Iain Crichton Smith was born on the 1st January 1928 in Glasgow.
It’s sometimes stated that Crichton Smith was born on Lewis but his first two years were spent in Glasgow, a fact he refers to in his writing. He went to school in Stornoway, attending the Nicholson Institute, then gained a place at Aberdeen University, where he took a degree in English. Having trained as a teacher, he worked at Clydebank High School and – from 1955 to 1977 – at Oban High School. In both Clydebank and Oban he lived with his mother, until her death in 1969.
His years in Lewis proved to have a lasting influence on his creative work, in particular the “Wee Free” Kirk strand that permeates much of island life, which he saw as dogmatic and authoritarian, even anti-art. In an early piece of work, ‘Poem of Lewis’, Smith tells us that ‘They have no place for the fine graces of poetry.’
Crichton Smith wrote a huge number of poems almost a thousand , short stories, novels and plays in English and Gaelic, twenty-seven collections of poems appeared during his life or posthumously, alongside fourteen novels and numerous critical articles.
He is generally more respected in Gaelic for his prose, in English for his poetry. However, his achievement in both genres, in both languages, is remarkable and distinctive, with various features and concerns carried across genre and language borders.
A number of his poems explore the subject of the Highland Clearances, and his best-known novel Consider the Lilies is an account of the eviction of an elderly woman during such times. Elderly women and alienated individuals are common themes in his work. Among his later story collections and novels there are The Last Summer, Survival Without Error, My Last Duchess, which records the breakdown of a marriage, Goodbye Mr Dixon . With his knowledge of both city life and island life his works can be easily switched between either, There are vivid depictions of school life on Lewis in Mr Trill in Hades, and Other Stories and interrelated stories set in different apartments in The Tenement
Smith’s last book is a tragedy. An Honourable Death in 1992 it tells the story of Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald, known as Fighting Mac, he was a boy from the Black Isle who rose through the ranks of the army and was renowned for his courage, admired and loved, yet whose reputation was ruined by accounts of his homosexuality and encounters with young men in Ceylon. The Major-General sadly shot himself in a Paris hotel, avoiding a court-martial.
Iain Crichton Smith died aged 70 at his home at Taynuilt, Argyll after a fight with cancer.
For this place they died,
the new houses, the smell of seaweed,
an old woman walking about her croft,
the wind on the Atlantic,
a seagull lying dead on a bare headland,
the sea breaking whitely on the long sand,
flowers among the stones,
a minister on a Stornoway street
For this place they died.
The wind is beating against the headlands
the moor yellow with flowers,
like blue rings, there they used to walk
The loom of the wind on the headlands
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