Bard of the Silv'ry Tay


There are a few standard remarks that pursue the name of William McGonagall. He is "the world's worst poet", a writer so bad he is good. During his lifetime (1825-1902), he was celebrated, with abundant irony, as "the Great McGonagall". The faint air of risibility that comes off the name itself, which resembles the noise made when you gargle salt water, was made richer by some students who, in 1894, sent a letter bestowing on him the elaborate title, "Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Poet and Knight of the White Elephant, Burmah", a handle he used, without the least knowing wink, until his death at 77, one year after his beloved Queen Victoria.

His Dundee publisher, which issued the tuppenny pamphlets McGonagall hawked around the streets of Dundee and continued with his Poetic Gems for a century, proudly advertised him as "the greatest bad verse writer of his age ... or of any other age". Everyone is familiar with the typical McGonagall verse: the hobbled foot, the wavy-pavy line, leading to the inimitable belly-flop:

   "Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay!
   That has caused the Emperor of Brazil to leave
   His home far away, incognito in his dress,
   And view thee 'ere he passed along en route to Inverness."

McGonagall was born in Edinburgh to Irish parents. His father had come to Ayrshire, on the west of Scotland, in the early part of the century to pursue the commercially doomed trade of handloom weaving, and then with wife and children in tow - William was the youngest of five - moved from place to place, as machine weaving put paid to the handloom. In Glasgow, the future poet attended school for 18 months, his only formal education. When the cotton weaving failed there too, the family moved to Orkney where McGonagall senior became a "pedlar" - his son's description - selling "hardware among the peasantry".

In the eyes of the local islanders, they would have been Irish tinkers. From there they migrated to Dundee, which is customarily regarded as McGonagall's home town, along with other Caledonian comic characters, such as Oor Wullie, The Broons and Desperate Dan. The lives of both father and son were typical of the time in being shaped by the search for work. In one of his fragments of autobiography, in this case written in the third person, McGonagall stated that "his Father took him from the Mill and learned him the handloom himself and he has followed that occupation up to the present when he can get to do it".

When he could not get to do it, he turned to the stage, and his great literary love, Shakespeare. McGonagall began writing poetry only when he was in his 50s; but long before he became a writer he was an actor. He was a popular performer who received regular write-ups in the press, less because of his acting skills than for his outrageous antics on stage. He specialised in various roles, including Macbeth, which he enacted at several venues, including the Theatre Royal, Dundee.

The show consisted of selected highlights rather than the entire play. On one occasion, repeating the duel with Macduff for a third time, by audience demand, McGonagall refused to go down, as obliged by the script, when his opponent ran him through with his sword (Macbeth, V, viii). According to a review in the Dundee People's Journal, Macbeth "maintained his feet and flourished his weapon about the ears of his adversary", continuing to cry, "Lay on, Macduff; / And damned be him that first cries 'Hold'". Damned, rather, be Shakespeare's stage direction that states, "Macbeth slain". Eventually, the reviewer in the Journal wrote, Macduff resolved the matter "in a rather undignified way by taking the feet from under the principal character".

The extemporaneous approach to classic drama went down well with McGonagall's typical audience of weavers and mill hands. When he took to writing, he used the tricks he had learned on the stage to keep his hearers' attention, drawing on a combination of actorly guile and a narrative thrust derived from Scottish, Irish and English ballads. McGonagall was a prototypical performance poet, his fame depending as much on a talent for theatrical oratory as on his tuppenny pamphlets. A typical McGonagall recital would begin with a rendition of his own ballad "The Rattling Boy from Dublin", which outlines the singer's argument with a lad called Barney Magee over a lass called Biddy Brown:

   "Her eyes they were as black as sloes,
   She had black hair and an aquiline nose."

