The fascists were making a big noise down in London. I wrote away and they sent back some scurrilous literature about the Jews which absolutely outraged me. I shoved it in the bin. That left the communists. I lived in a house with three storeys and we had two maids (though we cut back to one servant during the Depression), but I went to the home of one of the boys I played football with and found it was just one room. You had to see the conditions in the slum areas of Edinburgh and Glasgow, where five or six households had one lavatory between them.

A 1936 speech by the British Union of Fascists' leader, Sir Oswald Mosley  real  56k

Reading the communist manifesto, I also found the internationalism of communism very attractive. In my Sunday school there had been a picture of Jesus sitting with a black child on his knee, an Indian girl, a Chinese, all the races round about him. I was totally taken by this idea.

I had an internationalist outlook, though I was proud to be a Scot. When I first got to know of the Scottish National Party at 17 or 18, I thought they were nutcases. I wasn't convinced they were the kind of people I wanted to be in charge of us. I can understand why people joined the SNP, considering the way Scotland has been treated by successive governments. But I thought we had the basis for a democratic government here in Britain, where all the English, Welsh and Scots (plus Irish, if they want to be) can be united together.

Fighting against fascism

I joined the Communist Party a few months before I went to Spain in 1937. The war against Franco's fascists was in all the papers, especially the Daily Worker. I went to an Aid Spain meeting addressed by a young man who had been wounded there and had married his nurse. After the meeting I said: 'I'm going to Spain.' I thought it was a wonderful adventure.

The BBC reports on the fall of Malaga to Franco's fascists in 1937  real  56k

I was in the Scots Guards in Germany when we had elections at the end of World War II. There was a provision for servicemen to vote, but two or three of us in the battalion didn't get our papers. There was some investigation, but the election went the way I wanted it to go anyway, the Labour Party won. That was when Major Attlee came to power.

There was a strong feeling for Labour in the Army, certainly in the Scots Guards, 2nd Battalion, where I was. The death of fascism was our principle aim in fighting the war and people voted Labour because they were disgusted with the way the Tory Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had made deals with Hitler and Mussolini. We were also hoping there would be a general improvement in the conditions of the working class, the old and the sick.

Neville Chamberlain returning from his 1938 meeting with Hitler in Munich  real  56k

Losing faith in communism

At an International Brigade meeting in 1948, my comrade, George Murray, had come out with some statement defending the Yugoslavs. We'd had a telegram from the Yugoslav International Brigaders asking us not to pre-judge the split between Tito and Stalin. After George came home, he was called to the Communist Party headquarters and expelled.

In 1956, the Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary. It happened that a former secretary of the Edinburgh Communist Party was there and witnessed the whole thing. He came back and called a meeting where the whole story came out. I left the party immediately. I was bloody well furious! I felt a large part of what I'd been fighting for in my life was disappearing.

Hungary's Radio Rakoczi appeals for Western aid as the Soviet tanks roll in  real  56k

I started to become interested in the environment and what mankind was doing to it. I approved of the Greens' aims, they had a more or less socialist agenda, though I'm aware the Scottish Green Party does have certain nationalist aspirations.