PLANS for the celebration of the life of historic playwright Joe Corrie are taking shape and two other popular wordsmiths of the past, Robert MacLeod and Peter Leslie are to be include in the exhibition being held at Lochgelly Centre to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Corrie's death.

Cardenden's Joe Corrie will be remembered as the miner who wrote songs, poems and plays about life in the world of working coal.

But Robert MacLeod and Peter Leslie both were poets who wrote about life around them.

Robert MacLeod (1876 – 1958) was born in Musselburgh in 1876, before the family moved to Cowdenbeath in 1887.

Although MacLeod belonged to a younger generation there are similarities between him and Pindar, which was Peter Leslie's pen name.

As a young man trapped in the mines it was MacLeod’s ambition to become a professional entertainer, specifically a song and dance man in the Music Hall which was highly popular at the time. He performed locally. Like the Lochgelly poet Pindar before him, MacLeod suffered a bad accident in the pit and incurred a leg injury which put an end to his ambitions.

Although his hopes of a career on the stage were shattered by this accident it was while he was recovering in hospital that he started to write poems and songs. From that time onwards he became an avid writer for the remainder of his life.

MacLeod wrote about local happenings such as Gala days, dances, sporting events, well known characters.

Said Lochgelly man Willie Hershaw, who is helping put together the concert and exhibition: "Over many years he sold copies of his poems to the football supporters attending Central Park and he himself was a keen supporter of Cowdenbeath F.C and wrote many poems about the club. He would stand outside the turnstiles with a cardboard tray, a bit like a programme seller and sell his crudely reproduced broadsheets for a few pennies a copy".

Willie added that there is an unsubstantiated story that MacLeod was the original author of Ye Cannae Shove Your Grannie Aff The Bus and sold the song in a pub for the price of a drink.

Peter Leslie (“Long John Pindar”), Pindar was born in auld Launcherhead at the foot of Lochgelly in 1835 in impoverished circumstances one year before Queen Victoria ascended the throne. His mother was a farm servant and there is some debate about who his real father was. His real name, or at least the name under which he later joined the army was Peter Leslie. Later he adopted the pen name of Pindar after the Classical Roman poet.

In Lochgelly he was never known by any other name than Pindar. “My parents,” he writes, “were of humble origin, belonging to that hard working class who earn their livelihood in the subterraneous caverns of the earth”.

At the age of ten he was sent to work down the pit and was put in charge of a pit pony earning sixpence a day. What is amazing is how, one way or another, a ten year old boy taught himself to read and write and was able to write poetry in later life. In 1858, he left the pits, went to Edinburgh and enlisted in the 71st Highland Regiment. In those days, you enlisted for a term of twenty one years.

When his term was finally up in the army he returned to the pits where within a year his leg was crushed in an accident that left him incapable of manual labour. By the time he received medical help the damage was done.

Willie added: "Through the work of people such as Arthur Nevay the work of both these people have been maintained in book form and they will add a great deal to the exhibition which starts on May 5 with a concert at Lochgelly Centre."