William Wallace and THIS War. (Speech at The Elderslie Commemoration, 1943.) [With:] The Free-Minded Scot. Trial and Defence of Douglas Young.

Glasgow: Published by Scottish Secretariat, Ltd.; Printed and Published by The Caledonian Press, 1943. 2 pamphlets, each 8vo, pp. [8]; 12. Stapled in self-wrappers as issued. Both pamphlets a little creased and soiled, staples rusted. Two pamphlets by poet, classicist and, between 1942 and 1945, leader of the SNP, Douglas Young (1913-1973). In 1943 Young was between prison terms for ‘his refusal of both military and industrial wartime conscription for the purposes of raising the topic of Scottish independence in courtroom tribunals’ (McCaffrey, ‘The Adjacent Kingdom of England’, Études écossaises 17, p. 88) - he argued unsuccessfully that Scots could not be conscripted to fight abroad under the 1707 Act of Union. In ‘William Wallace and THIS War’ Young uses the commemoration of the birth of Wallace to contrast taking up arms for Scottish independence, as Wallace did, with fighting overseas in service of England in the Second World War. The second pamphlet reprints Young’s statement to the court in his 1942 trial, preceded by a two-page and mildly hagiographic biography of this ‘dauntless Scot’ and his ‘brilliant career’. Both are quite scarce: Library Hub records 5 copies of ‘William Wallace’: NLS, BL, Aberdeen, St Andrews and Trinity College, Dublin; and 3 of ‘The Free-Minded Scot’, also at NLS, Aberdeen and St Andrews.