John Wheatley

John Wheatley was the most constructive of the Red Clydesiders, a former miner and devout Catholic who became the architect of modern council housing. As Minister of Health in Britain’s first Labour government, he passed the Housing Act of 1924 that put hundreds of thousands of working families into decent homes, and it remains his monument.

From the mines to Shettleston

Wheatley was born in a mining village in County Waterford, in Ireland, in 1869, the son of a miner, and his family came to the Glasgow area while he was still a boy. He went down the Lanarkshire pits at fourteen and worked there for a dozen years, educating himself all the while, before leaving to build a successful printing and publishing business in the East End of the city.

The Catholic socialist

A deeply religious man, Wheatley set out to show that socialism and the Catholic faith could go hand in hand. In 1906 he founded the Catholic Socialist Society, braving the open hostility of the Church, and in doing so he helped to bring Glasgow’s large Irish Catholic community into the Labour movement. His was a Christian socialism that he defended in fierce public debate against Marxists such as John Maclean.

Red Clydeside

Wheatley joined the Independent Labour Party in 1907 and became, with his friend James Maxton, one of its leading intellects. He was a Glasgow councillor, an opponent of the First World War, and a leader of the rent strikes, a central figure in the story of Red Clydeside that we tell in our post on what Red Clydeside was. In 1922 he was elected Member of Parliament for Glasgow Shettleston.

The Housing Act

Housing was the cause of his life. Appalled by the slums and overcrowding of Glasgow, he had set out his vision in a 1913 pamphlet, Eight Pound Cottages for Glasgow Citizens. When Labour took office in 1924, Ramsay MacDonald made him Minister of Health, and Wheatley drafted and carried through the Housing (Financial Provisions) Act. By building good council houses at modest rents, backed by state subsidy, it transformed working-class housing across Britain and began the slow clearing of the city’s tenement slums. It was the one great achievement of that short-lived government.

A Glasgow legend

Wheatley fell out with MacDonald’s cautious leadership and was not returned to office. He died suddenly at his home in Shettleston in 1930, aged sixty, and his funeral was the largest Glasgow had seen since that of John Maclean. He is remembered still in the name of the Wheatley housing group, today the city’s great social landlord.