by Trevor Royle
It is not difficult to see why the politicians were included, even though the list is eclectic. Haldane, brother of Naomi Mitchison, was a pioneering geneticist who was also a Communist while the Duchess of Atholl was considered a dangerous liberal, and Lockhart was on the list on account of his connections with British intelligence. In 1918 he had been implicated in a plot to assassinate the Soviet leader Lenin, and had been sentenced to death in absentia by the Russians who were still Hitler’s allies in the summer of 1940. His interest in Balkans politics may also have told against him. It certainly accounted for the most wanted Scottish name on the list – Robert William Seton-Watson of London University’s School of Slavonic Studies, who was a vociferous opponent of appeasement. The Nazis were particularly interested in his papers ‘for the German-Balkan politics, especially for Hungary and Jugoslavia’. If these were not found at his London address, paratroopers were to raid his Scottish home at Kyle House on the Isle of Skye.
Seton-Watson was Britain’s foremost Balkanist, and had built up an international reputation for his outspoken views on the Slavonic nationalists and for his role in settling the borders of Yugoslavia at the Paris peace conference in 1919. A quiet, diffident man, he seemed to be in closer touch with the realities of central European affairs than many members of the British government, and he had been quick to point out the dangers posed by Hitler’s territorial ambitions. In 1940 he was employed in the political intelligence department of the Foreign Office where he enjoyed a close relationship with Dr Edward Benes (also on the list) who was head of the provisional Czech government in London.
Also included on the list were the names of every Jewish refugee who had made their home in Scotland in the 1930s: they would have been easily traced by cross-reference to the index, which contained the main towns and cities of Britain, so that under Glasgow can be found M134 – Dr Lorenz Michaelis, born in 1902 and wanted by the inland security services whose Einsatzgruppe D, led by the notorious SS murderer Otto Ohlendorf, was responsible for the deaths of 90,000 Jews in Russia between June 1941 and July 1942.
The existence of the Black Book only became known after the end of the war when details were published in the press. Some of those listed regarded their presence as a badge of honour; Noël Coward recorded in his memoirs that after the war was over and the details had been revealed he received a telegram from Rebecca West which read: ‘My dear – the people we should have been seen dead with.’32 Others were less sanguine because even though the existence of the Sonderfahndungsliste GB had not been generally known it was clear from what had happened in Europe that the Nazis would target politicians and intellectuals, especially if they were on the left or had been opponents of appeasement. That description would have applied to the Haldane family which had two members of the list – J. B. S. Haldane and his sister Naomi Mitchison, both of whom were prominent socialist thinkers and opponents of Nazism. At the time Naomi was living in the family home at Carradale in Kintyre which was being used as an evacuation centre for children from Glasgow. While recalling those days on the 50th anniversary of the invasion scare she admitted her fear that she would be targeted if the Nazis ever came to Scotland.
I remember hearing that both my husband [Labour politician Richard Mitchison] and myself were on the Gestapo death list. It was deeply upsetting. I kept wondering what would happen to all my Glasgow kids if the Nazis came in and took over. At first I thought I would try to convince them I really loved Germany, but that would never have worked, so then I thought I might be able to shoot one or two of them before I was shot myself.
