REGULAR readers will know that this column eschews the “book review” approach to telling Scotland’s history, but every so often a book comes into my hands which is so definitive, so magisterial and well written that I have to let another person effectively tell the story of Scotland Back In The Day.

One such book landed on my desk at the weekend and I read it in one sitting, so important and refined was its story and its language. But I should have known that the veteran journalist and broadcaster Russell Galbraith would make a superb job of retelling the story of Tom Johnston, one of the greatest – if not the greatest – political figures in 20th-century Scotland.

Galbraith’s Without Quarter should be required reading for all serious students of Scottish history.It accurately and sensitively portrays the life and career of Tom Johnston, a man whose reputation is such that for this greatly expanded – I reckon by a whopping 15,000 words – edition of the original 1995 book, both former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and current First Minister Nicola Sturgeon provided separate forewords. The list of famous people quoted ranges from Sir Winston Churchill to former First Minister Alex Salmond.

This brief account of Johnston draws heavily on Galbraith’s writings and indeed Johntson’s own speeches and articles, because he started his career as a prolific and highly motivated journalist.

Tom Johnston was born in Kirkintilloch, now in East Dunbartonshire, in 1881, the son of a grocer David and Margaret, nee Blackwood – a family connection that proved invaluable. He was educated at Lenzie Academy and even before he left he was already writing what we would now call pulp fiction for magazines.

He continued doing so, but also took a huge interest in politics, joining the Independent Labour Party and being elected to Kirkintilloch School Board when he was only 21. He managed to avoid going to university for a law degree by a bit of luck. In 1906 a Blackwood family legacy of a printing press turned him into a journalist and editor and he had found his forte, helped also by “non-graduating” study of political economy and moral philosophy at Glasgow University where his contemporaries included future Red Clydesider Jimmy Maxton.

From that family press emanated Forward, the most influential political newspaper of the Red Clydeside era, which Johnston founded, edited and mostly wrote for 30 years.

In 2009 he caused a sensation with his book Our Scots Noble Families, which excoriated the land-owning aristocracy: “Show the people that our Old Nobility is not noble, that its lands are stolen lands – stolen either by force or fraud; show people that the title-deeds are rapine, murder, massacre, cheating, or court harlotry; dissolve the halo of divinity that surrounds the hereditary title; let the people clearly understand that our present House of Lords is composed largely of descendants of successful pirates and rogues; do these things and you shatter the Romance that keeps the nation numb and spellbound while privilege picks its pocket.”

With one bound, Johnston became an intellectual powerhouse of the Red Clydeside movement and when World War One began, the by now Kirkintilloch councillor led the anti-war cries with Forward. It was duly and briefly suppressed in 1916 by the British Government and only reopened when Johnston promised not to do anti-war items.

With the surge of the Red Clydesiders, Johnston was elected to parliament in 1922 for the West Stirlingshire seat and in his maiden speech in the Commons he hit home hard: “We are here representing thousands of men and women who have been tried almost beyond the bounds of endurance. We have pleaded with the Government tonight to do something immediately to relieve the agonies, the slow torture and starvation in hundreds and thousands of homes in this country. We are met by laughter, mockery and jeers.

“Some of our speakers, perhaps, have not addressed the House in the polished accents of Oxford or Cambridge. We do not pretend to come here to throw about Latin maxims, to utter any pleasantries, or to offer meaningless courtesies, for most of them are meaningless. We have come here to ask reasonably and courteously that the Government should face the fact that the common people of our native land are in a state of starvation. You are in a majority. You refuse our remedies. What are you going to do?”

Sadly, that question is still being asked 100-plus years later.

Johnston, who was still editing Forward, served in Ramsay MacDonald’s 1929 government but lost his seat in 1931, returning to the Commons in 1935 for Labour in his old seat. When war broke out and Neville Chamberlain resigned, his admirer Winston Churchill offered Johnston a Cabinet seat as Secretary of State for Scotland.

A FORMER Forward colleague wrote: “Who would have dreamt that Tom Johnston of Forward, who had so scornfully derided the Lloyd George coalition in the First World War, would become Secretary of State for Scotland in a coalition Government headed by Winston Churchill?”

Johnston himself recalled: “Coming down to Whitehall I ticked off in my mind several of the things I was certain I could do, even during a war.” He wanted “an industrial parliament to begin attracting industries north, face up to the Whitehall departments and stem the drift south of our Scots population. And I could have a jolly good try at a public corporation on a non-profit basis to harness Highland water power for electricity.”

