Information Scotland

The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland

December 2007 Volume 5(6)

Endpiece

Standing down

Brian Osborne has stumbled upon an excellent new subject for a book, and he tells us about his new series of articles for Information Scotland.

As a writer I am never happier than when I stumble across a subject that seems to be fresh and uncharted territory – I suspect this is partly because I know that nobody can then say “Osborne’s book on X isn’t nearly as good as Smith’s or Brown’s.” I was lucky with my first biography, the life of Henry Bell. There had been a biography of him previously, but it was published in 1844 and I didn’t think it presented too much competition. Since then I have done another two biographies of people who hadn’t previously been written about at any length.

Now, with all that experience, and the wisdom of old age, I wonder if the fact that nobody before me had written a life of Lord Braxfield or MacDonnell of Glengarry should perhaps have told me something. This brilliant insight may not be unconnected to the presence of several large boxes of remaindered copies of the Glengarry book in my garage. The secret, I now think, is not only finding a fresh subject but also finding one that people actually want to read about. Of course what is also needed is a subject that the writer wants to write about. There are lots of subjects that I could write about which might be more commercially successful than Glengarry but which I would find insufferably boring to write about. Let’s be quite clear about this – I am a hack, but a hack with some principles!

Well, some years ago I came across a fascinating subject which not only did I know nothing about and about which little or nothing had been written but which nobody I spoke to seemed to know anything about. While researching Glasgow, a City at War I came across references to the Home Guard manning anti-aircraft rocket batteries at a number of sites across Scotland. Not only did I not know that there were anti-aircraft rocket batteries in the Second World War but I certainly had no idea that the Home Guard operated them. My knowledge of the Home Guard was, like most people’s, largely based on the TV series Dad’s Army and I had thought that it consisted solely of groups of men like those in the photograph (below) of the Yarrows Shipbuilders detachment.
Anyway some reference to the rocket batteries found its way into the book and being keen on recycling material I developed it for an article for the Scots Magazine. Along the way I discovered that there was a lot more to the Home Guard than the Dad’s Army stereotype and that, although there were a number of UK histories of the Home Guard, oddly enough nobody had done a book on it from a Scottish perspective.

A little bit of preliminary research, scoping the subject and looking at sources, convinced me that there was indeed a book in it; a carefully composed pitch went off to Birlinn, and, with surprisingly little delay, a contract and an advance was forthcoming and the whole project was underway.

It is particularly strange that such a book hasn’t been done before because the sources for the Home Guard in Scotland are rather rich. When the Home Guard “stood-down” in 1944 the army commander in Scotland circulated all Home Guard battalions and instructed them to complete a historical and statistical return for their unit. Even more usefully he then arranged for the seven bound volumes containing these unit histories to be deposited in the National Library of Scotland (MS 3816-3822.) There are also surprisingly large numbers of files in the National Archives at Kew, with far more Scottish records surviving than for English areas with equivalent population. Scattered across Scotland, and retrievable via the very useful Scottish Archives Network , are collections, small in scale but often rich in fascinating local detail, in places like Ayr, Hawick and Stirling – so I have had an enjoyable autumn of visiting some rather attractive archive offices, with a special mention for the Hawick Heritage Hub and the delightfully rural Angus Archives at Restenneth Priory, outside Forfar.

As I break off from grappling with Chapter 7 to write this Endpiece I am fairly confident that it will all be finished by April 2008 and sometime in that vague publishing season called “Autumn 2008” The People’s Army: The Home Guard in Scotland will hit the bookshops.

Like the Home Guard I am also “standing down.” This will be my last Endpiece for some time. No, the Editor hasn’t fired me, but I have been asked to write six historical articles for Information Scotland to celebrate the SLA/CILIPS centenary and the feeling was that you can have too much of a good thing! So the plan is for guest writers to be slotted in to alternate with Colin Will in this space. If I am very lucky and still able to work my computer I may be back here in Endpiece land in April 2009!

Brian D Osborne e: brian@bdosborne.fsnet.co.uk

Information Scotland Vol. 5(6) December 2007

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Last updated: 26-Feb-2008