Item 0021 - Ye who weep for the Kaffir : poem

William Wilfred Campbell was born in Newmarket, Ontario in 1861. He grew up in Wiarton and attended high school in Owen Sound before carrying on his studies at University College, in 1881-82 (where he wrote for the student newspaper The Varsity) and Wycliffe College in 1882-83, at the University of Toronto. Campbell then went to study at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He married Mary Dibble of Woodstock, Ontario, in 1884, and worked as rector of the congregations of West Claremont, New Hampshire, and St. Stephen, New Brunswick. His first two volumes of verse were written during this time: Sunshine and Snowflakes (1888) and Lake Lyrics (1889). Campbell abandoned the ministry in 1892 after having accepted a position in the office of the Secretary of State in Ottawa. From 1909 on he worked in the Dominion Archives. He contributed to the "Mermaid Inn" literary columns in the Toronto Globe in the early 1890s, and he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1892. He published volumes of verse and verse drama regularly and later in life took an interest in Canada's involvement in World War I, his son Basil serving as a major in the second Canadian Pioneer Battalion in September 1914. Wilfred Campbell died in Ottawa in 1918.