Origins of the Saltire Society

The Saltire Society was ‘formed in 1936 by a group of people who wished to see Scotland take its proper place as a cultural unit’. The Society, a 1939 annual report stated, would ‘loo[k] back to the past only to move forward’ and that its main concern was ‘with the future’. It would ‘envisag[e] a new Scotland with a vigorous intellectual life, drawing on the past for inspiration to new advances in art, learning, and the graces of life’. According to George Bruce, the origins of the Society arose from a conversation between the journalist George Malcolm Thomson and politician and academic Andrew Dewar Gibb. Quoting Alison Sheppard's Memories of the Saltire Society (a lost autobiographical account by Sheppard), Bruce suggests that Thomson ‘found himself shocked by the Scots’ and their lack of interest in their own history and culture and ‘communicated his feeling to Dewar Gibb’:

It was Dewar Gibb's wife, Margaret Downie, who repeated ‘the gist’ of this conversation to Sheppard, who was secretary of Glasgow University's Women's Student Union at the time. This story of the origination of the Society's founding is supported by the report of a conference organised by the Perth branch of the Society in 1947, at which Sheppard spoke during a session called ‘The Saltire Society: Retrospect and Intentions’. The published report of the conference states that Sheppard, who was by then the Society's honorary secretary, said:

The Saltire Society came to birth in Glasgow […] There were present as midwives, three Professors, an author, and an historian. […] the Saltire Society owed its being to professors.

From the first, certain fixed principles, by common consent, were taken for granted:

• – It was to be a National Society

• – There was to be no feeling of inferiority. Comparisons with Scotland's southern neighbour were abandoned. International contacts were to be made direct with other countries, and members of the Society were to behave as representatives of a small, but important European country.