Willie McRae (18 May 1923 – 7 April 1985) was a Scottish lawyer, orator, naval officer, politician and anti-nuclear campaigner. In the Second World War he served in the British Army and then the Royal Indian Navy. He supported the Indian independence movement and for much of his life was active in the Scottish National Party (SNP).
McRae, who struggled with alcoholism and depression, died by suicide in 1985 after crashing his car in a remote part of the Scottish Highlands, shooting himself in the head with a revolver. McRae's death spawned conspiracy theories among Scottish Nationalists that he had been assassinated. These conspiracy theories were rejected by his family. Two plays related to McRae's life were staged in 2014, which prompted renewed interest in his death and the establishment of a privately funded "Justice For Willie" campaign. The campaign reported in 2016 that it had been unable to find any evidence to undermine the official suicide verdict.
Life
Early life and education
McRae was born in Carron, Falkirk, where his father was an electrician. McRae edited a local newspaper in Grangemouth at the same time as reading history at the University of Glasgow, from which he gained a first-class degree. After the war McRae returned to the University of Glasgow and graduated again, this time in law. He supported the Indian independence movement.
Political activities
McRae became a solicitor and an SNP activist. In both of the 1974 General Elections and in the 1979 General Election he stood for Parliament as the SNP candidate for Ross and Cromarty. In October 1974 he only lost to the Conservative Hamish Gray by 633 votes, but in 1979 Gray's majority increased to 4,735. In the latter year he also contested the SNP leadership, coming third in a three-way contest with 52 votes to Stephen Maxwell's 117 votes and winner Gordon Wilson's 530 votes.
McRae was a vocal critic of the British nuclear lobby. Early in the 1980s he was a key figure in a campaign against the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority plans to dispose of nuclear waste in the Mullwharchar area of the Galloway Hills. Representing the SNP in a public inquiry, McRae asked difficult questions of the UKAEA and famously declared at one meeting that "nuclear waste should be stored where Guy Fawkes put his gunpowder." The authority's plans were rejected, and McRae was credited with "single-handedly" preventing the area from becoming a nuclear waste dump.
Death
alt=|thumb|Loch Loyne, [[Glenmoriston, Inverness-shire. McRae and his car were found just off the road here.]]
McRae struggled with both depression and alcoholism: erratic behaviour led to him being removed from his law practice in 1981. At the time of his death, McRae had two drink driving convictions and was awaiting action on a third, which could have seen him jailed. He had already threatened suicide once. His brother Fergus recalled that; "Willie suffered from depression at times due to things just getting on top of him and finding it hard to cope." Fergus McRae related to the police investigating his brother's death that McRae had "not been himself" and had been drinking heavily.
On 5 April 1985 McRae left his Glasgow flat at 18:30 to spend the weekend at his cottage at Ardelve near Dornie, Ross-shire. He was not seen again until the next morning around 10:00, when two Australian tourists, Alan Crowe, an airline pilot, and his wife Barbara, saw his maroon Volvo saloon car on a moor a short distance from the junction of the A887 and A87 roads Bun Loyne, Glenmoriston, Inverness-shire.
A weapon was found on Sunday 7 April, in a pool of water directly beneath where the car had been discovered. The gun was an antique and unlicensed Smith & Wesson .22 calibre revolver containing two spent cartridges and five remaining rounds. McRae's brother Fergus confirmed that the weapon was McRae's, and that he had acquired it in India during his war service. As the weapon was unlicensed, it was detained by the police and destroyed. Allegations were made that McRae was under government surveillance; that the distance from McRae's car at which the gun was found and the lack of fingerprints on it rendered a suicide not credible; that McRae was shot twice and in the back of the neck rather than once in the temple; and that McRae was carrying incriminating papers that were not found with his body. These documents supposedly related to the dumping of nuclear waste from the Dounreay Nuclear Power Development Establishment, or an alleged paedophile ring in Westminster.
These claims were extensively investigated by the privately funded "Justice For Willie" campaign from 2015 to 2016, with the explicit aim of overturning the suicide verdict. It concluded that claims that McRae had been murdered were not credible and that there was little evidence for allegations that McRae had been under government surveillance or that documents had been removed from his body. Having been refused access to police records of the investigation and rebuffed by both the Lord Advocate and the Procurator Fiscal in her attempts to conduct private, confidential meetings with them, Ewing, as she later wrote, came "up against a brick wall".
The same year, the republican pro-independence group Siol nan Gaidheal erected a cairn near the site of McRae's crash. The cairn's plaque reads; "Willie MacRae (sic). A Scottish Patriot Died Here On The Sixth Of April 1985. The Struggle Goes On".
In 1991, Channel 4 broadcast a "Scottish Eye" documentary investigating the mysterious circumstances of McRae's death. It found evidence to suggest that McRae had been under surveillance by UK intelligence services and that his death had likely involved foul play.
In 2005, Winnie Ewing's son Fergus, by then an MSP, requested a meeting with Elish Angiolini, Solicitor General for Scotland, to discuss allegations that have persisted that McRae was under surveillance at the time of his death. The request was rebuffed, with Angiolini claiming that he had not been under surveillance and that she was satisfied that a thorough investigation into the case had been carried out.
Statements by police officers
In July 2006, a retired police officer, Iain Fraser, who was working as a private investigator at the time of McRae's death, claimed that he had been anonymously employed to keep McRae under surveillance only weeks before he died. In November 2006 an episode of the Scottish Television show Unsolved examined the circumstances of McRae's death.
In November 2010, John Finnie, then SNP group leader on Highland Council and a former police officer, wrote to the Lord Advocate urging her to re-investigate McRae's death and release any details so far withheld. Finnie's request was prompted by the release the previous month of further details concerning the death of David Kelly. In January 2011 the Crown Office requested the files on the case from Northern Constabulary.
Also in November 2010, Donald Morrison, a former Strathclyde Police officer, alleged that McRae had been "under surveillance" by both Special Branch and MI5. Morrison claimed that he had collaborated with former colleague Iain Fraser to discover more about McRae's death. Morrison called for an enquiry into McRae's death and promised that he would give it a sworn affidavit that MI5 was involved. One of the plays explored his anti-nuclear campaigning, links with nationalist radicals and allegations that Special Branch and MI5 were surveilling him.
In April 2015, a petition was opened to hold a Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) on McRae's death. It attracted 6,500 signatures in 5 days. The petition eventually collected over 13,000 signatures and was handed in, in June 2015. The Crown Office rejected the proposal to hold a Fatal Accident Inquiry. On the same day, one of the journalists involved started crowdfunding for a book on the case titled 30 Years of Silence.
On the Easter weekend of April 2015, the 30th anniversary of McRae's death, Scotland on Sunday ran a story claiming that McRae's Volvo was moved back to the crash site by Northern Constabulary in an attempt to hide that the car had been moved before the bullet had been found – accounting for the discrepancies relating to the gun's distance from the car. The claims in this article were examined by the Justice For Willie campaign in 2016 and found to be misleading: claims that the car was removed and then returned to the scene were dismissed by witnesses and officers who attended at the time, and allegations that the gun was found several yards from the car were described by a police officer as "a load of rubbish".