John Maclean (1879–1923): Red Clydeside's Revolutionary Teacher

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.

Maclean has been claimed by communists, socialists and nationalists, each emphasising different parts of his life. Much writing about him is admiring, and some claims, such as that his health was ruined by deliberate poisoning in prison, rest on his own suspicions. This card reports what is documented and labels the rest.

The teacher

established John Maclean was born in Pollokshaws, then a separate burgh south of Glasgow, on 24 August 1879. His father came from Mull and his mother from Corpach near Fort William, and both spoke Gaelic. His father, a potter, died when John was young, and his mother worked to keep the family. Maclean trained as a teacher under the Free Church and, studying part-time, took an MA at the University of Glasgow in 1904.

established Maclean became a Marxist and joined the Social Democratic Federation, later the British Socialist Party. His great gift was teaching. His evening classes in Marxist economics drew hundreds of workers at a time, and he later helped found the Scottish Labour College to provide independent working-class education.

established Maclean's classes belonged to a wider movement. The historian Jonathan Rose, in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), traces "independent working-class education" to the Plebs League, formed in October 1908 by rebel students at Ruskin College, Oxford, who founded the Marxist Central Labour College in 1909. A National Council of Labour Colleges followed in 1921 to carry Marxist classes across Britain, in open rivalry with the Workers' Educational Association, which offered university-style teaching it called impartial. Rose does not discuss Maclean himself.

shared Rose argues that much Marxist teaching in the labour colleges was dogmatic and full of jargon, which cut it off from many of the workers it aimed to reach. His Glasgow examples include the foundryman Thomas Bell, later Maclean's biographer, who admitted that the Socialist Labour Party could silence opponents with quotations from Marx and Engels "but we never made members", and the Communist J. R. Campbell, whose study circles for Glasgow slum-dwellers left his students baffled, as his stepson recalled (both as quoted by Rose). Maclean's own classes were famous for their large audiences, so how far this criticism fits him is an open question.

Against the war

established When war broke out in 1914, Maclean opposed it as an imperialist conflict fought for the profits of the ruling class, and he spoke against it across Clydeside, supporting the rent strikes and workers' resistance to wartime controls. On 27 October 1915 he was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act, and Govan School Board dismissed him from his teaching post. He became a full-time revolutionary lecturer and organiser, and in 1916 he was imprisoned. Protests secured his release in 1917.

Soviet consul

established After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks honoured him. In January 1918 he was named one of the honorary presidents of the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets, and in February Lenin's government appointed him Soviet consul in Scotland. He opened a consulate in Glasgow, but the British government refused to recognise it.

The speech from the dock

established On 15 April 1918 Maclean was arrested for sedition. At his trial in Edinburgh in May he conducted his own defence and delivered a speech lasting about 75 minutes. It included the lines: "I am not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot." He was sentenced to five years' penal servitude.

established In Peterhead prison he went on hunger strike and was force-fed, an ordeal that permanently damaged his health. After a public campaign he was released on 3 December 1918, weeks after the armistice, to a huge welcome in Glasgow.

shared Maclean believed his food was being drugged in prison. His suspicions are recorded, but there is no independent evidence that he was deliberately poisoned.

Isolation and death

established In the December 1918 general election Maclean stood as the Labour candidate for Glasgow Gorbals against the sitting MP George Barnes, and lost. When the Communist Party of Great Britain was formed in 1920, Maclean refused to join, disagreeing with its direction from Moscow and its rejection of his belief in a separate Scottish revolution. In 1923 he founded the Scottish Workers' Republican Party, which combined communism with independence for Scotland.

established Weakened by prison and poverty, he collapsed while speaking outdoors in November 1923 and died of pneumonia at home in Pollokshaws on 30 November 1923, aged 44. Thousands followed his funeral.

Legacy

established Lenin named Maclean among the isolated heroes of world revolution, and the Soviet Union issued a stamp in his honour in 1979. The poet and folklorist Hamish Henderson wrote "The John Maclean March" for a memorial meeting in 1948, and Sorley MacLean and Hugh MacDiarmid wrote poems about him.

shared His legacy is contested. Scottish nationalists claim him as an early advocate of independence; communists as a revolutionary martyr; others see a brave and principled but politically isolated figure whose later years were marked by ill health. All agree on his courage and his gift as an educator.

