Looking back to a time when a civic movement took forward Scotland’s cause

The Scottish Covenant is 75 years old this year

Since the SNP’s rout at the general election, some are calling for the baton to be passed to a broad civic movement. It seems a good moment to look back at a time when that did happen. The Scottish, or National Covenant, is 75 years old this year. Essentially a petition demanding a Scottish Parliament, it was signed by two million people, significantly more than half the adult population of the country at the time. 

The Covenant was launched in October 1949 in Edinburgh’s Assembly Hall on the Mound, by a great advocate for Scottish self-determination, John MacCormick. It was hugely successful in reaching across party divides, and within a week attracted approaching 50,000 signatures and was soon heading for a million. It was signed by belted earls and socialist shipbuilders, members of all political parties and none. 

The boxes of signatures are held in the National Library of Scotland. My request to view them was initially rebuffed on grounds of data protection - they said they were closed for viewing until 2048. I challenged that, arguing that it was a public document that people had signed proudly, and eventually they relented.

So, I was the first person to open the boxes for dozens of years, probably since they were first donated. The forces of gravity have begun to stick them together and a horrified curator rushed over to point out that I was absolutely not allowed to absent-mindedly moisten my forefinger with my tongue as I flicked through. The next time I went to the counter,  I asked for another box of the ‘finger-lickin’ good Scottish Covenant”.

Each sheet reads at the top: “...We pledge ourselves, in all loyalty to the Crown and within the framework of the United Kingdom, to do everything in our power to secure for Scotland a Parliament with adequate legislative authority in Scottish affairs”.

I was hoping to see names I recognised, addresses and places I know - perhaps my  paternal grandparents in Warriston Crescent in Edinburgh or my widowed great-grandmother Elizabeth Ross, in Glenpark Street in Glasgow. I didn’t spot any familiar addresses in the couple of boxes I went through, but It was touching to see the long lists, mostly arranged by neighbourhood, covering whole streets and buildings, big cities, rural hamlets, wee towns. On several, all the names are in the same handwriting. It has been claimed that some were spurious, but it is hard to be certain. 

I imagined some passionate young advocate for Home Rule going round the doors, and getting permission to fill in the names of floury-handed mums as they cooked the tea, or dads home from the pit or the shipyards, dandling babies on their knees. Some sheets are written in beautiful fountain pen, others in pencil. One or two sheets look as if cups of strong tea have been placed on them - or a wee bit of gravy spilled. A swell in Renfrew had a magenta fountain pen which they must have lent around for the ceremony and there are pages of signatures in different hands, all in the same pinky-purple ink.  One sheet has a child’s drawing taking up half the page. In another, someone has scored out a bit of the pledge that they didn’t agree with. 

It is a historic document that shows a deep desire for Scotland to have a greater say over its own affairs. It also reveals who was hanging out in the kitchen of a particular tenement flat when some wee Home Ruler rang the doorbell. Or perhaps they were out in the back green, folding sheets and chatting, their names linked for posterity on this historic record. It is also a reminder of a time when Scotland was pretty monocultural - lots of Agnes Greys and Robert Balfours, not many Patels or Nardinis. Large families in long-demolished tenements, and rural hamlets now emptied by demographic change left their mark and their aspirations for a better nation here. 

The ink ran out in Calderbank

Not everyone who was asked to sign agreed. In ‘Stone Voices’ Neal Ascherson recalls taking a sheet of it to Malaya in 1951:  

“I was eighteen years old when I was conscripted into the Royal Marines to do my National Service.. .We were defending the British Empire. I was not sure what this would look like, nor whether it was worth defending. But I had been told that Malaya, in particular, contained a great many Scots who might find me a prosperous career if I conducted myself prudently and industriously. From Scotland, I brought two pieces of paper in my black tin trunk. One was a copy of the Scottish Covenant….We, the people of Scotland,” it began. In my innocence, I assumed that far-flung colonial Scots would be proud to sign it, if not in blood then at least in a gush of sentimental patriotism. Our camp in the state of Perak was close to the metal-roofed bungalow of an Aberdonian tin- mine manager, Mr Johnston Mather. He was the bit of Empire we were to protect, and rewarded us with invitations to drink whisky – the large half-and-half glass known as a stengah - or occasionally to Sunday curry tiffin at the Ipoh Club. One evening when I was alone with him in the bungalow, I shyly unfolded the Covenant and asked him if he would like to sign. 

