A NUMBER of readers who entered the December Nicol’s Killer Quiz complained that Robert W Service was not Scots-born, as we’d stated, but Canadian. We’re all wrong, as it happens - he was actually born in Preston Lancashire, in January 1874, the eldest of 10 children.

However, his father was a successful Glasgow banker, his mother the daughter of a distillery family and his grandfather was the Postmaster in the Ayrshire town of Kilwinning. Indeed family lore has it that his great-great-grandfather was given to getting drunk with Robert Burns in the inns of Irvine, just down the road.
So speedily did the Service children arrive, that as a toddler Robert was sent to live with his grandpa and three doting aunts in Ayrshire. Here he spent his formative years, before rejoining the rest of the family, now returned to Glasgow.

At 15 he followed his father into banking, then he went to Glasgow University. But he had an aversion to authority and fell out with a lecturer, leaving after a few months. To his family’s consternation he decided to go to Canada at the tender age of 22, and once there spent a year exploring North America. He secured a job in a bank in the Yukon in 1905 where he moved in the cream of society and was known as a snappy dresser. A poem written for a church social started him on the career that was to make him wealthy.

We think of Dan McGrew, Sam McGhee, the Lovely Lady known as Lou and think of Service as a man who shared that world of poverty and hope. But in fact he found such success as a writer so early that most of his life he could do as he pleased.
In fact he spent no more than eight years altogether in Canada and left in 1912, spending most of his life writing books, plays, and poetry in France, spending the summer in Brittany and wintering on the Riviera - that is when he was not off adventuring, for he was footloose and travelled from China to Cuba, the Balkans to Tahiti, even after he married his French bride and had a family. But he always kept his UK passport. He escaped the Nazis (and grim wartime Britain) to spend WWII in Hollywood, writing screenplays and even acting with Marlene Dietrich in The Spoilers. After the war the family returned to their leisurely life in France where he died in 1958.

• We have had several requests to publish the quiz answers, so look out in the March edition for the answers to this month’s Nicol’s Killer Quiz questions.