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To See Ourselves: A Personal History of Scotland Since 1950
Since 1945 the world has changed at breakneck speed, and life in post-war Scotland is now entirely different from what it was like when Alistair Moffat grew up in the quiet Border town of Kelso in the 1950s. At that time the rhythms and practicalities of daily life which had remained constant for many generations were about to change in the most unimaginable ways.
This is a book about these changes – many of which have been dizzying and disorientating – and how they have affected each and every one of us in all parts of the country. The main themes, such as housing, healthcare, sport, the media, the arts and entertainment, urban and country life, our relationship with the environment, politics, religion and education, are all viewed through the lens of personal experience. Alistair's own recollections of big events and small, together with other eyewitness accounts, bring these decades alive in a way that no ordinary history can with a directness and poignancy that underlines how much has been gained – and how much lost.
This is a book about these changes – many of which have been dizzying and disorientating – and how they have affected each and every one of us in all parts of the country. The main themes, such as housing, healthcare, sport, the media, the arts and entertainment, urban and country life, our relationship with the environment, politics, religion and education, are all viewed through the lens of personal experience. Alistair's own recollections of big events and small, together with other eyewitness accounts, bring these decades alive in a way that no ordinary history can with a directness and poignancy that underlines how much has been gained – and how much lost.
- GenresHistory
272 pages, Hardcover
Published August 12, 2025
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25 people want to read
About the author
Alistair Moffat
59 books214 followersAlistair Moffat is an award winning writer, historian and former Director of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Director of Programmes at Scottish Television.
Moffat was educated at the University of St Andrews, graduating in 1972 with a degree in Medieval History. He is the founder of the Borders Book Festival and Co-Chairman of The Great Tapestry of Scotland.
Moffat was educated at the University of St Andrews, graduating in 1972 with a degree in Medieval History. He is the founder of the Borders Book Festival and Co-Chairman of The Great Tapestry of Scotland.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 21, 2025
As the title suggests this is a History of Scotland over the past 75 years as seen through the author’s eyes. He was brought up in Kelso, firstly in what he says people dismissively called a prefab, then a council house, in a time before the rise of supermarkets, when the food was local, without a hint of air miles, and goods were dispensed from larger containers into smaller carriable ones by the shop assistant (in my experience this was usually a man.) At the time most houses did not have a fridge - never mind a freezer - so food was consumed more or less on the day it was bought, necessitating many visits to the shops each week. Moffat waxes most nostalgic about the milk from the local farmer, rich and creamy or richer and creamier - no skimmed milk back then - but that food products from the Empire were unremarked on, taken as read, as was Imperial paraphernalia such as the label on Camp Coffee bottles. He also remembers, as do I, that Christmas was a working day in Scotland until very late in the 1950s.
His father was of the generation that knew its place and still suffered from deference to the landed classes (the Duke of Roxburghe’s Floors Castle lies just outside Kelso.) When Moffat’s elder sister performed well enough in school to get to University her dad at first was against it but his wife prevailed on him so off the sister went and in due course Moffat followed. Corporal punishment by the tawse was an everyday feature of Scottish schools at that point and Moffat outlines the circumstances that led to its abandonment.
The mid-1960s expansion of university places and the provision of grants made working class attendance at University eminently affordable for Moffat’s contemporaries and he laments the present system whereby, notwithstanding the provision for tuition fees, Scottish students now rack up huge debts while gaining a degree. He is also of the opinion that student life ought to be about more than educational attainment rather than narrowed down to academic performance.
The coming of television altered daily life as did the advent of The Beatles, the sexual revolution, and the Abortion Bill sponsored by Moffat’s local MP, David Steel.
Agriculture too has changed, the coming of the little grey Fergie tractor with its device for transferring power to farm implements hastening the demise of the horse and the jobs that they necessitated, grooming, smithing etc.
