\n At the event, the campaign will launch the next crowdfunder to raise the rest of the funds required to commission a life-sized, bronze statue of Maclean to be erected at Glasgow\u2019s Saltmarket.\n<\/p>\n
\n The event, taking place in the Old Burnt Barns, 179 London Road, Glasgow G40 1PA, and starting at 7pm, will be chaired by the author Ron Culley. He will open the meeting, before a number of speakers will address the question \u201cWhy a statue of John Maclean?\u201d After the speeches there will be a Q&A session where folk can find out more about Maclean and how the campaign is going. It\u2019s an open meeting \u2013 all welcome.\n<\/p>\n
\n Poster for John McLean event (Image: Supplied)\n<\/p>\n
\n For the last three weeks I\u2019ve been writing about an exhibition currently running in Shetland<\/a> Museum in Lerwick, centred on the lives and work of Hugh MacDiarmid, his wife Valda and their son Michael, on the island of Whalsay from 1933-42.\n<\/p>\n \n It is perhaps even less well-known that John Maclean visited Shetland<\/a> in 1907, and I am indebted to Brian Smith of the Shetland Amenity Trust, for reminding me of this. To quote the biography by Maclean\u2019s daughter, Nan Milton: \u201cMaclean spent six weeks of his summer holiday in 1907, for the third year in succession, on a propaganda tour, covering every area in which a branch [of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF)] existed, and doing pioneering work in many others, like Lerwick in the Shetlands.\n<\/p>\n \n READ MORE: Inside the must-see exhibition currently running in Shetland<\/a>\n<\/p>\n \n \u201cThere he gave evening lectures for a week under the auspices of the Lerwick Working Men\u2019s Association. His subjects, as advertised in the local newspaper, were: \u2018The Inevitability of Socialism\u2019, The Basic Principles of Socialism\u2019, Socialists and Education<\/a>\u2019, Socialism and the Trusts\u2019, \u2018The Class Struggle\u2019, and \u2018Socialism and Morality\u2019.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n The following paragraph was quoted by Milton as a tribute paid by one of his audience at that time, as told to Peter Jamieson in Lerwick in 1948: \u201cMaclean was an outstanding personality. I have pleasant memories of he and I strolling out the North Road, he with [a copy of Marx\u2019s] Capital firmly held under his arm, listening eagerly while I tried to demonstrate some of the enormities of landlordism and the iniquities of \u2018fishing tenures\u2019 in Shetland.\n<\/p>\n \n \u201cHe was most attentive and the tenderness of his heart was outstandingly apparent when there was mention of oppression and hardship.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n Milton comments: \u201cThe concrete results of his summer tours were new branches and new members for the established ones. Thus before leaving Shetland that year a new branch had been formed in Lerwick.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n Despite the numerous lectures and talks and the sheer energy he must have spent travelling and addressing the meetings, Maclean\u2019s writing is quite limited, although the collection In The Rapids Of Revolution: Essays, Articles And Letters 1902-23, edited by Nan Milton (London: Alison & Busby, 1978) is an essential book for anyone interested seriously in Scotland\u2019s social history and possible futures.\n<\/p>\n \n Milton explains that the reason why there\u2019s a relative scarcity of his writing was due to the fact that Maclean was first and foremost concerned with education. \u201cThe Scottish working class was poorly educated. After leaving school, very few read anything but newspapers, although all respectable households contained at least two books \u2013 the Bible and the poems of Robbie Burns. Maclean\u2019s educational work had to be done orally, and he never at any time wrote more than a short pamphlet.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n In 2026, with almost all Scotland\u2019s public media opposing independence and suppressing any genuine discussion of its virtues and liabilities, the priority of education enacted by Maclean seems to me exemplary, and more urgently in need of recognition than ever.\n<\/p>\n \n On April 26, 1913, in the SDF journal Justice (I owe this information to Brian Smith), the columnist \u201cGael\u201d (Maclean), discussing the need for SDF publications, noted that \u201cShetland alone could keep a daily going\u201d \u2013 high praise, recognition of the significant radical component in Shetland and a register of the fact that he was still thinking about his comrades in the northern archipelago more than half a decade later.