The Famous Tay Whale Dundee city centre. Paul Godfrey described McGonagall on the strength of the "Tay Whale" and other verse as "the worst poet in the English language". Hugh MacDiarmid wrote of the "Tay Whale" that "what this [the verses about John Wood and the Tay Whale] amounts to, of course, is simply what quite uneducated and stupid people—the two adjectives by no means necessarily go together, for many uneducated people have great vitality and a raciness of utterance altogether lacking here—would produce if asked to recount something they had read in a newspaper." MacDiarmid continued that "in their retailings of, or comments
John Tay John Tay John I. Tay (1832 – 8 January 1892) was a Seventh-day Adventist missionary who was known for his pioneering work in the South Pacific. It was through his efforts that most of the inhabitants of Pitcairn Island were converted to Adventism, and that the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists purchased the "Pitcairn" schooner for missionary work in the South Pacific. John I. Tay was born in 1832. He went to sea when he was sixteen. Tay served on the U.S. sloop-of-war USS "Housatonic" during the American Civil War (1861–65). He settled in Oakland, California after the war, and