I recall telling one of the local fishermen that I knew quite well and he said, ‘Och well, we will just have to get a boat and take you over to America if the worst happens.33
While the German invasion of Scotland was only a remote possibility, it is also probable that not everyone in the country would have been dismayed by the outcome. From the evidence of what happened in the rest of occupied Europe, including the Channel Islands which was occupied in the summer of 1940, the Nazis would have attempted to enter into alliances with those friendly, or at least not unfriendly, towards them. While there would have been mass round-ups of the kind of people represented in the Black Book, the German administration would have looked for the same kind of cooperation they had found in the Channel Islands, Vichy France and other parts of occupied Europe. In pursuit of those aims the Nazis established ‘Radio Caledonia’, which was part of its ‘Concordia’ propaganda network of short-range stations which purported to be broadcasting from within the UK, and in this case made appeals to Scots to make a separate peace with Hitler. Its main broadcaster was Donald Grant, a Hoover salesman from Alness who had joined the British Union of Fascists before the war, but the station ceased broadcasting in August 1942, having failed to make any impact within Scotland.34
However, from the evidence of the research undertaken by Schellenberg’s department, the Nazis would have expected (but would not necessarily have received) support from a number of sympathetic organisations including the Anglo-German Fellowship which had been established in 1936 to foster links with Nazi Germany, and which contained several prominent supporters of appeasement. Many were establishment figures, and amongst the fellowship’s Scottish membership were the Duke of Hamilton, Lord Arbuthnot, Lord Lieutenant for Kincardineshire, and Sir Thomas Moore, Unionist MP for Ayr Burghs.35 Similarly, The Link, another influential pro-German group founded in 1937, had several Scots amongst its membership, as did the Right Club, a secret society which had been founded in 1939 by Captain Archibald Ramsay, Unionist MP for Peebles and South Midlothian, a well-known appeaser and anti-Semite. Although these far-right groupings had been closed down or infiltrated by the beginning of the war they still attracted interest from the security services, and Ramsay was arrested on 23 May and interned under the provisions of Defence Regulation 18b.
In addition to these pro-fascist organisations, most of which were relatively harmless if extremely wrong-headed, the Nazis would probably have looked for support from those members of the SNP who were vociferous supporters of home rule and disapproved of the continuation of the union. The poet and classicist Douglas Young was chairman of the Aberdeen branch at the time, and as a prominent opponent of conscription (see Chapter 5) he was frequently vilified as being a Nazi sympathiser. That was not the case, but he did advise Roland Muirhead that Scotland should seek a separate peace if an invasion were successful, and that prominent Scots should be prepared to take part in the new form of governance under Nazi rule: ‘The Germans will look around for aborigines to run Scotland, and it is to be wished that the eventual administration consist of people who have in the past shown themselves to care for the interests of Scotland.’36 There were other prominent members of the nationalist community who were also potential Nazi sympathisers. Amongst them were the writer Ronald Macdonald Douglas, who was briefly interned, and Arthur Donaldson who had been expelled from the SNP on account of his extreme views. Having founded his own pro-independence party, United Scotland, Donaldson became a leading opponent of conscription, and was eventually arrested in 1941.
At the time his supporters believed that his arrest was due to his views on conscription but it was later revealed that he had been targeted by MI5. Donaldson had reportedly told one of its agents that he anticipated a German invasion and that he would be prepared to establish an independent but pro-Nazi Scottish government similar to the administration established by Vidkun Quisling after the fall of Norway. The agent reported these findings to his superior officer Richard Brooman-White, an artillery officer from Dumbarton who had been forced to leave the army due to ill health, and was working at the time for a new section of MI5 devoted to scrutinising ‘Celtic movements’: ‘The movement in Scotland must then be able to show the German government that it is organised and has a clear-cut policy, that it is not with England in the war. The German government will give them every possible assistance in their early struggle, and when fire and confusion is
at its height in England the movement can start in earnest.’37
As a result of Donaldson’s discussions with the MI5 agent, his arrest was ordered by the Lord Advocate Thomas Cooper with the backing of Lord Rosebery, who had succeeded Johnston as Regional Commissioner for Civil Defence on the latter’s promotion to Secretary of State for Scotland (see Chapter 5). However, after spending five weeks in Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow Donaldson was released on Johnston’s orders either because the evidence was too flimsy or, more likely, because MI5 could not afford to jeopardise its position if the incident ever became public property. Donaldson survived the war and later became the SNP’s chairman in the 1960s.
