‘‘Our Heroine is Dead’: Miss Margaret Wallace Thomson, Paisley Organist (1853-1896)

An article that I wrote for the Glasgow Society of Organists’ newsletter, The Glasgow Diapason. Margaret Wallace Thomson of Paisley was one of only two women represented in Paisley publisher Parlane's 'The National Choir' publication, with an arrangement of Burns’s ‘The smiling spring’ and a song of her own, ‘The weary day’. When she died, the Paisley Choral Union subscribed to erect an imposing marble tombstone, topped with a nine-foot obelisk, tribute to her talent and the respect in which she was held.