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Scots Who Ha'e. Scottish nationalists appeared as puzzled as the police. In the last year, 1,700,000 Scots who believe that Scotland suffers from the centralization of government in London have put their signatures to the Scottish Covenant, a petition asking for a Scottish parliament. But serious nationalists are few. One of them, Aberdeen Engineer Gordon Murray, leader of the tiny Scottish Republican Party, which had once boasted that it had designs on the Stone, said: "We would certainly like to take the credit, but I'm afraid we properly can't." Bouncy, kilt-wearing Mrs. Wendy ("Wee Wendy") Wood, leader of the Scottish Patriots' Association, who in 1932 roused her followers to tear down the British flag from Stirling Castle, said: "It's the best news I have heard in years. The Stone was retrieved, not stolen." Her group did not take it, she hastened to add.
Then someone drew attention to a novel called The North Wind of Love, written in 1944 by Scottish Nationalist Compton Mackenzie, onetime rector of Glasgow University, in which he describes a group of Scottish college graduates who conspire to liberate the Stone, but are exposed at the last moment. Said jubilant Author Mackenzie last week: "I hope I may have given good advice to the young men who carried out this successful effort and shown them what to avoid ... No patriotic Scot could help having a feeling of elation." Mysterious stickers appeared on Glasgow shop fronts: "Would you keep stolen property in YOUR church?"
Destiny's Ransom. At week's end the Glasgow Daily Record published a petition, addressed to King George, which it had received through the mail. The petitioners, who did not sign their names, boasted that they had taken the Stone of Destiny, offered proof by giving unpublished but accurate details of the wrist watch left behind in the Abbey. They petitioned that the Stone be kept in Scotland henceforth, and taken to London only for the coronation of the King's successors.
The Times had called the theft "a coarse and vulgar crime," and the BBC had banned all jokes mentioning the Stone, including the remark that no Scot could have taken the Stone because no Scot would have left a wrist watch behind. Said the Manchester Guardian: "Need we English be much wounded by the loss of the Stone, if it is never recovered? We have a far better and more respectable one of our own, the King's Stone, now at Kingston-on-Thames, on which the Saxon Kings were crowned."