MARY McCabe of Pensioners for Independence reminisces on her long-standing friendship with Hamish MacQueen, who died last week aged 96.

HAMISH MacQueen joined the SNP in 1947. From then on until well into his nineties he produced, printed and delivered millions of pro-indy leaflets and posters, both during election campaigns and in what he called “peacetime”. If the SNP needed a candidate for a hopeless council seat to boost the overall vote, Hamish was your man. Unlike most “paper” candidates he would work hard to run a proper campaign, safe in the knowledge that Labour would win as usual.

Hamish’s CV included an eclectic range of paid jobs from driving instructor through insurance agent to grave-digger (in his 80s he sold Betterware products door-to-door). However he mostly worked with the publisher Bill McLellan, whose books on Scottish culture Hamish painstakingly hawked round bookshops which were focussed on the London scene.

Hamish’s extended family was well-to-do and he inherited occasional legacies. Within a year or two the money would be all gone, spent on political projects such as hardware for SNP offices.

After one legacy from a centenarian aunt, Hamish set up a “Scottish Trades Association”. He bought sample goods from Scottish companies and peddled them round supermarkets, urging them to support Scottish produce. Occasionally he ran his STA stall at SNP conferences (until the price the party charged for a stall soared). His business sank when he could no longer afford fresh samples and customers noticed that his Duncan’s chocolate was well past its sell-by!

Meanwhile Hamish himself lived hand-to-mouth, sometimes in shared accommodation.

His pro-indy activities outside the SNP were countless. Throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s he was an active member of every pro-indy group going.

The first time I ever met Hamish was in 1972. I was part of a student activist group, all jeans and long hair. Hamish was middle-aged, short-back-and-sides, crumpled suit and tie. He was standing at his window, peering from behind his curtain out into the street like a character from a film noir, watching for the TV detector vans.

He gave us buckets of paste and some shocking-pink posters featuring an oil-rig and “England expects … Scotland’s Oil”. He sent us out to poster Sauchiehall Street in the middle of the afternoon because “There’ll be fewer police around than at night”. Needless to say we all ended up in court.

Hamish himself once did time. When a fellow-activist was upset at having to miss his vote (in those days you only got a postal or proxy vote if you were abroad for work purposes), Hamish volunteered to impersonate him. Unfortunately the polling clerk turned out to be Hamish’s neighbour. Lacking any money for bail, Hamish spent a few weeks in the Bar-L until a friend came home on leave from the Merchant Navy. When Hamish told his cell-mate what his crime was, the man was incredulous: “You could have had my vote!”

His political activities featured a silent disregard for laws seen as counterproductive to the indy movement. During the years when the BBC refused to broadcast SNP Party Political Broadcasts Hamish helped run “Radio Free Scotland” (a mixture of Scottish music and political information suppressed by the mainstream media). The equipment had to be shifted from location to location to avoid the detector vans. Hamish’s flat was popular for its good reception, being at the top of a tenement on top of Hill Street in Glasgow.

In the 1990s Hamish was one of the regulars who physically constructed the Visitors’ Centre on the SNP-owned island Eilean Mor McCormick. The island and the nearby jetty had been left in a legacy to the SNP. Unwisely, the SNP sold off the mainland jetty which ended up with a proprietor who rarely visited Scotland but was possessive enough to try to stop anyone else using the jetty.

He slung a rope across part of the sea to prevent access. This caused problems for local farmers who wanted to graze sheep on Eilean Mor. However, Hamish and his group always brought along a pair of shears to cut the rope and sailed on through.

Hamish was retiring by nature. When approached for the President’s Award at SNP conference he vehemently refused. When in 1997 Glasgow SNP named one of their new rooms after him and threw a surprise party for him to mark his 50 years in the SNP, he sat hunched in the corner all evening as speaker after speaker sang his praises. Afterwards he swore he wasn’t going to have anything to do with the party for the next six months.

Last year Maryhill Burgh Hall staged an exhibition of Hamish’s political memorabilia. Hamish didn’t attend.

Hamish MacQueen’s funeral is to be at the Maryhill Crematorium at 2.15pm on Friday, July 26. Bob Doris MSP will do the eulogy and John Mason MSP will do the prayer. All welcome.