The Scottish Labour College

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The College's founding is well documented, and Maclean's founding address survives in print. Its later history, including numbers of students, funding and its exact place in the national movement, is less well covered in the sources consulted for this card. Claims about how many later union leaders and politicians passed through its classes are hard to measure.

John Maclean's classes

established John Maclean, born in Pollokshaws in 1879, was a schoolteacher, a Marxist and one of the leading figures of "Red Clydeside". He taught economics to working people for years, and his role in the Renfrewshire co-operative societies led them to press local school boards for adult economics classes. From 1912 his lectures in Bath Street, Glasgow, regularly drew between 100 and 200 people.

A college for the working class

established By 1916 Maclean and his supporters wanted something more regular and permanent. In February 1916 Maclean and James Dunlop MacDougall published A Plea for a Labour College for Scotland. It argued that the state's education system would not give workers what they needed, so "the workers must establish and maintain their own colleges to equip themselves for their own specific tasks as a class". Economics, it said, "must be taught fundamentally from a labour standpoint", with the writings of Marx as the basis of study, and history taught through the materialist method. The college was to train organisers, union officials and writers for the labour press.

The founding meeting

established The Scottish Labour College was founded in 1916 at a meeting attended by 471 delegates representing 271 trade union bodies. Maclean himself was in prison, convicted under the Defence of the Realm Act for his opposition to the war, so his address was delivered by MacDougall. Maclean was released in 1917 after demonstrations that followed the February Revolution in Russia.

Evening classes

established The College was modelled on the Central Labour College in London and ran evening classes in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen and elsewhere. Among those who attended was Mary Brooksbank (1897–1978), the Dundee mill worker, activist and songwriter.

The national movement

established In October 1921 the National Council of Labour Colleges was founded at a convention in Birmingham to coordinate the labour college movement and to provide education "from the working class point of view" through colleges, classes and lectures. The colleges, first run by the Plebs movement, came under the control of trade unions. The NCLC absorbed the Plebs League in 1927, and in 1964 it merged with the Workers' Educational Trade Union Committee to form the TUC's Education Department.

shared The Scottish Labour College is usually described as becoming part of the NCLC's network. The sources consulted for this card describe the national movement but do not set out the Scottish college's later history in detail.

Two traditions of adult education

shared Historians of Scottish adult education place the College in the second of two traditions. Janis Davidson, in her chapter of Scottish Education (5th edn, 2018), drawing on Lyn Tett and Tony Cooke, describes a "respectable" tradition in which the better-off promoted education for the poor, rooted in Calvinist ideas of self-improvement and the needs of industry, and a radical tradition that grew out of working-class movements and aimed to help men and women understand their circumstances in order to change them. In the first half of the twentieth century the respectable strand ran through university extramural classes and council evening classes, while socialist educators kept the radical strand going. Davidson notes rivalry, rooted in ideological differences, between the Workers' Educational Association and the providers of more radical socialist education in Scotland. Cooke also observes that the wish to "get on" in life motivated learners in both traditions, so the line between them should not be drawn too sharply.

established The wider setting was thin. A 1975 Scottish Education Department inquiry, the Alexander Report, concluded that Scotland had been much slower than England to develop adult education in an organised way. Independent bodies such as the labour colleges and the WEA therefore carried much of the load before the state built up community education from the 1970s.

Legacy

traditional The College is often said to have trained a generation of Scottish trade union officials, miners' agents, councillors and Labour politicians. That is plausible given its purpose and backing, but it is hard to measure from the sources available.

• John Maclean's economics lectures drew up to 200 people at a time.
• The College's founding meeting drew 471 delegates.
• Maclean was in prison when the College was founded.
• His founding address was delivered by James Dunlop MacDougall.
• The College was modelled on the Central Labour College in London.
• The Dundee songwriter Mary Brooksbank attended its classes.
• The national labour college network was founded in Birmingham in 1921.
• It became part of the TUC's education service in 1964.

• Do not give student numbers or lists of famous alumni without a source.
• Do not say Maclean addressed the founding meeting in person.
• Do not describe the College as part of the state education system; it was deliberately independent.
• Do not treat the labour colleges and the WEA as the same movement; they were rivals with different aims.