The decline of church-going has been precipitate (apparently now attendance at Catholic services outstrips the Church of Scotland, a fact which would have astonished those formidable eighteenth and nineteenth century adherents of the Scottish Reformation.) He touches on the religious divide which still mars life in Scotland. Apparently in staunchly Protestant Larkhall the lowest traffic light of a set was smashed on a routine basis, ASDA was even discouraged from opening there due to its green livery.
Newspaper readership was once much higher in Scotland than in the rest of the UK, the Saturday evening ‘pinks’ a feature, and Sundays were dominated by the Sunday Post, adorned by its pullout “Fun Section” - The Broons, Oor Wullie and all, and its border editions covered rugby extensively.
Moffat tells us that the Sunday Post was a true newspaper, with broad coverage of foreign news. “Couthy, borderline obsessive about Scottish sports reporting and constantly upholding what might be seen as the values of the Kirk - the Sunday Post was all of those things. But parochial it was not.” He then adds the killer line, “The paper even covered events in England.”
He remarks on the liberation of the licensing laws - which has not led to the deterioration of behaviour its critics feared and predicted but, he says, to a more measured approach to alcohol consumption - and laments the decline in amateur sport.
He notes the transformation of women’s place in society, and the highlighting of domestic abuse which had once tended to be considered a private matter but is now treated more seriously.
His final chapter is titled Permacrisis> and deals with the upheavals, political and otherwise, which the world has seen over the past decade.
As a summary of the Scots experience in the past seventy years To See Ourselves is an excellent primer.
His father was of the generation that knew its place and still suffered from deference to the landed classes (the Duke of Roxburghe’s Floors Castle lies just outside Kelso.) When Moffat’s elder sister performed well enough in school to get to University her dad at first was against it but his wife prevailed on him so off the sister went and in due course Moffat followed. Corporal punishment by the tawse was an everyday feature of Scottish schools at that point and Moffat outlines the circumstances that led to its abandonment.
The mid-1960s expansion of university places and the provision of grants made working class attendance at University eminently affordable for Moffat’s contemporaries and he laments the present system whereby, notwithstanding the provision for tuition fees, Scottish students now rack up huge debts while gaining a degree. He is also of the opinion that student life ought to be about more than educational attainment rather than narrowed down to academic performance.
The coming of television altered daily life as did the advent of The Beatles, the sexual revolution, and the Abortion Bill sponsored by Moffat’s local MP, David Steel.
Agriculture too has changed, the coming of the little grey Fergie tractor with its device for transferring power to farm implements hastening the demise of the horse and the jobs that they necessitated, grooming, smithing etc.
The decline of church-going has been precipitate (apparently now attendance at Catholic services outstrips the Church of Scotland, a fact which would have astonished those formidable eighteenth and nineteenth century adherents of the Scottish Reformation.) He touches on the religious divide which still mars life in Scotland. Apparently in staunchly Protestant Larkhall the lowest traffic light of a set was smashed on a routine basis, ASDA was even discouraged from opening there due to its green livery.
Newspaper readership was once much higher in Scotland than in the rest of the UK, the Saturday evening ‘pinks’ a feature, and Sundays were dominated by the Sunday Post, adorned by its pullout “Fun Section” - The Broons, Oor Wullie and all, and its border editions covered rugby extensively.
Moffat tells us that the Sunday Post was a true newspaper, with broad coverage of foreign news. “Couthy, borderline obsessive about Scottish sports reporting and constantly upholding what might be seen as the values of the Kirk - the Sunday Post was all of those things. But parochial it was not.” He then adds the killer line, “The paper even covered events in England.”
He remarks on the liberation of the licensing laws - which has not led to the deterioration of behaviour its critics feared and predicted but, he says, to a more measured approach to alcohol consumption - and laments the decline in amateur sport.
He notes the transformation of women’s place in society, and the highlighting of domestic abuse which had once tended to be considered a private matter but is now treated more seriously.
His final chapter is titled Permacrisis> and deals with the upheavals, political and otherwise, which the world has seen over the past decade.
As a summary of the Scots experience in the past seventy years To See Ourselves is an excellent primer.
