In 1939, as Britain braced for the possibility of a Nazi invasion, the government printed 2.45 million copies of a poster to keep in reserve for the darkest days ahead.
Its message was a simple five-word command: Keep Calm and Carry On.
That stiff-upper-lip slogan is far better known today than it was during the Second World War. The posters remained in storage for months after being printed and, in April 1940, almost all were pulped so the paper could be recycled.
It is a myth that wartime Britons constantly had those words ringing in their ears. It is no myth, however, that they tried to live by them.
In the autumn of 2026, it no longer takes the threat of a Nazi invasion to test the nation’s resolve. These days, all it takes is a single email sent by an anonymous person with a keyboard and a mouse.
About 1,000 schools across Scotland received the same email, headed ‘Death is near’. The sender claimed to be Mikhail Andropov, leader of the Red Owl project — a fictional activist organisation apparently created for this wave of hoax bomb threats.
‘We’re going to carry out a genocide against your people,’ the message stated, before claiming that a bomb had been planted on school premises.
Parents collect their children in Inverness after nearby Culloden Academy was evacuated
About 1,000 schools across Scotland received the identical email
Schools in Northern Ireland received similar messages. Thousands of schools in Italy were also targeted with a variation of the threat, although in those emails Andropov was described as the leader of the ‘Vilayat of Misoginistan’. Roughly translated, that means the Province of Woman Hater Land.
One can only wonder how much amusement the sender found in inventing that pseudo-sinister nonsense — or in cobbling together the names of two former Soviet leaders.
Probably not as much amusement, though, as the spectacle that followed shortly after 10am on Wednesday, when the response descended into a display of headless-chicken panic.
Across Scotland, the reaction became a postcode lottery of confusion. Every targeted school received the same email at the same time, yet the response varied dramatically between local authorities — and, in some cases, from one school to the next.
In Glasgow, schools largely stayed open and carried on. In Edinburgh, schools that received the message evacuated their pupils.
Both councils insist they acted according to established safety procedures. But can both approaches really be right?
Perth and Kinross Council said some schools that received the bomb threat took the ‘precautionary decision to evacuate’. They certainly did. At Kinross High, videos showed children gathered on sports pitches beneath foil blankets, resembling survivors of a natural disaster.
It raises an obvious question: why did some schools within the same local authority evacuate while others did not?
‘Schools took appropriate action based on the circumstances and information available,’ the council said.
The email was the same, the council was the same and the police advice was the same. Yet depending on which academy you attend, you either end up shivering on a football pitch or continue with double maths.
The emergency protocol appears to have been reduced to a coin toss, with ‘run for your lives’ and ‘carry on as normal’ somehow both deemed correct.
In the Highlands, parents of pupils at Invergordon Academy received a text saying the school would close for the rest of the day and students would be sent home ‘with immediate effect’. Parents were also told not to come to the school to collect their children.
Twenty-five miles away, in the same council area, Fortrose Academy on the Black Isle also closed its doors. But its message to parents instructed them to come and collect their children from school.
Stay away! Come immediately! Everybody out — grab a foil blanket at the door! Remain in your seats — and keep your eyes on the blackboard!
Pupils from Kinross Academy in Fife are evacuated
Somewhere in a darkened room, an unpleasant figure at a computer must have been laughing. If Scotland has a nationwide — or even council-wide — procedure for dealing with malicious emails sent to schools, it appears to have been written by committee, shredded and pieced back together in the dark.
Every possible response, from abandoning the building to remaining at desks, was adopted somewhere.
It looked less like an emergency plan than an attempt to cover every number on the roulette wheel, ensuring that at least some schools could later claim to have made the right decision. Yet the most troubling part of the confusion was that nobody could say they had been caught completely unprepared.
Only last month, almost the same scenario unfolded. A malicious email alleging that explosives had been planted on school premises reached hundreds of schools across Scotland, as well as several in Northern Ireland.
The sender had apparently failed to account for Scotland’s October break. Schools across most of the country were empty, leaving headteachers with no pupils to evacuate and no parents to alarm.
What councils received was effectively a low-stakes, nationwide rehearsal. Even if nobody had previously imagined that one threatening email could be sent to hundreds of schools at the click of a mouse, there was now a clear example in front of them. Was that not the moment to get organised and agree a coherent response before the inevitable repeat?
To be fair to headteachers, nobody would envy the judgment they were forced to make on Wednesday. It is preferable to face ridicule from commentators such as me for overreacting to an obvious hoax than to take a chance on a threat that turns out to be genuine.
They are condemned if they act and condemned immeasurably more severely if they fail to act. That is precisely why councils, police forces and the Scottish Government need a clear, agreed and joined-up protocol.
Some people, including Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto, believe the author of the latest threat is simply a ‘cretin’. Others — myself included — suspect there may be more behind it.
This did not look to me like a simple prank. It looked more like an information-gathering exercise: a vital part of civic infrastructure was being stress-tested, and we do not know by whom or for what purpose.
What the sender now knows beyond doubt is how much disruption can be caused in Scotland by a few lines of copy-and-pasted nonsense sent by email.
The message will empty some classrooms while others remain full. It will send thousands of parents racing towards school gates while thousands more are told to stay away. It will tie up police control rooms, occupy government ministers and, ultimately, reveal decision-makers frozen like rabbits in headlights.
If this was a stress test, then Scotland failed it. We were part Corporal Jones — leaping around and shouting ‘Don’t panic! Don’t panic!’ — and part Captain Mainwaring, puffing out his chest and insisting everything was under control as disorder spread around him.
Keep calm and carry on? That was our finest hour. On this occasion, we scattered like startled pigeons in every direction.
j.brocklebank@dailymail.co.uk