Wishing many happy returns to the Sunday Herald

A VERY happy birthday to all of you who give us this fabulous paper. Love it and long may you celebrate many more birthdays.

MANY happy returns on the Sunday Herald’s 18th birthday (The 18-year-old life a of paper that defines modern Scotland, Sunday Herald at 18 supplement, February 26).

Editor Neil Mackay wrote: “And so we became the only paper in Scotland – or the world for that matter (apart from Catalonia, I guess) which supported Scottish independence.”

That is not strictly true. In November 1926, a group of nationalists, members of the Scots National League, launched the Scots Independent newspaper.

This was before the formation of the Scottish National Party, and was in fact a conduit for the merging of the Scottish Party and the National Party of Scotland to become the Scottish National Party. I personally had never heard of the paper until I joined the SNP in Peterhead in 1966.

Previous contributors to the paper were Compton Mackenzie, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Grahame and Christopher Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid). They were all before my time, but Mike Grieve, the latter’s son, was editor in 1966.

The paper – owned jointly by the SNP and the Scottish Secretariat – cost the SNP a lot of money (and aggro), and it became a private limited company in 1957. It is neither owned nor controlled by the SNP, but it has supported Scottish independence all its days.

When I joined the SNP it was a weekly, and every SNP branch took copies. At present it is monthly and celebrated its 90th birthday at a lunch in Perth in November 2016.

As a former temporary editor of the paper (for three months from November 2005 until January 2016 – how time flies – I was over the moon when the Sunday Herald came out for Yes and I still have that front page. I was even more ecstatic when the Herald group produced The National.

One of the pithy sayings of the late Oliver Brown was: “All a man needs in life is a good cause and the enmity of the Glasgow Herald, and you can be assured if he has the first then the second will automatically follow.” Perhaps we should amend that to say The Scotsman. Jim Lynch Edinburgh