The author of the well-known poem about the boy on the train to Kirkcaldy, Mrs. Smith was the wife of the headmaster of Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh. When asked to contribute to a schoolboys’ magazine, she produced ‘The Boy in the Train’, thus immortalising a noisy lad who had once been in the compartment when the Smiths were on their way by train to their annual Easter holiday in Elie. The poem was then reproduced in the official school journal in 1913, and thereafter included in many anthologies of popular Scottish verse.
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