THE Scottish Covenant is 75 years old this year. A petition demanding a Scottish Parliament, it was signed by two million people – significantly more than half the adult population at the time.

The Covenant was launched in ­October 1949 in Edinburgh’s ­Assembly Hall on the Mound, by a great advocate for ­Scottish ­self-determination, John ­MacCormick. Within a week, it had attracted approaching 50,000 ­signatures and was soon heading for a million. It was signed by belted earls and socialist shipbuilders, ­members of all political parties and none.

The boxes of signatures are held in the National Library of ­Scotland. My request to view them was ­initially ­rebuffed on grounds of data ­protection – they said they were closed until 2048. I challenged that, and eventually they relented.

So, I was the first person to open the boxes for many years. The ­forces of gravity have begun to stick them ­together and a horrified ­curator rushed over to point out that I was absolutely not ­allowed to ­absent-mindedly moisten my ­forefinger with my tongue as I flicked through them. The next time I went to the counter, I asked for another box of the “finger-lickin’ good” ­Scottish Covenant”.

On several sheets all the names are in the same handwriting. It has been claimed that some signatures were spurious, but it is hard to be certain. I imagined some passionate young advocate for Home Rule going round the doors, and getting permission to fill in the names of floury-handed mums as they cooked the tea, or dads home from the pit. One or two sheets look as if cups of strong tea have been placed on them.

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A swell in Renfrew had a ­magenta fountain pen which they must have lent around for the ceremony and there are pages of signatures in ­different hands, all in the same pinky-purple ink. One sheet has a child’s drawing taking up half the page. In another, someone has scored out a bit of the pledge that they didn’t agree with.

It is a historic document that shows a deep desire for Scotland to have a greater say over its own affairs. In my late father Arnold Kemp’s book on post-war Scotland The Hollow Drum, he explains the political context.

The SNP’s leader Douglas Young was jailed during the Second Word War for refusing to be conscripted, on the grounds that this was against the Treaty of Union. MacCormick, who had stood against him, left the party and started a group from the ashes of the Home Rule ­Association, called the Scottish Covenant. The aim was to create a broad-based movement to campaign for a Scottish Parliament.

There was strong support, in ­particular from the Liberals and the Conservatives. James Stuart, later a ­Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland, ­masterminded a Unionist policy ­document – Scottish Control Of ­Scottish Affairs – in 1947, which ­argued that Union was strength but Union was not amalgamation. ­“Scotland is a nation.”

At the height of Covenant fever, Winston Churchill urged Scotland to stand up for its rights against Labour centralisation which he called “the serfdom of socialism”.

Kemp writes that Churchill’s ­support “may have been cynical” – in any case, it evaporated after the ­Conservatives won the 1951 General Election by a whisker, winning 49% of the vote in Scotland.

After a couple of years of foment, Kemp concludes: “The Covenant ­faded away. It disappeared, almost like a puff of smoke, because it had no significant location in ­parliamentary politics. The Conservatives had been its fairweather friends. They ­insisted that any change must be by the ­parliamentary route. There was, the Glasgow Herald noted, a tacit ­contract between the major parties not to seek an alliance with the home rulers which ‘might have baffled a wiser leader’ than MacCormick.”

For many years, the front cover of the Covenant hung in the living room of Ian Hamilton’s – he of Stone of Destiny fame – home near Oban.

When the Scottish Parliament was reconvened, he donated it, hoping it would be displayed in the vestibule. He was disappointed that he never saw it again or was able to find out what had become of it.

My uncle David Kemp tells me that Hamilton suspected it had been lost. The Scottish Parliament did not know where it was when I contacted them, but the National Library staff tracked it down to the National Records of Scotland, in a storage facility on an industrial estate. Sadly there are no plans to mark its 75th year.

Like Hamilton and MacCormick, most of the people whose names are on the Covenant are no longer with us. But it would be a fitting tribute to their efforts to find a place for the title page of the Covenant in the ­Scottish Parliament, which was ­finally ­reconvened 50 years later.

A longer version of this piece can be found on Jackie Kemp’s Substack, titled A Letter From Scotland.