Other leading Scots who flirted briefly with the idea of dealing with Nazi Germany were the poets Hugh MacDiarmid and George Campbell Hay (Deorsa Mac Iain Deorsa), a Gaelic speaker who lived in Edinburgh having been educated at Fettes and Oxford. Writing to fellow poet Sorley MacLean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain) on 5 June 1940, MacDiarmid put forward the idea that while ‘the Germans are appalling enough and in the short-term view more murderously destructive, they cannot win – but the British and French bourgeoisie can, and is a far greater enemy’.38 Within this same period (but a year earlier) Hay would have been quite content to see southern Britain overrun by the Nazis, writing to Douglas Young in May 1939 that it would be history’s revenge: ‘Of course there will be starvation – in England. It will be an interesting thing for Ireland to watch.’39
Donaldson, and to a lesser extent, Young and Hay, clearly believed that there was little difference between government from Westminster or Berlin, and that Scotland had much to gain following the confusion of an invasion and the establishment of Nazi rule, but their thinking was never put to the test. On 17 September Operation Sealion was postponed, and the Germans began returning their invasion barges to the Rhine. By then the Battle of Britain had been fought, and the German failure to win air superiority had put paid to any immediate thought of a cross-Channel invasion. By then, too, Hitler’s strategic goals had also changed: on 18 December he issued a new Directive No. 21 in which he ordered his forces to be prepared to ‘crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign’.
5 Scotland’s Conscience, Moral and Political
By the 1930s most of the political optimism generated by the end of the First World War had evaporated. Scotland entered the Second World War with recent memories of the economic depression and a fractured political system which seemed to be incapable of grappling with the country’s manifold problems. In the aftermath of the First World War the Liberal party had begun its long and painful decline, and as it did so, a pattern began to emerge in Scottish politics. Both the Conservatives and Labour had picked up support from the Liberals but each benefited in different ways. Increasingly the middle classes were seen as the preserve of the Conservatives who worked hard to build up core support in country areas and amongst young people who wanted to ‘get on in life’. Labour continued to look for support from the industrial working class, especially in the central belt but also got backing from moderates and free-thinkers who saw them as the coming party and an engine for social change.
During that inter-war period Scottish politics remained largely unionist in complexion but that did not mean that nationalist or home rule sentiments had been eclipsed, even though one of the first political casualties of the First World War had been a bill aimed at producing a measure of political devolution for Scotland. In May 1914 a Home Rule Bill had passed its second reading in the House of Commons, mainly as a result of the promptings of the Scottish Home Rule Association and the Young Scots Society, a radical-minded grouping within the ruling Liberal Party who described themselves at the time of their inception in 1901 as being in favour of free trade, social reform and what they called ‘the unquenchable and indefinable spirit of nationalism’. They were also pro-Boer, much to the ire of unionist newspapers such as the Scotsman.1 The bill had envisaged the creation of a devolved Scotland within the framework of a new federal structure for the United Kingdom or, as prime minister H. H. Asquith put it, the new union would have a peculiarity: ‘that while for common purposes all its constituent members can deliberate and act together, none of them is at liberty to deal with those matters which are specially appropriate and necessary for itself without the common consent of all.’2 The Liberals had supported the concept of home rule since the 1880s when it seemed that Ireland would be granted a measure of independence as part of William Ewart Gladstone’s desire to settle the ‘great moral issue of Ireland’ and that in the process Scotland would lose out. In 1894 and 1895 Scottish home rule bills had gained parliamentary majorities but had not been passed due to lack of parliamentary time. The Liberals had also been responsible for the creation in 1885 of the Scottish Office under the leadership of a secretary for Scotland who had specific responsibilities in a number of areas including education, agriculture and fisheries.
