Sir Patrick Dollan

Sir Patrick Joseph Dollan (3 April 1885 – 30 January 1963) and his wife, Agnes, Lady Dollan (née Moir; 16 August 1887 – 16 July 1966) were Glasgow activists in the Scottish Independent Labour Party. During the First World War they campaigned against the Munitions of War Act of 1915 which suspended trade unionists' rights for the duration of hostilities. Early years Born in Baillieston, Lanarkshire on 3 April 1885 of Irish descent and raised Roman Catholic, Dollan attended St Bridget's elementary school until he was ten years old. He later joined his father working as a miner at Clydeside Colliery in 1900. He married Agnes Moir, a Protestant, in 1912. She was a suffragette and a staunch pacifist during World War I. Activism Patrick and Agnes Dollan were vocal in raising awareness of the plight of thousands of Glasgow tenants who were having their rents raised at a time when military conscription had reduced their earning potential. Government concern at the volatile situation in the city led to the Rent Restrictions Act of November 1915, freezing rents at pre-war levels. In the 1920s he was the author of a booklet, The Clyde Rent War!, a narrative of the Glasgow rent strikes of 1915–16, which also contained proposals for housing policy reform. Dollan was election organiser for the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in the 1922 United Kingdom general election and then the chairman of the Scottish section of the ILP from 1922 until 1932, when he was expelled and formed his own Scottish Socialist Party, which immediately affiliated to the Labour Party.