The Trust’s research worker, Dr Ian MacDougall is pressing ahead with the next project which is the edited recollections of twenty-two journalists from throughout Scotland. The earliest of the 22 started work in 1930 on the Perthshire Constitutional and together these fascinating recollections cover most of the twentieth century. Four of the journalists are women, although as late as 1950 a young woman looking for a start with the Daily Express in Glasgow was assured ‘It’s not a job for a woman’.
Among the papers where the journalists worked are dailies such the Scotsman, the Glasgow Herald, the Aberdeen Press and Journal, the Dundee Courier the Times, the Guardian, the Daily Express, the Scottish Daily Mail, the Daily Record, the Daily Herald and the Daily Worker. The Sundays represented were the Sunday Express, the Sunday Post, the Sunday Mail and the Sunday Sun, and local weekly papers from the John O’Groat Journal to the Dumfries and Galloway Standard. There are descriptions of what it was like to work on such papers as well as on hours, wages, working conditions, colleagues and on various events, garnished with amusing anecdotes.
It is planned that the book will be published in 2013