IN Gordon Brown's pivotal ­referendum speech, widely seen as tipping the balance in favour of No, he proclaimed the silent majority would be silent no more.

The intervention followed several weeks where, in some parts of the country, Yes supporters were the only campaigning group in evidence, from blue-and-white car and window stickers to lapel badges and flags.

In the early hours of Friday morning, at the Better Together campaign headquarters in Glasgow, street campaigners from the other side of the argument spoke about the difficulties they faced persuading No voters to take a more public stance.

Alison Dowling, 47, from Erskine, said she always felt there was a "huge disparity" between the public campaigns and what was being said on the doorsteps of Renfrewshire, where she spent the last few weeks canvassing.

She said: "It was very difficult because we were speaking to people who were very strong about a No vote, but didn't want to do anything in public, even down to putting a sticker in their car in case it got damaged.

"There was no question people felt intimidated, but that intimidation hardened people's attitudes in private to vote No because they didn't like what they saw.

"The people I spoke to didn't like the austerity measures in place and they didn't like the Westminster Government but they did not believe in the myth of a pot of gold at the end of Alex Salmond's tartan rainbow."

Jamie Hilland, a 21-year-old law student from Lanark, who is studying at Glasgow University, recognises there was a genuine move by Labour supporters towards independence.

But campaigning in South Lanarkshire he also felt long-held allegiances were in place and that much of the rhetoric around the Yes campaign was empty.

He said: "The Yes campaign did seem to have the better operation on the ground and there seemed to be more people buying into it and they struck a more forceful tone, but also managed to be sympathetic.

"But if you actually spoke to people about those views it seemed to be represented by a general desire for a new future without really getting into the specifics and my experience of campaigning was that the Better Together campaign won the serious arguments on the doorstep."

James Hallwood, 28, a Labour activist from Sussex, arrived in Scotland on the morning of the count to campaign alongside Labour MP William Bain in Glasgow North East.

From previous media coverage of the referendum he was expecting the Better Together campaign to be "up against it" on the doorstep with perceptions that they were "negative" and being part of Britain was increasingly toxic.

"It was completely the opposite," he said. "What was most surprising was the fact that the people we spoke to liked being British and felt a city like London was just as much their city as Glasgow.

"It may have been harder for them to express that publicly given the way the Yes campaign identified itself so strongly with Scottish identity, but the evidence was that a wider sense of an upsurge of Scottish nationalism, at the expense of feeling British, just didn't seem to be in evidence."