Scottish Authors > Helen Cruickshank Poet, Cultural & political activist 1886-1975

Helen Burness Cruickshank was born on 15th May 1886, in Hillside, near Montrose, of local parents, and went to school in Montrose. Summer holidays were spent in Glenesk and the landscapes and people of Angus and its glens appear in her poetry. After leaving school, Cruickshank entered the Civil Service, working first in London, and then, from 1912, in Edinburgh, where she spent most of her adult life. She joined the Women's Social and Political Union and actively campaigned for the Suffragette cause. She was also a committed Scottish nationalist, an active member of the Saltire Society, and a founder member of Scottish PEN, which she served in various ways. She encouraged the work of the young CM Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid), of James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon), and other writers, and was sympathetic in her appreciation of the poetry of Violet Jacob and Marion Angus. Helen Cruickshank devoted much of her life to other people (she cared for her elderly mother), yet published poetry over several decades, in Scottish chapbook, Northern numbers and many other journals, and in Up the Noran Water (1934), Sea Buckthorn (1954), The Ponnage pool (1968), Collected poems (1971) and More collected poems

Helen Cruickshank's best known poem is probably Shy Geordie which, like much of her work, is in Scots and draws on her Angus country heritage (the poem has been set to music by several people, including Buxton Orr and Jim Reid). Many of her poems echo ballad and folk-song and other traditional forms. In Glenskenno Woods, There was a sang or Fause friend may appear simple, but they show a range of mood and tone, from lyrical to humorous, and her best work avoids the charge of sentimentality which might sometimes be levelled. She draws on the natural world for strong symbols about human life, as in the fine Sea Buckthorn (set to music by Francis George Scott), or in Ponnage pool, prefaced with a quotation from Hugh MacDiarmid; this deals with questions of personal identity:

I mind o' the Ponnage Pule,

The reid brae risin',

Morphie Lade,

An' the saumon that louped the dam,

A tree i' Martin's Den

Wi' names carved on it;

But I ken na wha I am.

Cruickshank also wrote in English; her poem Spring in the Mearns for instance, is a tribute to Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Lines for Wendy Wood celebrate another activist; this poem also illustrates Cruickshank's own passionate concern with social problems, her compassion and commitment to the fighting of poverty and injustice, shown, too, in a Scots poem such as Song of pity for refugees.

Although Cruickshank recorded her long life and aspects of her times in her Octobiography (1978), the significance of her generous contribution to he cultural life of Scotland still awaits a full estimation. Helen Cruickshank died in 1975.

Carol Anderson

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