Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Drummond, William Henry
DRUMMOND, WILLIAM HENRY (1854–1907), Canadian physician and poet, born on 13 April 1854 at Currawn, co. Leitrim, Ireland, was eldest of four sons of George Drummond, an officer in the Royal Irish constabulary, who was then stationed at Currawn. His mother was Elizabeth Morris Soden. In 1856 the family moved to Tawley, co. Donegal, where Paddy McNulty, one of the hereditary scholars of Ireland, gave the boy the rudiments of his education, and on the river Duff he first learned to cast a fly.
In 1865 the family went out to Canada, where the father soon died, and the mother and her four children were reduced to the slenderest resources. After a few terms at a private school in Montreal, William Drummond studied telegraphy, and by 1869 was an operator at the village of Bord-à-Plouffe on the Rivière des Prairies. Here he first came in contact with the habitant and voyageur French-speaking backwoodsmen, whose simple tales and legends he was later to turn to literary account.
In 1876 Drummond, having saved sufficient money, resumed his studies, first in the High School, Montreal, then at McGill University, and finally at Bishop's College, Montreal, where he graduated in medicine in 1884. He practised his profession for two years at the village of Stornoway, near Lake Megantic, and then bought a practice at Knowlton in the township of Brome. Towards the close of 1888 he returned to Montreal. There he became professor of medical jurisprudence at Bishop's College in 1895, and soon made a literary reputation. He received the hon. degree of LL.D. from Toronto in 1902 and of D.C.L. from Bishop's College, Lennoxville in 1905. In the summer of 1905 Drummond and his brothers acquired property in the silver region of Cobalt, in northern Ontario, and most of his time until his death was spent in superintending the valuable Drummond mines. He acted as vice-president of the company. In the spring of 1907 he hurried from Montreal to his camp on hearing that small-pox had broken out there. Within a week of his arrival he died at Cobalt of cerebral hæmorrhage, on 6 April. He was buried in Mount Royal cemetery, Montreal.
In 1894 he married May Isabel Harvey of Savanna la Mar, Jamaica. Of four children, a son, Charles Barclay, and a daughter, Moira, survive.
It was after his marriage in 1894 that Drummond transcribed for publication the broken patois verse in which he had embodied his memories of the habitant, and which raised the dialect to the level of a literary language of unspoiled freshness and humour. ‘The Wreck of the Julie Plante,’ composed at Bord-à-Plouffe, the first piece of his to circulate widely, showed something of his whimsical fancy and droll powers of exaggeration. His mingled tenderness and mirth were revealed later. Three collections of Drummond's verse appeared in his lifetime: ‘The Habitant’ (1897); ‘Johnny Courteau’ (1901); and ‘The Voyageur’ (1905). There appeared posthumously ‘The Great Fight’ (1908), with a memoir by his wife. All these volumes have been many times reprinted. In a preface to ‘The Habitant’ (1897) Louis Fréchette [q. v. Suppl. II] justly and generously transferred to Drummond a phrase which had been bestowed upon himself by Longfellow in 1863—‘the pathfinder of a new land of song.’ Few dialect poets have succeeded in equal measure with Drummond in capturing at once the salient and concealed characteristics of the persons whom they portray. Drummond's habitant, although using an alien speech, faithfully presents a highly interesting racial type. His humorous exaggeration of eccentricities never passes into unkindly caricature. Drummond had, too, at his command an admirable faculty of telling a story.
[Mrs. Drummond's memoir prefixed to The Great Fight, 1908; information from Drummond's brother, Mr. George E. Drummond.]