There is a memorial plaque in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh, mounted on a wall near the gates of George Heriot’s School. It honours a man who died penniless above a pub, buried in an unmarked grave, and whose poetry was so catastrophically awful that audiences hurled rotten fish at him during performances. The plaque reads: “William McGonagall – Poet and Tragedian.” That he received this recognition at all – nearly a century after his death – tells us something important about what culture actually remembers, and why.
William Topaz McGonagall, born in March 1825 to Irish immigrant parents in Edinburgh, is widely regarded as the worst poet in the English language. Not merely bad. Not forgettably mediocre. He is the singular, undisputed champion of poetic failure – a man whose work is so consistently, magnificently terrible that it has remained continuously in print for over 130 years, outlasting legions of his more accomplished Victorian contemporaries. The paradox of McGonagall is that his incompetence is, in its own peculiar way, a form of genius.
From Loom to Verse
McGonagall spent the first half of his adult life as a handloom weaver in Dundee, to which his family moved when he was eleven. By the 1870s the profession was dying. He found Shakespeare first. During breaks at the mill, he recited Hamlet and Macbeth monologues and persuaded a local penny theatre to cast him as Macbeth. When the actor playing Macduff ran him through with a sword, McGonagall simply refused to die – parrying, fighting back, staying upright until the exasperated Macduff physically wrestled him to the floor. The Book of Heroic Failures later awarded him the title of “worst Macbeth.”
Then, in June 1877, at the age of 52, came his poetic epiphany. Sitting in his back room in Paton’s Lane, Dundee, lamenting his inability to holiday in the Highlands, he was seized by what he called “a strange kind of feeling.” “A flame seemed to kindle up my entire frame,” he wrote in his autobiography, “and instantly I was seized with a strong desire to write poetry.” He imagined a voice crying in his ears: “Write! Write!”
Over the next 25 years, McGonagall produced approximately 200 poems. He had no grasp of metaphor, no ear for metre, and an apparent allergy to the rules of English syntax. His rhymes were forced, his vocabulary bewildering, and his attempts at gravitas produced results that were, as the Scottish Poetry Library puts it, “unwittingly butchery.” Yet he exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, anyone’s opinion of his work.
The Tay Bridge Disaster
McGonagall’s most famous work is “The Tay Bridge Disaster,” published in 1880. It commemorates the collapse of the Tay Rail Bridge near Dundee on the evening of 28 December 1879, when a passenger train plunged into the River Firth of Tay during a violent gale. The disaster killed at least 75 people – modern sources settle on this figure, though McGonagall claimed ninety – and remains the fifth-deadliest railway accident in UK history.
More than a year before the catastrophe, McGonagall had written a poem celebrating the bridge’s opening, which included a prescient verse: “I hope that God will protect all passengers / By night and by day, / And that no accident will befall them while crossing / The Bridge of the Silvery Tay.” When the bridge fell, he returned to the subject. The resulting poem opened with lines that have become, against all odds, iconic:
> 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.
The poem is dreadful. It is also unforgettable. McGonagall’s flat recitation of facts, his bafflingly literal final stanza offering engineering advice (“your central girders would not have given way / Had they been supported on each side with buttresses”), and the relentless repetition of “Which will be remember’d for a very long time” create something that transcends mere bad writing. It was set to music and performed at the 1958 Hoffnung Music Festival, and it has been regularly revived since. That more Britons know of the Tay Bridge disaster through McGonagall’s mangled verse than through any contemporary newspaper account is perhaps his most lasting contribution to public memory.
The Poet Who Walked to Balmoral
McGonagall’s self-belief was impervious to all evidence. In 1878, following the death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, he wrote to Queen Victoria offering his services as poet laureate. A court functionary declined politely. McGonagall interpreted this as tacit endorsement and announced himself as “the Queen’s Poet.”
He then walked approximately 60 miles from Dundee to Balmoral Castle to make his case in person. The guard informed him that Tennyson held the position. McGonagall offered to read his poems; the guard declined. McGonagall presented a pamphlet bearing “William McGonagall, Poet of Her Majesty” in large letters. The guard was enraged, paid two pence for it, and threatened arrest if McGonagall approached again. He returned to Dundee, but never abandoned the title – it appeared on all his subsequent broadsides.
In 1894, a letter arrived informing him that Thibaw Min, King of Burma, had knighted him as “Sir Topaz McGonagall, Grand Knight of the Holy Order of the White Elephant of Burma.” The hoax was transparent – “Topaz” alluded to Chaucer’s deliberately awful “The Tale of Sir Topas” from The Canterbury Tales. But McGonagall either missed the reference or chose to exploit it. He styled himself “Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant, Burmah” for life, and the title appears on his memorial plaque.
