FP Poets

This page has been some time in the making, but the topic sprung to prominence in 2024 with the celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the death of Robert Fergusson. That luminary was followed some thirty years later by Walter Scott, who published ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’. Fast forward to more contemporary times, with Andrew Young in the 1930’s, Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch Sutherland in the 1940’s through the 1980’s, and more recently Tom Pow and Don Ledingham.

Click on any of the names shown below for a biography, which in some cases will be RHS-oriented. Thanks to the Scottish Poetry Library and the ‘Allpoetry’ website for filling in some entries in the meantime.

The RHS London Club sponsors an annual prize for poem written by a Pupil. Click here to see the winning entries from 2017 to 2024

Click on any of the images below to enable a full screen slideshow…

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Tom Pow

Tom Pow, who completed his High School education in 1968, has made a big impression on school life in the last year or so, delivering keynote speeches at the Robert Fergusson event in October 2024, and at the 2025 Prize Giving.

Tom started at the RHS Junior School, Northfield Broadway in 1956, and won merit prizes in his first and second senior years, then the RHS London Club prize for an English poem in his final year at School… He went on to a stellar career, as shown in his Scottish poetry Library entry.. Tom wrote a poem specifically for the Fergusson event; ‘Butterfly’, an evocative description of Fergusson’s early life and tragically early death. Tom delivered the poem at the short ceremony to rededicate the Fergusson memorial tablet, first installed and dedicated at the old Royal High School site in 1958. Tom has given permission to us to publish the poem; thanks also to the publisher – Taproot Press.

Further evidence of Tom’s poetic and performance skills ca be seen at: ‘The Village and the Road‘

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Don Ledingham

Don features not only in these, the Poetry pages, but has another entry on the Authors pages where the credits for Edinburgh Revisited are shared with Former Pupil Gordon Hunter..

Don, who attended Royal High between 1963 and 1976, and represented Scotland at International Rugby Schoolboy level, describes his poetry timeline as follows:

My first published poem in my own name was Johnnie Wilson’s Day, which won the Leopard Magazine poetry competition in in 1993. At the time the £500 prize was the biggest in Scotland for a single poem.  I published my first volume of poems “Langshaw Echoes” later that year which sold nearly 700 copies. In 1994 I won the Leopard prize again, this time with “Auld Brookie”. I published my second volume of poems “The Clipping” in 1997. In 1999 I formed a creative partnership with photographer Gordon Hunter. We worked on a series of picture poems which linked my poetry with Gordon’s photographs of scenes from the endangered Scottish Borders rural heritage at the turn of the millennium. In 2000 we were invited to exhibit our work, entitled “Scottish Inheritance” at the Scottish Writer’s Museum, on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.  The exhibition raised over £3000 which we donated to the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Society following the tragedy which was the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak.

I’ve been influenced at various times by Norman McCaig, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, George Mackay Brown, Edwin Morgan, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Yehuda Amichai, Robert Burns, Hugh MacDiarmid, and R.S Thomas.

Don has several substantial bodies of work, including the following (click on the highlighted versions for the published contents):

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John V Whitworth

John Whitworth 1945-2019

John V Whitworth’s senior education was at the Royal High School from 1958 to 1964, having spent his primary school years at James Gillespie’s. He won class prizes at every stage of his High School life, culminating in his 6th form as Dux of English, and winner of the prestigious Royal High School Exhibition bursary.

Whitworth’s poetry career began at Merton College, Oxford, where he earned an MA and a B.Phil in English Literature. After graduation he taught a master class at the University of Kent, tutored foreign students, taught Creative Writing, and conducted poetry workshops and readings in hundreds of primary schools. To read more about his career, read an account here published in ‘AllPoetry.Com’