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Mag Memories: Jenny Turner

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Jenny Turner looks back on the wide orbit of 1980s Edinburgh Review, and its intersecting boys’ clubs and girls’ clubs

In Justified Sinners (2002), Ross Birrell and Alec Finlay’s “archaeology of Scottish counterculture”, Malcolm Dickson remembers the Free University of Glasgow, a loose group that met in the late 1980s to talk about “cross-recognition, kindred spirits, shaking people out of the impossibility of action, behave as if you had power and act as you mean to go on.” He “cringes” to remember one session in particular, at which “an Andrea Dworkin text was read out and the men then had to leave the room to discuss it, then return, and the two groups compared notes. What a slagging!”

I took part in that session, which had been organised by the artist Carol Rhodes (1959-2018), who was at that time working unpaid at the Transmission Gallery and paid – at least I think so – as an assistant to her live-in landlord, Alasdair Gray. Like Malcolm, who went on to edit Variant, I too found the session uncomfortable, though probably for different reasons. You can feel and even know things but have no words for them, and I am evidence that this condition can persist for years and years.

I have been asked to write about my memories of Edinburgh Review, at which I was a regular contributor from 1984 to 1990, and in particular about what a “boys’ club” the wider scene appears to have been. ER and Common Sense and Here & Now and Polygon Books and the Free University of Glasgow, the networks and publications that came together at Self-Determination and Power, the weekend event James Kelman organised with Noam Chomsky in January 1990 at the Pearce Institute in Govan: and it’s just objectively true, and obvious, that all these networks and publications were run by men.

ER was edited by Peter Kravitz then Murdo Macdonald, both of whom also ran the list at Polygon from 1988. Here & Now was Alistair Dickson, Common Sense was Richard Gunn and Werner Bonefeld. Everybody read and admired the emergent work of Agnes Owens, Janice Galloway, AL Kennedy, but there really was a sense that masculinity was where it was at in Scottish literature at that time, in the work of Kelman, Gray, Tom Leonard, Jeff Torrington. In a way it kind of had to be, given that Scotland under Thatcher was all about the breaking of what Beatrix Campbell used to call “the men’s movement”, the old-style organised and unionised industrial working class.

But identity fluctuates, and people are complicated, and a history that considers objectivity an easy matter is unlikely to have much in it of much use. What strikes me now, when I look back on that period, is how much time I spent doing things with women: with Marion Coutts, the artist, writer and musician, designing what I still think is an amazing poster for the 1988 Free Uni Scratchparl weekend in Glasgow (From. An. Other. Shore, it says, between the stretching fingers of an open hand. Respect, self-help, fragments, resilience, confession, guilt, it continues down the left-hand side).

With Kirsty Reid, who edited Liz Lochhead’s Dreaming Frankenstein (1984) and went on to create the superb One Isn’t Paying meme for our neighbourhood anti-poll-tax group, and the even more deathless Oor Wullie Thinks It’s Silly, And His Bucket Says Fuck It.

I shared flats at different times with Deirdre Watt and Lorna Waite, both of whom edited and wrote for ER, I did Pleasance multigym with Julie Milton, who put together the first Original Prints anthology of Scottish women’s writing. Sue Wiseman, now Professor of Seventeenth Century Literature at Birkbeck in London, was the first and best of ER’s critical writers on Kelman. Marion Sinclair, now head of Publishing Scotland, started at Polygon as its first proper staff person in 1988. So yes, there were many boys’ clubs going on across the central belt in the 1980s, but they interacted and intersected with the girls’ clubs.  The interesting question is why the boys’ clubs get remembered more, and more formally memorialised, and the girls’ ones don’t.

The Free Uni, Malcolm remembered in his article, also aimed to set up an actual clubhouse: “a place that didn’t shut at 5pm and which didn’t require you to spend money”. The Double Deckers, I called this, after the children’s TV show, seeing myself, I think, as Gillian Bailey. Except that nothing like it ever happened, because opening and maintaining an actual built space necessitates not just talk but steady material resources.

In the podcast interview he contributed a few weeks ago to the Scottish Magazines Network, Murdo talked about how Edinburgh Review and Polygon would never have published the sort of work they did, would probably not have existed, without the institutional anomaly of the Student Publications Board at Edinburgh University, a sort of student club that as well as doing pub guides and the weekly student paper, had the resources to take on proper, important book-projects: Gordon Brown’s Red Paper on Scotland (1975), Kelman’s Not not while the giro and The Busconductor Hines (1983-4). Peter, Murdo, Kirsty, Deirdre, Lorna, Julie and I had all been students at Edinburgh University. All of us started out with Pubs Board as students in our different ways.

Here’s the thing, though: on who, and what, sticks around enough to get properly remembered. ER would not have been ER without the vision and know-how of Peter Kravitz, and nor would Polygon nor the Free Uni; and if you read up on old interviews with Galloway and Kelman, you’ll know how much such writers say they owe to him as well. Then along comes Murdo with the Democratic Intellect and the Scottish common-sense philosophy connection, and thus all those extraordinary cross-disciplinary imprints, Sigma, Mundi, Determinations, all those beautiful white paperback originals with their spinal colophons and their deep French flaps. Even as very young men, and Peter would have been 23 in 1984, Peter and Murdo seemed always fully formed in a way the rest of us weren’t. It is not, I hope, to diminish their brains and work to notice that much of this difference was socio-economic.

Both had English public-school educations behind them, and huge collections of old books, and most importantly, had flats of their own to keep them in. They were men of property, they drove cars, they knew how to handle money and they used it in adult, expansive ways. When I was Murdo’s lodger, I remember, I used to hide out scared in my room when he gave tea-parties for venerable friends such as Halla Beloff, George and Elspeth Davie. And I can now laugh – almost – at how bitterly I remember Christopher Logue being slow to get a piece in, and Peter sending him a chocolate cake from Fortnum & Mason. He never sent me a chocolate cake from Fortnum & Mason! Not a Tunnock’s Teacake, nor a Cadbury’s Crème Egg!

I did get paid, though: £50 for my first ER piece, I remember it clearly because I donated it to the relief fund for the famine in Ethiopia. I had a strange idea at that time that it was wrong to take money for writing, I remember explaining it to my mother, though I can’t remember how I put it.  It may have had to do with claiming dole at the time and also housing benefit.  For a couple of years I also had Scottish Education Department grants. I don’t remember how much I got for subsequent ER pieces, though presumably it was about the same. I do remember that after that first splurge with charity, I started keeping the money to myself. The government’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme gave you £40 a week for a year if you put up £1,000 of savings, so I did that and set myself up as a journalist. I often wish that I hadn’t, or that I had got myself out of it later. But for better or worse I didn’t, and here I am.

Alasdair Gray’s motto and motif for Edinburgh Review

I was surprised, the other day, while talking to one of my Labour Party friends near where I live in south-east London, to find that this friend doesn’t think of me – as I think of myself – as posh. I’ve been a homeowner for nearly 20 years now, I write articles for the London Review of Books, I have loads of books and the shelves to keep them on: I never expected such prosperity when I was younger, and I don’t think I especially deserve it. Or that anyone deserves anything, good or bad. But I do think: historical forces, how they tear through people, how they’ve flung me up, at least for the moment, and what burdens they are dumping on the young.