Poet Baiting and the Edinburgh Revival
McGonagall made what passed for a living selling broadsides – single-sheet printed poems – on the streets and in pubs. He also gave live performances, which became a form of popular entertainment known as “poet baiting.” Audiences attended specifically to heckle and throw rotten vegetables. In July 1880, after being carried out of a venue on the shoulders of revellers, McGonagall was dropped and suffered serious head and arm injuries. He later attributed his survival to his “thick felt hat, dense artistic curls, and above all, the genius of poetry.”
He attempted to conquer London in 1880 and New York in 1887 – both trips failed. In 1888, a circus promoter named Burlington Brumell paid him 15 shillings per evening to read verse while being pelted with eggs, flour, herring, and stale bread. The act ran for nearly a year before city authorities threatened to revoke Brumell’s licence.
The publication history was equally fraught. In 1885, McGonagall collaborated with a reporter named John Willocks on an autobiography, The Book of Lamentations of the Poet Macgonagall. He never read the manuscript before publication. The opening line read: “My parents were poor but bibulous – the latter fact in a measure explains the former.” McGonagall believed “bibulous” meant fond of reading the Bible. It meant fond of drinking. When he discovered the deception, he threatened legal action and rewrote the autobiography himself.
By 1893, the mockery had become unbearable. He left Dundee – where, as one newspaper observed, he might stay “seeing as Dundee rhymes with 1893” – and settled in Edinburgh. The capital’s legal and student communities embraced him as a cult figure. His readings drew full houses. But the recognition was fleeting. By 1900, McGonagall was destitute and too frail to walk the streets selling his work. He died on 29 September 1902, of a cerebral haemorrhage, in a rented room above what is now The Captain’s Bar on South College Street. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Greyfriars Kirkyard.
From Obscurity to Immortality
For decades after his death, McGonagall was largely forgotten. The posthumous recovery began in the 1950s, when the Irish comedian Spike Milligan discovered his work and began incorporating readings into The Goon Show, the BBC radio programme that also launched the careers of Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. In 1974, Milligan co-wrote and starred in The Great McGonagall, a comedy film with Sellers appearing as Queen Victoria – playing the role, according to director Joseph McGrath, “on his knees, wearing roller-skates.”
The trickle became a flood. McGonagall was lampooned in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Terry Pratchett created the Gonnagle in his Discworld novels – a battle poet who repels enemies through the awfulness of his verse – and explicitly acknowledged McGonagall as inspiration. J.K. Rowling borrowed the surname for Professor Minerva McGonagall, confirming in her e-book Short Stories from Hogwarts: “There was something irresistible to me about his name, and the idea that such a brilliant woman might be a distant relative of the buffoonish McGonagall.” The name comes directly from a tombstone in Greyfriars Kirkyard, where Rowling walked during the years she was writing the novels.
In 2009, readers of Dundee Central Library voted McGonagall the second most popular Scottish poet after Robert Burns. Dundee now honours him: there is a McGonagall Square in the West End, and his lines are inscribed along Riverside Drive, deliberately preserving his spelling errors – “Beatiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay.” The William Topaz McGonagall Appreciation Society holds an annual gala dinner at which courses are served in reverse order, from dessert to starter. Birlinn’s Collected Poems remains in print. A memorial plaque was finally installed at Greyfriars Kirkyard in 1999.
The Question That Won’t Go Away
Was McGonagall genuinely talentless, or was he performing a kind of anti-poetry with knowing precision? Scholars have debated this for decades. His supporters note that he earned 15 shillings a night – a respectable sum – at a time when handloom weavers were being rendered obsolete, and point to his extraordinary self-promotion and instinct for spectacle. As Undiscovered Scotland observes: “All the evidence suggests that here was a man who knew exactly what he was doing.”
Others are less generous. The Poetry Foundation describes his verse as “strictly narrative, without lyrical or metaphorical gestures.” Some researchers have speculated that McGonagall’s absolute certainty in his own talent and his deafness to criticism may indicate a form of autism that went undiagnosed in his lifetime.
The truth may be that the distinction between authentic incompetence and performed incompetence is, in McGonagall’s case, irrelevant. What matters is the body of work – 200 poems that are as entertaining, as baffling, and as culturally embedded as anything produced by the Victorian literary establishment. His Poetic Gems have never gone out of print. The Tay Bridge disaster is more widely known because of his poem than because of any historical account. A cemetery in Edinburgh that tourists visit primarily to find Harry Potter references has a plaque dedicated to him.
William McGonagall died as he lived: certain of his own greatness, indifferent to the evidence, and utterly, magnificently unforgettable.
