Murray, Charles 1864–1941

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Murray, Charles 1864–1941

PERSONAL: Born September 29, 1864, in Alford, Aberdeenshire, Scotland; died April 12, 1941, in Banchory, Kincardineshire, Scotland; married Edith Rogers, 1895; children: one son, two daughters. Education: Studied civil engineering in Aberdeen, Scotland.

CAREER: Poet and civil engineer. Engineer apprentice in Aberdeen, Scotland, beginning 1881; civil engineer, manager, and partner with gold-mining firm in South Africa, 1888–1912; deputy inspector of mines for Transvaal, South Africa, beginning 1901; Government of South Africa, Pretoria, undersecretary for public works, then chief engineer and secretary, then secretary of public works, beginning 1910. Military service: British military; served in Railway Pioneer Regiment during Boer War; also served during World War I; became lieutenant.

AWARDS, HONORS: L.L.D., Aberdeen University, 1920; named companion, Order of St. Michael and St. George, 1922; Murray Park in Alford, Scotland, established in 1956.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

A Handful of Heather, privately printed, 1893.

Hamewith (title means "Homeward"), 1900, revised 2nd edition, with introduction by Andrew Lang, [London, England,] 1909, 5th edition, 1944.

A Sough o' War, Constable (London, England), 1917.

In the Country Places, 1920.

Hamewith and Other Poems: Collected Editions, 1927.

The Last Poems, Charles Murray Memorial Trust (Scotland), 1969.

Hamewith: The Complete Poems of Charles Murray, edited by Nan Shepherd, Charles Murray Memorial Trust (Scotland), 1979.

SIDELIGHTS: Although Scottish poet Charles Murray spent his career as an engineer and civil servant in South Africa, he was primarily interested in writing verses in which he expressed, in the Scots dialect, his homesickness for his native land. In 1893 he privately printed twelve copies of his first collection of poems, A Handful of Heather, but he soon decided that the poems were an embarrassment to him. He destroyed the books and saved copies of only thirteen poems of the forty in the collection.

Despite his disappointment with his first collection, Murray continued to write poetry. His next volume, Hamewith, includes the thirteen poems he salvaged from A Handful of Heather as well as twenty-one new ones. Although Murray had lived in South Africa for twelve years, he set all his poems in his childhood home of Alford, and the works feature simple Scottish farmers who speak in a broad Scots dialect. As Andrew Lang wrote in his introduction to the 1909 edition of Hamewith, "The Scots of Mr. Murray is so pure and so rich that it may puzzle some patriots whose sentiments are stronger than their linguistic acquirements." As reported by Antony Kamm in the Biographical Companion to Literature in English, many years later Murray admitted at a dinner in his honor that he wrote in Scots to please his father.

Murray's A Sough o' War depicts events during World War I, and, according to John A.L. Gilfillan in an essay posted on the Scottish Library Association, Web site the collection shows "yet again the poet's fervour for his own countryside and his pride in the courage of his countrymen." Although Murray wrote about the rural culture of his childhood, he was not a "tearjerking sentimentalist," according to Trevor Royle, writing in the Companion to Scottish Literature. Royle praised Murray's lively tone and his skillful use of language. Royle also noted that when a poem by Murray was published in the Aberdeen Post and Journal in the spring of 1933, his popularity was such that the first edition sold out by nine a.m. the day it hit the bookstore shelves, and two more first editions had to be printed to satisfy the demand.

In addition to writing poetry, Murray was known for translating the works of Horace into Scots. According to Lang, Murray's translations of Horace "are among the best extant." The poet returned to Scotland in 1922 and died in Banchory in 1941. His ashes were buried in a churchyard of his birthplace, Alford.