Tait, William J.

• Billy Tait

William J. Tait was born in Mid Yell in 1918, the son of Jemima Williamson and Robert W. Tait, a teacher. He attended Anderson Educational Institute, where he became top pupil in Shetland for his year, and went on to Edinburgh University where he studied English. During his time in Lerwick, Tait became interested in left-wing politics and, after moving to Edinburgh, joined the Communist Party. During his university years he became ill with pleurisy, a condition which eventually led to pulmonary tuberculosis and a spell of recuperation in Shetland. One of his earliest poems, 'The interruption' was written about these experiences. After graduating Tait became a teacher, taking a job in West Calder before returning to the Anderson Educational Institute as English master. While living back in Shetland he, along with others of a similar political bent, was instrumental in the revival of the Shetland Labour Party in 1943. In 1947 many of the same people came together to found the New Shetlander, a journal to which Tait contributed until his death. Many of the poems he first published in the journal were collected in his only book A Day Between Weathers (1980). It remains one of the key volumes in Shetland's literature. His papers also include a number of plays, and the largely unpublished translations of French poetry which Tait worked on throughout his career. His versions of the medieval French poet Villon are unique in Shetland's writing. Tait left Shetland once more in 1949 and, during the next thirty years, taught English in colleges and schools in Brixton, Colchester, Coventry, Birmingham and Dundee. During these years he also visited Edinburgh frequently, where he associated with many of the leading Scottish writers of the twentieth century such as Hugh MacDiarmid and Sidney Goodsir Smith.\r\n\r\nIn the 1980s Tait returned to Shetland to live in his mother's house in Mid Yell. In his final years he rejoined the editorial committee of the New Shetlander and was an enthusiastic and sometimes devastating performer at the Althing debating society. He died on 1 August 1992.