IN May 1952, the year after he had returned to Downing Street as peacetime prime minister, and a year before he would win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Winston Churchill, one of the giants of the age, held in his hands an unusual silver casket. It was in the shape of Glasgow’s Tolbooth Steeple.

The 15in-high model contained a parchment which testified to the fact he had become only the seventh person to be awarded honorary membership of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce. It was presented to him in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street by a delegation from the chamber. The great man thanked them for “presenting me with such an agreeable and charming memento in this casket, which I shall always treasure”.

When you think of Churchill and Scotland it can be hard to see beyond his time as MP for Dundee between 1908 and 1922, during which he served as president of the Board of Trade, home secretary, first lord of the Admiralty, minister of munitions, secretary of state for war and air, and colonial secretary. But a trawl through various books and the Herald archives – prompted by Dundee-born actor Brian Cox portraying Churchill in a film that will be released next week – reveals an interesting array of visits to and speeches in Scotland throughout his remarkable career.

Churchill had already made his name as a war hero, a war correspondent, a Conservative MP for Oldham and a Liberal MP for North-West Manchester (he’d switched parties in May 1904) before he became the Liberal MP for Dundee in 1908. He was re-elected in 1910 and continued to represent the seat until 1922.

Churchill had been taken badly ill with appendicitis prior to the 1922 election and so was unable to campaign vigorously. When Clementine, his wife, spoke on his behalf on the hustings, she was booed and barracked. “She portrayed him as the peacemaker he was at heart,” his grand-daughter, Celia Sandys, later wrote, “but the Dundee newspapers and the proletarian voters, recalling his anti-Bolshevik policies, saw him only as a warmonger.”

On Monday, November 13, a rowdy public meeting took place at the city’s Drill Hall, attended by 10,000 people. Tempers were running high and the police drew their batons before it even began. Churchill was barracked and booed by sections of the crowd but gave as good as he got. At one point he said: “If about 100 young men and women in the town choose to spoil the whole meeting, and if about 100 of those young reptiles choose to deny democracy and the mass of the people the power to conduct great assemblies, the fault is with them, the blame is with them, and the punishment will be administered to them by the electors.”

He lost the seat, however, and the Conservatives returned to power after an absence of 17 years. As he noted, his defeat left him “without an office, without a seat, without a party and without an appendix”. The Glasgow Herald described it as a “serious disappointment to the moderate elements in the town, whose internecine quarrels so largely contributed to the result. It was also a great disappointment to Mr Churchill, the more so as he was most sanguine of victory.”

In July 1923 Churchill returned to Scotland to receive an honorary degree from Edinburgh University at McEwan Hall, where he “was accorded a great reception and greeted with loud and prolonged cheering”.

On October 4 the Herald said Churchill had been approached, and had agreed, to contest a Glasgow constituency at the next General Election, but added: “Neither the one assertion nor the other appears to be true.” A month later, the paper understood Churchill had been invited to stand as the Liberal candidate in Glasgow’s Central Division “and that it is extremely probable that the invitation will be accepted”.

Churchill, however, declined politely. He had been flirting with the idea of rejoining the Conservatives, but their proposal to scrap free trade in favour of protection angered Churchill, a lifelong free trader.

Stanley Baldwin called an election for December 1923 but the Conservatives lost almost 100 seats, and in the end Labour’s Ramsay Macdonald took over as the head of a minority government. Churchill, who had stood, and lost, as a Liberal candidate, had, however, decided by May 1924 that the Liberals could no longer be an independent force in British politics and that only the Conservatives could thwart socialism.

On September 25, having declined an invitation from the Dunfermline Burghs Unionist Association to stand as their candidate at the next election, he addressed a Scottish Unionist demonstration at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, at which he spoke of the threat of socialism and of Macdonald’s pro-Bolshevik policies. The following month, standing as a Constitutionalist, he won the safe Conservative seat of Epping, and finally returned to the Commons and was appointed chancellor.

On November 13, 1925, Churchill returned to the Usher Hall to praise the Baldwin government’s achievements. He was greeted enthusiastically, and one Tory grandee declared that the only one of the high offices of state that Churchill had yet to occupy was that of PM, and that it didn’t take much in the way of prophecy to forecast that he would yet find himself in No 10.

