IN January 1967, the SNP’s William (“Billy”) Wolfe was interviewed by our sister paper, the Evening Times. Wolfe had twice tried and failed to replace the Labour Old Etonian, Tam Dalyell, as MP for West Lothian – at a 1962 by-election and the 1964 general election – and his interviewer, the redoubtable Jack House, wrote that Wolfe “expects to beat [Dalyell] hollow next election”.

Wolfe was proud of the insurgent campaign he had staged in that 1962 by-election. The result had rattled Labour and the Unionists, and the Tory, Liberal and Communist candidates all lost their deposits. It was the first time that this had happened to the Tories in a by-election since December 1946.

Political correspondents predicted that if the SNP could capture the votes of people unhappy with government policies, it could become a new force in Scottish politics. As it happened, Wolfe’s achievement led to a temporary increase in support for the SNP, which in turn would lead to Winnie Ewing’s momentous victory at a Hamilton by-election in 1967. The bubble burst in 1970 but the SNP enjoyed a revival in its electoral fortunes thanks to its brilliant slogan, “It’s Scotland’s Oil”.

By the time Wolfe met Jack House in 1967, he was a leading figure in the SNP. Just 41, he was running the Chieftain Forge in Bathgate, employing 18 men who made spades, shovels and replicas of the claymore (one of which is pictured here).

He was still intent, one day, on replacing Dalyell as West Lothian’s representative in parliament. But it was not to be. Between 1966 and 1979 he would contest five other general elections in West Lothian, and though he achieved nearly 25,000 votes in October 1974, slicing Dalyell’s majority in half, he was unable to find a seat in the Commons.

Wolfe, however, became a transformative leader of his party. In October 1969 at the annual conference in Oban he defeated the incumbent, Arthur Donaldson, by 544 votes to 238. In his decade in charge he would give the SNP a clear sense of organisation and discipline, and instil in it a social democratic ethos. As he remarked at the 1970 SNP conference: “We are not just concerned with a solitary aim, although that aim of independence is over-riding and is fundamentally the greatest thing we can fight for freedom. We are part of a social movement as well, agitating for reforms.”

He was also renowned for his astute recruitment drives, and for his approach to SNP propaganda. When Wolfe took over, the party had 0.8% of the popular vote in Scotland; with him at the helm, it achieved 21.9% in February 1974 and peaked at 30.4%, with 11 MPs that October. He led the SNP for a full decade; and in the view of Arnold Kemp, a former Glasgow Herald editor, he made a considerable contribution to the rise of the Nationalists.

A flavour of Wolfe’s achievements comes from the obituaries and tributes written upon his death at the age of 86 in March 2010.

The Herald obituary said: “He was perhaps the first modern leader of the SNP and a talented evangelist for the cause of independence.” Alex Salmond declared: “Billy Wolfe blazed the trail in the professionalisation and organisation of the SNP and he more than anyone transformed it into a modern political party.” His colleague, Margo MacDonald, added: “Billy was the most unusual politician I’ve ever met because, without being sentimental, he didn’t have a jealous or mean bone in his body.”

Murray Ritchie, an ex-Herald Scottish political editor, wrote in an obituary that Wolfe “helped transform the SNP from a romantic movement into [a] modern political force”. Ritchie also noted that it was Wolfe who was credited with commissioning the familiar SNP yellow and black logo encompassing the thistle and Saltire.

William Wolfe was born in Bathgate in February, 1924, the son of a successful local businessman. Kemp, who profiled Wolfe in his book, The Hollow Drum, says that his nationalism may be traced from the death of his seven-year-old brother. Wolfe was just four at the time.

“His father, though loving, became withdrawn in his grief and Wolfe was thrown upon his own company,” Kemp writes. At nine, Wolfe came across Robert Baden-Powell’s book, Scouting for Boys. The first Chief Scout became a kind of substitute father. Wolfe was a County Commissioner in the Scouts when he contested West Lothian in 1962.

By this time he had served in the army – he arrived in Europe the day after D-Day, and was also based in India and Indonesia. While sailing home from India in 1947 he chanced upon a stray newspaper page, which had an item about the Saltire Society. He joined the society in Edinburgh while studying to become an accountant.

Later, relates Kemp, Wolfe began to worry about the sheer number of Scots who were emigrating. He made enquiries of all the main parties and realised that only the SNP’s approach seemed logical and right to him. He joined the party in 1959 and after 1962 he joined the party’s national executive and went on to hold various internal posts.

In his decade in charge he kept his focus on independence – revealing, for example, at a rally in 1969, that the SNP was planning to issue a Declaration of Nationhood the following year, the 650th anniversary of the declaration of independence at Arbroath.

In June 1970, urging people to vote SNP at the general election, he wrote a typically eloquent piece in the Herald. The Union of Parliaments had outlived any usefulness it may once have had, he wrote; and “there is in the SNP no outworn ideology – only patriotism, common sense and a concern for humanity”.

In 1979 a referendum rejected the idea of a Scottish Assembly. The SNP then sided with the Tories to bring down the Labour government. Wolfe stepped down and was replaced by Gordon Wilson. That year’s annual conference was a combustible affair, to say the least.

Wolfe became party president in 1980 but in 1982 he stirred controversy with outspoken remarks, widely interpreted as anti-Catholic, prior to the Pope’s visit to Scotland. Then, after the Falklands war had broken out, he publicly identified the Argentinian junta with the Roman Catholic Church, and the Falkland Islanders with Protestantism.

There was a furious outcry; Wolfe refused to resign as SNP president or from the party, but he did not stand for re-election as president. At that year’s SNP conference, an attempt to allow him to address a session was rejected unceremoniously by delegates. “He was treated like a leper,” Arnold Kemp later recorded.

In 1992, Wolfe wrote a candid, near-2,000 word article for this newspaper about the controversy. The end of his political career, he reflected, “was at my own hands, alone. The self-inflicted wound bled for a long time”.

From 1991 to 2008 he served as a member of the SNP’s National Executive Committee and as an elected member of its National Council.

Wolfe was a lifelong student of Scottish history and culture, and in January 1984 he staged, in Bathgate, a “festive and recreational occasion”, attended by 40 political activists, poets, academics and writers. Wolfe rejected a suggestion that he was trying to form a new political party; rather, he said, he had concluded that the cultural aspects of Scotland needed fresh emphasis because of the erosion of national identity.