This latest bill was swept away by the great tide of war in the summer of 1914 but the notion of home rule or devolution was not entirely dead. In 1918 the Scottish Home Rule Association was revived by Roland Muirhead, a radical businessman from Lochwinnoch who was also a prominent nationalist, and it attracted the support of many other leading ILP members including James Maxton and Tom Johnston. During that same period both the Scottish Council of the Labour Party and the Scottish Trades Union Congress passed resolutions in favour of home rule and for Scotland to be represented at the Versailles peace negotiations as an independent country. In the following year, 1920, the Executive of the Scottish Council of the Labour Party adopted a draft bill which stated that ‘a determined effort should be made to secure Home Rule for Scotland in the first session of Parliament, and that the question should be taken out of the hands of place-hunting lawyers and vote-catching politicians by the political and industrial efforts of the Labour Party in Scotland which should co-ordinate all its forces to this end, using any legitimate means, political or industrial, to secure the establishment of a Scottish Parliament’.3 However, the proposal failed to find any backers, as did two later efforts in 1924 and 1927 when Scottish Home Rule bills were unsuccessfully introduced, respectively, by George Buchanan, ILP MP for the Gorbals, and the Rev. James Barr, ILP MP for Motherwell.
However, it was not all a lost cause. Through Buchanan’s and Barr’s efforts interest in nationalism had been given a boost, and on 23 June 1928 the National Party of Scotland was founded in Stirling. Its membership was variegated – a mixture of intellectuals, idealists, students and disenchanted former ILP members – and its first chairman was Muirhead, while its secretary was John MacCormick, a young Glasgow lawyer with a talent for public speaking. Six years later it joined forces with the Scottish Party to become the Scottish National Party (SNP) but by then membership of the party was in a parlous state, having dropped to 2,000 in September 1939.4
The coming of war could have been a body blow to the new party – a planned all-party convention on home rule had to be cancelled – but there was a new rallying call. Two years earlier, during the 1937 party convention, the SNP passed a resolution which declared that it was ‘strongly opposed to the manpower of Scotland being used to defend an Empire in the government of which she has no voice’, a move which committed its members of military age to refuse to be conscripted until a separate Scottish government had been formed. The same meeting stopped short of attempting to secure Scottish neutrality in the event of war but the decision to oppose conscription gave a clear indication of the strength of the party’s anti-war sentiments. An Anti-Conscription League founded by Wendy Wood, a radical and somewhat unorthodox political activist, defended the ‘constitutional right’ of Scots to avoid military service while the Scottish Neutrality League argued that Scotland should be allowed to demand neutrality in the event of a war. As it happened, the SNP dropped the measure on the outbreak of war but that decision was hotly contested and did not imply a complete willingness to support the wartime Westminster government. In April 1940 the SNP broke ranks
when it put up a candidate to fight a by-election in Argyll. Although an electoral truce had been instituted by all the main parties on the outbreak of war the SNP did not feel bound to accept it and fought a doughty campaign in which the candidate was its leader William Power, a noted poet and journalist. As might have been expected, the Conservatives retained the seat (Major Duncan McCallum, 12,317 votes) but Power did well to garner 7,308 votes, or 37.2 per cent of the poll, and might have done better had not the Germans invaded Norway two days before polling day, a move which underlined the parlous nature of the country’s war effort.
Power was an interesting character. Born in Glasgow in 1873 he came from farming stock, originally from Angus, and was well versed in his country’s history and literature. Largely self-taught – he left school aged fourteen and worked in the Royal Bank of Scotland for twenty years – he began writing as a young man, and his contributions to the Glasgow Herald led to a permanent position as a leader writer and political commentator. All the while his interests were widening, and in the 1920s he became associated with Hugh MacDiarmid’s Scottish Renaissance movement, fully supporting its credo that nationalism and internationalism could co-exist and were not mutually exclusive. An autobiography Should Auld Acquaintance (1937) is notable for his shrewd comments on the contemporary scene and the personalities who fashioned events during the inter-war period. However, at the time of the Argyll by-election Power was sixty-seven and his authority was waning. A fresh row was also about to erupt within the party about its attitude to conscription, and this was destined to plunge the SNP into fresh disarray.