When it came to giving Barney Magee a whack with "my darling shillelah" - "Saying botheration to you and Biddy Brown, / For I'm the rattling boy from Dublin town" - the audience would have roared along with the "Whack fal de da, fal de darelido" chorus that comes after every verse. That would be followed by a couple of poems of the more stirring variety - "Bannockburn" or his account of "The Battle of Tel-el-Kebir" - leading into a tear-jerker such as "The Little Match Girl" which, as the poet Edwin Morgan has remarked, can be read "quite straight" by an actor with a good voice, injecting "some pathos, as doubtless Dickens would have done". Still, the rabble had come to be roused, and for that McGonagall turned to Shakespeare, who, like him, was an actor as well as a poet, and the single writer to whom he deferred. The Glasgow Evening Times journalist William Power once attended a McGonagall event in the city's Albion Halls:

"After reciting some of his own poems to an accompaniment of whistles and cat-calls, the Bard armed himself with a most dangerous-looking broadsword and strode up and down the platform declaiming "Clarence's dream" and "Give me another horse! - Bind up my wounds!" His voice rose to a howl. He thrust and slashed at imaginary foes. A shower of apples and oranges fell on the platform. Almost before they touched, they were met by the fell edge of McGonagall's claymore, and cut to pieces. The audience yelled with delight; McGonagall yelled louder still, and with a fury which I fancy was not wholly feigned."

McGonagall was the object of many unkind tricks besides the knighthood hoax. On one occasion, he was invited to Stratton's Restaurant in Dundee to meet some "gentlemen", one of whom was impersonating the celebrated Irish playwright Dion Boucicault. They offered him £20 a week, a huge sum, to perform in London. However, McGonagall found them out (or so he tells us) and, in a fierce phrase, "stared my pretended friends out of countenance until they couldn't endure the penetrating glance of my poetic eye". In contrast to his tormentors, McGonagall appears to have done little harm. The recorded offences involve no greater sin than that of pride. He once refused to recite at a parlour soirée in New York, which his Scottish hosts had organised for his benefit, because it fell on the sabbath. His hard-pressed landlady accused him of "affronting" her before the assembled neighbours, and McGonagall retired to bed wrapped in self-righteousness.

While the majority of his Victorian contemporaries have passed into oblivion, McGonagall's verse has survived. His would be the only name that a majority of Scots could offer if pressed to identify a national poet, after the obvious example of Robert Burns. This may say something about the status of the writer in Scotland but it can also be taken as a tribute to McGonagall. His verse is memorable; it is enjoyable. One of the principal requirements of literary permanence is a distinct voice, and few are more distinct than McGonagall's. You will travel a long way to meet someone able to identify lines by Alfred Austin (appointed poet laureate in 1896) or by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, another contemporary. But reel out some McGonagall - "Ye lovers of the picturesque, if ye wish to drown your grief, / Take my advice, and visit the ancient town of Crieff" - and the listener is keenly awaiting the bathetic thump before it arrives.

The recognition cannot be explained simply by McGonagall's abysmal prosody. Poetasters are ten a penny, but McGonagall is alone among versifiers in lacking almost any trace of the poetic, and this has proved sufficient to create a unique style. On the rare occasions when a half-decent image occurs in McGonagall, it seems inappropriate. One crops up in "The Albion Battleship Calamity", about the collapse of a grandstand in the course of the ship's launch, which killed several people. When McGonagall writes that "The vessel was christened by the Duchess of York / And the spectators' hearts felt as light as cork", the final simile invokes not only the celebratory mood of the crowd at the moment when champagne bottles were popping, but the imminent disaster that was to leave bodies floating in the river, "light as cork". More often, McGonagall is true to his exquisitely unpoetic manner which, however, we are bound to call "the real thing". There are poems in Poetic Gems that are much too refined to be his own work. One is "The Bonnie Lass o' Dundee", which swings with such a regular beat that the reader's instinct is to sing it:

   "O' a' the toons that I've been in
   I dearly love Dundee,
   It's here the bonnie lassie lives,
   The lass I love to see.
   Her face is fair, broon is her hair,
   And dark blue is her e'e,
   And aboon a' the lasses e'er I saw,
   There's nane like her to me -
   The bonnie broon-hair'd lassie o' Bonnie Dundee."