In November 1929 Churchill was elected as rector of Edinburgh University, beating the novelist GK Chesterton, the Liberal candidate, and the Fabian Socialist Beatrice Webb. The Glasgow Herald reported his rectorial address at the McEwan Hall, on March 4, 1931, at which he lamented the decline of parliamentary government and said the House of Commons was losing the respect of the public.

The Conservatives fell in 1929, and Macdonald once again found himself at the head of a minority government. Churchill resigned from the Conservative shadow cabinet in 1930. He was still only 56. The Thirties were to be his wilderness years: out of office and out of favour, he spent much of the decade warning about Adolf Hitler’s growing influence in Germany. (One of the few references in the Herald to him during this time concerns an unsuccessful bid to stand as rector of Glasgow University in 1937. The winning candidate, unfortunately, died just eight days after his election.)

Churchill’s spell in the wilderness came to an end on September 3, 1939, just as Britain found itself at war with Germany. Neville Chamberlain made him first lord of the Admiralty and gave him a seat in the war cabinet. He made an early visit to the naval base at Scapa Flow where, says Gilbert, he learned of the slow pace of pre-war preparations. His worst fears were confirmed when the battleship Royal Oak was torpedoed and sunk at Scapa Flow, with the loss of more than 800 lives. Churchill wept when he received the news.

On May 10, 1940, when, in his own words, “the German hordes are pouring into the Low Countries”, he finally became prime minister, taking over from Chamberlain who, unable to form a coalition government, resigned. “I was conscious of a profound sense of relief,” Churchill later wrote in his war memoirs. “At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene.” He would in time become what AJP Taylor would famously describe as “the saviour of his country”.

In late October Churchill paid a surprise visit to the east of Scotland to inspect the coastal defences. The following day, Clementine dined at the City Chambers, where Lord Provost Patrick Dollan told her, “Never in the history of our country has a single man carried a burden such as Mr Churchill is doing today.” That same day, Scotland suffered its worst air raids of the war so far, with high explosives and incendiaries being dropped in several districts. At least seven people died in what, thanks to wartime reporting restrictions, could only be said to be a western coastal town.

A key episode occurred on January 17, 1941, when Churchill came north to Glasgow and the City Chambers to speak of his aim to “extirpate Hitler from Europe”. With him was President Roosevelt’s personal envoy, Harry Hopkins.

As Martin Gilbert says in his magisterial biography of Churchill, there was one crucial point in 1941 “when all Britain’s war plans depended upon the attitude of the United States towards payment for arms supplies”. Churchill discussed Britain’s needs in long conversations with Hopkins.

On January 17, at what was then the North British Hotel, Hopkins told the dinner guests: “I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return?” He said he would quote a biblical verse – “Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God”. He paused then said, “Even to the end.” Churchill, it is said, wept tears of relief and gratitude.

On January 28, Churchill wrote to Lord Provost Dollan to thank him for his reception and praise the city’s indomitable spirit. The letter was sold at auction in London in 2015.

There is another intriguing passage in Gilbert’s book, relating to March 1944. With Soviet forces making their way into central Poland, he says, Churchill proposed a meeting with Roosevelt and Stalin to try to preserve some form of democratic form of government for Poland, and suggested Invergordon as a venue – “the weather might well be agreeable in Scotland at that time”. Roosevelt, a presidential election uppermost in his mind, declined.

In June 1945, the war finally over, and with Churchill contesting another General Election, he visited Glasgow and Edinburgh to scenes of adulation. The Herald said: “It was the day of his election tour, but his progress both in Glasgow and in Edinburgh later was more in the nature of a triumphal visit.” The election, however, saw a resounding victory for Clement Attlee and Labour. Churchill was out of office again; he would not return to No 10 until October 1951.

