Ramsay MacDonald(1866–1937)

James Ramsay MacDonald was born at Gregory Place in Lossiemouth on the Moray Firth on 12 October 1866 and raised in a one-room cottage in the fishing town by his mother, his grandmother and an aunt. He was schooled at the Free Church school until thirteen, worked three years as a pupil-teacher there, and at eighteen left for Bristol and then London, working his way into the socialist movement of the 1880s. His rise from that cottage to the office of Prime Minister is one of the great ascents in British public life.

He joined the Fabian Society in 1886 and was a founding member of the Independent Labour Party in 1893, serving as its first secretary. In 1896 he married Margaret Gladstone, a serious social reformer whose partnership steadied his early career. When the trade unions, the ILP and the Fabians formed the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 to put working men into Parliament, MacDonald became its secretary: he drafted its constitution, ran the 1906 general election that returned twenty-nine members and became the Labour Party, and built the organisational machine that carried Labour to a million and a half votes by 1910.

He was elected leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party and, in January 1924, after the Conservatives lost their majority, was sent for by George V to form the first Labour government in British history. He was fifty-seven. He returned to the premiership in 1929 at the head of the largest party in the Commons, and through the financial crisis of 1931 he led a National Government of all three parties that held sterling steady and won that autumn's general election by a landslide.

MacDonald's gift was for the patient construction of institutions. He took a movement that had no representation in Parliament at the start of his career and gave it, within thirty years, the organisation, the constitution and the parliamentary credibility of a party of government. He sat in the Commons across four decades, for Leicester, Aberavon, Seaham and finally the Scottish Universities.

He died in 1937 on a recuperative sea voyage and was buried beside Margaret at Spynie, outside Lossiemouth, looking out over the firth where he had grown up. The MacDonald name carries his memory as the boy from a Moray fishing town who broke into a system that had locked working men out of government for two centuries, and who proved that a workers' party could form a government of the United Kingdom. Every Labour government since has stood on the parliamentary foundation he built.