\n<\/p>\n \n And this returns us to the exhibition \u2013 Outwith: Valda, MacDiarmid and Whalsay \u2013 at the Shetland Museum. And it prompts me to consider MacDiarmid\u2019s involvement with the local people and how the economy of Shetland enters his poetry.\n<\/p>\n \n In 1939, MacDiarmid gave practical help to a group of Whalsay cottars, opposing the County Assessor\u2019s raising of rates. At their request, MacDiarmid argued forcefully for them, in meetings and in letters, pointing out that they shouldn\u2019t be charged any rates, as they had no public amenities at all.\n<\/p>\n \n The assessor, Thomas Johnston, wrote to the laird, William Bruce, MacDiarmid\u2019s erstwhile bridge partner in Symbister House, who agreed that the poet was \u201can infernal nuisance. He is being well watched here I can tell you, and will be reported if there is any sedition.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n MacDiarmid secured a Sir Alexander MacEwan to act as the cottars\u2019 legal representative but it was impossible, in the event, for him to get to Shetland in time to do so.\n<\/p>\n \n When the appeals were dismissed, the assessor wrote a letter to the Lerwick paper to justify himself. MacDiarmid replied, noting of Johnston and the \u201creactionary council\u201d who supported him: \u201cI repudiate all the \u2018conventional lies\u2019 which are used to dignify Mr Johnston\u2019s business<\/a> \u2013 and mask his personal responsibility for what he does. I am simply and solely concerned with the ultimate fact that on no matter what specious pretexts in the home country of the wealthiest empire in the world, and at a time when national service is being appealed for on all hands or made compulsory, the administrative system finds it necessary to \u2018put the screw\u2019 on the poorest of the poor and wring a few more shillings out of people below the subsistence level. That is what it all boils down to, and I have no hesitation in stigmatising it as a shameful and intolerable state of affairs and condemning lock, stock and barrel the system under which it takes place and the officials who work that system.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n In his autobiography Lucky Poet, MacDiarmid pictures himself in his croft, \u201ca nice commodious four-roomed cottage standing on a hillside and looking out over a tangled pattern of complicated tideways, voes, and islands with snaggled coasts to the North Shetland mainland and the Atlantic\u201d.\n<\/p>\n \n The human scale is suggested again when says, 400 pages later, \u201cThese are the thoughts with which I sit by my Shetland window completing the writing of this book …\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n So when we consider the matters of MacDiarmid\u2019s daily life, domestic work, local conditions, contexts of social inequality and political injustice, and see them measured in his imagination and literary work, there is no discrepancy between the daily work, the material facts, storms, opposition and darkness, and the love of islands, the returning tides, the value of the lives of the people around him and what his best art might deliver, long-term.\n<\/p>\n \n What mattered for MacDiarmid is not what the artist has to teach in any condescending way but rather what the artist has to learn from the lives of the people he lives among, forms of attention, acquiring knowledge, forming articulation and taking action.\n<\/p>\n \n READ MORE: A real hub of creativity is found in Shetland Museum’s Outwith exhibition<\/a>\n<\/p>\n \n In the last chapter of Lucky Poet, he describes a ship\u2019s captain on the bridge in a storm, the waves crashing over him: \u201cBeing covered and lost under water meant nothing to him. But the blow of the water \u2013 that was something! The deck had been boarded by a moving mountain \u2013 \u2018He\u2019ll be drowned!\u2019 \u2013 \u2018No more than a fish!\u2019 \u2013 The mountain had slid off.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n The same thing is there in the poetry, magnified and even more sharply focused, as in The Wreck of the Swan:\n<\/p>\n \n No dreamers these but hard-bitten men\n<\/p>\n \n Used to all the tortures of\n<\/p>\n \n Old Feathery legs \u2013\n<\/p>\n \n The black villain who rides every crested wave\n<\/p>\n \n North of 65 degrees \u2013 he and his accursed legions,\n<\/p>\n \n The fog, the blizzard, the black-squall and the hurricane.\n<\/p>\n \n Up to their waists in water on the foredeck,\n<\/p>\n \n And sweeping all hands in a heap on the lee-scuppers,\n<\/p>\n \n Their arms and hands clawing up through the boiling surf\n<\/p>\n \n Still grasping wriggling fish and gutting knives.