John Wheatley

Wheatley was born to Thomas and Johanna Wheatley in Bonmahon, County Waterford, Ireland. In 1876 the family moved to Bargeddie, near Baillieston, Lanarkshire in Scotland. His father found work as a miner in the local coalfield, however his family lived in grinding poverty, with him, his parents and his seven brothers and sisters living in a single room cottage without drainage or running water. Wheatley did well at school, but at the age of 11, he joined his father working as a miner, which he did for the next twelve years. After that he worked briefly as a shop assistant and then as a publican. The Catholic Workingman (1909), Miners, Mines and Misery (1909), Eight Pound Cottages for Glasgow Citizens (1913), Municipal Banking (1920) and The New Rent Act (1920). He was a deeply religious man and a practising Roman Catholic. Influenced by early Christian-socialist thinkers, in 1907 he joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP). He founded and was the first chairman of the Catholic Socialist Society. ==Political career==

Wheatley was elected to a Shettleston seat on the Lanarkshire county council in 1910, and he held the seat for Labour in 1912 when Shettleston was incorporated into Glasgow. He became an active councillor, and advocated for council schemes to build municipal housing for working-class tenants at fair rents. On 9 May 1924, H. G. Wells led a delegation to ask for birth control reforms. The delegation asked for two things: that institutions under Ministry of Health control should give contraceptive advice to those who asked for it; and that doctors at welfare centres should be allowed to offer advice in certain medical cases. Wheatley held strong views against birth control and refused to support the campaign. Wheatley was a passionate advocate of the miners' cause during the 1926 general strike. Wheatley criticised MacDonald for moving Labour to the right after 1924. Consequently, he did not hold a post in the Labour Government which formed after the 1929 general election. He refused to support many of the measures proposed by MacDonald's government. Along with James Maxton (now Wheatley's leader in the ILP) he became one of the Labour-left's leading critics. ==Death and legacy==

John Wheatley died at his home from a brain haemorrhage on 12 May 1930, at age 60. Wheatley Housing Group (Scotland's largest registered social landlord) and John Wheatley College (now Glasgow Kelvin College) in Glasgow are named after him. His nephew, John Thomas Wheatley, became a Labour MP for Edinburgh East in 1947 and Lord Advocate. ==Further reading==