Tom Johnston(1881–1965)

Thomas Johnston was born at Kirkintilloch in eastern Dunbartonshire on the second of November 1881, eldest son of David Johnston, a Kirkintilloch grocer, and Mary Blackwood. He was schooled at Lairdsland Public School in Kirkintilloch and at Lenzie Academy, took a clerk's post at the family grocery, and in 1903 in his twenty-second year founded with his Kirkintilloch cousins the small weekly socialist newspaper Forward, which he edited for the next thirty years from the back room of the grocery and built into the leading Scottish-language socialist political journal of the early twentieth century.

He stood as the Independent Labour Party candidate for West Stirlingshire at the general elections of 1918 and 1922, was returned at the second attempt in November 1922 in his forty-first year, and held a Commons seat (West Stirlingshire 1922 to 1924 and again 1929 to 1931; Stirling and Falkirk Burghs 1929 to 1931; Dundee 1932 to 1935; West Stirlingshire 1935 to 1945) for the next twenty-three years. He served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Scottish Office in the first Labour government of 1924, as Lord Privy Seal in the second Labour government of 1929 to 1931, and from February 1941 in the wartime coalition under Winston Churchill as Secretary of State for Scotland.

His four years at the Scottish Office (February 1941 to May 1945) transformed the institutional architecture of modern Scotland. He persuaded Churchill to allow a Scottish Council of State (an informal cabinet of all five surviving former Secretaries of State for Scotland) which met regularly to coordinate the Scottish wartime industrial-and-administrative response; he carried through Parliament the Hydro-Electric Development (Scotland) Act of 1943, the foundational statute that established the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board with the power to develop the Highland water resources for public electricity generation and rural-economic regeneration; and he founded the Scottish Council on Industry (1942) and the Scottish Tourist Board (1945), the two parastatal economic-development bodies that ran Scottish industrial and tourism policy for the next half-century.

The Hydro Board, of which Johnston served as Chairman from his retirement from politics in May 1945 to 1959, built across the next twenty-five years fifty-four power stations and seventy-eight dams across the Highlands, supplied electric power for the first time to over a quarter of a million Highland households, founded the chemical-and-aluminium-industrial complex at Fort William, Kinlochleven and Invergordon, and added approximately twenty per cent to the agricultural productivity of the Highland counties on the strength of mechanised electric milking, electric lighting and refrigerated storage. He chaired in retirement the Forestry Commissioners (1945 to 1948), the British Broadcasting Corporation's Broadcasting Council for Scotland (1946 to 1952), and was awarded the Companion of Honour by Clement Attlee in 1953. He died at his Kirkintilloch home on the fifth of September 1965 in his eighty-fourth year. The Johnston name in modern Scottish economic history carries the weight of the Hydro Board and the wartime Scottish Office tenure.