Willie McRae Forty Years On – 3000 Trees

ASSASSINATION: FORTY YEARS ON – From The Province Of The Cat by George Gunn

The dictionary definition of “assassination” is, “to murder (a usually prominent person) by sudden or secret attack often for political reasons”. So it was with the death of Willie McRae in 1985.

Willie McRae, a former Vice-Chairman of the Scottish National Party, was a Glasgow lawyer of Highland descent and he met his death on a lonely stretch of road, a short distance from the junction of the A887 and A87 roads in Glenmoriston, Inverness-shire, on 7^th April, 1985. It was later discovered he had a bullet in the back of his head. He was 62 years old.

Willie McRae was an active nationalist and civil rights campaigner and prominent in the anti-nuclear movement. He was allegedly a homosexual and this was used against him as a slur. That he had a drink problem was common knowledge and like most people suffering from alcoholism was prone to depression and mental highs – possibly bipolar, but undiagnosed. After his death ,the British state used these aspects of his complex personality to discredit the life and work of Willie McRae in an attempt to destroy his reputation. I wrote my play, “Three Thousand Trees”, which was staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 2014 (along with Andy Paterson’s similarly titled and splendidly different show) to put the empathetic case for Willie and showcase the cause he ultimately gave his life for – Scottish independence.

To revive the play now, even in the limited form of a reading, to celebrate Willie McRae’s life, given all that is going on in the world from Gaza to Govan, is a rare opportunity to shine a light on the progress (or not) the independence movement has made since 2014 – when the play was first produced – and to contemplate the increasingly dangerous world we now inhabit and to contrast it with the world of 1985, when Willie left the stage.

The whys and wherefores of the “controversy” surrounding Willie McRae’s death have been well discussed. Indeed, in my play, the last hour of the character Willie Mackay – based on McRae – sets the scene for the forthcoming assassination which awaits Willie when he exits the petrol station shop, where he has been passing the time with Kirstag, the young local girl who has known him all her life. The question is: why in 2025, come the weekend of the 5^th/6^th of April, are we marking the 40^th anniversary of the death of Willie McRae? Why is it so important to remember this tragic event?

The answer is because, as time goes by, it becomes ever more significant. What it does, for those of us in the Scottish independence movement, is to remind us just what we are up against, and that no matter how reasonable we think our demand for independence is, the reaction of the British state is never going to be anything else other than hostile and unreasonable. They hold what they have and they will not give it up.

In 1985 the Miner’s Strike had been broken due to the brutal tactics of the British State, which employed the police as anti-working class militia who never gave up an opportunity to literally beat the miner’s down. The complicit media constantly showed the strikers as a threat to society, when in reality the miners were trying to preserve their industry and protect society from Thatcher’s excesses. Embedded at the heart of this class struggle were the state secret services who, by the Summer of 1985, were effectively out of control.

It is difficult to gauge whether MI5, for example, has ever got back into the box. The Official Secrets Act, D Notices – now officially known as DSMA-Notices (Defence and Security Media Advisory Notices) – and paraphernalia of other devices ensure that state security will divulge nothing about what it does. Despite what governments say whistle-blowers are treated with institutional suspicion and double standards. They are lauded as heroes in the pages of The Sun when they spill the beans about the NHS or the SNP, but meet grisly ends when it comes to opposing war and nuclear weapons. The amount of “suicides” amongst anti-militarist and environmental campaigners since 1979 is well beyond coincidence. The official verdict of Willie McRae was “death by suicide” but there has been no public inquiry and no post-mortem details have ever been released.

Just who was Willie McRae was and what does his life and death mean for Scotland?

Willie McRae was born in Carron, Falkirk to parents of Highland stock. He was going back to the family home near Dornie in Wester Ross when he met his death. He volunteered for the British Army in 1939 when he was 16½ and was discharged when his true age was determined. He promptly joined the Royal Indian Navy and was drafted into Naval Intelligence where he learned Urdu and attended freedom meetings in India at which he spoke. MI6 picked up on this and subsequently MI5 opened a file on him as “a character likely to engage in subversive activities”. That file was never closed.