McGonagall could not have kept such rhythm going for the length of a couplet, never mind the skilful nine-line verses of this poem, nor was he capable of so neatly combining the charms of girl and town. Later, the stanza mysteriously shrinks, the metre stumbles, and the rhymes start to thud - suggesting that McGonagall was here, after all.

As his voice is unique, so it is impossible to parody with the proper conviction. Would-be imitators always intend a joke, whereas McGonagall's lines are inevitably guided by sincerity, the ultimate redeeming feature of his verse. In The Autobiography of Sir William Topaz McGonagall, he explained how he first "received the spirit of poetry":

"Well, it being the holiday week in Dundee, I was ... lamenting to myself because I couldn't get to the Highlands on holiday to see the beautiful scenery, when all of a sudden my body got inflamed, and instantly I was seized with a strong desire to write poetry, so strong, in fact, that in imagination I heard a voice crying in my ears -


The visitation occurred in 1877, when he was 52. Every word McGonagall wrote afterwards was true to his inspiration, which is to say, true to his feelings. His feelings were mostly public-spirited and good-natured. Open Poetic Gems at any page, and you are likely to find expressions of goodwill. McGonagall makes a curious separation in the Autobiography between the inspiration that excited his creative instinct, and the subject matter that was meant to fulfil it. "Being overcome with a desire to write poetry, I found paper, pen and ink, and in a state of frenzy, sat me down to think what should be my first subject." The muse commanded him to write - but it was up to him to choose what to write about.

Characteristically, he chose the public works of a decent man: "All at once, I thought of the Revd George Gilfillan, and composed a poem of four stanzas in his praise." It was published immediately in the Weekly News, under the initials W McG. For his second poem, he chose a wonder of Victorian engineering, "The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay" (two years later, the bridge collapsed in a storm, inspiring what is perhaps McGonagall's most famous poem, "The Tay Bridge Disaster"). From then on, McGonagall set himself to work for the benefit of society in the only way he knew, by recording public events. As he witnesses the unveiling of the Black Watch Memorial at Aberfeldy, his thoughts are with the local people, of whom the regiment is the formidable representative: "As they gaze upon the beautiful Black Watch monument, / I hope they will think of the brave soldiers and feel content." At a time when many listening to his recitals would have been unable to read, McGonagall acted as a poet of reportage, always mindful of the importance of basic information.

When was the memorial unveiled? "'Twas in the year of 1887, and on Saturday the 12th of November." The line could be shortened, and the rhythm smoothed, by ending it "on November 12th", but that would have deprived McGonagall of his all-embracing human touch as he completes the couplet: "Which the people of Aberfeldy and elsewhere will remember." In another poem, in commending the courage of a London man in an emergency, he instinctively reports the basic details: "Thomas Cooke, of No 6 Percy Road, Canning Town, / Whose name ought to be to posterity handed down".

The poetry of information is suggestively modern, and the same can be said of the improvisatory feel of much of McGonagall's work. The late Robert Creeley, an improvisatory poet par excellence, once responded to a question about his method of composition: "It continues until it closes, and that's usually when I stop." The remark, which sounded quite advanced in 1963, could as easily have been uttered by McGonagall in the 1880s, if he'd had the least self-consciousness. McGonagall's poems are frequently shapeless, dictated only by the feeling that guides them (like Creeley's, though one would not wish to stretch the comparison). The feeling may appear ridiculous to some, but it is never phoney. In his poem "The Ancient Town of Leith", in which the poetry of reportage is brought to a heightened state - "And as for the Docks, they are magnificent to see, / They comprise five docks, two piers, 1,141 yards long respectively" - McGonagall turns his friendly and caring eye on Bailie Gibson's fish shop, "most elegant to be seen":

   "And the fish he sells there are beautiful and clean;
   And for himself, he is a very good man,
   And to deny it there's few people can."

