THIS affecting photograph would have stopped many readers in their tracks when it was published in November 1956. The woman had just been evicted from the two-bedroomed house in the Borders, where she had lived for 25 years. A sheriff officer and his assistants took two hours to take her furniture into the road, before a joiner changed the front-door lock. The furniture was loaded into a van and taken 50 yards to a house that a neighbour had temporarily made available to the woman and her family. The camera caught the woman as she sat on one of her chairs, evidently deeply upset as she tried to take stock of her changed circumstances.

“The eviction,” reported the Glasgow Herald, “was the first to be made under a ruling of the Court of Session that a deserted wife is not entitled to retain a house of which her husband was tenant. Mrs -------’s husband left her three years ago.” She had previously received the promise of alternative accommodation, the paper added, but she had decided to allow the eviction to take its course.

The house was an upper flat above the house occupied by the landlords, who said in a statement that legal proceedings would not have been started against the woman had it not been for alleged “excessive noise” in her house. The landlords also said that she was not the legal tenant.

“This is a disgrace to Scotland,” the woman told reporters.