As a Scottish Liberal Party (SLP) publication later observed: ‘Partly because of distance, partly because of national feeling, Liberals in Scotland felt they could run their own affairs better as an independent Party, rather than as a unit of a U.K. Party, directed from London.’ At this point the SLP was not, as activist Sandra Grieve observed, ‘a mass membership party, it had virtually no money, no external sponsorship and little prospect of electoral success’. It was headed by a president, initially ‘titular, rather than active’, beneath which sat a chairman, ‘the organisational head’ and ‘political leader’, three vice-chairmen and one or two treasurers. Finally, there was a small executive to which all specialist committees reported.

Lady Glen-Coats was the first chair (1946), succeeded by John G. Wilson in 1952, both of whom had the job of leading the SLP ‘through the especially difficult days of the late 40s and early 50s’. Glen-Coats in particular kept the show on the road when the party could easily have ceased to exist. The daughter-in-law of Sir Thomas Glen-Coats, the Liberal MP for West Renfrewshire 1906–1910 and a prominent industrialist in Paisley, she became something of a Liberal talent spotter, encouraging Sir William Beveridge to stand for Parliament during the war and recommending a young Jo Grimond to the electors of Orkney & Shetland in 1945 (she had been due to stand herself). Sandra Grieve reckoned Glen-Coats ‘set the tone for women in the party’, with those prominent ‘well educated, well connected, articulate and confident, in fact not so different from the men’.

Despite the reforms of 1946, there remained a rather ‘uneasy’ and ‘ill-defined’ relationship between the SLP and the Liberal Party Organisation (LPO) in London. The Scottish Liberal Federation had been part of the LPO but the SLP considered itself ‘wholly independent, running its own organisation, raising its own money, selected its own Candidates, determining its own priorities and campaigns’. In practice, however, it accepted the leadership of the UK Parliamentary Liberal Party, from whom the national leader was drawn, while also tending ‘to follow policy leads from its larger English partner’.