Robin Jenkins
Robin Jenkins (1912-2005)
His Life and Works
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The painting on the front cover is a portrait of Robin Jenkins by Jennifer McRae The portrait is exhibited in the National Gallery In Edinburgh
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Introduction In 2008 whilst on a visit to Glasgow I came across ‘The Cone-Gatherers’ by Robin Jenkins. Having read it on my return journey home I sought out and read ‘A Would-be Hero’ and ‘The Pearl Fishers’. So far I have read about half of his many books. As one of my hobbies is researching Family Trees, and specifically researching the lives of individuals, I decided to look into the Life and Work of Robin Jenkins. I was surprised to find no biography but much information readily available. This work is a compilation of many pieces taken from books, newspapers and the Internet. I hope other readers of Jenkins might find it useful. Tony Dunlop ATnC.DUNLOP@Hotmail.co.uk www.ISSUU.com/investigate4fun
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Robin Jenkins Family Tree
James Forsyth JENKINS 1882 16 August 1920 Rutherglen
Annie Cunningham ROBINS 3 July 1886
John W YLIE
Helen Lyle MacLoud
Bridgetown, Glasgow
Married 18 August 1909
Ireland
Married 13 December 1913
Mary McIntyre W YLIE 1915 1988 Greenock
John ROBIN JENKINS 11 September 1912 24 February 2005 Flemington, Cambuslang
Married 13 June 1937
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Colin W ylie JENKINS 1950 1992 Glasgow
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Helen JENKINS
Ann JENKINS
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1912 Birth (Ref 627/00 0647) Born on the morning of September 11th at Burnside Terrace, Flemington, Cambuslang near Glasgow. He was named JOHN ROBIN JENKINS. He was the one son in a family of five. His father was JAMES FORSYTH JENKINS (at the time of the birth was recorded as being a ‘Spirit Salesman’) who was born in 1882, at Rutherglen, the son of CHARLES JENKINS and MARY FORSYTH (The register shows the birth as illegitimate). The 1901 Census shows James, aged 12, as the oldest of seven children living at Main Street in Cambuslang. His mother was ANNIE CUNNINGHAM ROBINS who was born on 3rd July 1886 in Bridgetown, Glasgow. She was the daughter of JOHN ROBIN (a ‘Steel Nail maker’) and ISOBELLE (nee ARNOLD). The 1901 Census shows Annie, aged 14, the oldest of five children, living at Victoria Gardens Rutherglen. She works as a ‘Curtain Folder’.
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1920 Death of his Father (Ref 627/00 0169) Father JAMES FORSYTH JENKINS dies on 16th August at 9 Burnside Buildings, Flemington aged 31years – Robin is just seven years old.
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1923 He won a bursary to Hamilton Academy
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1935 Graduates with BA at Glasgow University
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1936 Gains MA in English at Glasgow University
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1936 to 1939 Teaching at schools in Glasgow
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1937 Marriage (Ref 644/08 1357) On 13th June 1937 at 21 Hope Street Glasgow JOHN ROBIN JENKINS married MARY McINTYRE WYLIE. He is aged 24, bachelor and School Teacher, and living at 707 Dalmarnock Road, Glasgow. She is aged 21, spinster and Hospital Nurse, and living at 8 Wellington Street, Greenock. She was born in 1915, the daughter of JOHN WYLIE (Ships Plater, deceased) and HELEN LYLE MacLOUD. They were married on 13th December 1913 both from Greenock – she is recorded as a Domestic Servant.
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1939 Moves to Moffat in the Borders to teach children evacuated from Glasgow.
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1940 to 1946 The Second World Wars years. Having declared himself a ‘conscientious objector’ he worked for the Forestry Service in Argyll
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1950 Birth (Ref 644/07 0323) -- Son COLIN WYLIE JENKINS born in Glasgow – College District
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1951 Published “So Gaily Sings the Lark” through MacLellan
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1953 Published “Happy for the Child” through Lehmann
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1954 Published “The Thistle and the Grail” through MacDonald The Thistle is the unlucky local football team of Drumsagart, a drab Industrial town in Lanarkshire. Cursed with poverty, an ineffective President and a string of defeats, the Thistle team members are running low on morale, especially when it seems like there are many people against them.
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1955 Published “The Cone Gatherers” through MacDonald. Calum and Neil are the cone-gatherers - two brothers at work in the forest of a large Scottish estate. But the harmony of their life together is shadowed by the dark obsessive hatred of Duror, the gamekeeper.
