The newspaper, which had as its slogan "Read the people's paper and keep 500 in jobs",[1] folded after six months with a deficit of £1.2 million,[3] but was published for another six months by a small group of employees who, led by journalist Dorothy-Grace Elder, staged the country's one and only newspaper work-in, writing and selling the paper themselves on the streets of Glasgow, taking no salaries, and refusing to leave the Albion Street building.
The first 16-page edition of the newspaper rolled off the presses as a broadsheet, as the Scottish Daily Express had been, at 9:50 p.m. on 4 May 1975, under the editorship of Fred Sillito, with Andrew McCallum as news editor, and 500 employee-shareholders.
The journalists, based on the third floor of the Albion Street building, agreed to take a basic £69 a week salary and the editor £150.
After taking returns into account, this produced an actual sales figures of less than 180,000, which meant that financial losses had begun to occur.
[3] After the capital costs were taken into account, Hird wrote, the company had a start-up budget of only £950,000, a relatively small amount to launch a new paper.
The losses continued, made worse on 19 September when Beaverbrook began legal action to recover £59,000 the company said was still owed on the sale of the building.
The next day, 21 October, members of the executive council met Prime Minister Harold Wilson to ask again, without success, that the government's loan conditions be relaxed.
On Saturday, 1 November, the workers held a rally in at Custom House Quay attended by several hundred employees and members of the Scottish National Party (SNP), where speakers appealed to the government to save the newspaper and the 500 jobs.
A small group of employees stood outside factories and stores at five o'clock every morning shaking tin cans and asking for donations, a situation that continued for six months until, needing to earn a living, workers began to leave, putting an end to Scotland's experiment in worker-controlled news production.
Throughout, I dreaded the day the phone would ring to tell us the police would be sent in to re-claim the building (then part owned by the Labour government and with a council interest also).