The Invisible Spirit: A Life of Postwar Scotland 1945-75 by Kenneth Roy – review

Gripping murder cases, disasters, controversies: this is a lively exploration of a neglected era in the country's popular history
Scottish children, Dundee, 1955
Dundee, June 1955. Photograph: John Murray/Getty Images

The murder trial may be a popular entertainment everywhere, but in Scotland until relatively recently it had its own special sense of theatre. It was hard to doubt the majesty of the law when, for example, the judge at the trial of the serial killer Peter Manuel entered his Glasgow courtroom every day to the fanfare of trumpets. That was in 1958. Five years later, a judge in Aberdeen walked to the court through a guard of Gordon Highlanders, especially arranged for his inspection and with bayonets fixed, before settling down to hear the case of young Henry John Burnett, who stood accused of murdering his lover's husband. What kind of country were we living in? Duck Soup's Freedonia? Whatever it was, Manuel and Burnett were soon out of it, hanged in Barlinnie and Craiginches prisons, respectively.

Burnett, the last man to be legally executed in Scotland, is just as obscure to popular history as the killers Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen who, six months after Burnett's hanging in August 1963, became the last to go to the gallows in England. Manuel, on the other hand, became Scotland's most famous murderer since Burke and  Hare, as a man convicted of seven deaths and almost certainly responsible for two others in a series of killings that, in the mid-1950s had the industrial lowlands in a fever of fearful speculation. (When his fourth – or sixth – victim was discovered buried in a Lanarkshire field, this reviewer remembers evening newspaper sellers patrolling a local council estate shouting the headline: "Isabelle Cooke's body found … Isabelle Cooke's body found", all the way down Keir Hardie Terrace. She was 17.)

Everything about the Manuel case was gripping: motives were hard to find; the initial incompetence of the police investigation led to the detention of an innocent man for two months; and, most sensational of all, halfway through the trial Manuel sacked his lawyers and began to conduct his own defence. When the guilty verdict eventually arrived, newspapers gave over the whole of their front pages to the murderer's picture, which, thanks to the severity of Scottish contempt laws, had never before been published. That, too, was sensational. As Kenneth Roy writes, it remains the case's "one immutable feature – the face of Peter Manuel with its deep-set black eyes … and its power to go on haunting the national imagination".

The question is: which national imagination? Scotland has certainly produced murderers who have been infamous throughout the UK – bearing Ian Brady and Dennis Nilsen in mind, you might even argue that serial killing was a Scottish specialism. But Manuel, by committing his crimes in Scotland and being tried by a Scottish court, is not among them. When Roy writes of a national imagination, the nation he has in mind is Scotland. This is modern, post-devolution usage. In 1958, the nation held to the same boundaries as the state and roughly described the UK minus the dissenting republicans of Northern Ireland, within which Scotland was … what? A region, perhaps, though of a mysterious, elevated kind, with its own systems of religion, education and the law – and its own crimes and criminals splashed across the pages of its own press.

A history of Scotland during those postwar years is not an easy proposition, which is perhaps why Roy has subtitled his book more modestly as "a life". Histories of Scotland since 1707 have always faced the problem that so much of the story is bound up with the rest of Britain's, and this entwining was never stronger than in the 30 years after 1945, when British institutions such as the monarchy, the trade unions, the BBC and the NHS were at their most respected and popular. To trot out a political statistic often used to puncture the notion that Scotland is inherently leftist: as recently as the 1955 general election, the Conservative and Unionist party won a majority of the Scottish vote as well as of Scottish seats, one or two of which were in working-class districts of Glasgow.

To grow up in that time, as the author and this reviewer did (both of us were born in 1945), was quite naturally to imagine a British inheritance and identity instead of, or more usually as well as, a loyalty to Scotland. Just as economic historians must try to separate Scottish statistics from British ones, so a social history like Roy's has to unwind a thread of everyday Scottish life from a British pattern. One risk lies in overstressing the Scottish part: yes, we laughed readily enough at Stanley Baxter doing his bit in Glasgow radio comedies, but the more powerful influence, leading to many thousands of playground impersonations, was The Goon Show out of London. On the other hand, Scotland was different from England (in some ways more different than now), a difference that tends to get lost in even the richest and subtlest histories of modern Britain as a whole.

By deciding that "the spirit" of the Scottish nation, "though invisible to the naked eye, never quite evaporated", Roy strikes a persuasive balance – reminiscent of James Robertson's splendid epic novel And the Land Lay Still, published in 2010, which covers much the same period and takes a similar line: that under the surface, and just occasionally above it (the removal of the Stone of Destiny, for example), people in Scotland were moving steadily towards a new national consciousness. This is debatable hindsight, but at least with Roy there are few rosy tints. "It would be futile to pretend that it describes a prosperous and well-governed people," Roy writes of his account, adding that in 1975 – the year that North Sea oil came ashore and the book closes – much began to change for the better, long before devolution installed a parliament in Edinburgh.

But this isn't a nationalist narrative or even a particularly political one. Instead, it cures a deficit in Scotland's popular history. Roy's long career as a reporter makes him particularly enjoyable as a sharp and lively narrator of the crimes, controversies, campaigns and disasters that held Scottish attention but often went unnoticed or made only a slight impression in the south. The ferry Princess Victoria goes down in a gale and 133 people are drowned; Isabel Cooke's body is found; the words "a sensible modicum of whisky" become a national catchphrase after a distinguished jurist uses them to defend himself against a drink-driving charge; shipyards close and coalmines catch fire; farewell the trumpets.