A battle royal is brewing for seats at the boardroom table of the venerable Alliance Trust in Dundee. Its leader, nicknamed "Katherine the Great" in decades past, has been here before and will likely once again be focused on building the defences.

Katherine Garrett-Cox has been campaigning with the £3 billion Alliance Trust on other fronts in recent times, notably the Scottish constitutional issue.

While its home city of Dundee liked the "Yes" option in last September's independence referendum, Alliance Trust certainly did not appear to favour this choice.

It talked about creating separate English subsidiaries in what amounted to a high-profile intervention on the constitutional issue by one of Scotland's financial sector heavyweights.

As recently as this month, when the trust unveiled results for 2014, Ms Garrett-Cox signalled some wariness over the potential impact on Alliance shareholders and customers of further devolution for Scotland.

Many in the business community stepped up to throw in their tuppenceworth on the independence debate. Ms Garrett-Cox's forthright comments on the devolution issue were perhaps more surprising.

However, with major Alliance investor Elliott Advisors having now launched a campaign to shake up the investment trust's board, Ms Garrett-Cox is probably going to have to focus her forces on this front.

It is easy to long for the good old days of past decades at Alliance Trust, when it sat back a bit from the cut-and-thrust of life in the City of London and continued to pursue a culture that was perhaps perceived as a bit dusty but nevertheless enabled it to prosper.

This sentiment is not being expressed as the longstanding holder of a modest number of shares in Alliance, with this stake very much parked for reasons which have nothing to do with the trust's performance or value. Rather, it is expressed as a business journalist who had the pleasure of dealing with some of the former bosses and fund managers at Alliance Trust.

It was always very interesting to have a chat with former managing directors Gavin Suggett and Lyndon Bolton. Alan Young, Alliance's former chief investment officer, also seemed to epitomise the culture of the investment trust with his understated and philosophical air.

The big culture change at Alliance Trust appeared to start when Alan Harden took up the role of chief executive at the start of 2004, following the retirement of Mr Suggett.

Mr Harden worked for big global financial institutions before joining Alliance Trust.

As well as embarking on a culture change, he opened an office in Hong Kong, which was subsequently closed.

Mr Harden was at the helm when Alliance recruited Ms Garrett-Cox, a former chief investment officer at Aberdeen Asset Management, from fund manager Morley in 2007. She succeeded Mr Harden as chief executive in 2008.

After Mr Suggett departed, Alliance diversified into private equity and property. These moves have been reversed by Ms Garrett-Cox.

Alliance Trust has meanwhile, in recent times, built up sizeable operations in London.

Under Mr Harden and Ms Garrett-Cox, Alliance Trust has seemed to move to becoming ever-more conventionally corporate, in contrast to its bygone days.

Maybe it is the way of the world, with a relentless drive to modernisation everywhere regardless of whether the old or new ways delivered best.

Investment trusts in general offer much, notably in terms of tending to have lower management fees than other vehicles aimed at individual savers and allowing people access to a diversified portfolio of equities.

It has been a fascinating sector to cover over the years and decades, with all the personalities.

Ms Garrett-Cox is another engaging character in the sector, as are the likes of James Anderson at Baillie Gifford, Martin Gilbert at Aberdeen Asset Management, and Colin McLean at SVM.

It might seem to the unfamiliar to be quite a sleepy sector, but it is not. And there have been plenty of battles over the years. Often these are initiated by the short-term arbitrageurs, although it is sometimes long-term investors who trigger radical change or even the break-up of an investment trust and the return of cash to shareholders.

The switch of the management contract to another investment house, the breaking up of trusts and return of cash to shareholders, and big share buy-back programmes to narrow the discount at which stock trades to net asset value have been among changes sought at various investment trusts.

Boardroom change, of the type being proposed by Elliott, is at the less extreme end of the scale of demands.

Elliott is campaigning to place three experienced "independent" directors, financial sector veterans Anthony Brooke, Peter Chambers, and Rory Macnamara, around Alliance's boardroom table. It is urging the trust's many thousands of shareholders, through individual letters and an "ImproveAllianceTrust" website, to back the election of the additional directors at the annual meeting on April 29.

Elliott and the funds it advises have built a 12 per cent stake in Alliance Trust and it is following in the footsteps of hedge fund Laxey Partners. Laxey mustered more than 30 per cent of shareholder votes in 2011 for its campaign to secure controls on the discount at which Alliance shares traded to their net asset value.

The only thing that really matters at the end of the day for a trust such as Alliance is its investment performance.

Arbitrageurs or other investors cannot realistically, and in any case would probably not wish to, push for radical change at a trust which is performing very well, especially if it has built up such a track record that its shares trade at a premium to net asset value.

You do not see any moves on Edinburgh partnership Baillie Gifford's Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, for example.

Ms Garrett-Cox, as an industry veteran, will be well aware that the best defence an investment trust can have is stellar investment performance. Alliance Trust's recent investment performance has not been spectacular.

So Katherine the Great, if she and Alliance fail to reach agreement with Elliott on board composition, looks to have a real tussle on her hands.