WHEN most hunting folk think of the 19th-century sporting poet Will H Ogilvie, it is for his poem Running On, frequently read at hunting funerals.
However, a new collection of many of his 1,100 poems, Belalie and Beyond, reveals a man who spent 11 years in Australia as a jackaroo, horseman and “Bush poet”, every bit as sensitive, sincere (and some would say sentimental) as Rudyard Kipling, Sir Henry Newbolt and GJ Whyte-Melville.
The book is the achievement of the Will H Ogilvie Memorial Trust in the Scottish Borders, where William Henry Ogilvie was born on a tenant farm of the Duke of Buccleuch near Kelso and where he died nearby at Askirk, aged 93, in 1963.
In between, however, after schooling at Kelso High School and Fettes College in…