“Johnston Mather was a small man with hard yellow knees. He sat in his cane chair and looked at me for a long time. When he seemed about to speak, we were interrupted by a flying beetle the size of a small crow which droned across the room and crashed into one wall after another. Presently it fell behind the drinks cabinet, where its drone changed to a shrill scream of fear. Mather's Highland terrier got up and strolled over to the cabinet. There was a crunching noise and the screaming stopped. Mather continued to stare at me. Then he said: Laddie, if you know what's good for you, you'll just put that piece of nonsense away and we’ll hear no more of it.”

The political backdrop

Despite Ascherson’s rather frightening experience, the Scottish Covenant did have wide cross-party support. In my late father Arnold Kemp’s book on post-war Scotland ‘The Hollow Drum”, he explains the context. 

The SNP was split

The SNP’s leader Douglas Young was jailed during the war for refusing to be conscripted by the British state, on the grounds that this was against the Treaty of Union. Kemp gives this pen portrait of him:

“As a boy I have a memory of a tall, lean and bearded figure coming to the house (he was 6ft 7in, I learn from the obituary in The Herald library): my father, I recall, was fond of him. He was born in Fife in 1912, educated at Merchiston, St Andrews and New College, Oxford, where at the end of the interview he was asked if there was anything he did not know; he was a scholar, a translator of Aristophanes, and my father admired the disciplined way he read the newspapers - going through them, marking items of interest, and cutting them out for future reference. Once, as they were travelling together to Glasgow by train, Young pointed through the window in the direction of Saughton Prison and alarmed their respectable companions in the compartment by recalling, with apparently pleasurable nostalgia the time he had spent inside.”

After Young’s election as leader in 1942, the SNP entered the political shadows for about 20 years. MacCormick, who had stood against him, left the party and started a group from the ashes of the Home Rule Association, called the Scottish Covenant. Association The aim was to create a broad-based non party-political movement to campaign for a Scottish Parliament.

The Labour Party sent out mixed messages

Kemp writes that when the Labour government was campaigning in 1945, they sent out mixed messages: “Douglas Young, that assiduous chronicler of broken Labour promises on home rule, notes that it was not mentioned in the UK Labour manifesto in1945, but that a manifesto put out by the party’s Scottish office gave a Scottish parliament a priority second only to the defeat of Japan.” Twenty-four of the Labour MPs elected in Scotland personally undertook to promote such a parliament but the promise was soon submerged. 

There was strong support from the Conservatives

James Stuart, later a Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland, masterminded a Unionist policy document ‘Scottish Control of Scottish Affairs’ in 1947, which argued that Union was strength but Union was not amalgamation. ‘Scotland is a nation’.”

In an essay in the New Penguin History of Scotland, John Foster writes that in the post-war period, Labour’s nationalisation programme was sidelining Scotland’s traditional elite and sucking power to London and the south of England. The economic power that had been held in Scotand before then was mighty - now it was being diminished. Foster quotes another one-time Scottish Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland, Walter Elliot, who complained in the Commons that in Scotland, “nationalisation means denationalisation” - the loss of national control. 

Labour read attacks on ‘the London government’ by those who supported the National Covenant, not entirely unfairly, as an attack on their government and policies. 

The Conservatives and Liberals even made a pact to support John MacCormick who stood as a Liberal parliamentary candidate in 1948. But historian Tom Devine argues in ‘The Scottish Nation’  that the idea Unionists were converted to Home Rule was ‘ludicrous’ “Instead they were skillfully paying the Scottish card against Labour for party electoral advantage.”

