William McGonagall was a Scottish poet and public performer. He gained notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers' opinions of his work.
Sir Thomas Bouch was a British railway engineer. He was born in Thursby, near Carlisle, Cumberland, and lived in Edinburgh. As manager of the Edinburgh and Northern Railway he introduced the first roll-on/roll-off train ferry service in the world. Subsequently as a consulting engineer, he helped develop the caisson and popularised the use of lattice girders in railway bridges. He was knighted after the successful completion of the first Tay Railway Bridge, but his reputation was destroyed by the subsequent Tay Bridge disaster, in which 75 people are believed to have died as a result of defects in design, construction and maintenance, for all of which Bouch was held responsible. He died within 18 months of being knighted.
The Tay Bridge carries rail traffic across the Firth of Tay in Scotland between Dundee and the suburb of Wormit in Fife. Its span is 2.75 miles. It is the second bridge to occupy the site.
The Tay Bridge is a railway bridge across the Firth of Tay at Dundee, Scotland:
The River Tay is the longest river in Scotland and the seventh-longest in Great Britain. The Tay originates in western Scotland on the slopes of Ben Lui, then flows easterly across the Highlands, through Loch Dochart, Loch Iubhair and Loch Tay, then continues east through Strathtay, in the centre of Scotland, then southeasterly through Perth, where it becomes tidal, to its mouth at the Firth of Tay, south of Dundee. It is the largest river in the United Kingdom by measured discharge. Its catchment is approximately 2,000 square miles, the Tweed's is 1,500 sq mi (3,900 km2) and the Spey's is 1,097 sq mi (2,840 km2).
Doggerel, or doggrel, is poetry that is irregular in rhythm and in rhyme, often deliberately for burlesque or comic effect. Alternatively, it can mean verse which has a monotonous rhythm, easy rhyme, and cheap or trivial meaning.
Rev George Gilfillan was a Scottish author and poet. One of the spasmodic poets, Gilfillan was also an editor and commentator, with memoirs, critical dissertations in many editions of earlier British poetry.
World Tour of Scotland is a six-part television series – the first of Billy Connolly's "world tours" – originally broadcast by the BBC in July and August 1994. It involves his touring around his homeland for 54 nights during early 1994, beginning in Greenock and visiting cities and towns and performing live on stage to audiences. However, this, like all his other tours, involves more than just shows: he visits numerous places of historic and scenic value, as well as some places that resonate with his own upbringing.
The Norwood Junction railway crash occurred on 1 May 1891, when a cast-iron underbridge over Portland Road, 60 yards (55 m) north-east of Norwood Junction railway station, fractured under the weight of an express train from Brighton to London Bridge.
The Tay Bridge disaster occurred during a violent European windstorm on Sunday 28 December 1879, when the first Tay Rail Bridge collapsed as a North British Railway (NBR) passenger train on the Edinburgh to Aberdeen Line from Burntisland bound for its final destination of Dundee passed over it, killing all aboard. The bridge—designed by Sir Thomas Bouch—used lattice girders supported by iron piers, with cast iron columns and wrought iron cross-bracing. The piers were narrower and their cross-bracing was less extensive and robust than on previous similar designs by Bouch.
"The Famous Tay Whale" is a poem by William Topaz McGonagall about the Tay Whale, also known as the Monster, a humpback whale hunted and killed in 1883 in the Firth of Tay near Dundee, Scotland, then the country's main whaling port. The doggerel verse is famous for lacking poetic quality.
Dundee is the fourth-largest city in Scotland with a population of around 150,000 people. It is situated on the north bank of the Firth of Tay on the east coast of the Central Lowlands of Scotland. The Dundee area has been settled since the Mesolithic with evidence of Pictish habitation beginning in the Iron Age. During the Medieval Era the city became a prominent trading port and was the site of many battles. Throughout the Industrial Revolution, the local jute industry caused the city to grow rapidly. In this period, Dundee also gained prominence due to its marmalade industry and its journalism, giving Dundee its epithet as the city of "jute, jam and journalism".
James Valentine was a Scottish photographer. Valentine's of Dundee produced Scottish topographical views from the 1860s, and later became internationally famous as the producers of picture postcards.
The Tay Whale, known locally as the Monster, was a humpback whale that swam into the Firth of Tay of eastern Scotland in 1883. It was harpooned in a hunt, but escaped, and was found floating dead off Stonehaven a week later. It was towed into Dundee by a showman, John Woods, and exhibited on a train tour of Scotland and England.
Events from the year 1880 in Scotland.
Events from the year 1878 in Scotland.
Events from the year 1877 in Scotland.
The Oscar was a whaling ship that was wrecked near Aberdeen, Scotland, on 1 April 1813. It was so close to the shore that families helplessly watched the ship's men struggle and drown, a few yards from safety. This disaster led to community funding for the bereaved families and is known in poem and art. It resulted in changes to bring safety in a new lighthouse for the headland, and a street in Torry was named Oscar Road.
Kirstie Blair, FRSE is Dean of Arts and Humanities at Stirling University and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2021. She specialises in Victorian literature and the working class writing, poetry and literature, and working with museums and industrial heritage sites to engage the community around them. Her book Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community' won the Saltire Society Book of the Year and Research Book of the Year awards in 2019.
The Tay Bridge Disaster at Wikisource 
