MARCH 3, 1953, three months before the Coronation. The man who rang the Glasgow Herald at midnight, speaking with an educated Scottish voice, said that posters were being put up across the city at that very moment, and would be all over Scotland by morning, offering a £2,000 reward for information “leading to the identification of Elizabeth 1 of Scotland, dead or alive.”

This was an issue at the time. One Scots Labour MP said that “numbers of people in Scotland, and not the Scottish Nationalists alone” were “deeply concerned about what they consider to be the unjustified use of ‘Elizabeth II’. He and some colleagues wanted the Commons to reject the Royal Titles Bill as it did not “provide for a historically accurate royal title for Scotland.”

The Edinburgh Conservative MP, Sir William Darling publicly supported ‘Elizabeth II’ as the new title. He received a live machine-gun bullet wrapped in cotton wool, and the offer of police protection. At Renfrew County Council a move was made to disapprove of the cipher ‘E II R’ on 52,000 Coronation souvenir tins of toffees.

On March 4 this paper reported that the “Scottish Republican Army” had warned that unless a “certain sign” was removed - the wording on the Royal Scots Memorial in Edinburgh, which mentioned ‘Queen Elizabeth II’ - it would again mobilise. On March 6 the Herald said two men had been questioned by police in relation to the Scottish National Congress ‘reward’ posters.