It’s great to get to contribute to this project, to think that people are interested in things I know about from 30 years ago, getting on for 35. It’s nice to stand outside yourself for a moment, to see yourself, a little candle, a tiny part of something bigger. Someone reading this, maybe, will remember more than I can from Carol’s Andrea Dworkin session. What was the slagging, who did it, what was said in it? Was it taken seriously, and if so, how, and by whom?

Jenny Turner was born in Aberdeen and educated at the University of Edinburgh. She is on the editorial board of the London Review of Books, and published a novel, The Brainstorm, in 2007.

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Podcast: Esther Breitenbach

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Esther Breitenbach on Scottish feminist magazines

A fascinating introduction to the print culture of Scottish feminism, focused on the Scottish Women’s Liberation Journal (1977-78) and MsPrint (1978-81), and looking ahead to Harpies and Quines (1992-94).

Dr Esther Breitenbach is our guide to the role of these magazines in feminist networking and political organising, the challenges of editorial/activist collectives, and the uncertain place of feminist perspectives in the wider Scottish magazine culture of the period.

Interviewers: Rachael Alexander and Scott Hames. To explore this world further, key sources include Sarah Browne’s The Women’s Liberation Movement in Scotland (Manchester University Press, 2014), Shirley Henderson and Alison Mackay (eds), Grit and Diamonds: Women in Scotland Making History, 1980-1990 (Stramullion, 1990) and the anthology Women and Contemporary Scottish Politics (Polygon, 2001), edited by Esther Breitenbach and Fiona Mackay. The British Library’s ‘Sisterhood and After’ project also features a number of testimonies by women active in the women’s liberation movement in Scotland (Sheila Gilmore, Sandie Wyles, Rowena Arshad, Mukami McCrum, Elizabeth Armstrong, and Zoe Fairbairns). See also Rachael Alexander’s article and blog on Scottish feminist magazines, via the network’s informal bibliography.

BONUS: near the end of our conversation, Esther mentions the cartoon below, which she credits to Sue Innes (from SWLJ 4).

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Mag Memories: D.M. Black

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In our next inky recollection, D.M. Black looks back on a prodigious stack of poetry magazines and cultural reviews.

For more memories, and to share your own, please come along to our online event on 12 May.

Curious to look back over this great gulf of time to the 1960s-to-1980s when I was involved, sometimes very involved, with Scottish magazines. I remember above all Alan Riddell’s Lines Review, Duncan Glen’s Akros, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Poor. Old. Tired. Horse, Bob Tait’s Scottish International, Joy Hendry’s Chapman. Later of course it was Robin Fulton’s Lines Review.

Issues of Lines Review edited (L-R) by Sydney Goodsir Smith (1955),
Robin Fulton (1972), William Montgomerie (1978), Tessa Ransford (1996)

I myself (with the help of a friend with a talent for design, Patrick Taylor) briefly edited five issues of a quarterly magazine, Extra Verse, while I was a student at Edinburgh University. I had inherited it from someone in Birmingham, and passed it on to Barry Cole in London, so it makes little showing in the annals of Scotland. But it published some good poems by Robert Garioch, Edwin Morgan, George MacBeth, George Mackay Brown, Crae Ritchie, Robin Fulton and others, not to mention an entire issue devoted to a Festschrift for Ian Hamilton Finlay.

One thing that was very striking in those days was how unpretentious many of the best Scottish writers were! I am startled, as I write out that list, that such competent and ambitious poets were willing to publish in a more or less completely invisible magazine, and it suggests an informality and friendliness that, at the time, I took for granted, but in retrospect find deeply attractive.

My impression is that this blog is seeking precursors for Scottish nationalism, and of course we still had the tumultuous presence of Hugh MacDiarmid to steer us in that direction.  All the magazines I have mentioned were strongly biased toward “Scotland” in a cultural sense, and even I, an immigrant at the age of 8 from the British Empire, as I became acculturated in Scotland developed a prejudice against the south-east-of-England literary scene that it took many years to overcome (perhaps even now, after many years of living in London, it is still not wholly eroded). Scottish writers tended to look in every direction except England. Poor. Old. Tired. Horse, probably the most truly international of them all, published adventurous work from Austria, Iceland, France, the US… Ian Hamilton Finlay was too truly a rebel to submit to any orthodoxy, even that of Scottish nationalism; he feuded joyfully and comically with MacDiarmid, and finally established Little Sparta to celebrate his chronic war against the Athens of the North. For all that, he was profoundly Scottish and his magazine to my mind always had a lovely echo of his wonderful and insinuating accent.

I would say, impressionistically, that things changed in the late 1960s; prior to that time, the “nationalism” was mainly cultural. We were living the Dream, in Scott Hames’s term, and the Grind had not yet begun. (Winifred Ewing’s victory at the Hamilton by-election in 1967 changed all that.) The founding of Scottish International in 1968 was an important moment. I had known Bob Tait quite well as a student (he had edited a small magazine called Feedback – appropriately green, as he remarked), and was both surprised and pleased when he suddenly shot to prominence as one of the three editors, shortly to become the main editor, of this major new initiative by the Scottish Arts Council. I was by then away from Edinburgh, either in London or living at Findhorn, and could never make sense of the political hostilities around the magazine – MacDiarmid’s hostility to the project, in particular, and also Tom Scott’s. I assume now it was because the Dream was being taken over by the Grind, and the extravagance of some of MacDiarmid’s positions – his theatrical “Stalinism”, for example – was being marginalised by the attempt of others to think realistically about ordinary political concerns.

Bob, I think, was too young to be quite able to cope with the pressures he came under.  He had his own strong socialist views (he was less interested in the “Scottish tradition”, and more fascinated by the modern world – he had a great admiration for the Canadian pioneer of media studies, Marshall McLuhan), and he allowed these views increasingly to dominate the magazine, which really needed, if it was to justify its expensive Arts Council backing, to be able to stand back and give hospitality to a wider range of positions. It became more “political”, and less “literary”, and the roles of Bob’s nominal co-editors, Edwin Morgan and Robert Garioch – probably not roles in which either of those sensitive men could flourish – drifted into ineffective “adviser”-ships. In 1973 Bob was ousted, and his position was taken over briefly by Tom Buchan.

Lines, Akros, and Chapman, were all longer-lived and more clear in their focus. Lines and Akros were both predominantly literary: Lines was subsidised by the printer and publisher Callum Macdonald, and presented itself with his sobriety and simplicity (a shy, friendly man, he was also the printer of my own Extra Verse). I thought of Lines as Scotland’s “premier” poetry magazine, perhaps because it was so long-running (it had been founded in 1952) and appeared so reliably. While Robin Fulton (now Robin Fulton Macpherson) was editor, I published two collections in the Lines Review Editions series, but doubted my wisdom later as they received little publicity even within Scotland, and none at all outside it. This of course was the backside of Scottish amiability: the magazines were very hospitable to young writers, but poets who were a bit savvy about building a larger reputation, like Norman MacCaig, knew they had to find publication outside of Scotland.

