Violet Jacob was born into the Kennedy-Erskine family an aristocratic family who had owned the Dun estate near Montrose for hundreds of years. Amongst her ancestors she included a friend of John Knox and the first Moderator of the new Church of Scotland and Augusta FitzClarence, the natural daughter of King William IV and the actress Dorothy Jordan. She married Major Arthur Jacob in 1894 and travelled with him to India where she painted many rare flowers and kept a dairy of all her observations. During World War 1 she lost her only child, Harry, when he died of wounds received at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. She spent much of her life away from Angus, only returning when her husband died in 1936.
As a child she learned to speak Scots because she was "aye in and oot amo’ the ploomen’s feet". In other words, she spent a great deal of time hanging about with the ploughmen on the estate’s main farm. Here she learned that Scots was a separate and beautiful language in an age when most girls of her class would have, wrongly, regarded Scots as sub-standard English. Violet loved poetry and words and earned a reputation as a fine writer of poetry, novels and children’s stories. Her native area provided much of the inspiration for her work. Her novel of the Jacobite Rebellion, Flemington, was even set in her birthplace, the House of Dun. John Buchan rated Flemington very highly, saying it was the best Scots novel since "The master of Ballantrae" by Robert Louis Stevenson. She was not a prolific writer and produced novels and poetry sparingly. Amongst her best loved work are the poems "The wild geese" and the "Tam I’ the Kirk". Her collection of 1915 "The songs of Angus" is still much loved.
Scottish Renaissance
She wrote in the Scots vernacular long before the Scottish Renaissance of the 1920’s when poets of the calibre of Hugh MacDiarmid came to the fore. Violet was a friend of MacDiarmid who was also a reporter on the Montrose Review during the 1920’s. She met him on her visits to Angus on holiday usually during the autumn. They were good friends and he later recalled her as a handsome and charming woman. He included some of her poetry in the first edition of the anthology Northern Numbers which is credited with having been instrumental in the revival of interest in Scots writing. Jacob was not truly part of the Renaissance movement but she was influential amongst the young poets involved in the revival. In 1936 Arthur died and Violet returned to live in Kirriemuir, Angus. She died in 1946. Her birthplace, the House of Dun, is a fine Adam mansion house under the care of the National Trust for Scotland. The house and grounds are open to the public and are well worth a visit.
© Angus Council 1998 - 2009