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1956 Awarded the Fredrick Niven Award for Literature Published “Guests of War” through MacDonald In the autumn of 1939, as the Nazi Blitzkrieg sweeps across Europe, the people of Gowburgh are forced to prepare themselves for war. Women and children of the town are evacuated to Langrigg, causing tension with the population of their new home.
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1957 to 1959 Teaching at Gjazi College, Kabul, Afghanistan through British Institute
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1957 Published “The Missionaries” through MacDonald Sollas, a remote island off Scotland's west coast, has been invaded by a group of Christian sectarians who claim a right to live and worship on the island. The island's owner, Mr. Vontin, and his daughter take measures to have the group removed, while a young university student, Andrew, finds himself in a quest for truth and caught in the middle of the passionate dispute. Andrew's voyage of self-discovery raises questions of morality, social standing, and the role of the Christian church today.
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1958 Published “The Changeling” through MacDonald The changeling of the title is Tom Curdie, the product of a Glasgow slum. Thirteen years old, he is on probation for theft. His teachers admit him to be clever, but only one, Charles Forbes, sees in his reticence and in his seemingly insolent smile a magnanimity uncanny in a child. He decides to take Tom on holiday with his own family. And the effect of his decision is the subject of this powerful book.
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1959 to 1961 Teaching in Barcelona, Spain through British Institute
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1959 Published “Love is a Fervent Fire” through MacDonald Hugh Carstares, badly wounded in the war that cost him his wife, seemed to himself and to his superiors in the forestry service only the burnt out wreck of a hero. But in Kinlochgarvie he found people on whose lives his coming acted as a catalyst for the hopes and despairs never acknowledged by them in secret.
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1960 Published “Some Kind of Grace” through MacDonald Two British travellers, Donald Kemp and Margaret Duncan, have disappeared in the wild mountainous region of northern Afghanistan; a terrain into which western Europeans seldom penetrate. The authorities in Kabul say that they have been murdered by the inhabitants of a small and primitive village and that retribution has already been exacted in the form of wholesale reprisals. John McLeod, a friend of the missing couple who has spent some years in Afghanistan as a diplomat, is deeply suspicious of these explanations. He returns to Kabul and starts his own inquiries, but everywhere he is met with obstruction and evasion, though McLeod is deterred neither by the devious courtesies of local officials nor by the discreet negations of his own embassy. The quest becomes an obsession in which physical pursuit is linked with a personal desire to discover the truth of Donald and Margaret's whole strange relationship.
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1961 Published “Dust on the Paw” through MacDonald Abdul Wahab, an Afghan science teacher, is eagerly anticipating the arrival of his British fiancée, Laura Johnstone, in the capital of his home country. However, the employees at the British Embassy are in turmoil at this new arrival and all the disaster they are sure that this mixed marriage will bring.
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1962 Published “The Tiger of Gold”
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1963 to 1968 Teaching at Gaya School, Sabah, Borneo through British Institute
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1963
Published “A Love of Innocence” through Cape A moving story of two young boys growing up haunted by dark secrets from the past.
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1964 Published “The Sardana Dancers” through Cape Jonathan and Maddy are desperate for something significant, something creative to happen in their lives. They become passionately involved with John, an aggressive, working-class Glaswegian painter, and beautiful Barcelona student, Montserrat, whose brother is an imprisoned Catelan patriot.
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1968 to 1970 Teaching at Dunoon Grammar School until he retired in 1970
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1968 Moved with his family to live in Toward at ‘Fairview’. Remained there for the rest of his life. Published “A Very Scotch Affair” through Gollancz A Very Scotch Affair, is set in Glasgow and tells the tale of Mungo Niven, a man who possesses a fiercely Scotch conscience and who feels trapped in a drab and unfulfilling existence. Mungo's wife is the extroverted and excessively cheerful Bess, too busy cracking jokes or playing whist to give her husband's misery any sympathy and dismissing his vague intellectual, imaginative and amorous ambitions as pointless dreams. Mungo finds himself bound to her not so much by love and loyalty as by the many
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Robin Jenkins trivial commonplaces of married life. When Bess is stricken by cancer, Mungo sees an opportunity for him to escape both his loveless marriage and his tyrannical conscience. As Mungo seizes this chance, his actions have far-reaching effects which he had never imagined; his eldest son follows his father's example into betrayal and abandons his pregnant girlfriend; his eighteenyear-old daughter becomes emotionally numb to the situation; his younger son, just twelve-years-old, develops an intense hatred towards his father and turns his back on the family, moving away to live with relatives. Mungo is left looking at the pieces of his broken family. x
1969 Published “The Holy Tree” through Gollancz
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1970 Published “Exploitation” through ………….