I look back on Akros with particular pleasure. Duncan Glen was passionately committed to Scottish writing (and wrote well himself, in a lightly accented Scots); rather surprisingly, he lived in England, in Preston, and when I did an MA at Lancaster university I visited him there on several occasions: he was always extremely generous and supportive. I have a sense of owing him many debts, and he was willing to publish lengthy pieces, both of poetry and prose, that few magazines would have entertained. I once thanked him for publishing my very long poem ‘The Hands of Felicity’ with ‘almost miraculous accuracy’. He at once bowed out of the firing line and credited his wife, Margaret: she was Akros‘s meticulous proof-reader.  Lines (under Robin Fulton), and Akros too, both had a sense of responsibility with regard to publishing reviews, and keeping abreast of new writing. This is a most important function, especially in a small country like Scotland where criticism, as a serious activity, was often sidelined in favour of partisanship (MacDiarmid too often setting the example).

Chapman, founded in 1970 by Walter Perrie and others, but edited for most of its life by Joy Hendry, probably managed best of all the tension between literature and political issues. It was unmistakably “Scottish”, but was also able to address very directly matters to do with feminism and other social and cultural issues. One issue was entitled “Woven by Women”. An issue in 1983 was headlined “The state of Scotland: the predicament of the Scottish writer”, and asked very directly what it meant, for better or worse, for a writer to be Scottish: is it “a predicament or a blessing?” It was notable that by then the tone had changed: Scottish nationalism had moved on both from the simplicities of the Dream and the obsessionality of the Grind: most contributors were thinking practically and the intermediate notion of “devolution” had entered the discussion.

I look back on all these magazines with great gratitude, for the hospitality they offered me, and also with considerable admiration, for the genuine seriousness and the high aspirations of their editors and backers. They represented both a community and a context in which excellent and characterful writers could develop, and the larger topics, to do with “Scotland” and its characteristics, could be debated. And I notice I haven’t even mentioned that witty and admirable poet, Alan Jackson, whose sardonic essay on “The Knitted Claymore” (Lines Review, 1971) introduced some welcome comedy into the conversation. The word community is what I would now emphasise: these magazines were the vehicles of a very warm and idiosyncratic community – quite a coherent national “culture”, but with no sense, to my feeling, of the gravitational pull of a political party-line.

D.M. Black is a Scottish writer and psychoanalyst based in London. He has published seven collections of poetry, several pamphlets, and has written extensively on poets of the Scottish Renaissance. More recently he has written about Dante in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and Los Angeles Review of Books. His translation and commentary on Dante’s Purgatorio will appear later this year in the New York Review of Books Classics series.

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Podcast: John Herdman

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John Herdman on the Scottish literary and political scene of the 1960s and 70s

A lively exploration of the cultural and political changes we can trace through small Scottish magazines of the 1960s and 70s, from Lines Review to Akros, Chapman and beyond.

The first issue of Scottish International went to press only a few weeks after the SNP’s breakthrough in the Hamilton by-election of 2 November 1967. But there was no easy correspondence between literary and political movements of the time, as the second wave of MacDiarmid’s Scottish Renaissance bristled against the ‘internationalism’ of 60s counterculture, and a young editor, Bob Tait, asked ‘What Kind of Scotland?’ the intelligentsia really wanted. John Herdman is the ideal guide to this terrain. Our conversation builds on his memoir Another Country: An Era in Scottish Politics and Letters, and traces these developments into the 1980s and beyond.

Interviewers: Rory Scothorne and Scott Hames. The introduction draws on Rory’s PhD research and on Eleanor Bell’s article ‘Rejecting the Knitted Claymore: the challenge to cultural nationalism in Scottish literary magazines of the 1960s and 1970s’, which you can access via the network’s informal bibliography. Edinburgh University library has an excellent resource on Scottish International, and Richard Crockatt has an evocative essay on Bob Tait and his world, published by Sceptical Scot.

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Mag Memories: The Day I Received a Death Threat

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Ahead of our public launch event on 5 May, we’ll be running a number of blogs and podcasts sharing the memories of magazinists.  To start us off, Prof Alistair McCleery offers a behind-the-scenes tour of how many Scottish magazines have been funded.

Is this thing on? Will I start?

The Scottish Arts Council, which had been established in 1967, in an early example of devolution from the overarching Arts Council of Great Britain, had a clear mission to promote cultural creation and reception across the nation. When I first became involved with it in 1988, the Literature Department was headed by the erudite and humane Walter Cairns and its Literature Committee was chaired by the energetic and diplomatic Deirdre Keaney. New projects flowed from their passion: the Edinburgh Book Festival, the Canongate Classics series, and the Scottish Poetry Library. Walter and Deirdre were both primarily responsible for the commissioning of the 1989 readership survey that in turn led to a number of key initiatives such as ‘Now Read On’ and ‘Readiscovery’.


And magazines?

I was coming to that. But you need to understand the culture Walter and Deirdre, and later (from 1996) Gavin Wallace and Derry Jeffares, created at the SAC and specifically how decision-making took place. In particular, the committee structure allowed for a great deal of transparency in decisions on the distribution of tax-payers’ money. The decisions were made by committee members who were representative of, and circulated within the wider groups of, writers, editors, and publishers as well as academics like me. Derry Jeffares, who had come to Stirling University from Leeds with enormous, entrepreneurial experience of academic publishing, built on the work of Deirdre when he took over as Chair of the Literature Committee, and further encouraged the development of writers and readers, both directly and indirectly through the support of book and magazine publishers. Derry acted as a mentor to me at this time, as he did for so many others; he constantly reminded me of my roots in the ‘Black North’ [of Ireland] as he persisted in calling it from his sophisticated TCD upbringing – even when I was enjoying his hospitality at Fife Ness, a long way from Derry and Dublin for both of us. Anyway, I also served on two sub-committees of the Literature Committee, the Mixed Arts and the Magazines, where it was a very positive experience to work alongside the likes of James Robertson.

Can you tell me more about the Magazines sub-committee?

We were all committed to the importance of small literary magazines. We valued them highly as an outlet for new writers, not only in terms of seeing their work in print but also as an opportunity for editorial advice and support to shape and encourage their careers; as a place for more experienced writers to experiment without losing either their usual publisher or a readership accustomed to a certain style or subject-matter; and as a print venue where writers with similar views and/or styles could coalesce to form more influential groupings to contribute to the constant regeneration of Scottish literary culture. These might seem rather high-minded views but they were the guiding principles behind our decision-making.

 

To be honest, we really only encountered one persistent difficulty: staleness. Let me explain. Sometimes, editors who had typically founded a magazine, and poured a great of their own time (and occasionally money) into it, found it difficult to comprehend that they and the magazine needed to change and adapt from what it had been at its beginnings. For example, Gairm had been founded by Derick Thomson in 1951 and he was to act as its editor for fifty years. It published all the great Gaelic writers of the twentieth century from Sorley MacLean through George Campbell Hay to Iain Crichton Smith. And Derick was an absolute giant in both the literary and the academic spheres. (I also served alongside him on the Council of the ASLS at one time.) But after nearly forty years, the magazine no longer seemed as – what’s the right word – as exciting, innovative, leading-edge as it once was. It seemed to be only going through the motions. We felt that a change of editor would likely reinvigorate it but Derick, when approached informally, was very resistant to abandoning the role, even to take up an honorary editorship. You can understand why. However, in the end, we continued to support it financially because there was no sign of any other Gaelic literary magazine on the horizon.

