William Thomson (iii)

He was educated at Dundee and the University of St Andrews. He was the first teacher of geography at the Anderson Educational Institute, Lerwick, in 1958, and became headmaster at Kirkwall Grammar School in 1971. He was a town councillor in Lerwick from 1968-1971. He is author of a very fine History of Orkney (1987), later New History of Orkney (2001, 2008), which contains much of interest for students of Shetland. Thomson has taken a special interest in the problem of runrig agriculture in Shetland and Orkney. He dealt with the subject first in a pioneering article 'Funzie, Fetlar: a Shetland run-rig township in the nineteenth century', Scottish Geographical Magazine, 86, 1970; he has returned to it in his recent collection of essays Orkney Land and People (2008).