Charles Murray

Charles Murray (1864–1941) was born at Alford in Aberdeenshire and trained as an engineer. In 1888 he went out to South Africa, where he worked on the Rand and in the Transvaal, and later became a senior official in the Public Works Department.

Far from home he wrote verse in the Scots of the Aberdeenshire country he had left, much of it first printed in Scottish periodicals. His first volume, Hamewith, appeared in Aberdeen in 1900, and the enlarged collection, with an introduction by Andrew Lang and many new poems, was published in London by Constable in 1916; that is the book printed here.

Murray retired to Banchory in Aberdeenshire in 1924 and died there in 1941.