It is an honour to have been asked to write an
introduction to this selection of the writings of W. Oliver Brown, who
was undoubtedly one of the main leaders of Scottish nationalist thought
in the period from the 1930’s to the 1970’s. Professionally a school
teacher of modern languages, fluent in French and German and honoured by
l’Academie Francaise, he was also brilliant in his command of English.
To introduce him is a task which should properly be redundant, for the
man and his work and its influence should be as well known throughout
Scotland as are his overlapping contemporaries, Lewis Grassic Gibbon,
Neil Gunn and Hugh MacDiarmid. Like those three he was a writer, but in
the totally different genre of the polemicist, committed to overt
argument for his beliefs, which others might share with equal strength
but express less directly.
And overt his arguments certainly were, for
not only was he a writer but he was also a speaker, regularly at street
corners, whatever the weather. For several years his pitch at the corner
of Sauchiehall St. and Wellington St., gathered a hearing overflowing
from the queue of the nearby Scala Cinema. Overt again, because he was
also a publisher, frequently producing his pamphlets at his own cost and
taking full responsibility for what he stated in them. Never were any
of his quotations challenged as being inaccurate, and the swift piercing
comments with which he would follow such quotations are masterpieces of
scathing humour.
Several examples of such quotations and comments will
be found in this selection, and from them Scotswomen and men of today
can realise how strong and clear the ideas of freedom and of a caring
society in an independent Scotland were expressed and promulgated in the
burgeoning nationalist movement. Those days included Cunninghame-Graham,
R.E. Muirhead, the Scottish Secretariat, and the I.L.P.,
(Independent Labour Party’), notably James Maxton therein. But Oliver
Brown was the most articulate in analysing the details of both the
particular English usurpation of Scottish rights and the general
opposition of imperialism to national liberty everywhere. Sadly
Oliver was forced to conclude, in his pamphlet Scotlandshire, that
"Scotland’s economic decline was due not to natural disadvantages
but to a deliberate policy by alien and hostile rulers", hut also
"that the Labour Party’ is no less unjust to Scotland than its
opponents".
I hope that this selection of his work will show the
continuing truth and relevance of the wit and wisdom of W. Oliver Brown
to Scotland today.
R. S. Silver
