The Poet

Though easily the best known and most popular Scots poet of the period from 1910 till the 1960s, Charles Murray's literary output was modest. Though there was nothing amateur in his approach to his poetry, Murray was not a professional literary man and had to compose in the time he could spare from a busy working life first as prospector and mine manager, then as a senior colonial civil servant, in the newly created Union of South Africa.

'Aiberdeen Awa!'

Only three individual collections appeared during his lifetime - Hamewith (1900, 1909); A Sough o War (1917) and In the Country Places (1920) - the latter two the traditional 'slim volumes' in which verse often appears. The poems from all three were brought together in Hamewith and Other Poems in 1927 which remained in print till the 1960s.

Murray's verse had appeared in book form before 1900 - his first collection, the privately-printed A Handful of Heather, appeared in 1893 in an edition of only 12 copies for family and friends. It is very rare, because Murray recovered and destroyed copies not in the hands of immediate family - almost certainly because of a poem called 'Mr Robinson', which lampoons the mining magnate J[oseph] B[enjamin] Robinson, an influential figure in 1890s South Africa. It begins

You've heard of the donkey, wrapped up in the skin,
Who thought as a king of the forest to pass,
Until a loud 'hee-haw' proclaimed from within
In spite of appearance the brute was an ass

Robinson's business ethics are questioned, but the main evidence of his folly is his disagreement with Murray's professional colleagues on 'Deep Level matters' related to the fast-developing goldmines of the Witwatersrand (ironically the professionals were wrong and Robinson right about the direction of the main gold-bearing reef).

In 1969, twenty-eight years after Murray's death, poems which had not appeared in book form during his lifetime were published as The Last Poems, with Preface and Notes by Alexander Keith.

Finally in 1979, Murray's friend, the novelist Nan Shepherd, edited Hamewith: the complete poems of Charles Murray. These publications were supported by the Charles Murray Memorial Fund.

The Shepherd Hamewith has been out of print for some years and the Fund's general editor, Dr Colin Milton, has prepared a new edition of Murray's poems. The new edition includes for the first time those Scots poems which appeared in A Handful of Heather but which were not included in later collections. And for the benefit of a new generation of readers, the Scots glossary has been expanded and fuller definitions given.

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• Murray And Scots
• The Making Of The Poems
• Murray's Countryside
• A Sough o War
• The Memorial Fund
• Publications

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