Most accounts of the cultural and political revival movement known as the Scottish Renaissance finish with the outbreak of World War Two in 1939: a convenient but unsatisfactory closure since it robs the movement of its last words. As the previous chapter has shown, such a periodisation is equally unsatisfactory in relation to the later stages of Scottish modernism. In consequence, Scottish culture in the 1940s and 1950s often appears to be stranded in a kind of no-man's land, cut off from the innovative national and European influences of the previous two decades and waiting to be rescued by the new demotic and largely urban writing which, together with the popular culture of the 1960s generation, will take it on a different journey. Yet this perception of the stationary cultural journey of the 1940s and 1950s is not true to the reality of the period as can be seen from the primary sources of the time.

It is certainly the case that as with the changes brought to modernist art generally as a result of two World Wars, World War Two did mark the end of the originating and principal development phase of Scottish modernism, although its character had been altering throughout the 1930s in response to political, social and economic pressures.