Poets
and Politicians
  One
of the oldest houses in Paisley – a small thatched cottage in
Queen Street – was home to the weaver-poet Robert
Tannahill (1774 –1810). As one of Paisley’s
most famous poets and songwriters, his songs included Jessie the Flower
o’ Dunblane. He admired Burns and helped found one of the two
earliest Burns Clubs, the Burns Anniversary Society in Paisley in 1805.
The other club is in Greenock.
  Alexander
Wilson (1776 – 1813) was born in Seedhill. He
published his first poems in 1790 bur after emigrating to North America
in 1794, he was the first person to record the bird life of the area.
He has several birds named after him, including the Wilson plover and
the Wilson warbler.
 A
plaque in the High Street marks where John
Wilson (1785 – 1854) was born. He was a writer
and poet, a friend of James Hogg, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William
Wordsworth and wrote under the name of Christopher North. In 1820, he
became Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh
where his statue stands in Princes Street Gardens.
Britain’s
longest-serving Communist MP, elected in 1935 to represent West Fife,
was Paisley Buddie William Gallagher (1881 –
1965). After meeting Lenin in 1920, he helped to found the British Communist
Party and became its president from 1956 to 1963. He was a popular man
in his hometown and when he died his funeral procession was a mile long.
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