Alex Salmond biography: A skinny, quiet but talented boy who liked the girls and horses but learned how to put Scotland first

THE young Alex Salmond was no stranger to the tawse. At his first school, Linlithgow Primary, he was once belted for making farmyard noises.

"I kept clucking in class, which I thought was very amusing, but my teacher thought it was less so," Salmond recalled nearly 40 years after his first painful lashes. "Mrs Baird was a formidable woman, but an extremely good teacher," he added. "I had the belt six times in primary one, but not very often after that - I was a bit more careful." The experience, he added, had not done him any harm.

It was also at primary school that Salmond experienced his first foray into populist politics, standing for the SNP in mock elections. "It was the only party left," he explained later. "I had a landslide victory because I advocated half-day school and the replacement of free school milk with ice cream."

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Margaret Henderson, who taught him in Primary 6, reckons there may have been another, possibly subconscious, influence during this period. "At the time I was teaching, the BMC car factory came up from Birmingham to Bathgate and lots of English workers said they were coming up to 'civilise the Scots'. Now that did not go down at all. It put my back up, and perhaps the whole atmosphere rubbed off on the boys."

Henderson also remembered the young Salmond's health problems. "Alex had very bad asthma and so did my son and she (his mother Mary Salmond] was always very nice to me because our boys had similar problems. I could hear him breathing from the front of the classroom because his asthma was so bad, but it didn't stop him joining in the fun. He was also terribly untidy. If you remember the chap in the Persil advert with his shirt hanging out, then that was Alex. His desk looked like it had been stirred by a stick, but he was a very clever lad."

A fellow pupil at Linlithgow Primary was Murdoch Kennedy, who suffered a stammer and was later active with him in the Linlithgow SNP branch. "There was never any bother with Alex," added Henderson, "although I didn't see him as a politician but more a scientist, someone who was serious but clever."

Salmond's childhood appears to have been a happy one. His parents were loving, encouraging and delighted not just in his progress, but also that of his brother and two sisters, who all lived at a council house on Preston Road. "We weren't poor," Salmond stressed in 1990, "but money was tight. Education was important to my family and they managed to send all four of us to university. It can't have been easy."

"His parents had a very gentle calm influence on all the family,' recalled one of Salmond's teachers, "that all of them should work hard and study hard, which they did." Journalists later noted Salmond's "serenity", a rootedness probably stemming from a stable childhood in which his mother was the predominant influence.

Blessed with a good memory, Salmond took a trainspotter's delight in memorising footballing facts and figures, although there was disappointment when his teacher did not include him in the school team. Following Hearts took Salmond south of the Border for the first time. His team had reached the final of the Texaco Cup (later the Anglo-Scottish Cup) and had to play Wolverhampton Wanderers over two legs in 1971.

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Hearts lost 3-1 at home on 14 April 1971, but beat Wolves 1-0 on 3 May, losing 3-2 on aggregate. "The latter was the game Alex travelled down to see," recalled a university friend. "He went down and back in the same day and expressed no desire to travel south again." Indeed, it is possible he did not visit England again until he worked for the Scottish Office in the late 1970s. "Given the choice," he said in 2005, "I would rather travel west than south."

Salmond started indulging in "the sport of kings" aged nine, in 1964, after his uncle Andrew told him an Irish horse called Arkle was going "to humble the pride of England", a horse called Millhouse in the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Salmond watched in grainy black and white as Arkle won. "My half-a-crown became seven-and-six," he later recalled, "and I suddenly started to become interested in horse racing."

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Salmond's father called him "skink" (as in Cullen Skink) as a child because he was so skinny, but food played a big part in his life and continued to do so into adulthood. He later recalled his mother's Christmas cakes being the talk of the town. "She would make some 50 each year to give out to extended family, friends and old folk," he said. "I used to dispatch them. These were serious cakes and they lasted for ages." His favourite dish, however, was rice pudding made with goat's milk because of a severe allergy to cow's milk.

As current affairs were discussed at home, his parents were not immediately aware of his interest. "I'm not political and I didn't see it," recalled Mary Salmond, "but the lady next door who Alex used to pop in and see a lot said to me, 'I can see him in Parliament one day', and I thought, 'what rubbish'."

At secondary school, Linlithgow Academy, the teenage Salmond stood out. "He was confident, didn't go with the pack," remembered a contemporary. "He wasn't a loner but certainly stood out as an individual, he also wasn't afraid of standing up to teachers. In fifth and sixth year we all used to play cards in the common room and Alex played a big part in that."

Salmond had surprised his parents by revealing himself to be a talented boy soprano. Mary remembered arriving late at the school for a "little concert" and being struck by a moving performance of the traditional Irish folk song, The Lark in the Clear Air. "I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard," she recalled, "but I didn't know it was Alex."

Salmond's vocal talent reached a wider audience when an Edinburgh organist called Dr EF Thomas, sought out a boy soprano for what would be the only Scottish touring production of Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl And The Night Visitors. an hour-long one-act opera which was then a popular Christmas classic. He did two performances in the lead role at Callendar Park College of Education and St Michael's Church over the festive period of 1967-68 and was, according to his mother, "absolutely marvellous".

Covering the first performance at the end of 1967, the Linlithgowshire Journal and Gazette noted he was co-starring with 20 girls (Menotti stipulated Amahl must be a boy) but "did not seem overawed in the slightest by his female company".

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Shortly afterwards his voice broke. "I used to be able to sing lots of octaves and I ended up being able to sing about four notes, so I wasn't good at it any more," he recalled. "But the one thing it left me with was being able to be in front of audiences."

His school reports were "satisfactory without being brilliant". He preferred to sit at the back of the class, among the girls, but took his studies seriously without larking about. For Sixth Year Studies English Salmond chose to study the poetry of RS Thomas. Blind since birth, Thomas was a cleric who became a committed Welsh Nationalist on leaving the ministry in 1978. A difficult man, he refused to support Plaid Cymru because he believed they did not go far enough in their opposition to English rule. He did, however, support the Meibion Glyndwr fire-bombings of English holiday cottages in rural Wales.

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Evidence of how his prose and poetry shaped Salmond's thinking can be found in a Thomas essay on Scotland which Salmond would later quote: "And so we come full circle back to the crude reality, the necessity for politics, distasteful as they may appear. For it is England, the home of the industrial revolution, and the consequent 20th-century rationalism, that have been the winter on our native pastures, and we must break their grip, and the grip of all the quislings and yes-men before we can strike that authentic note."