GREENOCK was once home to William Aitken, who was called the ‘Railway Poet’ or the ‘Laureate of the Line’.

I discovered this after my wife gave me a book entitled Ayrshire’s Lost Villages. We both have connections with Ayrshire.

Author Dane Love advises that Aitken was born in Sorn, East Ayrshire, in 1851.

While still a youth, his family moved to Montgarswood Bridgend, a village between Sorn and Mauchline that no longer exists. The village is pictured on the cover of Love’s book.

In 1871, Aitken was employed by the Glasgow and South Western Railway Company as a signalman at Kilmacolm. His career led to Aitken becoming a traffic inspector with the company.

Love states that Aitken, who lived in Greenock, started writing poetry at an early age and later had several books of poems published. He became known as the ‘Railway Poet’ or the ‘Laureate of the Line’ because many of his works were what Love describes as relating to incidents and events in the life of the railway.

Aitken was a member of the Congregational Church and a Sunday School superintendent.

Love’s book tells readers that Aitken was also active in the Railway Mission in Greenock, which he founded in 1885 as the Railwaymen’s Christian Association.

Aitken died in Greenock in 1931 at the age of 80, and his body was returned to Ayrshire for burial in the kirkyard in Sorn, the village of his birth. His wife Jean passed away in Greenock in 1934.

A Greenock and district directory from the second half of the 1890s reveals that William Aitken and my paternal great grandfather almost certainly knew each other. It lists Aitken living at 25 Brougham Street and my great grandfather at number 29.

Dane Love’s Ayrshire’s Lost Villages is published by Carn Publishing, Auchinleck, East Ayrshire.