Scotsman' as follows:
‘In an introduction to ‘The Kirk Above Dee Water’ by the Rev H.M.B.Reid (now Professor Reid of Glasgow University) the late Mr S.R.Crockett wrote that when the time came when the Galloway requiem ‘Sae he’s won awa’’ should be said of him, it was in Balmaghie kirkyard he should like to lie ‘among the dear and simple folk I knew and loved in youth.’ His wish was fulfilled and there he was laid to rest yesterday in the churchyard overlooking the Dee, the river he made so famous.
The funeral procession left Castle Douglas Station to which the remains had been taken direct from London, at half past one o’clock, and in the streets through which it passed there was large numbers of people, to many of whom doubtless, the novelist was known in his early years, when Castle Douglas was his home. The cortege having traversed the four miles between the town and the church of Balmaghie, a simple service was held within the unpretentious building. The ministers taking part were the Rev. W.A.Mowat parish minister; the Rev A.B.Craigh, United Free Church, Laurieston, and the Rev J. Mitchell St Andrew’s United Free church, Peebles (the congregation of which Mr Crockett was a member). At the close the mourners, reverently standing, heard the Dead march in ‘Saul’ played by the organist and the body was then borne to its last resting place.
The pall bearers were Mr Philip Crockett (son) Mr Samuel Crockett (cousin) Mr John Oliver (nephew) Mr William Sproat (brother in law) Mr Malcom McL Harper, Mr Andrew C. Penman, Mr John Maclellan and the Rev A.B.Craig. Mrs Crockett and her two daughters and her niece Miss Gunn, Edinburgh, were also present.
Mr Craig conducted the brief graveside service and Mr Philip Crockett in a few words thanked the company for the respect they had paid to his father’s memory.
Professor Reid, Glasgow, was prevented by unavoidable duties from being present.
If you've never heard of Crockett before, you may rightly be wondering how you've missed him. You're not alone. And Crockett is not alone in being someone who was both held in great esteem, and a celebrity in his day, who has (for whatever reasons) been airbrushed out of history. It is worth, perhaps simply remembering that it is up to each of us to do what we can to keep the legacy of those we love alive. Without us, they fall from memory. That is a shame. The pleasure I have taken from my 'adventures' with Crockett over the past quarter of a century are the main part of what drives me to continue to share my knowledge of him and his work. I believe his legacy is important. Not just to me, but to the people of Galloway, Scotland and all who love reading about places and people now long gone and who can only exist for us in the imagination.
Cally Phillips.