For the stronger we our houses do build, the less chance we have of being killed.
Thank you, Spike Milligan. Thank you so much for bringing this poet back into the spotlight.
His name is William McGonagall. He is the namesake for Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter series...and a truly horrible poet. Apparently, Spike, Peter Sellers and Joe McGrath (who worked on, amongst other things, Not Only...But Also) would get together on McGonagall's birthday every year and read his poetry out loud (and bust their guts laughing). Spike and Peter even made a movie about him, which McGrath directed.
Ironically, I had a character who was slated to appear in Book Three named Kynaston Jordan who shares some traits with McGonagall, namely the inability to use meter when writing a poem. Kynaston's poetry is very similar to McGonagall's, so he'll probably become a tribute character of sorts. After seeing him in real life, Basil recounts his days at Oxford when he and his friends would pass around books of Kynaston's poetry and read it out loud, trying to see how long they could go without laughing. Since mangled English is something Basil finds horribly funny, he confesses he was never really all that good at it. (What they did with it is rather similar to what people do with The Eye of Argon today. To quote Dave Langford, "The challenge of death, at SF conventions, is to read The Eye of Argon aloud, straight-faced, without choking and falling over. The grandmaster challenge is to read it with a squeaky voice after inhaling helium. What fun we fans have.")
Basil and his friends (likely William Conrad and Algernon Huddleston) probably didn't have helium, but the poetry was bad enough. Remember, Basil, Will and Algy wrote what was essentially an MST of Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton when they were still at Eton, so this was right up their alley...