He set up an all-powerful and all-party Council of State and by its authority resisted key building workers from Scotland being conscripted to the armed forces. Johnston said that helped local authorities, the Special Housing Association and private builders to complete 36,200 houses, in addition to carrying out repairs on 75,000 houses damaged by bombing.

“It enabled us also,” Johnston went on, “to secure the erection of Civil Defence hostels in such a manner as would enable their rapid conversion after the war to separate dwelling houses: it gave us labour too for the restoration and rehabilitation in suitable cases of dwellings previously condemned, and for the conversion of empty shops and offices into dwelling houses.”

It wasn’t just retaining manpower that worried Johnston. According to Johnston’s own records, in the course of the war, some 13,000 women were transferred to England because of the shortage of factories in Scotland. This figure included 500 women directed south in a single week in 1942, a year after Johnston was appointed Secretary of State.

He later wrote: “Unless drastic and immediate steps had been taken to correct these drifts to the land beyond the Cheviots, the outlook for Scottish industry and the Scottish nation post-war had been bleak indeed.”

As Galbraith shows, Johnston really did believe that Scotland’s future should be decided by Scots living in Scotland, and he proved it when he took on the highly centralised – in London, of course – planning system.

He wrote: “Every now and again some ingenious gentleman in London would exude a plan for a centralised planning of our industries, our housing, our roads, rails, canals, airports, our shops, our churches -- yes, the location of our churches! -- and our beer shops. And you never knew in what rapturous moment some persuasive hierarchy at a ministry might have been authorised to so plan and blueprint for us.”

He duly established two regional planning authorities for Scotland, covering the east and west of the country.

“Thereafter, when central planning boiled up in London,” he later recalled, “I would always point to the prior existence of my regional associations and say that centralisation must stop south of the Cheviots.”

Galbraith quotes Labour great Herbert Morrison recalling that whenever Johnston looked in danger of losing an argument in Cabinet he didn’t hesitate to remind those present that “there was a strong nationalist movement in Scotland and that it could be a potential danger if it grew through lack of attention to Scottish interests”.

He used that threat frequently during his time at St Andrew’s House.

Johnston also anticipated the National Health Service by “using hospital beds earmarked for Civil Defence casualties to accommodate ordinary patients who could not afford specialist services”, as Galbraith recalls.

Johnston wrote: “It was obviously foolish to have well equipped hospitals often standing empty and their staffs awaiting Civil Defence casualties -- which, thank God, never came -- while war workers could not afford specialist diagnosis and treatment.”

The experiment was a huge success and spread across Scotland. Galbraith again: “Waiting lists for treatment at the voluntary hospitals, totalling 34,000 patients, simply disappeared.”

And, as Johnston testified after the war, there was no friction or antagonism from the voluntary hospitals over any of the lost patients. “Indeed,” wrote Johnston, “they made a small monetary payment for every patient taken off their hands, and a vast amount of preventable suffering and pain was simply obliterated.”

FAMILY doctors also contributed to this minor revolution in patient care. They were encouraged, with difficult cases of diagnosis, to seek assistance from specialists paid by the Scottish Office, or refer patients to the Civil Defence hospitals for treatment.”

Though Aneurin Bevan gets all the credit it is not often realised that it was Johnston with Ernest Brown, Minister of Health, who were responsible for the original White Paper outlining the NHS, approved by the War Cabinet on February 9, 1944.

His last major action as Secretary of State was the Education Act of 1945: “If a secondary schooling is good for the children of the middle class and the children of the rich, it ought to be good enough for the children of the working class.’’

His time was up. For reasons we still don’t know Johnston retired from active politics in 1945 when he was still only 64. He would go on to serve as the dynamic boss of the Hydro Board which he had set up during the war, then help to transform Scotland’s economy as head of the Scottish Tourist Board. For good measure, he ran the Forestry Commission, too.

In short he was a master of all trades. He was proud, above all, of giving Scotland a “guid conceit” of itself by 1945.

“You could sense it everywhere, and not least in the civil service,” he wrote. “We met England now without any inferiority complex. We were a nation once again.”

Tom Johnston had married his wife Margaret in 1914, and she was by his side when he died at his home in Milngavie on September 5, 1965, his latter years being blighted by a number of small strokes.

All Scotland mourned.

Without Quarter by Russell Galbraith, published by Birlinn, £12.99