ABSTRACT
The long 1960s, from the Suez débâcle of 1956 to the oil price crisis of 1973, saw Scotland as well as the rest of Europe, ride the rapids of peaceful but relentless social change. Lord Beaverbrook, old and sick, returned briefly to Scotland in 1962, to the village of Torphichen in West Lothian, a rural island in the industrial belt, from which the Aitkens had emigrated to Canada over a century earlier. The dying prophet of a dying empire-the most restless of the red Scots-visited the exact spot where, within a few weeks, the revival of nationalist politics started. The Scottish National Party (SNP) had one of its few branches in the village, but it was from this branch that the intiatives which were to transform it, and Scottish politics, were to come.
