About Helen Cruickshank
Helen Burness Cruickshank (1886-1975) played a major role in 20th-century Scottish letters, both as a poet in her own right and as a catalyst for the Scottish Renaissance movement.
Beginnings and Professional Life
Cruickshank was born in the village of Hillside, near Montrose, and was educated at Montrose Academy. She spent childhood summer holidays in the Angus Glens, and their landscape and people would inspire her finest poetry. Since her family could not afford university fees, Cruickshank left school at fifteen and entered the Civil Service. She worked first for the Post Office in London from 1903 to 1912. The low wages and limited opportunities offered to the working woman led her to join the Women’s Social and Political Union and to become an active Suffragette. In 1912, she moved to Edinburgh to work in the newly established National Health Insurance Scheme. She would remain a civil servant until her retirement in 1944.
The Poet
Cruickshank began writing poetry shortly before the First World War. Her work began appearing in magazines and by 1920 was regularly chosen for the Glasgow Herald’s daily poetry feature. She came to the attention of Hugh MacDiarmid who featured her work in Scots in the anthology Northern Numbers and review Scottish Chapbook. Her first book of poetry, Up the Noran Water and Other Scots Poems was published by Methuen in 1934. Cruickshank was not a prolific poet. Only two further volumes Sea Buckthorn (1954) and The Ponnage Pool (1968), besides her Collected Poems (1971), would appear in her lifetime.
Cruickshank wrote both in Lowland Scots and in English but believed that her best work was in the former. Many of her poems were influenced by balladry and folksong, and some were set to music, including 'Shy Geordie', her best-known work, by Buxton Orr and Jim Reid, and 'Sea Buckthorn' by Francis George Scott. Although she favoured traditional forms, Cruickshank retained a lively interest in developments in modern poetry, experimenting with concrete poetry in ‘Peradventure’ and subscribing to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Wild Hawthorn Press.
Although known primarily as a poet, Edinburgh University Library’s Cruickshank Papers also contain manuscripts of short fiction and theatrical works.
Cruickshank and the Scottish Literary Renaissance
Cruickshank is perhaps best known as a focal point for the movement that became known as the Scottish Literary Renaissance. For nearly half-a-century, her house at Corstorphine in Edinburgh was a gathering place for Scottish writers from Lewis Grassic Gibbon through to George Mackay Brown. She was an early friend and supporter of Hugh MacDiarmid and was instrumental in obtaining financial assistance for him and his young family from the Royal Literary Fund. Gibbon and MacDiarmid dedicated their joint volume of polemical essays Scottish Scene; or, The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Albyn (1934) to Cruickshank.
Cruickshank disliked descriptions of herself as a ‘handmaid of the Scottish muse’, which downplayed her campaigning role in the Renaissance movement. She was a founder member (1927) and secretary of the Scottish Centre of International PEN and a founder member of the Saltire Society in 1936. She was also a close colleague of the many women writers, including Nan Shepherd, Catherine Carswell, Marion Lochhead, Bessie MacArthur, F. Marian McNeill, and Nannie K. Wells, whose role in the Scottish Renaissance is only now being acknowledged.
Recognition
The BBC broadcast a programme to celebrate Cruickshank’s 80th birthday in 1966. In 1970, she was awarded an Honorary Degree by Edinburgh University. She is commemorated in Makars' Court, outside The Writers' Museum, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh. Her unfinished autobiography, entitled Octobiography, was posthumously published in 1976.
Further Reading
Helen B. Cruickshank, Octobiography (Montrose: Standard Press, 1976)
Online Resources
Includes a biographical profile, a selection of poems, lists of biographical and critical resources, and links to publications by and about Helen Cruickshank in the Scottish Poetry Library's online catalogue. The Scottish Poetry Library is open to everyone to use and free to join.