Charles Murray: Author of “Hamewith”

THE POPULARITY of Hamewith and its author was quite phenomenal in the north‐east of Scotland. It is a significant mark of the affection in which the author was held by the community at large that he was soon popularly known as ‘Hamewith’ himself, in the same way as a farmer in that airt comes to be known by the name of his place. Hamewith was first published by Wyllie & Son, Aberdeen, in 1900. By 1909 a new and more elaborate edition was called for, with an introductiion by Andrew Lang, then Scotland's leading littérateur, and published by Constable in London. By 1912, when he was entertained to an official public dinner in Aberdeen, Charles Murray, who had emigrated to South Africa in 1888 at the age of 24, was then Secretary for Public Works in the Union of South Africa. It is important to note that Murray spent practically the whole of his working life (1888–1924) in South Africa, and wrote practically all his verse in exile. He is by no means the only Scottish writer to have seen his native land more clearly from a distance. One thinks, for example, of Stevenson in Samoa, Grassic Gibbon in Welwyn Garden City, and George Douglas Brown in London.