July 3, 2025
I have enjoyed other books by Alister Moffat and enjoyed this book enormously. He adopts an easy, pleasant style that kept me reading continuously.
His subtitle, for me, is telling: “A Personal History of Scotland Since 1950”. While a decade older than the author, his observations about the many topics he raises resonated deeply with me.
Most intriguing, however, was how different from mine were his reactions to his early upbringing and education. Alistair records the injustice and oppression he felt as a working-class boy, constrained by circumstance and hemmed in by teachers. His reaction has been to elbow himself into the comfort of a smaller world than his education and the media might have been encouraging. My own reactions to many of the similar stimuli he experienced within family, community and school, and then to a well-intentioned exposure to a wider world than Coupar Angus and then Dundee, were very different – less censorious, less condemnatory.
A rigorous schooling at the Morgan Academy with headmaster and teachers who earned our respect from their daily behaviour as well as from their war records, from neighbours who demanded our good behaviour and a willingness to oblige, family members who lived and worked in far-flung places around the world, exposure to good books, different accents, attitudes, media and sights far from home – all these drove me outwards into the world rather than to feel resentful or to withdraw into parochialism.
This is not a criticism of the author or his delightfully well-written, wonderfully insightful and well-researched book – rather it’s an incentive for personal reflection on my own peripatetic and more rootless life; on “what might have been” had I not been so easily persuaded by family, teachers, and circumstances to look outwards and beyond where I grew up. Did I take too seriously every injunction in our Morgan school song, “O’er the bridge that spans the river”…?
As well as providing me with enjoyment and a respect for the author’s intellectual talents, “To See Ourselves: A Personal History of Scotland Since 1950” leaves me questioning myself ruefully: “What if…?”
His subtitle, for me, is telling: “A Personal History of Scotland Since 1950”. While a decade older than the author, his observations about the many topics he raises resonated deeply with me.
Most intriguing, however, was how different from mine were his reactions to his early upbringing and education. Alistair records the injustice and oppression he felt as a working-class boy, constrained by circumstance and hemmed in by teachers. His reaction has been to elbow himself into the comfort of a smaller world than his education and the media might have been encouraging. My own reactions to many of the similar stimuli he experienced within family, community and school, and then to a well-intentioned exposure to a wider world than Coupar Angus and then Dundee, were very different – less censorious, less condemnatory.
A rigorous schooling at the Morgan Academy with headmaster and teachers who earned our respect from their daily behaviour as well as from their war records, from neighbours who demanded our good behaviour and a willingness to oblige, family members who lived and worked in far-flung places around the world, exposure to good books, different accents, attitudes, media and sights far from home – all these drove me outwards into the world rather than to feel resentful or to withdraw into parochialism.
This is not a criticism of the author or his delightfully well-written, wonderfully insightful and well-researched book – rather it’s an incentive for personal reflection on my own peripatetic and more rootless life; on “what might have been” had I not been so easily persuaded by family, teachers, and circumstances to look outwards and beyond where I grew up. Did I take too seriously every injunction in our Morgan school song, “O’er the bridge that spans the river”…?
As well as providing me with enjoyment and a respect for the author’s intellectual talents, “To See Ourselves: A Personal History of Scotland Since 1950” leaves me questioning myself ruefully: “What if…?”
December 31, 2025
I enjoyed this book although I don’t usually read books which contain so much fact rather than fiction and have not read anything else by Alastair Moffat. The writing style flows well and is therefore easy to read. It brought back memories of the history that I lived through from the 60s and matters that I had forgotten and it pointed to political facts that I had not been interested in at the time. My only criticism is that Ayrshire cows are brown and white and a town in Ayrshire is, surely, west of Glasgow.
July 1, 2025
This is a fascinating book telling the story of the huge changes which have occurred in Scottish society during the author's 75-year ling life. Ranging from subjects including food, the church, sport and the newspaper industry, the changes have been monumental.
February 3, 2026
A thoughtful mix of memoir and history. Moffat covers the facts of the last 75 years, but it's his personal experiences that evoke the feelings of the different eras.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews