Historic piece of SNP memorabilia discovered harking back to Winnie Ewing

Danabhadri Fergusson, 78, was clearing out her late husband Iain’s old paperwork when she came across a letter he received back in July 1967 from the SNP National Executive Committee authorising the Hamilton Constituency Association to contest a by-election that year with Ewing as the party’s candidate.

She then dug deeper into the piles of political memorabilia Iain had kept and – along with other documentation relating to the by-election – found an application form Ewing had filled in where she was requesting approval of her proposed nomination.

The documents are now set to be kept in the SNP archives at the National Library in Edinburgh.

Iain – who died in February aged 79 – was constituency secretary for Hamilton back in the day and had built up a close working relationship with Ewing before she went down in party history.

Danabhadri Fergusson with the 1967 letter authorising Winnie Ewing to be an SNP candidate. Pic: Gordon Terris

Danabhadri, from Larkhall, said she wanted to ensure the historic pieces were kept safe once she found them.

She told The National: “[Iain] was the biggest hoarder on the planet. I used to wait until he had gone to the football – he was a big Motherwell fan – and then fling things out and then look innocent when he returned home.

“When I found [the letter], because I’m not the type of person to keep things like that, I thought it had to go somewhere more important like a library, and my first thought was the SNP’s own archives.

“He was the constituency secretary at the time when Winnie was adopted, and the letter is addressed to him at his home address because the party was tiny, there were no party rooms.

“There was another document I found too, which is basically Winnie filling in a form saying ‘please, I’m a nice respectable Glasgow lawyer, can I stand in this by-election?’ “I found a photocopy of it first and then found the original. It had her writing in blue on it.”

Ewing – who originally worked as a lawyer – won the Hamilton by-election by a landslide after it had previously been a safe Labour seat.

Although she was not the first SNP MP – with the party having enjoyed a brief victory at the Motherwell by-election in 1945 – it was considered a breakthrough moment for the party after she secured 46% of the vote in a seat the SNP had not even contested at the previous year’s general election.

The SNP has been represented at Westminster continuously ever since her victory.

Iain’s son Euan, who has been an SNP member for 25 years, said: “I knew [Iain] had some old SNP stuff, but I didn’t know specifically that he had [the letter and form].

“I got brought up on the party and the stories of the SNP in the 60s and 70s.

“There’s even a tale about me throwing my rattle at Margaret Thatcher on the telly when I was young, so it was exciting my mum found this. It’s a very nostalgic piece.

“One my earliest memories was at a school gala day and seeing this woman running up to my dad to give him a hug, and it turned out that was Winnie.

“It was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth that turned my dad towards independence as she was being referred to as Queen Elizabeth II when she was actually Queen Elizabeth I in Scotland. He used to scrub the second I off pencils they had at school.

“It’s great the National Library is going to take them.”