Did you have any other criteria for funding magazines?

I think it would be fair to say that we enjoyed idiosyncrasy and encouraged diversity – of authors, topics and so on, to encourage as many readers as possible.  However, there were two key principles that we insisted on: a professionalism in design and production (these being the far-off days of print); and the payment of contributors.  The first was intended again to encourage readers – although I have to admit that most sales of these magazines were through subscriptions, individual and institutional, and only a few bookshops handled copies for the impulse buyer.

James Thin’s on North Bridge was an honourable exception, offering a wide range for what may have been a largely student market. The second criterion was more readily understood: we offered funding not only to support the production of the magazine but also to support the authors; you cannot create a healthy literary culture on the back of volunteer or amateur – I mean in the sense of unpaid – writers. We never used circulation figures as a funding criterion, as compared to content and presentation, but we did expect proper accounts, even of a rudimentary kind. On the other hand, with the benefit of hindsight, we perhaps should have been proactive in creating some form of central distribution system, perhaps with an existing firm, to strengthen circulation here and elsewhere.

You had a later involvement with the SAC and magazines, I believe?

A minor one. Sometime after I left the SAC committees, in 2004 in fact, Gavin Wallace commissioned Marion Sinclair, who had also previously served on the Literature Committee and is now, of course, Chief Executive of Publishing Scotland, to write a Review of Scottish Publishing. One of our key recommendations was the establishment of a new magazine to promote Scottish writing and publishing along the lines of the very successful Books Ireland that had been going from 1976. That had acted as a very successful ambassador for Irish literary culture, particularly in its overseas distribution through the country’s consulates and embassies. Unfortunately, the British Council was less enthusiastic about a Scottish iteration. Anyway, that was the origin of the Scottish Review of Books in 2004.

(Books in Scotland had already existed up to 1998. It had been founded by Norman Wilson of the Ramsay Head Press in 1976. On his death, his widow Christine took over as editor with the support of his son Conrad. Christine was very generous to a young academic with a large family in both employing me as a reviewer and providing my daughter and sons with lots of mint children’s books – a genre that Books in Scotland did not cover.) Where was I?

The ‘Scottish Review of Books’.

Yes. The magazine was eventually stabilised through its link with the Herald newspaper which distributed it as a supplement to its standard Saturday edition. This was due, I think, to the then links with the Herald of its Editor, the dynamic Alan Taylor. However, it still needed support from the SAC, now Creative Scotland, particularly after the link with the Herald was broken. In 2019, Creative Scotland stopped funding it and it survives now online only. Coincidentally, Books Ireland became online only in 2019 as well but it continues to be supported by the Irish Arts Council. You know, if Scotland were an independent nation like Ireland, then it might lose its…


We’d better stop there. But what about the title you’ve given to this interview?

Oh, the death threat, you ask. I noted earlier that a key criterion for funding was that the magazine had to pay its contributors. We didn’t set the rate but they had to be paid. One of the editors steadfastly refused to do this and we had to withdraw support for his magazine. He then wrote to the sub-committee threatening to kill each of us next time he ran across us. It was a less litigious time and we just ignored him. And of course, it was not the first extreme reaction I’d ever received. In the 1980s, I undertook a review of small poetry presses (basically everyone except Faber and Chatto) for the ACGB [Arts Council of Great Britain] and I had to make some negative recommendations. Well, you’ve never seen vicious vituperation like that of vitriolic versifiers. But that’s for another day…

Thanks. We’ll leave it there then.

(Alistair McCleery interviewed by Alistair McCleery, St Patrick’s Day, 2021)

Alistair McCleery has published much work on the history of the publishing trade as well as on its contemporary prospects. He is the author of over 120 refereed articles and book chapters as well as some 15 books. He has written on Scottish authors from John Buchan to Neil M. Gunn, and on Scottish literary magazines from the 1920s to the 1990s.

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Podcast: Murdo Macdonald

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Murdo Macdonald, on Edinburgh Review (1984-2014) and Common Sense (1987-1999)

This was a highly stimulating conversation on the student publishing scene at the University of Edinburgh in the 1980s, in which the relaunched Edinburgh Review and Common Sense both emerged, alongside the tremendous achievements of Polygon Press as a literary and academic publisher.

Professor Murdo Macdonald is our guide to the rich intellectual and social connections of this world, with the Edinburgh University Students Publication Board at its centre. Some key figures include Peter Kravitz, Jenny Turner, Richard Gunn and Duncan Mclean, and through them we encounter a very wide range of writers, thinkers, designers and artists — too many to name here, though you can gain a sense of this scene via Kravitz’s introduction to the Picador Book of Contemporary Scottish Literature  (1998), courtesy of Janice Galloway’s website.

Interviewers: Alex Thomson and Scott Hames. The introduction to our conversation cites Linda Gunn and Alistair McCleery’s article ‘Wasps in A Jam Jar: Scottish literary magazines and political culture 1979–1999’, which you can access via the network’s informal bibliography.

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Modern Scottish Magazines – A Long View

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The focus of this network begins in the 1960s, but there is a much deeper history of Scottish magazines. Charlotte Lauder takes a longer view.

Modern Scottish magazines have a long history. We can start with the Scots Magazine, established in 1739 and still published today.[1] Yet, beneath this remarkable longevity lies a fractured history which makes the Scots Magazine a convincing simile for the development of modern Scottish magazines in general. In fact, the Scots Magazine has been out of print for much of its life – between 1826 and 1887, and from 1893 to 1922. Its most stable period of publication has only been since 1927. Similarly, the magazine has flip-flopped between a variety of proprietors and political allegiances, including the Free Kirk of Scotland (Liberal), the St Andrew’s Society of Glasgow (Unionist-nationalist), and D. C. Thomson & Co. (Unionist).

 

Although prominent during the time period covered by this research network, the Scots Magazine is not a title I’d consider to be within its lens of inquiry. But it is still a magazine produced in Scotland and it emphasises many of the issues under evaluation by this network: how do magazines construct or express Scottish national identity? How does politics influence a magazine (and vice versa)? How important are the people behind the press? Ultimately, what do magazines do (and not do)?

These questions have been somewhat neglected, particularly outwith the 1920-40 period. While studies of these magazines remain important, and the work of Margery Palmer McCulloch, Alistair McCleery, Cairns Craig, and David Finkelstein is extremely relevant, our view of Scottish magazines has been thwarted by insularity and a tendency to arrange good marriages between the major movements of that era: Scottish nationalism, Scottish Literary Revival, and Scottish modernism. If we take a step back, what can a longer and broader view of Scottish magazines tell us?