After World War Two Willie attended Glasgow University and studied Law. He opened his own legal firm in Buchanan Street and prospered. His political campaigning brought him under the eye of the Strathclyde Special Branch, so much so that he became known to them on first-name terms. This was the strange hinterland Willie McRae lived in. In his domestic life he was a “bachelor” and lived alone in his flat in Glasgow’s Southside. To most people he was just a normal Glasgow lawyer.

In reality he was a deep and complex character. Willie McRae was a committed nationalist and although he believed in liberty and social justice for all people he was not really a socialist and had some shady dealings with Sead Na Gael, a right-wing ultra-nationalist group, although this was short-lived. It is alleged he had an affair with one of its members but this was part of the ongoing character assassination. All this put a strain between Willie and the SNP of which he was once Vice-Chairman and whom, for many members, he was a hero.

If people came to Willie McRae for help, no matter who they were, he would give it. That was his nature. This could be seen as a strength or as a weakness. He put it down to his Highland upbringing and cultural inheritance. It also made him vulnerable. But it made him who he was.

He was the joint founder of The Oystercatcher movement against nuclear dumping in Glen Etive and he became increasingly, forensically and aggressively, anti-nuclear. He had won one case against the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in Ayrshire. Willie was on the trail of another at Dounreay in Caithness where the company NIREX were proposing a huge nuclear dump. It was to Thurso he was planning to go to after his Easter weekend at Dornie.

Because his flat in Glasgow had been broken into several times before his visit to Dornie, he was in the habit of carrying his “vital documents” with him in two briefcases. He also carried a Bank of Scotland one hundred pound note which to Willie was a symbol of national pride.

He was also involved in investigating activities concerning drug smuggling in the North West Highlands through the Summer Isles and Ullapool. He was also a member of the Scotland-UN Committee and was one of its two legal representatives who led the successful case for an independent Scotland to join the United Nations post the 1979 referendum. The week before Willie McRae set off for Dornie his Committee colleague was shot at in his car while travelling past Kilmarnock.

Willie McRae was seen by many as being capable of leading Scotland into independence. He was dedicated to the cause, uncompromising but with great integrity. He was a compelling orator and a popular speaker at the SNP conferences and along with his intellectual ability and charisma it made him an endearing character to all who knew him.

His interests and achievements were not confined to Scotland. He had a hand in drafting India’s constitution in 1947. He was the author of Israel’s Maritime Law Code and was Emeritus Professor at the University of Haifa. After his death the university planted three thousand trees in his memory. This is where the title of the play comes from.

My feeling is that Willie McRae was the embodiment of what W.B. Yeats called “tragic joy”. Willie was like Prometheus, who so loved humanity that he stole for them fire from the gods, and was chained to a rock by Zeus as a punishment.

One of Willie McRae’s favourite sayings was, “Nuclear waste should be stored where Guy Fawkes stored his gunpowder.”  He once told a reporter, “If I have committed a crime, then charge me with it. But they won’t do that; they won’t put me on trial. Why will they not put me on trial?” He also said, “I am an idea and they want to kill me.”

The voice of Willie McRae can be heard once again in “Three Thousand Trees”, which is fitting as the theatre is a public forum where change and alternative possibilities are experimented on in public. In the theatre our society thinks out loud. We do not make theatre for ourselves but for the audience, for the people. A play reading may be the poor cousin of production but at least through  vocalising “Three Thousand Trees” on Saturday the 5^th of April in Evanton we have the opportunity to gather and hear the story of Willie McRae, of Scotland, of democracy and of justice. Democracy is nothing without justice and theatre and democracy are the two sides of a civilised society.

©George Gunn 2025

The reading of Three Thousand Trees will be at 4.00 PM on Saturday 5 April in the Jubilee Hall, Evanton. Tickets are going fast. Click here for details.