Marriage and Family Life
It is uncertain how Bruce was employed after his return from Spitsbergen in autumn 1899. In his whole life he rarely had settled salaried work, and usually relied on patronage or on influential acquaintances to find him temporary posts. Early in 1901 he evidently felt sufficiently confident of his prospects to get married. His bride was Jessie Mackenzie, who had worked as a nurse in Samuel Bruce's London surgery. Bruce's secretive nature, even among his circle of close friends and colleagues, was such that precise information about the wedding—its exact date, its location—has not been recorded by his biographers. However, his marriage has now been found. It took place on the 26 January 1901, at Nigg, in Ross & Cromarty, at the Chapelhill United Free Church after banns. Bruce gave his occupation as Naturalist and Zoologist, son of Samuel Noble Bruce, surgeon MRCS, and a bachelor, while Jessie gave her status as a spinster, daughter of Alexander Mackenzie, master tailor, deceased. Bruce gave his residence as 17 Joppa Road, Portobello, Edinburgh, while Jessie gave hers as Chapelhill, Nigg, and as one of the witnesses was Isabella Mackenzie it would appear that Nigg was Jessie's home parish. (Colin B. Withers).
The Bruces settled in the coastal Edinburgh suburb of Portobello, in the first of a series of addresses in that area. A son, Eillium Alastair, was born in April 1902, and a daughter, Sheila Mackenzie, was born seven years later. During these years Bruce founded the Scottish Ski Club and became its first president. He was also a co-founder of Edinburgh Zoo.
Bruce's chosen life as an explorer, his unreliable sources of income and his frequent extended absences, all placed severe strains on the marriage, and the couple became estranged around 1916. However, they continued to live in the same house until Bruce’s death. Eillium became a Merchant Navy officer, eventually captaining a Fisheries Research Ship which, by chance, bore the name Scotia.
Read more about this topic: William Speirs Bruce
Famous quotes containing the words marriage and, marriage, family and/or life:
“Marriage and deathless friendship, both should be inviolable and sacred: two great creative passions, separate, apart, but complementary: the one pivotal, the other adventurous: the one, marriage, the centre of human life; and the other, the leap ahead.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, “What will you have, sir?” And I said, “A glass of hemlock.””
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough.... He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think. He runs away from time, which is made of thought, and yet all he can feel is his own time, the present.”
—Eugenio Montale (1896–1981)