Willie Gallacher (politician)
| Willie Gallacher | |
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Member of Parliament for West Fife |
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In office 14 November 1935 – 23 February 1950 |
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| Preceded by | Charles Milne |
| Succeeded by | Willie Hamilton |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 25 December 1881 Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland |
| Died | 12 August 1965 (aged 84) Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland |
| Political party | Communist Party of Great Britain (from 1921) |
| Other political affiliations |
Independent Labour Party Social Democratic Federation Communist Labour Party (until 1921) |
William Gallacher (25 December 1881 – 12 August 1965) was a Scottish trade unionist, activist and communist. He was one of the leading figures of the Shop Stewards' Movement in wartime Glasgow (the 'Red Clydeside' period) and a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He served two terms in the House of Commons as the last Communist Member of Parliament (MP).
Gallacher was born in Paisley, Scotland on 25 December 1881, the son of an Irish father and a Scottish mother. His father died when he was seven years old, and one of his earliest ambitions was to earn enough money so that his mother would no longer have to work as a washerwoman. With his sisters, he finally achieved this goal at the age of nineteen, but his mother died shortly afterwards at the age of 54.
He began working at ten years old, and left school aged twelve. After a spell as a delivery boy for a grocer – where he had his first dispute with an employer – he found work in a sanitary engineering workshop. He later had a spell as a steward on some transatlantic crossings, before beginning work at Albion Motor Works, Glasgow, in 1912. After spending 1913 in the United States visiting his sisters in Chicago, he erected scaffolding in Belfast. Returning to Glasgow, he again found work at Albion Motor Works in 1914, just before the First World War broke out.
The "weakness for alcohol" shown by his father and elder brother, and the suffering this caused his mother, led him to become involved with the Temperance movement in his mid-adolescence. However, on discovering that colleagues had canvassed support for a director of a Trust Public House in the 1906 General Election, Gallacher ended his association with the organised Temperance movement. He remained a lifelong teetotaller.
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