FOR a party that has become so prominent in politics here in Scotland and the UK as a whole, and which is influencing independence movements worldwide, the Scottish National Party’s own history is rarely told.

Most people in Scotland are aware the Nats only became a major political force from 1967 onwards, which was the year when solicitor Winnie Ewing won a sensational by-election victory in Hamilton – the very heartland of Labour in Scotland. She was not actually the first SNP MP – that was Dr Robert McIntyre who won the Motherwell by-election on April 12, 1945, only to lose the seat 84 days later in the General Election of July 5 that year.

Progress for the party from 1967 on was very much a case of two steps forward, one step back, until the coming of the Holyrood Parliament made the rise of the SNP inevitable. The 2015 General Election merely confirmed what every sensible person knew – that the SNP is now, to coin a phrase, the natural party of government in Scotland.

So how did it all begin for the SNP? You probably have to go back to Rabbie Burns and Sir Walter Scott…

Burns almost single-handedly kept the Scots language alive in the late 18th century and his poetry was a source of massive national pride when a lot of Scots just wanted to be British Empire builders and the King’s English was rapidly becoming the only form of language spoken in Scotland.

Scott, who once met Burns, took up the cudgels. Prior to the great believer in Unionism’s Waverley novels, there had been a Scottish cultural cringe that makes the modern display of that phenomenon look tiny by comparison – Scott, however, saw no difficulty in reconciling his belief in the Union with promoting the culture and history of Scotland, and it was a stance that resonated with almost all his fellow Scots at that time. Not for nothing is the Scott Monument the largest for any writer in the western world.

Yet while Scots became empire builders abroad, many people began to question why the Union between two free and equal nations was anything but equal. The disastrous Highland Potato Famine between 1846 and 1855 was a truly negative experience for lovers of the Union. Ireland may not have been the only place to suffer such horror, but the Scottish catastrophe was not on the same scale as An Gorta Mor. Like Ireland, the Scottish famine also triggered mass movement of people. With emigration from the Highlands an everyday occurrence, questions about Scottish nationality and culture began to be asked across the land, and the Highland Land League – another forerunner of the SNP – would eventually be constituted to campaign for land reform.

Across Europe there were numerous nationalist movements in the 1840s, and Scotland saw its first expression of this culture shift in 1853 when the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights was established, largely because Ireland was getting too much attention in Westminster. Here’s a possibly shocking revelation for many SNP members: this forerunner of modern Scottish nationalism was founded mainly by Tories.

They wanted more Scottish MPs and more time for Scottish business in Parliament. They didn’t get it and the Association only lasted three years.

Still, the genie was out of the bottle, and as the clamour for Home Rule began to grow in Ireland, so there was an echo of the same hubbub in Scotland. In 1867, Scotland “took” seven seats from England in that year’s Representation of the People Act, and while there was no Home Rule campaign as such, the need to keep the Scots on the side of the Union ensured that in 1884, Gladstone’s Liberal government brought in further reforms which saw Scotland given 72 seats – a number that was maintained for more than a century.

Gladstone also revived the office of Secretary for Scotland and gave it to the Duke of Lennox and Richmond, Charles Gordon-Lennox, who had charge of the Scottish Office based in London which was created in 1885.

In the wake of Ireland’s Home Rule crisis in the 1880s, Gladstone’s manoeuvres looked like a good way of buying off the Scots. On the contrary, it only increased the desire for Home Rule. The Scots showed their appreciation for Gladstone’s gesture – the Scottish Home Rule Association was formed the following year. Its founder, Roland Muirhead, kept the Association going into the 1920s, and meanwhile the Scottish Liberal Association voted for Home Rule to be their policy in 1888.

As the Labour Party grew apace, its demands for reform included Home Rule for Scotland, a policy which also found favour with the newly elected Liberal MP for the city of Dundee in 1908 – a certain Winston Spencer Churchill. No surprise there – he had also advocated Home Rule for Ireland.

As many as 13 bills went before Parliament in the years before the Great War, but none made it past the talking stage. Then Scotland and most of Europe went to war, and Home Rule was temporarily forgotten. It is often thought that after Red Clydeside’s advent following the war, Home Rule went on the backburner as Labour fought to win power in Westminster. Not true: in 1924, with Labour in Scotland doing the pushing, a Home Rule bill was debated in the Commons, but was denied a vote and enough time.

Labour MP James Maxton summed up the feelings of many with his extraordinary speech that year, part of which is carved into the walls of the Holyrood Parliament: “Give us our parliament in Scotland. Set it up next year. We will start with no traditions. We will start with ideals ... men and women ... (will) spend their whole energy, their whole brain-power, their whole courage, and their whole soul, in making Scotland into a country in which we can take people from all nations of the earth and say: ‘This is our land, this is our Scotland, these are our people, these are our men, our works, our women and children: can you beat it?’”