Winston Churchill urged Scotland to stand up for its right to self-determination

At the height of Covenant fever, Winston Churchill urged Scotland to stand up for its rights against Labour centralisation which he called “the serfdom of socialism”. Kemp writes that Churchill’s support “may have been cynical” - in any case, it evaporated after the Conservatives won the 1951 general election by a whisker, winning 49% of the vote in Scotland. 

But after all the furore, the Covenant faded away

After a couple of years of foment, Kemp concludes: “The Covenant faded away. It disappeared, almost like a puff of smoke, because it had no significant location in parliamentary politics The Conservatives had been its fairweather friends. They insisted that any change must be by the parliamentary route. There was, the Glasgow Herald noted, a tacit contract between the major parties not to seek an alliance with the home rulers which ‘might have baffled a wiser leader’ than MacCormick.” 

The late Ian Hamilton, MacCormack’s friend (and one of those who stole the Stone of Destiny the very next year in 1950) was part of the effort to build support for the Covenant and then to take it forward. In his book ‘A Touch of Treason’ he recalls long nights with MacCormick discussing Scottish history and the constitution.

“They [The MacCormicks] lived up a close which was still lit by gas. The lamplighter came round night and morning with an acetylene flame on a long pole to light and extinguish the lamps, and the clatter of his equipment on the close wall when morning came was our signal to call it another day…  At these discussions I learned just how fragile the Scottish cause had become….There was no money and hidden from all the members was an enormous overdraft guaranteed by John and his great friend Bertie Grey. They were always on the verge of personal bankruptcy, as the terrified bank manager was always threatening to call in the overdraft. Always it edged up instead of down… 

“John travelled Scotland and spoke in every city, town, and village. For five years I stumped the same circuit. Public meetings are now out of fashion, but in those days John, or latterly myself with perhaps another for company would get to the town somehow and address a gathering of anything from ten to a couple of hundred people. It was preaching to the converted and the only hecklers were the Scottish Nationalists who regarded disrupting our meetings as sport..

“When called upon to address an audience [MacCormick] looked at them in silence until the air fairly tingled with his personal magnetism. It was not a gimmick, he was thinking what to say. ..His speeches were unquotable, immemorable and ephemeral, yet no one who heard him ever forgot them.”

This was the work that led up to all those boxes of signatures and the attempt to turn them into more autonomy for Scotland. But the Association did not have enough support to carry them into Westminster:

“If we were to go to the hustings we would have been annihilated. We had to pretend that the principles of the Scottish Covenant were so fundamentally imbued in every Scottish voter that they transcended all political beliefs arnd narrow partisan issues of creed or politics. This was humbug. The truth was that the Scots had still not regained sufficient selfconfidence to want to govern themselves and we knew it. We tried to keep the light alive, waiting for daybreak, but it was often a heartbreaking task.”

MacCormick, who Hamilton describes as ‘a tired-looking man who suffered from a chronic kidney condition’ died in 1961, aged 57. Hamilton, who still rode a motorbike well into his 70s, died in 2022 aged 97.

For many years, the front cover of the Scottish Covenant hung in pride of place in the living room of Hamilton’s home near Oban.  When the Scottish Parliament was opened, he donated it, hoping it would be displayed in the vestibule. 

Hamilton was disappointed that he never saw it again or was able to find out what had become of it. My uncle David Kemp tells me that Hamilton suspected it had been lost. The Scottish Parliament in fact did not know where it was when I contacted them, but the National Library staff tracked it down to the National Records of Scotland. I am in the process of getting permission to view it - it is not in their main building but in a storage facility in an in industrial estate. Sadly there are no plans to have an exhibition to mark its 75th year. 

Like Hamilton and MacCormick, most of the people whose names are on the Scottish Covenant are no longer with us But it would be a fitting tribute to their efforts to find a place for it in the Scottish Parliament, which was finally reconvened 50 long years after it was launched. 

( 13/7 Note: Added in a quote about McCormick’s speaking style and corrected a couple of typos)