Scottish Authors > S R Crockett Novelist 1859-1914

Born in Balmaghie, Kirkcudbrightshire, in 1859, Samuel Rutherford Crockett was the illegitimate son of a dairymaid whose parents, although Cameronians, were too proud to have her marry for mere respectability. Of tenant farming stock, they brought him up in a happy country childhood; from the Free Church school at Castle Douglas he won a bursary to Edinburgh University. Thereafter he travelled on the Continent as a tutor, then entered New College, Edinburgh, as a student for the Free Church ministry. He became Free Church minister at Penicuik, Midlothian, in 1886. He married the daughter of a philanthropic Manchester mill-owner and had four children.

He continued his journalism during his ministry. Lively sketches of Scottish ministers and congregations were so popular in their slightly sardonic humour that some twenty-four of them published in 1893 as The Stickit minister brought fame. The success in 1894 of The Raiders and The Lilac sunbonnet, both set in Galloway, the one adventure, the other a romance, led him to embark on full-time writing; he had in any case grown increasingly impatient with the narrow outlook of the Free Church.

Often maligned as "Kailyard", Crockett could from experience write of the slums of Edinburgh, of coalminers and factory workers and of the countries he had visited; even when treating country themes he did not always present idyllic pictures. He wrote vigorously and sometimes sensationally of Galloway Covenanters in Men of the Moss Hags; of feuding seventeenth century Kennedies in The Grey man, including Sawney Bean the legendary cannibal; of Edinburgh waifs and railwaymen in Cleg Kelly; of the noble fifteenth-century Douglases in Black Douglas and Maid Margaret - with a touch of sorcery; of French Huguenots in The White plumes of Navarre. His range was wide but uneven. He did not maintain his first popularity, perhaps because of this very versatility - every Crockett was different from the one before.

His health deteriorated, but his agent urged him to keep his illnesses secret. He had to spend winters abroad, in Spain or France, and return home only for the summers. But he remained always cheerful and hopeful, using all his interests to write not works of genius but lively narratives with a sardonic flavour.

"The burns were running red with the mighty July rain when Douglas Maclellan started over the meadows and moors to preach his sermon at the farmtown of Cauldshaws. He had thanked the Lord that morning in his opening prayer for 'the bounteous rain wherewith He had seen meet to refresh his weary heritage'.

His congregation silently acquiesced, 'for what,' said they, 'could a man from the Machars be expected to ken about meadow hay?'."

He died very suddenly in Tarascon in France in April 1914. His body was brought back to Balmaghie for burial, to lie "among the dear and simple folk I knew and loved in youth", as he had always hoped.

Francis Russell Hart, The Scottish Novel. A Critical Survey, Murray, 1978.

M. Donaldson, Samuel Rutherford Crockett, AUP, 1989.

Islay M Donaldson

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