In three plain-speaking lines, McGonagall has traced the path of decency - beginning with the fresh fish, which are productive of a clear conscience in the fishmonger, who thus draws the townspeople into reflective recognition of his virtue, which they are bound to emulate.

McGonagall's own virtue was rewarded in Dundee with derision and mockery. Every time he took to the stage, audience reaction threatened to turn into a brawl. It was joyous havoc, of the sort that easily becomes dangerous. He often stepped down from the platform coated in flour and rotten eggs. On one occasion, he was hoisted on to the shoulders of the young men in the audience and carried into the street, mid-poem, and on another had to barricade himself in his dressing room for safety. In 1889, in the interests of keeping the peace, Dundee city magistrates put a stop to his recitals. As McGonagall depended almost entirely on readings for his income - the takings at a performance ranged from four to 15 shillings, at a time when the rent for a two-roomed flat was about three shillings a week - the prohibition was a serious blow. When the statue of Burns was unveiled before the Albert Institute in Dundee, McGonagall was kept away by the police, to prevent over-excitement in the crowd (for this and other contemporary details, I am indebted to David Phillips and his book No Poet's Corner in the Abbey, 1971).

McGonagall carried on for several years after the restriction, travelling to Glasgow, London and New York in search of a living. He was unsuccessful everywhere. In America, friends advised him to suppress his royalist sympathies but McGonagall, imperialist down to the holes in his boots, refused to do so. One of the most famous, and touching, stories about him involves his overnight trek from Dundee to Balmoral to read before Queen Victoria. Another band of jokers had sent him "Her Majesty's letter of patronage". When McGonagall presented it to the constable at Balmoral lodge, he was threatened with arrest. The poet turned and started back for Dundee, his esteem for the queen undiminished:

   "Long may she be spared to roam
   Among the bonnie Highland floral,
   And spend many a happy day
   In the palace of Balmoral."

McGonagall died in Edinburgh on September 29, 1902, having completed a poem for the coronation of Victoria's heir, Edward VII - "The Coronation ceremony was really very grand, / There were countesses present, and duchesses from many a foreign land" - and was buried in a pauper's grave. The death certificate misspells his name "McGonigal".

Since then, the Poetic Gems have made a consistent profit for various publishers, which have issued them in overlapping volumes (in one case dedicated impertinently "by the publisher" to Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers) and they will continue to be read with enjoyment for a long time to come. McGonagall, who appears to have lacked any sense of humour, was nevertheless made happy by the happiness of others. He would have felt justified by the fame that today attaches to his name, and welcomed the attention that no doubt would have come from the descendants of those who dubbed him "Sir William Topaz McGonagall". Laugh on, then, but also bear in mind the words of Ezra Pound: "Only emotion endures."

The Tay Bridge Disaster by William McGonagall

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

'Twas about seven o'clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clouds seemed to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem'd to say -
"I'll blow down the Bridge of Tay."

When the train left Edinburgh
The passengers' hearts were light and felt no sorrow,
But Boreas blew a terrific gale,
Which made their hearts for to quail,
And many of the passengers with fear did say -

But when the train came near to Wormit Bay,
Boreas he did loud and angry bray,
And shook the central girders of the Bridge of Tay
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

So the train sped on with all its might,
And Bonnie Dundee soon hove in sight,
And the passengers' hearts felt light,

Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year,
With their friends at home they lov'd most dear,
And wish them all a happy New Year.

So the train mov'd slowly along the Bridge of Tay,
Until it was about midway,
Then the central girders with a crash gave way,
And down went the train and passengers into the Tay!
The Storm Fiend did loudly bray,
Because ninety lives had been taken away,
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

As soon as the catastrophe came to be known
The alarm from mouth to mouth was blown,
And the cry rang out all o'er the town,
Good heavens! the Tay Bridge is blown down,
And a passenger train from Edinburgh,
Which fill'd all the people's hearts with sorrow,
And made them all for to turn pale,
Because none of the passengers were sav'd to tell the tale
How the disaster happen'd on the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay.
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

· Poetic Gems is published by Duckworth, price £7.99.