ARNOLD Kemp, a former editor of this paper, made an interesting point when in 1990 he wrote an introduction to Dear Happy Ghosts, a hardback collection of photographs from the voluminous archives of the Herald and Times.

The eye of the press photographer, Kemp wrote, is not that of the recording angel; he or she follows the news, driven where the wind blows.

“What is news today is not news tomorrow, and the events which stirred distant times may seem odd and even trivial now. But, in the process of pursuing the news, the press photographer adds, whether intentionally or not, to the accumulation of social history”.

Leafing through the book, you can see what Kemp meant. Here is social history in one form after another: crowded tenements, protests, strikes, football matches, festivals, outings, the arts, public transport, thronged city-centre streets, shopping, crime, work, shipyards, to say nothing of people living through war.

Each photograph comes, as it were, with a story attached, from the files of the Herald, the Evening Times, or The Bulletin.

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Often, too, the photographs relate to major news stories: Manny Shinwell, say, addressing crowds of strikers from the City Chambers, or the sight of the Red Flag in George Square, at the time of the Red Clydeside unrest in 1919; or of Churchill waving to excited crowds in Glasgow as he campaigned in the first general election to be held after the end of the war in Europe.

More recent pictures in the book relate to the landmark visit of the Pope to Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park in 1982.

It’s this combination of news stories and photographs from our teeming archives that lies behind a new series, launched today in the Herald magazine.

It’s called Herald Decades, and each week we’ll be selecting subjects that, in ways large and small, helped make up the mosaic that is modern Scotland.

We start today with a look back at the events of 1961, when sustained protests greeted the arrival of the first US vessels at the Polaris base at the Holy Loch – a forerunner, really, of the protests that later gathered around the base at Faslane.

Over the next few weeks, as the Queen prepares to celebrate her Platinum Jubilee, we’ll be looking at her Silver Jubilee visits to Scotland in 1977. Ahead are such topics as that Papal visit to Bellahouston, the ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978-79, and the long journey to devolution after the failed 1979 referendum.

We’ll focus on key industrial disputes and on important figures and developments in the arts, and business, and politics, and sport. We’ll look back at the history of the Singer plant in Clydebank, once the world’s biggest sewing machine factory.

There will, we hope, be lighter moments, too: the changing trends in fashions and in retail – and even the rise and fall of punk music. Assuming, of course, that we can dig out our old safety-pins in time...