A key moment in the development of the SNP came in 1927 when the Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association (GUSNA) was formed, with the chief mover being a brilliant orator and organiser, John MacCormick, who would become a legend in nationalist circles. GUSNA itself is still going strong and it was members of the Association who repatriated the Stone of Destiny in 1950.

In April 1928, the National Party of Scotland (NPS) was formed, again with the formidable MacCormick at its core. He persuaded such literary luminaries as Hugh MacDiarmid, Eric Linklater, Compton Mackenzie and Neil Gunn to join the NPS whose first president was the colourful author and politician Robert Bontine Cunninghame Grahame, who had also been a founder of the Labour Party after leaving the Liberals. Whether the NPS was going to fight for outright independence or “Home Rule max” was still to be decided but at first they pushed for independence.

The NPS brought together GUSNA, the Scottish Home Rule Association, and the Scottish National Movement founded by the Edinburgh writer Lewis Spence, which itself had broken away from the Scots National League, then led by Tom Gibson, which also joined the new party. The SNL in turn had largely been a creation of the Highland Land League so, as you can see, there was a considerable deal of factionalism among nationalists at this time, though amazingly the new party enjoyed the support of the Scottish Daily Express. How times change…

Under the NPS banner and Roland Muirhead’s leadership, by-elections were fought and the party also put up candidates for local councils and the 1931 General Election – five in all, who gained a total of 21,000 votes or only 5,000 more than the Scottish Prohibition Party’s sole candidate Edwyn Scrimgeour who lost his Dundee seat.

A key development was the formation of the Scottish Party by John Kevan McDowall, Andrew Dewar Gibb and the Duke of Montrose in 1932. Their demand was for a Scottish Parliament within the Empire. These were right-of-centre politicians, to put it politely, but McCormick could see the possibilities of cooperation between the two parties.

Thanks to the indefatigable convener of East Dunbartonshire SNP, Willie Wilson, we have a fascinating insight into life in the NPS. His father John, then a young solicitor, acted as agent for John “Manny” McNichol who fought the Shettleston by-election for the NPS in 1930.

Having researched his father’s papers found in an attic by his brother Jack, Willie Wilson recalls: “The deposit back then was an astronomical £150, which might be equivalent to over £8,000 today [a Morris Minor car cost £120 at the time].

“Worse still, the candidate had to achieve 12.5 per cent of the total votes cast in order to save that deposit. It appears that in addition to the deposit the running costs for the campaign totalled a further £107. Financially, this venture was very risky indeed. I wonder what (SNP chief executive) Peter Murrell would make of that today?

“Some features of the campaign seem quaint to us now, such as hiring Mr Watters, a bill poster, who charged £1 and 19 shillings to put up 600 posters. That seems to have included the glue, but he charged an extra 1/6d (7.5p) for six brushes! By contrast, the hire of high-tech equipment such as motor cars and a telephone was much more expensive.

“The themes are amazingly similar to those we see in modern SNP campaign leaflets. The economy suffers from the poor returns received by Scotland from the huge revenues taken from us by Westminster.

“There are familiar complaints about industrial piracy, high unemployment and high emigration of Scots. Housing conditions and infant mortality were also shocking.

“McNicol undertook an impressive late campaign schedule including nine meetings in the last three days. One supporting speaker was the very elderly RB Cunninghame Graham.

“The McNicol-Wilson team managed to achieve 10.1 per cent of the vote. This was remarkably good for a two-year-old party and was more than double the share achieved by NPS candidates in the General Election the year before, but sadly was not enough to save that huge deposit.”

In 1933, with the NPS standing aside, Sir Alexander MacEwan stood for The Scottish Party in the by-election in Kilmarnock and polled a very respectable 16.9 per cent in fourth place behind National Labour’s Kenneth Lindsay; second and third place were filled by candidates for “Labour” as well as the “Independent Labour Party”, which shows what a mess the Left was in during those days of the Depression.

The key point about that 1933 by-election is that the NPS and Scottish Party were cooperating, and MacCormick pushed for even closer ties. He did so knowing that it was going to be a difficult job combining left and right-wing elements, outright independence seekers and Home Rulers all together in one party – some might say it still is.

Nevertheless, with Scotland’s future at stake, it was merely a matter of discussion and debate before the two parties decided to merge and, on April 7, 1934, the Scottish National Party was formally created in Glasgow with RB Cunninghame Graham as its first president and principal founders that included MacCormick, the Duke of Montrose, Roland Muirhead, Andrew Dewar Gibb, Tom Gibson, John McNicol, Kevan McDowall, and the party’s first leader, Sir Alexander MacEwen.

The rest, as they say, is history.