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1971 Published “The Expatriates” through Gollancz
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1972 Published “A Toast to the Lord” through Gollancz
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1973 Published “Far Cry from Bowmore” through …………
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1974 Published “A Figure of Fun” through Gollancz
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1978 Published “A Would-be Saint” though Gollancz The story of a young footballer growing up between the First and Second World wars
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1979 Published “Road to Alto” through ……..
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Robin Jenkins Published “Fergus Lamont” through Canongate From his origins as an illegitimate child in the slums of Glasgow, Fergus Lamont sets out to reclaim his inheritance and to remake his identity as soldier, poet and would-be aristocrat. x
1984 Published “Third World Atlas” through …………
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1985 Published “The Awakening of George Darroch” through Harris This novel is based on a momentous event in Scottish history, the Great Disruption of 1843, when a group of ministers took on the establishment in a bitter conflict which split the Church of Scotland down the middle.
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1988 Death (Ref 32/00 0044) --
Wife Mary dies aged 72
Published “Just Duffy” through Cannongate Convinced of his own rectitude, appalled at the moral squalor around him, Duffy declares war on society. Ridiculous, yet horrifying at the same time, his campaign builds to a terrifying conclusion. Beset with ambiguity, Duffy is a ferocious indictment of Calvinistic moral certainty, of a struggle for good which results in only evil and destruction x
1991 Published “Poverty Castle” through Balnain The novel is set within a novel, in which the happiness of an idealistic family in Argyll is tempered inexorably by events, human nature, and the socialism of industrial Glasgow.
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1992 Death (Ref 601/00 0841) -- Son Colin Wylie Jenkins dies aged 42 in Glasgow (Martha Street).
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1993 Published “Willie Hogg” through …………. An elderly man, Willie, and his wife, Maggie, travel to a Navajo reservation in the Arizona desert where Maggie's missionary sister, Elspeth, lies dying of cancer. An article on the couple in a Glasgow newspaper a few weeks previously had sparked off a great effort in the city to raise funds for the trip and Willie and his wife soon find themselves the target of unseemly publicity and envied by their neighbours. On their arrival in America, Willie finds his lifelong beliefs tested under the huge, empty sky of Arizona, and Maggie, it seems, has undergone a real transformation.
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1995 Published “Leila” through Polygon Robin Jenkins returned to the Far East in the 1950s for Leila, a tender love story involving a Scottish teacher, Andrew Sandilands, and Leila, the exotically beautiful daughter of a local politician. Leila is, like her father, implicated in the revolutionary tremors shaking the small country and the lovers are soon torn between the small-minded mores of the expatriate community and Leila's determined effort to play a role in her country's future.
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1996 Published “Lunderston Tales” through Polygon.
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1999 Awarded the OBE Published “Matthew and Sheila” through Polygon Following the death of his mother and rejection by his father, schoolboy Matthew is taken to Lunderston by his guardian where he meets Sheila. She introduces him to her own beliefs and together they call upon the supernatural to solve his problems.
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2000 Published “Poor Angus” through Canongate Books
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Published “Childish Things” through Canongate Books This text begins with a funeral at which Gregor McLeod is mourning the death of his wife. It soon becomes evident that McLeod is a womanizer and despite his very recent bereavement, is being pursued by an assortment of attractive women. Satirical and yet compassionate, Jenkins proceeds to explore McLeod’s adventurous escapades with the ladies both at home and abroad. The result is a tremendous compelling comic novel which retains all the sharpness, wit and pace that is customary from Jenkins, combined with mellow, wry wisdom that never fails to entertain. His central theme – do we ever outgrow ‘childish things’? – is explored with captivating insight and delicious humour.
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2002 Award Awarded the Saltaire Society’s ‘Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun’ Award for making an outstanding contribution to Scottish Life.
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2003 Award Given a Lifetime Achievement award by the Scottish Arts Council and the Saltaire Society. Published “Lady Magdalen” through Canongate Books This novel covers a fascinating period in Scottish (British) history, covering the Bishop's war, the first phase of the British civil wars of the seventeenth century. The ambitious Montrose signed the Covenant, but then became the King's Lieutenant in Scotland. The young Lady Magdalen was married off to James Graham, the future Marquis of Montrose, in a political alliance, but more specifically to provide heirs, as Graham was the last of his line. She was regarded as a timid nonentity by her siblings and husband, quite unsuited to the role of wife of one of the foremost figures in Scotland. Yet throughout the book one comes to have a great respect for Magdalen and her standards, as indeed do many of the men she confronted.
