Cailean Gallagher

Cailean Gallagher is completing a PhD on radical ideas of Scottish Jacobite exiles, and is co-author of Roch Winds: A Treacherous Guide to the State of Scotland. He is also a union organiser and co-ordinator of the Workers Observatory.

Cailean Gallagher is completing a PhD on radical ideas of Scottish Jacobite exiles, and is co-author of Roch Winds: A Treacherous Guide to the State of Scotland. He is also a union organiser and co-ordinator of the Workers Observatory.

Latest articles from Cailean Gallagher

comment Let’s not forget the workers who made Sir William Burrell rich

AS a child, I often passed a grand townhouse near the top of Byres Road where a metal plaque reads: Sir William Burrell Shipping Magnate & Art Collector Lived Here 1902-1927 I knew about the art collection but I had no idea what a shipping magnate was. Later, at school, I learned that Burrell had inherited a fleet of cargo barges during the heyday of the Clyde shipping boom.

PROFILE The man in the song every Scottish trade unionist will have heard

ON Good Friday in Salt Lake City, Utah, I made a pilgrimage to a place of martyrdom. At the edge of a public park, a blue-haired Catholic anarchist named Pegasus pointed to the patch of grass upon which the labour organiser and songwriter Joe Hill was executed in 1915. There is no monument or plaque, but next to the last crumbling section of the Sugar Park prison wall, we sang the lines from the famous Ballad of Joe Hill: “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me/Says I, ‘But

IN THE USA I went to a 'Highland Games' in Utah – here's what I learned

IN the blistering April sun, against the backdrop of a giant boulder resembling a red Castle Rock, a pipe band played the last set of the Redstone Highland Games. The pipe master boasted that the Salt Lake Scots’ final showpiece was composed by a visiting Scot who was “so impressed that we could keep our pipes going in the American desert”.

EXCLUSIVE An escape from harsh realities: The young Scots finding joy in dance

ON the first Saturday of spring, Lanark was jumping with dancing children. When I tried a door by Greyfriars Parish Church hoping to view the kirk’s Gothic interior, I caught sight of dozens of kids in a musical theatre session of the Fever Pitch Academy. A moment later, on the sunny high street, I passed a trio of girls tripping along with Dance Rite Academy, a Lanark-based dance and cheer club, emblazoned on their T-shirts.