The 1918 trial in more detail

established The historian Terry Brotherstone, who edited the speech for publication, describes the trial at the High Court in Edinburgh on 9 May 1918, under the Defence of the Realm Act. Maclean made no attempt to win an acquittal. He rejected the authority of the court, conducted his own defence and addressed his roughly 75-minute speech less to the judge and jury than to the labour movement in Britain and abroad. The trial lasted less than a day and no official transcript survives in the public records, but it drew great interest: the court was so packed that not everyone who had walked most of the way from Glasgow could get in. About a month later Lenin told a trade union conference in Moscow that the Scottish schoolteacher had been jailed "because he acted openly as the representative of our government". Lenin had earlier named Maclean, alongside Karl Liebknecht and Friedrich Adler, among "the isolated heroes" of world revolution, and when the founding congress of the Third International was called in 1919, Maclean was the only person in Britain invited by name.

established Prison records show the authorities divided over what to do with him. The Secretary of State for Scotland considered, on the advice of some doctors, having him certified insane; the idea was dropped. Letting him die on hunger strike was ruled out, partly for fear of the reaction. After his wife revealed, following a visit to Peterhead on 22 October 1918, that he had been force-fed without her knowledge, protests spread so widely that George Barnes, the Labour minister in the coalition cabinet, pressed for his release. Barnes was the sitting MP for the Gorbals, where Maclean had already been chosen as the Labour candidate. In the December election Maclean polled about 7,000 votes to Barnes's 14,000, despite a hostile press and the opposition of the Catholic Church.

Madness or politics? The argument about his last years

shared For decades much of what was known about Maclean came from Willie Gallacher's Revolt on the Clyde (1936) and Tom Bell's John Maclean: A Fighter for Freedom (1944). Brotherstone argues that both authors, writing as Communist Party leaders, left the impression of "a mentally unstable, historically marginal, Scottish martyr". Gallacher had failed to carry out Lenin's request to persuade Maclean to come to Soviet Russia, and Maclean publicly regarded Gallacher as theoretically naive. In The Legend of Red Clydeside (1983) the political scientist Iain McLean argued that Maclean's speech supported the Secretary of State's view that he was "more or less a lunatic", pointing to its claim that his food had been tampered with in Peterhead.

shared On the drugging claim itself the evidence is clear: an internal inquiry at the time found it had no substance, Gerry Rubin found no supporting evidence in government records in 1980, and Brotherstone, having read the later Scottish Office files, agrees that this is unlikely to change. But Brotherstone argues that the passage was about prison conditions generally, and that alertness to state surveillance was realism rather than paranoia: Special Branch under Basil Thomson really was reporting on revolutionaries for the cabinet. He also notes that the historians J. McHugh and B. J. Ripley found the Scottish national question was "not of primary political importance" in Maclean's 1920 attempt to form a Scottish Communist Party or in the Scottish Workers' Republican Party of 1923, a reading other historians dispute.

• From October 1918 until 1994 a Petrograd (later Leningrad) avenue was named Prospekt Maklina after John Maclean; it is now Angliysky Prospekt again.
• When the founding congress of the Third International was called in 1919, Maclean was the only person in Britain invited by name.
• Maclean's parents were Gaelic speakers from Mull and Corpach.
• He was sacked as a teacher by Govan School Board in 1915.
• Lenin's government made him Soviet consul in Scotland in 1918.
• His speech from the dock lasted about 75 minutes.
• He was force-fed on hunger strike in Peterhead.
• The Soviet Union put him on a postage stamp in 1979.

• Disputed: Whether Maclean's last years were marked by mental illness. Officials at the time and some historians, notably Iain McLean, have said so. Terry Brotherstone and others argue the evidence comes mainly from hostile official records and from the memoirs of Willie Gallacher and Tom Bell.
• Myth: Maclean was deliberately poisoned in prison. He believed his food was drugged, but an internal inquiry at the time found no substance in it, and no independent evidence has been found.
• Disputed: How central Scottish independence was to him. He founded the Scottish Workers' Republican Party in 1923, but J. McHugh and B. J. Ripley found the national question "not of primary political importance" in his 1920 attempt to form a Scottish Communist Party or in the 1923 party itself. Other historians dispute that reading.
• Myth: Britain recognised him as Soviet consul. Lenin's government appointed him in February 1918, but the British government refused to recognise the post.
• Myth: He was a Communist Party member. He refused to join the Communist Party of Great Britain when it was formed in 1920.