John Maclean by Henry Bell

John Maclean by Henry Bell

Author:Henry Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)


The mainstream newspapers told a similar – though less emphatic – story, adding that the procession continued to his home in Shawlands, and that there was no reason to fear for Maclean’s health. The Daily Record printed large pictures of Maclean being greeted on the platform, and waving an enormous red flag in front of a crowd.14

However, when recalling the event ten years later, Dora Montefiore gave a very different account, remembering ‘the agony of his wife and the sorrow of his relatives’ and finding Maclean to be the ‘wrung-out rags of humanity’. She added later that ‘His thoughts were now disconnected, his speech was irresponsible, his mind, from solitary confinement, was absolutely self-centred. In a word, prison life had done its work on a delicately-balanced psychology, and our unfortunate comrade was now a mental wreck.’15

But by the time her second account was written, Dora Montefiore had parted ways politically with Maclean and she was motivated to discredit him. Her view contradicts that of Maclean’s prison doctor, who wrote two months earlier that ‘Mentally he was quite clear and gave no evidence of insanity.’16

Nevertheless, months of confinement and daily force-feeding had taken their toll on Maclean. When the springs of his carriage collapsed at Carlton Place, speeches were made, but Maclean’s throat was too sore for him to speak.

Regardless of his health, Maclean’s election campaign was already in full swing when he arrived back in the city. Willie Gallacher was acting as his agent, and his election address had already been circulated throughout the city. The prospect of a recently jailed Bolshevik revolutionary fighting a Cabinet minister for a seat in Parliament was an exciting one, and the press and public watched with interest. But Maclean was unwilling to make any further speeches, and did not appear in public for most of the campaign – it is a matter of debate as to whether it was his throat and respiratory complaints, or his mental health, that kept him at home. Meanwhile, the whole of Scotland was jubilant at the Allied victory and the end of the war, and the spirit of jingoism was dominant in the election, with George Barnes declaring to cheering crowds: ‘I am for hanging the Kaiser.’17

The newspapers echoed that nationalism, and where previously the press had accused Maclean and other socialists of being German agents, they now repeated suggestions that Maclean’s politics were foreign in some other way. The Birmingham Post carried the following article:

Now John Maclean is the head and front of whatever revolutionary movement there may be on the Clyde and the great cities in the South which are supposed to contain missionaries of his … No Labour leader with a well-poised brain would go hunger-striking in gaol; having been so maladroit as to get himself incarcerated he would husband his strength against the time when he would be free, and not behave like a silly suffragette or a feeble-minded Conscientious Objector. That hunger-striking gives a clue to John Maclean’s mentality … That is



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