THE day before voters in the Glasgow Garscadden constituency went to the polls in April 1978, candidates and party workers laid siege to the Yarrow shipyard at Scotstoun.

At one point, four public address systems were in simultaneous operation as hundreds of workers poured from the main gate. The Socialist Workers’ Party candidate attracted some attention by jumping on top of a slow-moving articulated lorry and shouting “Don’t jump on the bandwagon!”, but in terms of audience reach he was outmatched by Labour and the SNP. Among those speaking in support of Labour’s man, Donald Dewar, was the Energy Secretary, Tony Benn.

Ladbrokes made Labour the odds-on favourite to win, a prediction that was borne out when Dewar, a 40-year-old lawyer, won, taking 16,507 votes, ahead of the SNP’s Keith Bovey, on 11,955. Dewar thus returned to Parliament, having previously represented Aberdeen South.

After the declaration, he left the count in a Knightswood school (someone flung a beer can at him as he emerged, missing narrowly) and, opening a bottle of champagne, told the crowd that it had been a “famous victory” for the party. Those who had said that Labour was dead or dying “have not been near Garscadden in the last four or five weeks”. The Herald observed that the win would give Labour confidence that it could halt the Nationalist advance.

In the 1980s, the Thatcher decade, Dewar was Labour’s leader north of the border, as shadow Scottish Secretary. On the right, he is pictured with people protesting the Conservative government’s health-service cuts, before addressing the Scottish Grand Committee in Edinburgh, in December 1983.

Labour leader John Smith brought his old friend south in 1992, making him shadow social services secretary. Dewar later served as opposition chief whip; and when Tony Blair became Prime Minister in 1997, Dewar returned north, as Scottish Secretary of State.

A lifelong advocate of home rule, Dewar quickly produced a White Paper that would be the foundation of a yes/yes result in the devolution referendum of September 1997. The Scottish Parliament followed in 1999. Dewar, our first First Minister, became known as ‘Father of the Nation’, a description that embarrassed him.

Dewar died, aged 63, in October 2000. His death was widely mourned. Labour minister Brian Wilson spoke for many when he touched on what he labelled the “quintessential Dewar blend” of “absolute loyalty, acute intelligence and clear social commitment with good humour, courtesy and moderation”.

Dewar, wrote the Herald’s political correspondent, Stuart Trotter, had been “a truly civilised, kindly and decent man.”