Firstly, Scottish magazines are ‘connecters’. Most of the best-studied Scottish titles are ‘little magazines’ like Patrick Geddes’ Evergreen (1895-96), Hugh MacDiarmid’s Scottish Chapbook (1922-23) and Northern Review (1924), and J. H. Whyte’s Modern Scot (1930-35), whose contributors and associated literati are also well-known. Research on these magazines, and their European counterparts, has provided a rich body of theoretical and methodological approaches, the most interesting of which is probably ‘periodical encounters’, focused on the social, economic, intellectual, cultural and material relations that make up connections between magazines, which Nathan Hensley has described as ‘a chain of visible or material connections’.[2] How magazines establish connections with other magazines (and also how they don’t) is just as interesting as what they publish. Materiality is a trusted entry point into these encounters – what is the format of the magazine? How many pages? What colours are used? Are these the same across the board? Assessing changes in form and layout also reveal ‘hidden’ aspects of magazines – is an increase in the number of pages the result of more funding? Does a change in format reflect a change in staff or printing premises? Can a change in font be political, or is it merely typographical?

 

As great at connecting as Scottish magazines were, they often published the same contributors, and increasingly those contributors ended up being the magazine’s readership. A long view of Scottish magazines therefore teaches us that they are also insular, and what a magazine sets out to do – for example, reaching an audience of like-minded intellectuals, writers, or creatives – is not always what it achieves. Hugh MacDiarmid, that omnipresent figure in the history of the modern Scottish press, lamented the lack of reach in Scottish magazines of the 1920s when he wrote that “None of these significant little periodicals – crude, absurd, enthusiastic, vital – have yet appeared in Auchtermuchty or Ardnamurchan […] It is discouraging to reflect that this is not the way the Dadaists go about the business!”.[3] Any study of postwar Scottish magazines should bear this in mind, and give attention to the ‘periodical encounters’ that immediately preceded those under examination here; or, at least, the encounters that magazines of the 1960s-90s said that they were responding to. Titles like The Voice of Scotland: a quarterly magazine of Scottish arts and affairs (1938-1961), The Galliard. An illustrated review of Scottish life and venture (1948-49), and Scottish art and letters (1944-50) are part of this precursory landscape and are as under-researched as those that form the body of this network.

 

Nationality is both helped and hindered by ‘periodical encounters’. Is a magazine produced in Scotland the only pre-requisite to being a ‘Scottish magazine’? What about magazines created for Scots abroad, like The Fiery Cross: a magazine for Scottish Canadians (1895-96) or The Australasian Highlander (1970-). There were magazines produced in Scotland by non-Scots, like those created by internationalist-socialist Guy A. Aldred’s Bakunin Press, including The Commune (1923-29), Regeneracion!! (1936-37), and Word (1938-64). And what about magazines that originated in Scotland, but which migrated elsewhere? James Leatham (1865-1945), the influential Aberdonian socialist and publisher of Scotland’s first socialist newspaper The Worker’s Herald (1891-92), after moving from Aberdeen to Yorkshire, established the Cottingham Press and published The Gateway (1912-45), ‘a monthly magazine aimed at Scots at home and abroad’, across these locations. Might there be a politically or editorially pithy magazine in London, Dublin, or New York with an eye towards Scotland and a viewpoint on devolution, arts funding, or contemporary literature? Most likely, no. But the outward looking and internationalist attitude of Scottish International (Review) (1968-74) and The Dark Horse (1995-) makes it not impossible.

Feminist magazines, of which Scotland was a prodigious producer, offer us a way into transnational encounters. As Rachael Alexander has demonstrated,[4] magazines such as Scottish Women’s Liberation Journal (1977-78), Ms Print (1978-81), Harpies and Quines (1992-94), and NESSIE: A Radical and Revolutionary Feminist Newsletter in Scotland (1979-?), were concurrent with Spare Rib (1972-93), A Woman’s Place (1977), and Ms. (1971-), and studies into the ‘periodical encounters’ of feminist magazines at local, regional, national and international levels are certainly ripe for further research.[5]

The obvious conclusion that a long view of Scottish magazines suggests is that, at some point or another, there has always been a need to represent and codify some aspect of Scottish life. Sometimes this is obvious: regionality, feminism, language, literature, politics, history, and religion. At other times, not so much – for example, what is within the pages of the sole issue of The Scot-free magazine, published in Glasgow in 1989? A long view reiterates a phrase I often use, that magazines have a porous boundary between consumption and contribution. By considering a longer history of Scottish magazines, we see this relationship at work, and that the ‘outside’ of magazines are just as important as the ‘inside’ of them.

Charlotte Lauder is a PhD student at the University of Strathclyde and National Library of Scotland. She focuses on popular literary magazines published in Scotland between 1870 and 1920. Her work on Scottish women’s magazines has been featured on BBC Radio Scotland and BBC Scotland News.

[1] https://www.dctmedia.co.uk/brands/the-scots-magazine/.

[2] Nathan K. Hensley, ‘Network: Andrew Lang and the Distributed Agencies of Literary Production’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 48, 3, (2015), 360.

[3] Alan Riach (ed.), Selected Poetry (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992), 7.

[4] https://www.genderequalmedia.scot/news/blog/harpies-and-quines-and-feminist-magazines-in-scotland/.

[5] Sarah Browne, “A Veritable Hotbed of Feminism”: Women’s Liberation in St Andrews, Scotland, c.1968-c.1979’, Twentieth Century British History, 23, 1, (2012), 100-123; Bec Wonders, ‘Mapping second wave feminist periodicals: Networks of conflict and counterpublics, 1970-1990’, Art Libraries Journal, 45, 3, (2020), 106-113.

Blog

Some Scottish Magazine Sources

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Inspired by Patrick Collier’s opening blog and talk, which offered us a guided tour of key theoretical sources in periodical studies, we thought it might be useful to assemble  a short bibliography of Scotland-specific sources on our magazines and their contexts.

It is, of course, only a starting point.

Rachael Alexander, ‘Harpies and Quines and feminist magazines in Scotland’, Gender Equal Media Scotland Blog, 28 February 2020.

Rachael Alexander, ‘”Alive, practical and different”: Harpies & Quines and Scottish Feminist Print in the 1990s’ in Laurel Forster and  Joanne Hollows (eds), Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s: The Postwar and Contemporary Period (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 307-22.

Chris Atton, ‘Alternative media in Scotland: Problems, positions and “Product”, Critical Quarterly 42.4 (2000): 40-46

Eleanor Bell, ‘Rejecting the Knitted Claymore: the challenge to cultural nationalism in Scottish literary magazines of the 1960s and 1970s’, in British Literature in Transition, 1960-1980: Flower Power, ed. by Kate McLoughlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 263-74.

Eleanor Bell, ‘”Leaps and Bounds”: Feminist Interventions in Scottish Literary Magazine Culture’ in Laurel Forster and  Joanne Hollows (eds), Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s: The Postwar and Contemporary Period (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 215-28.

Ross Birrell and Alec Finlay (eds), Justified Sinners: An Archaeology of Scottish Counter-Culture (1960-2000) (Edinburgh: Pocketbooks, 2002)

Neil Blain and David Hutchison (eds), The Media in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

David  Finkelstein, Margery Palmer McCulloch and Duncan Glen, Scottish Literary Periodicals: Three Essays (Edinburgh: Merchiston, 1998).

Susan Galloway and Huw David Jones, ‘The Scottish dimension of British arts government: a historical perspective’, Cultural Trends 19:1-2 (2010): 27-40.

