One of the earliest features on the
Flag was a tribute to Angus McGillveray and a repeat of his splendid
Rebel
Ceilidh Song Book, which inspired
SING A SANG AT LEAST.
It has been drawn to our attention that
Dr Gordon Wilson, former National Chairman of the Scottish National
Party, has contributed an article on Angus to ‘The Dictionary of
National Biography’ in 2004 which we are delighted to repeat below:-
McGillveray,
Angus (1931-1996), politician, was born at Dunmaglas, 46 Main Street,
East Whitburn, West Lothian, on 13 October 1930, the elder of two sons
of Joseph Charles McGillveray (1900-1971), fruiterer, and his wife,
Marion Prentice, neé Docherty (1902-1981). Educated at Whitburn
Primary School (193501941) and
Lindsay High School, Bathgate (1941-5), he was apprenticed to John Laughridge, a local
company of painters and decorators. After his apprenticeship he worked
with them for two years before establishing his own firm of painters and
decorators in 1955. On 29 March
1952 he married Jean Blair Brown (b. 1930), florist, at the
Church of Scotland, Stoneyburn, West Lothian. They had a daughter,
Janice, and two sons, Charles and Colin.
McGillveray was from his early years a
great exponent of the culture of Scotland. A gifted artist, he also had
special interests in piping and highland dancing. He arranged many
fund-raising ceilidhs for cultural societies. He was responsible for
holding in Bathgate one of the biggest highland dancing competitions in
Scotland. It was to raise still more funds that he created a weekly
sweep, called Saltire Pools, which benefited a wide range of cultural
organizations.
McGillveray joined the Scottish
National Party (SNP) in 1952 when it was still a small organization with
some 20 branches and a small membership. In the early 1960s the SNP
began to grow. In 1962 it contested the West Lothian by-election and
won over 23 per cent of the vote. The impetus given by this election
boosted the SNP’s national membership and prestige. It also created a
power centre in West Lothian where McGillveray worked alongside the
future party chairman, William Woolfe, to modernize the party. On his
own initiative, McGillveray established a publications department in
West Calder, which supplied leaflets, badges, and policy booklets to the
party. By 1964 the SNP had 35 branches, and by 1970 the total had
mushroomed to over 400. Membership had also gone through exponential
growth. The whole organization was hungry for promotional material.
During that period, McGillveray, by then head of the SNP’s publications
department, assisted by his wife, Jean, established a Scotland-wide
network and sales reached into six figures. The famous It’s Scotland’s
Oil leaflet (1973) sold over 1 million copies – a stupendous figure for
a country with 3 million households. In 1962, again on his own
initiative and at his own cost, he adapted the formula of Saltire Pools
to found the SNP’s own version, Alba Pools. This was a runaway
success. In its first five years, it raked in £200,000. This money
financed the explosive growth of the SNP and permitted the SNP at
national level to set a high standard in research and publications new
to Scottish politics.
McGillveray’s organizational genius and
marketing flair contributed critically to the emergence of the SNP as a
major player on Scottish and United Kingdom politics. He was widely
recognized as a mainspring of the leap forward. Additionally, he fought
many elections and served on the West Lothian district council.
Although his family had lived in the lowlands for two centuries, he
proud of his highland origins and was open and welcoming by nature. He
died in the house of his birth on 4 November 1996, after a courageous
struggle over years against cancer, and was survived by his wife and
their three children. There was a huge turn-out at his funeral, at
Falkirk crematorium four days later, testifying to the affection and respect in
which he was held.