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2005 Death
(Ref 532/00 0029)
Robin Jenkins died late in the evening of 24th February 2005 at the Inverclyde Royal Hospital in Greenock. His home address is shown on the Certifica as Fairhaven at Toward. His wife is shown as still living. The informant is given as Ann Schneider, daughter. The following is a paragraph from the Obituary in The Scotsman “He was a man of great strength of purpose, which carried him through bad times. Worst was the death of his wife in 1988, which caused him to turn uniquely to verse with a moving tribute, "Now that May has gone". He wrote on, movingly, about old age, in Willie Hogg and Childish Things, while never losing his comic edge. He lost his teacher son, Colin, of heart failure, but rejoiced in his daughters, Anne and Helen, his four grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren in England and the United States.” x
2007 Published (Posthumously) “The Pearl Fishers” through Polygon When the beautiful pearl-fisher, Effie Williamson, arrives in a rural Scottish village, with her grandparents and siblings, the residents react in many different ways, from hospitable warmth to outright rejection, exacerbate when the religious, gentle Gavin Hamilton takes the family into his home, the Old Manse. A difficult love blossoms gradually between Effie and Gavin under the scrutiny of the watchful locals.
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Sculpture installed at the entrance to Bebmore Botanic Garden
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Robin Jenkins Robin Jenkins Quotations – taken as abstracts from his books (as Published on the BBC Website – Writing Scotland) Jenkins on Darker Side of Life From So Gaily Sings the Lark David glanced at the white-blossomed tree. ‘It is fragrant,’ he declared with a quite passionate emphasis. ‘Break off a twig though and smell that. Go on, try it,’ Hamilton urged. Reluctantly David did so. ‘What does it smell like now? Is it still fragrant?’ ‘Hardly.’ ‘It’s got a stink like a weasel. That’s not wonderful. It’s the same wi’ everything: the surface is fair but what’s under’s rotten.’ From Happy for the Child ‘Will I tell you, elder, why I don’t believe in hell? Because I’m convinced it’s beyond the ingenuity of even the Almighty to think up worse punishments than these. We breathe and we’re in hell. Listen.’ They heard Jeanie’s sobbing, a bus on the street outside, and in the house thuds and screams from the thudder.
Jenkins on Death as Redemption From The Cone-Gatherers First she said: ‘Help him, Baird.’ Then she went down on her knees, near the blood and the spilt cones. She could not pray, but she could weep; and as she wept pity, and purified hope, and joy, welled up in her heart.
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Robin Jenkins Jenkins on Self-deception From the Changeling Without doubt, at the very back of his mind from the very beginning had been the hope that his befriending of this slum delinquent child might reach the ears of authority. He had dreamed that at some future promotion interview some favourable councillor … would ask: ‘Is it the case, Mr Forbes …?’ His answer would be modest but effective.
Jenkins on Scotland From The Thistle and the Grail The Scots have always had a violence in their souls. Nowadays they express it at football; long ago religion was the outlet. From ‘Why I decided Scotland must be seen through fresh and truthful eyes’, Glasgow Herald, 12 October 1982 The Scots have always had a violence in their souls. Nowadays they express it at football; long ago religion was the outlet. Are the Scots really dull, humourless and spiritually sterile? Have we altogether lost the qualities that produced some of the best ballads in the world? Or do those qualities still persist, beneath layers of defeatism and subservience?. Looking back I can see now that [Flemington] was as fruitful a birthplace as any for a Scottish novelist, especially one concerned with moral values. Seen through the eyes of a child, people, events and places had indeed a ballad-like quality. Women wept publicly because their men would not be returning from the Great War or because they were humiliatingly poor. Passions were openly expressed. Words were vivid and memorable. People were strikingly diverse. Mysteries abounded
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Robin Jenkins From Fergus Lamont For generations in Scotland, bursary-winners and gold medallists have passed out of the schools and universities, fixed in the belief that nothing has a value that cannot be marked out of a hundred. This is the reason why the Scots have failed as artists and patriots, but succeeded as engineers and theologians. Before a man can enjoy the singing of blackbirds, or understand his country’s history, it is necessary for him to have felt, when a child at school, the mortification of scoring less than fifty per cent.
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