Duncan Glen, ‘Scottish periodicals of the 1960s and 1970s’ in Selected Scottish and Other Essays (Kirkcaldy: Akros, 1999), pp. x-y. [also collected in Finkelstein et al 1998]

Linda Gunn and Alistair McCleery, ‘Wasps in a jam jar: Scottish literary magazines and political culture 1979–1999’ in Further From The Frontiers: Cross-currents in Irish and Scottish Studies, ed. by Aimee McNair and Jacqueline Ryder (Aberdeen: AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, 2009), pp. 41–52.

Scott Hames, The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution: Voice, Class, Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

Christopher Harvie, ‘Nationalism, Journalism and Cultural Politics’ in Nationalism in the Nineties, ed. by Tom Gallagher (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1991), pp. 29-45.

John Herdman, Another Country: An Era in Scottish Politics and Letters (Edinburgh: Thirsty, 2013).
[previous edition published as Poets, Pubs, Polls and Pillar Boxes: Memoirs of an Era in Scottish Politics and Letters (Akros, 1999)]

David Hutchison, ‘The Alternative Press’ in Headlines: The Media in Scotland, ed. by David Hutchison (Edinburgh: EUSPB, 1978), pp. 39-50.

Ben Jackson, The Case for Scottish Independence: A History of Nationalist Political Thought in Modern Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)
[draws extensively on political and cultural magazines in charting the development of nationalist/devolutionist thought]

Stephen Kendrick, ‘Scotland, Social Change and Politics’ in The Making of Scotland: Nation, Culture and Social Change, ed. by David McCrone, Stephen Kendrick and Pat Straw (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), pp. 71-90.

Myra Macdonald, ‘The Press in Scotland’, in Headlines: The Media in Scotland, ed. by David Hutchison (Edinburgh: EUSPB, 1978), pp. 8-21.

Lila Matsumoto, ‘Poetic experiments and trans-national exchange: the Little Magazines Migrant (1959-1960) and Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. (1962-1967)’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2013).

Margery Palmer McCulloch, ‘Continuing the Renaissance: Little Magazines and a Late Phase of Scottish Modernism in the 1940s’, Études écossaises 15 (2012): 59-73.

Peter Meech and Richard Kilborn, ‘Media and identity in a stateless nation: the case of Scotland’, Media, Culture and Society 14 (1992): 245-259.

Jane Potter, ‘Literary Publishing 1945-2000’ in The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 4: Professionalism and Diversity 1880-2000, ed. by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 250-76.
[includes short case studies of Akros and Cencrastus by Zsuzsanna Varga, and discussion of other literary periodicals – Lines Review, Lallans, Chapman, Verse, New Writing Scotland, etc – mainly in the context of SAC funding]

Richard Price, ‘Little Magazines and Scottish Modernism’ [first published as ‘Little’], Northwords (Winter 2002/3): 33-35.

Richard Price, ‘Some Questions about Literary Infrastructure in the 1960s’ in The Scottish Sixties: Reading, Rebellion, Revolution, ed. by Eleanor Bell and Linda Gunn (Amsterdam: Brill, 2013), pp. 93-114.

Tessa Ransford, ‘Independent Pamphlet Publishing‘, Scottish Affairs 70 (Winter 2010): 104-13.

Philip Schlesinger, ‘Scottish Devolution and the Media’, Political Quarterly 69 (1998): 55-74.

Rory Scothorne, ‘The “Radical Current”: Nationalism and the Radical Left in Scotland, 1967-1979’, H-Nationalism(2018)

Bob Tait, ‘Scottish International: A Brief Account’, in Scottish Poetry Index: An Index to Poetry and Poetry-Related Material in Scottish Magazines, 1952- (Edinburgh: Scottish Poetry Library), vol. 6 (1997), pp. 63-65.

Roderick Watson, ‘Scottish Poetry: The Scene and the Sixties’ in The Scottish Sixties: Reading, Rebellion, Revolution, ed. by Eleanor Bell and Linda Gunn (Amsterdam: Brill, 2013), pp. 69-92.

 

Blog, Event digest

Back Issues: Event 1 Digest

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The launch issue of a magazine tends to flaunt its novelty, but the much-delayed  start to this project was focused more on backstory.

The network’s first meeting (24 February 2021) began with a short talk by Patrick Collier, developing the themes of his blog post ‘Six or Seven (or so) Ways to Read a Magazine’. This was a rich tour d’horizon of the magazine in theory, unpacking the multi-voicedness, seriality and objecthood that make these artefacts what they are. What sort of critical – or uncritical – gaze is appropriate to the magazine, Collier asked, linking several milestones in periodical studies to recent ‘method wars’ in literary studies. Exploring the value of close, distant and ‘just’ reading, alongside questions of genre and materiality, this was a highly stimulating introduction to the field.

One of its pioneers, Margaret Beetham, emphasised ‘how the formal qualities of the periodical are shaped by its particular relationship to time’.[1] And the cultural work that magazines do, Collier argued, is caught up with their iterative nature. In examining specific titles we should attend to their ‘open’ and ‘closed’ qualities from issue to issue (rather than tethering a single article firmly to its date of publication). A cultural review might respond to unfolding events from a variety of perspectives, inviting readers to participate (via letters pages) and to navigate the mixed-genre text in their own way (open), but it will also construct a consistent persona, publishing schedule and implied reader across time (closed).

Commercial magazines may have a mission statement of sorts, but we take it with a pinch of salt, knowing that advertising and circulation are the foremost considerations. Non-commercial magazines, Collier noted, are in some ways easier objects for cultural historians to handle: even if they include a wide range of material and voices, they are usually led by a small group committed to ‘making its meanings stick’ rather than generating profits.

For the Scottish magazines at the centre of our interest, their typical smallness (of circulation, of dramatis personae), uncommercial aims and strength of editorial mission (often activist or avant-garde) will often lean toward the ‘closed’ pole of Beetham’s helpful rubric. At the same time, the majority of these titles are passionately engaged in ‘opening the doors’ of cultural and political change in Scotland, focused on generating new ideas, publics and connections.

And here, perhaps, is a notable feature of periodicals linked (in varying degrees) to a wider nation-building project. For many of our target titles, the implied subject and audience is ‘Scotland’, so that journals and reviews focused on Scottish poetry, Scottish feminism or Scottish constitutional change have a stable structuring interest and ‘field’ (closed) which they are actively shaping, expanding and contesting (open); all in ways that tend to naturalise the national frame they treat both as a cultural given and a prompt to action and critique.

We might say that periodicals such as Question Magazine – profiled here by Ben Jackson – ‘cover’ a domain of Scottish cultural and political life they also help to ‘constitute’ and solidify, its fortnightly reports helping to make this world both discursively and materially real, available to purchase in newsagents and bookshops. One of the interesting features of these magazines is how their formally ‘closed’ features – including the notable absence of women contributors – sit alongside their more ideologically ‘open’ aims and qualities, generating fresh national possibility, community and identity.

Questions of audience are of special interest for periodicals directly engaged in politics, alliance-making and mobilisation. Rory Scothorne noted the history of revolutionary newspapers as surrogate political organisations, an often ‘closed’ and hierarchical locus of debate sharing features with the vanguardist party (and often providing a source of income for party activity). The recent work of Lucy Delap (on the print-culture of British feminism) was noted for its relevance in studying magazines as modern political and rhetorical forms, and Patrick Collier noted the broader importance of periodicals in constructing ‘counter-public spheres’.