\n<\/p>\n \n The poem has its documentary imperative: \u201cTime the public knew what these men have to face.\u201d There were at that time, MacDiarmid tells us, nearly 100,000 of them at sea, and if you consider the fishing industry to include shipbuilders, rope, net and box manufacturers, fish friers, buyers, retailers, salesmen, railways and road transport, coal, salt and ice industries, you might say that around three million folk depended on the trawlermen for a living. Again, the specific working economics connect to literary perception and social vision. Making these connections allowed MacDiarmid access to the world beyond Shetland in precisely this way.\n<\/p>\n \n Towards the end of the volume Stony Limits (1935) comes the poem Lament for the Great Music<\/a>, which takes us from Shetland south and west to mainland Scotland, out from the pre-eminently Norse influences and into the Gaelic<\/a> and Celtic<\/a> worlds of Scotland, connecting them deliberately, beginning to encompass and envision a plural nationality, and to go beyond that by connecting all this, in the opening lines of the poem, with the archipelago of ancient Greece.\n<\/p>\n \n AS Greece once was, so Scotland\u2019s archipelagos and Highlands are now, a singular \u201cfold of value in the world\u201d. This is the meaning of the questions that open the poem Scotland Small?, which we quoted a fortnight ago: \u201cOur multiform, infinite Scotland, small?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n The multiplicity of meanings and identities uncovered in this poem, of flowers and insect life, are tied to the specific post-Clearances history of the landscape in view, with its peat-hags \u201cnot worked \/ Within living memory\u201d (because the crofters have gone) and where \u201cthe little Blackface sheep\u201d that have replaced them, are found grazing. The result is a poem that famously evokes the intrinsic potential of Scotland yet also connects that unsentimentally to its specific history.\n<\/p>\n \n MacDiarmid was the first poet of the last century to work like this, so comprehensively and deeply, the process extending from Shetland to the western archipelagos of Scotland. In September 1937, he made an extensive tour of the Western Isles.\n<\/p>\n \n His letters allow us to track his journey through the Hebrides, visiting Skye<\/a>, Raasay, South Uist, Canna, Eigg, Barra, and Tobermory on Mull, and so on.\n<\/p>\n \n In 1939, he published The Islands Of Scotland, the first book of its kind to shift the focus decisively away from the Hebrides. Up till then, they were the islands romanticised to the point of cliche and associated most in the popular imagination with the nostalgic and ill-fated destiny of Bonnie Prince Charlie and related legends.\n<\/p>\n \n In the book, MacDiarmid devotes 50 pages to Shetland, 20 to Orkney<\/a> and 25 to all the Hebrides \u2013 vastly disproportionate, you might argue, but also perhaps a necessary counterbalance, emphasising contemporary living conditions as well as lasting qualities of social life and spiritual identity to be found nowhere else in the world.\n<\/p>\n \n This is anti-romantic, in one sense, but realism is not the book\u2019s only strength.\n<\/p>\n \n READ MORE: How can we neglect one of Scotland’s most prominent sons?<\/a>\n<\/p>\n \n The major result of MacDiarmid\u2019s multi-faceted understanding of Scotland\u2019s plural identity was his editing The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry, published in 1940. In this, poems in English and Scots appear alongside translations from Latin and Gaelic<\/a>, the latter made with the help of Sorley MacLean.\n<\/p>\n \n They included major poems by Duncan Ban MacIntyre and Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair. MacDiarmid was introduced to MacLean on a visit to Edinburgh<\/a> in 1934, and the Gaelic poet visited him on Whalsay in 1935, before going to war in North Africa. MacDiarmid tells us that his own poem, In Talk with Duncan Ban MacIntyre, was written after making the translation of Praise of Ben Dorain, which dates it to 1939.\n<\/p>\n \n He praises Duncan Ban by saying that only in his poetry can we feel we stand in the woods by a river as three hinds and a stag approach, rise on their hind legs and browse on the twigs above us, close enough to touch as their breath comes into our faces. Then he continues: We have the feeling of having reached that state All watchers of animals desire Of having dispensed with our physical presence.\n<\/p>\n \n Or is that it? Is not really the bottom of our desire Not to be ignored but to be accepted?\n<\/p>\n