Various civic honours came Churchill’s way during and after the war – the freedom of Edinburgh, of Aberdeen, of Ayr, of Perth, of Stirling. The only one he declined, it turned out, was from Dundee. He made a number of other visits to Scotland – Edinburgh and Dalmeny in 1946, a Unionist rally at Ibrox in 1949, a key speech at the Usher Hall in February 1950, a Unionist speech at Glasgow in 1951. A cigar of his was auctioned in Largs that same year, sold for £9 to a female American tourist.

In 1953, the year of his Nobel prize, he and Clementine took the train north to stay for a couple of days with the young Queen Elizabeth at Balmoral Castle. This was also the year in which, addressing Conservatives in Glasgow, he wondered aloud if “a new breeze” was “blowing through a tormented world”: he was keen to open dialogue with the successors to the late Joseph Stalin.

In November 1954 a Shetland knitter, Mrs RC Slater, made a pullover for Sir Winston on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The garment bore a Norwegian pattern depicting the tree of life.

Churchill retired from office in 1955. Four years later, Glasgow Museums and Galleries bought a 4ft-high bronze figure, the sketch design for a 9ft statue of Churchill for his Woodford constituency by Cathcart-born David McFall.

Churchill died on January 24, 1965, aged 90. Flags flew at half-mast all over Glasgow, as they did everywhere else. “He was a man for all seasons, for all time,” the Glasgow Herald said on its front page the following day. “Sir Winston Churchill had been called ‘the greatest Englishman'; and there was none to dispute the claim.”

Churchill (PG) is released on June 16

CHURCHILL AND DUNDEE

Brian Taylor, BBC Scotland's Dundee-born political editor, offers a few thoughts on Churchill and Dundee.

Churchill's tenure in Dundee marks the cusp of UK politics in the early part of the 20th century. When he arrived on the banks of the Tay, the Liberals had not long won a landslide General Election in 1906. When he left, the Liberals were quite definitely on the slide and Labour was on the rise.

But Churchill did not have fond memories of Dundee. What he had regarded as a seat for life turned out to be a substantial setback when he was defeated in 1922. Dundee reciprocates by disregarding Churchill’s links with the city.

I remember when there was talk of a statue in Dundee. It was debated, it was discussed. Arguments were evinced on both sides. The discourse was heated and intense. Finally, Dundee’s civic leaders met. They considered. Then they pronounced. They agreed to commission a statue … of Desperate Dan.

There is a tiny plaque commemorating Churchill. It is stuck on a gable end in the west of the city centre, close to a bingo hall.

Dundee had turned against Churchill, supposedly for a range of reasons. Some resented his actions against striking miners. It is said by some that Dundee’s Irish immigrant population disliked him because of his post-war attitudes on Ireland. Others felt that he was just too grand, that he tended to descend regally upon his urban constituency, rather than work with it and for it.

Whatever, he was defeated in a dual constituency by a combination of a socialist and pacifist, Edmund Morel, and a Prohibitionist, Edwin (Neddy) Scrymgeour.

Scrymgeour is still remembered in Dundee street songs – or was when I was young. The ditty ran a little like this: “Vote, vote, vote for Neddy Scrymgeour. He’s the man tae gie ye ham and eggs. If ye dinnae vote for him, we’ll ca’ yer windaes in …” As I say, something like that.

Scrymgeour is reckoned to have been the only politician elected in Britain on a solely Prohibitionist ticket – although it was a prevalent campaign at the time. Indeed, it is said that the early Labour movement in Scotland had three key aims: home rule; a minimum wage; and temperance. (Well, two out of three ain't bad.)

Folk memory in Dundee has it that in the 1922 election the town’s citizens piled out of the pubs to vote for Scrymgeour the Teetotaller purely to get Churchill out. They then headed back to the pubs.

Dundee-born Brian Cox, who plays Churchill in the new film, which is set in the run-up to D-Day in the summer of 1944, said in a recent interview that Churchill habitually put the country before himself: “He had a vision, a great heart and a great sense of caring.” Asked if he felt that Britain needed a Churchill today, the high-profile supporter of Scottish independence said it did. “[Churchill] wasn’t like the bunch of chancers we’ve got now, who are not a patch on him. Boris Johnson can bleat all he likes, but he ain’t no Winston Churchill.”