In these ‘parallel discursive arenas’, Nancy Fraser argued, ‘members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs’.[2] We can readily see how this description fits many of our Scottish titles, but might also observe the paradox of conceiving the national public (real or potential) as a subaltern counter-public – a paradox much easier to glimpse after two decades of devolution and the rapid consolidation of a Scottish democratic system.

Speaking from the archivist’s point of view, Graeme Hawley highlighted the practical and classificatory challenges that accompany the definitional conundrums outlined in Collier’s introduction: what exactly is a magazine, viewed in terms of its physical dimensions, publishing schedule, balance of visual and textual material, and so on? How can the dizzying variety of their content, and the embedded knowledge they ‘accidentally’ capture (e.g. the way a demolished building looked in a photograph from 1960), be tagged or catalogued for disaggregation and research, using digital finding aids? These reflections recall Beetham’s point (cited by Collier) that the magazine is ‘not so much a form in its own right as an enabling space for readers traversing the items they encounter’. How can this ‘enabling space’ be mapped for others, and made accessible to readers physically remote from archival collections? At the encouragement of the group, Hawley agreed to write a separate SMN blog developing these thoughts. The network will return to the question of digitisation later in the year.

This was a rich and dynamic conversation I can’t fully summarise, but here are a few points and observations that lodged in my memory:

        • Ben Jackson was the first of several (including the author of this blogpost) to confess having used magazine articles as ‘disaggregated’ historical fodder, rather than (as Collier suggested) ‘reading magazines closely as magazines’. Collier noted the inevitability of selectivity in using magazines for teaching or research, and offered generous absolution.

       

        • Reflecting on her own time with the Cencrastus editorial collective, Glenda Norquay complicated the image of politically driven magazines as ‘closed’ organisations. Although there may be an agreed editorial agenda, the nature of such magazines demands unpaid work at different levels and also a turnover of editorial staff, which can produce a degree of instability. An unchanging masthead can also conceal multiple perspective and evolving internal views.

       

        • Charlotte Lauder pointed out that mass-circulation commercial magazines can also have strong viewpoints, and directed our attention to publishers and proprietors (not only editors and contributors) in studying these agendas. Charlotte’s own work on The People’s Friend, owned and published by the Liberal MP for Dundee John Leng prior to its sale to DC Thomson, is a fascinating example.

       

        • Alex Thomson noted the importance of state patronage and public subsidy, especially via the Scottish Arts Council. In addition to their own strong agendas, most of our Scottish magazines would also face the imperative of satisfying the funding body (within a distinctive ‘double arm’s length’ regime prior to devolution, enjoying greater autonomy from government). This support was often premised on the publication of original literary content (poetry and short stories), effectively cross-subsidising these magazines’ more contentious offerings (for which the SAC was not paying and was not strictly answerable).

       

        • Malcolm Petrie noted the ‘interlinked’ nature of these Scottish magazines, and the many lines of affiliation (and occasional discord) by which they were knitted together. How might we approach them as a collection of titles, instead of separate entities? Patrick Collier observed that magazines always exist in dialogue with each other, and suggested framing our research agenda in a way that spotlights the threads of debate between magazines, thus foregrounding the broader ‘ecology’ in which they interact.

       

        • Nikki Simpson noted some of the practical challenges and potential of archiving magazines, and outlined her own plans to establish an International Magazines Centre in Edinburgh. The special challenges of copyright for digitisation will be a key focus of the network in later events.

       

      We rounded off the meeting with some planning discussion relating to upcoming activity (events, podcasts, interviews), and further details of the edited book project in development. The editors will be commissioning chapters later this year, with a preference for cross-disciplinary perspectives and co-authorship of chapters. Further details and a call for papers will follow soon.

      This much-delayed start to the network’s activity was truly heartening, and we look forward to our next meeting.  Prompted by Patrick Collier’s short bibliographic tour of periodical studies, we thought it might be helpful to compile a mini-bibliography on the Scottish contexts of our target magazines.

    • [1] Margaret Beetham, ‘Open and Closed: The Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, Victorian Periodicals Review 22.3 (Fall, 1989): 96-100 (p. 97).

      [2] Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56-80 (p. 67).

       

Blog, Profile

Profile: Question Magazine

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A key aim of the network is recovering lost or forgotten magazines. Ben Jackson revisits Question Magazine, ‘the independent political review for Scotland’

On 6 September 1977 Neal Ascherson, at that time political correspondent of the Scotsman, confided to his diary some gloomy observations about the publishing scene in Scotland: ‘As Tom Nairn predicted to me a few days ago, the publication of Q magazine is stopped. The figures are sickening. The circulation was down to about a thousand (max. 1500 a few months ago), and only five out of 2000 libraries in Scotland, and only two universities out of eight subscribed.’ Ascherson was struck by the incongruity of this failure taking place at the very moment that Scottish politics and culture had never seemed more dynamic: ‘It’s unbelievable that in the most important decade of its recent history, at the moment when the country should be alive with fateful debates, Scotland can’t support one serious political review.’[1]

Q magazine – or, to give the publication’s full title, Question – has not subsequently acquired the cult status now enjoyed by publications such as Radical Scotland or Scottish International, nor has it been subject to the same level of academic attention. It was fated to have a shorter lifespan – running from October 1975 to August 1977, a total of 34 issues. Crucially, it did not embody an obvious political or cultural agenda that would enable it to be easily slotted into subsequent historical narratives. Nonetheless, the magazine was an audacious presence in Scottish public life that deserves to be more widely discussed. Q was an attempt to produce a regular magazine of political and cultural commentary in Scotland in the same vein as the New Statesman, the Spectator, or even the Economist. It was not intended to be a small-scale publication circulated among the cognoscenti but rather an influential public forum sold in newsagents while a new Scotland confidently awaited its devolved destiny. The first issue announced the magazine’s mission: ‘Q is an independent political review for Scotland, not tied to any political party. It is the editorial policy of Q that the review is open to interesting contributions, whether they agree with Q’s opinion or not. With the coming of the Assembly there is clearly a great need for a review such as Q.’[2]

It was certainly true that the pages of Q published contributions from all sides of the political debate in Scotland. But there was also some artifice in this description since the team behind the magazine had a discernible leaning towards the SNP. The founder and editor of the magazine was Peter Chiene, a lawyer and supporter of the SNP. He produced the magazine with a small editorial board: Alfie Donaldson, a law lecturer originally from Northern Ireland but based in Edinburgh; Michael Grieve, the prominent journalist and former Vice-President Publicity of the SNP (and of course son of Christopher Grieve/Hugh MacDiarmid); and, perhaps most intriguing of all, Alexander ‘Sandy’ McCall Smith, at that time a legal academic but later of course the world-famous novelist who authored The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series (McCall Smith officially became Q’s deputy editor later in its run). Michael Spens, the architect and critic (and SNP parliamentary candidate), was also added later to the editorial board.

