"You weren't allowed to be outspoken about nationalism"
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"OUR phones were tapped constantly. We knew they were on the line and we used to get a good laugh out of it."
Conspiracy theories over phone-tapping and secret service snooping sound like an Orwellian nightmare but Mary Macrae is adamant plots were afoot in the 1970s to stamp out Scottish nationalism.
The 77-year-old Gaelic-speaking grandmother from Stornoway was knocking on doors for votes for the Smithton and Ardersier seat in the Highland Regional Council elections of 1974, coming in second place behind an independent candidate with 293 or 25 per cent of the votes, and is still canvassing her Culloden neighbourhood.
"It was great being pro-Scottish but I remember looking at the other party candidates as traitors," says the Ardersier and Petty branch secretary. "You weren’t allowed to be outspoken about nationalism. I worked in Arnotts and you had to keep quiet. You had to go with the flow."
Fellow nationalist Lorna Young recalls: "We were ignored, we were laughed at, people made fun of us. I worked in a bank and it was frowned upon to come out as a nationalist. You were a closet supporter."
The 77-year-old Inverness East branch secretary, who still campaigns by cold-calling voters, was extremely active in the 1970s.
She and her husband Tom used to publish a nationalist newsletter from their home at Eastfield Avenue, Drakies.
"There was nothing but ink and sheets of paper all over the house drying. At one time there were 22,000 papers in the hallway to be handed out by a certain date. It was just all go. We would come home from work and have to go straight out posting them all through letterboxes. I remember one time, it was the autumn, we were that hungry we were eating the apples off the trees in the people’s gardens."
Mr Young, a time-served electrician who ran Highland Blinds Ltd, was an SNP activist from the 1960s, joining the party when he left the Queen’s Own Highlanders (Seaforth and Camerons). He is in poor health now.
"He was the king of postering," Mrs Young says. "I remember going to bed and he was still out putting posters up all over the place. You couldn’t get a more passionate supporter than Tom. He was out dancing in the garden when Winnie Ewing won the Hamilton by-election in 1967."
The couple’s daughter Cheryl Brown said it was fun to move in SNP circles.
"I was leafletting from the age of 12," she says. "I remember Winnie Ewing making us cheese on toast at her house in Lossiemouth and telling us Maggie Thatcher wouldn’t share a toilet with the other women in Westminster.
"The things you remember when you think back!"
Mrs Young remembers the 1970s as a time of the greatest highs and the deepest lows.
That was the decade Donald Barr, the SNP candidate, came within 1,134 votes of winning the Inverness seat in the general election of October 1974 and a referendum on Scottish devolution secured 51 per cent of the vote but the result was void because the turnout of 32.9 per cent fell short of the required 40 per cent condition for the Scotland Act 1978 to be implemented.
Mrs Young said: "We had so much excitement but there sure have been some terrible downers. By the time Maggie Thatcher got to power we’d burnt ourselves out. We were sickened. But this time around, I’m quietly confident that we’re going to win."
Inverness historian, columnist and author Bill McAllister was a Labour activist in the 1970s.
He was a member of the "yes" camp for a Scottish assembly at the 1979 referendum and remembers that it snowed on polling day, in May.
"The parliament eventually arrived – but separation from the rest of the UK is a very different and, I believe, more dangerous option," Mr McAllister says.
"This referendum is unique in that ‘yes’ would mean separation and in my view that would be very bad news for the people of Scotland. Pensions, childcare, etc., would be paid for by five million people instead of 60 million people – a big and dangerous call. Ripping up 300 years of history seems to me to be a step too far."
