1 GLASGOW University graduate Florence Marian McNeill was an extraordinary writer, suffrage campaigner, journalist and early driving force behind the SNP. Born in Orkney, she moved to Glasgow to study, graduating in 1912 with a Master of the Arts.
2 Florence, known to her friends as Floss, was born in 1885, the eighth of 12 children and the daughter of a Free Church minister. Glasgow University’s website says: “McNeill studied at the University and travelled in Germany and France before graduating MA in 1912. She became organiser of the Scottish Federation of Women’s Suffrage Societies and Secretary of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, and worked in social research in London. She moved to Greece after the First World War but returned to Scotland in 1920 to work as a freelance journalist and writer.”
3 Florence’s books include The Scots Kitchen, still regarded by many as the definitive book on Scottish cookery, which she wrote, she said: “to preserve the recipes of our old national dishes, many of which are in danger of falling into undeserved oblivion”, and The Silver Bough, a four-volume study of the national and local Festivals of Scotland.
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4 Florence and her brother Duncan were two of the earliest members of the Scottish National Party, which was founded in 1933. Florence was the party’s first Vice-President and she also founded the Clan MacNeill Association in 1932.
5 She was a regular contributor to the Glasgow Times’s sister newspaper The Herald, as well as the Scotsman in Edinburgh, where she moved to in later life. In 1929, she worked on the staff of the Scottish National Dictionary Association. She died in February 1973.
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