Q initially appeared monthly, in a compact 24-page format, before moving to a fortnightly publication schedule from October 1976 (No. 13). The fortnightly magazine increased its size to tabloid and reduced the page count to 12. In design terms, Q was an orthodox, even rather dry, publication: print was laid out across several columns with the odd pull quote to break up the text. Initially, there were few images beyond the cover, a cartoon or two, and the occasional photo. The use of images increased markedly when the magazine shifted to its new tabloid format and by the end of its run Q’s design had become much slicker. Editorially, the magazine followed analogous publications edited from London in providing a powerful blend of serious political commentary; in-depth coverage of business and science; and a strong culture section that afforded plenty of space to the high arts and book reviews. Longer features were mixed with regular fixtures such as a diary-style set of short observations on the news, ‘Flyter’; a short editorial column expressing Q’s official view; a letters page; and a crossword. What set Q apart from, say, the New Statesman or Spectator, obviously, was that it viewed the world through a distinctive Scottish lens.

Reading Q now is to be reminded of the vibrancy of Scottish political culture in the 1970s – a time of high hopes and trenchant debates, populated by a cast of fascinating characters, many of whom would continue to play a significant role in Scottish and British public life well into the twenty-first century. Q’s contributors included an eclectic list of luminaries such as Neal Ascherson, Alan Bold, Gordon Brown, Henry Drucker, Owen Dudley Edwards, Duncan Glen, Christopher Harvie, James Hunter, Neil MacCormick, Stephen Maxwell, Edwin Morgan, Tom Nairn, Jim Naughtie, George Reid, Malcolm Rifkind, David Steel, Jim Sillars, Teddy Taylor, Brian Wilson and many others. As this list suggests, a major deficiency of Q was that it printed almost no articles by women and provided only the most meagre coverage of the women’s movement (in this it was representative of the deficiencies of Scotland’s 1970s political culture more generally). As best I can tell (some articles were written anonymously and some writers used initials rather than full first names), only three female authors ever wrote feature-length articles for the magazine: the author Naomi Mitchison (twice); the then director of the Edinburgh Film Festival, Lynda Myles; and Alison Bruce, a researcher at Glasgow University. There was also a strong public and voluntary sector representation among Q authors: many of the pieces in a given issue were written by academics, politicians, and employees of pressure groups and charities, with journalists making a respectable showing as the principal representatives of the private sector.

Despite these limits, the pages of Q provide a fascinating window into a period in which the structure of contemporary Scottish politics was taking shape. Looming over everything was the question of devolution. When would it happen? What would it look like? But hovering behind those questions were the rise of the SNP and the possibility of independence. Q hosted animated debates about each of the four main parties and Jim Sillars’s new Scottish Labour Party (SLP); European integration; the implications of North Sea oil; land-ownership and the Highlands; the Scottish universities and their relationship to devolution; the Scottish cultural scene; Irish nationalism; the rise of nationalism in Quebec; and many other topics. Q also prepared for devolution by investigating the delivery of Scottish public services and the scope for their improvement when a new assembly took charge. Health, education, housing, local government, the legal system, and policing were all treated in depth.

The quality of the writing was usually high. Tom Nairn contributed several scintillating articles that are essential to understanding his level of practical engagement with Scottish politics in this period (as a member of Sillars’s SLP), as opposed to his more Olympian pronouncements in his contributions to New Left Review.[3] The SNP theorist Stephen Maxwell was also a regular contributor, penning an important review of Nairn’s book, The Break-up of Britain (1977). Maxwell also engaged the Labour MP John Mackintosh in a fascinating exchange that illuminated the emerging fault-line between Labour devolutionists and independence supporters that was in the event delayed by twenty years because of the failure of devolution to launch in the 1970s.[4] Q hosted a lively debate about the politics of the 7:84 theatre company and their seminal play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil.[5] Neil MacCormick used Q to challenge the SNP orthodoxy that it would secure a mandate for independence by winning a majority of Scotland’s parliamentary seats. MacCormick argued that a majority of votes rather than seats would be necessary to secure democratic legitimacy for a new Scottish state.[6] This is just a flavour of the range of analysis aired in Q, though it does underline that the magazine’s most influential work tended to be penned by supporters of independence. Some intriguing names and juxtapositions were also to be found among the book reviews, such as David Trimble reviewing Robert Fisk’s book on the recent Ulster Workers’ strike; Ted Cowan reviewing Christopher Harvie’s Scotland and Nationalism; and Donald Campbell reviewing William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw (‘a kind of Glasgow Kojak’).[7] Appropriately, the final issue included a cover feature by Peter Chiene celebrating the 85th birthday of Hugh MacDiarmid. Chiene argued that MacDiarmid’s great achievements in poetry had yet to be matched by Scots in other fields, notably fiction and political theory. But he was optimistic that the rise of the SNP at least indicated that new Scottish political thinking was underway, even if it had yet to attain the heights exemplified by MacDiarmid’s work.[8]

Q was sadly not to play any further role in fostering this novel political thought. Neal Ascherson, for one, felt the loss of the magazine keenly and vented to his diary about the failures he thought it revealed in Scotland’s intellectual infrastructure:

For journalists, Q was quite indispensable, the only place where really free and intellectual argument, as well as many very practical suggestions, took place in print. If Hibernia has a circulation of 20,000 in a smaller country, why could Q not have reached a miserable six or seven? Too ‘Edinburgh’, too identified with the SNP? The real trouble is the extreme weakness and stuntedness of the political intellectual here, and reluctance to commit money and time. Can there only be 1500 people who want to speculate on their country’s future and understand its present, when so many hundreds of thousand vote for a new future?[9]

Ascherson’s lament remains a resonant one for anyone interested in publishing serious analysis about Scotland, even (or perhaps especially) today.

Ben Jackson is Associate Professor of Modern History at Oxford University. He is the author of The Case for Scottish Independence: A History of Nationalist Political Thought in Modern Scotland (CUP, 2020).

[1] Neal Ascherson, ‘Devolution Diary’, Cencrastus, No. 22, 1986, p. 51.

[2] ‘What is Q’, Q, No. 1, October 1975, p. 24.

[3] For example, Tom Nairn, ‘The Radical Approach’, Q, No. 10, July 1976; ‘Scotland the Misfit’, Q, No. 13, 8 October 1976; ‘1931 – A Repeat Performance?’, Q, No. 14, 22 October 1976; ‘Revolutionaries Versus Parliamentarists’, Q, No. 16, 19 November 1976.

[4] Stephen Maxwell, ‘Review: The Break-Up of Britain’, Q, No. 31, 24 June 1977; ‘The Trouble with John P. Mackintosh’, Q, No. 24, 18 March 1977; John Mackintosh, ‘The Trouble with Stephen Maxwell’, Q, No. 26, 15 April 1977.

[5] Ian Bayne, ‘Ideology and 7:84’, Q, No. 3, December 1975; John Forsyth, ‘7:84 Replies’, Q, No. 4, January 1976.

[6] Neil MacCormick, ‘The Mandate Question’, Q, No. 12, September 1976.

[7] David Trimble, review, Q, No. 3, December 1975; Ted Cowan, ‘The Reds and the Blacks’, Q, No. 29, 27 May 1977; Duncan Campbell, ‘MacLaverty and McIlvanney’, Q, No. 29, 27 May 1977 (quote at p. 10).

[8] Peter Chiene, ‘Poets versus Philosophers’, Q, No. 34, 26 August 1977.

[9] Ascherson, ‘Devolution Diary’, p. 51.