SCOTLAND does many things badly: football, drugs, transitioning to becoming a normal country, restaurant service, weather. And, in William Topaz McGonagall, we produced a poet said to be the worst in literary history.

It was an honour that McGonagall worked hard to achieve, producing an impressive volume of variable – from awful to worse – verse (258 of his poems are published on the McGonagall Online website). It’s difficult to know how seriously he took himself. The overwhelming suggestion, from his autobiography and other sources, is that he did.

On the other hand, for a while, in desperate pursuit of an income, he recited his works in a circus at which the audience was invited to pelt him with eggs, flour and other comestibles. It’s difficult to imagine Tennyson doing this.

It’s also difficult to tell where and when William was born. You can go to the horse’s mouth but, in McGonagall’s case, it’s likely to say “Moo!” He claimed to have been born in Edinburgh, a city he loved, but the 1841 Census puts his place of birth as “Ireland”. Certainly, he says in his sketchy autobiography that his parents were Irish.

Never fearing tautology, the first line of his autobiography says: “My Dear Readers of this autobiography, which I am the author of …” Clumsy articulation sometimes suggest an autodidact and, like so many of that time, McGonagall was self-taught, and an avid reader of Shakespeare.

He was born in either 1825 or 1830, depending on which mood he was in, though the consensus now favours the former date. His father was a handloom weaver, and the family tried Glasgow and Orkney for work, before settling in Dundee.

William followed his father into weaving, which he interpreted freely as entertaining his colleagues with recitations from Shakespeare. His mates were so impressed they paid a local theatre owner to let him play Macbeth. Unfortunately, he refused to die at the hands of Macduff (thinking the actor in that role envious of him), fighting on and on, and leaving the production to peter out in confusion.

With his reputation as an actor already preceding him, McGonagall turned to verse, after having what appears to have been some sort of seizure or episode: “I was sitting in my back room in Paton’s Lane, Dundee … 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 thought I heard a voice crying in my ears – ‘WRITE! WRITE!’”

Aye, right. The rest is disaster, not least his most famous poem, about the Tay Bridge incident of that ilk, which opened thus: “Beautiful railway bridge of the silv'ry Tay/Alas! I am very sorry to say/That ninety lives [over-estimate; hope I haven’t ruined the scansion here] have been taken away/On the last sabbath day of 1879/Which will be remember'd for a very long time.”

This wasn’t the first time he’d assaulted the Tay Bridge in verse. The second poem ever to stagger forth from his frenzied pen was ‘Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay’, which he claimed had “caused a great sensation in Dundee”. Incredibly, it had also “caused the Emperor of Brazil to leave his home far away incognito and view the bridge as he passed along en route to Inverness”. Zattso?

With tragic prescience, the poem expressed the hope that “ … God will protect all passengers/By night and by day/And that no accident will befall them while crossing/The Bridge over the silvery Tay.” One thing we learn for sure from McGonagall is that the Tay was right silvery.

If you’re wondering, incidentally, about the middle name Topaz, it originated in a letter that the poet received in 1894, purportedly from the office of King Thibaw Min of Burma. It informed him that the King had dubbed him Topaz McGonagall, Grand Knight of the Holy Order of the White Elephant Burma

The thought that this might be at worst a hoax, and at best a dubious honour, lingered but briefly on one of William’s inefficacious frontal lobes, and he adopted the title (and the “Sir”) with relish.

William had a thing for royalty. Thinking Queen Victoria might enjoy being tickled by his poesy, he wrote asking her to be his patron. A flunkey replied, pooh-poohing the idea. Taking this as a “yes”, McGonagall hiked 60 miles through stormy weather from Dundee to Balmoral. He got as far as the front gate.

Informing the gatekeeper that he was “The Queen’s poet”, he was told in turn that he wisnae ’cos that was the aforementioned Lord Tennyson. After some toing and froing, with William exclaiming at one point, “I am not a strolling mountebank!”, the affronted poetaster slung his hook.

He couldn’t even assuage his hurt pride with drink. Hated the stuff. On one occasion, entering a pub to recite a poem about the evils of swallie, he was pelted with peas. In ‘The Demon Drink’, he wrote of a man who “finds his wife fou’/Then that causes, no doubt, a great hullaballoo”.

Some of McGonagall’s verse has oft – ken? – been left out of collections, perhaps because it’s too good. One example is ‘Lines in Praise of Sunlight Soap’, which reads: “Ye can use it, with great pleasure and ease/Without wasting any elbow grease/And, while washing the most dirty clothes/The sweat won’t be dripping off your nose.”

McGonagall spent his last days in Edinburgh, of which he wrote: “I will tell the world boldly without dismay/You have the biggest college in the world at the present day.” Buried in an unmarked grave in the city’s Greyfriars Kirkyard, he got a tombstone in 1999, not to mention a plaque above 5 South College Street with the inscription “Willam McGonagall/Poet and Tragedian/Died Here/ 29 September 1902.”

We offer the following alternative, which he would discern, rightly, as a compliment: “William McGonagall/Though you’re now deid/Your work lives on/Like week-old breid.”

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