Nan (MacLean) Milton, political activist and biographer; born April 24, 1913, died April 23, 1996
NAN MILTON will be remembered with great fondness by all who knew her as a kind, caring, active person and by some as the daughter of the great John MacLean, Clydeside rebel and Scottish republican socialist.
Her biography of her father, John MacLean, and her selection of his works, In the Rapids of Revolution, are now out of print. Published in 1973 by a London-based, British left-wing group, they are the definitive works on John MacLean.
Earlier and subsequent biographies published by his unionist opponents, claimed, or implied, that MacLean was a deviant for proposing Scottish independence.
Apart from Guy Aldred, an English anarchist who became an adopted Scot, and Dr James D Young, the Scottish labour historian, Nan became the main defender and protagonist of her father's memory.
As secretary of the John MacLean Society she had an international correspondence that was legendary in the academic left, non-British, world. She was once a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, an odd imperial title she opined. She was a communist but never a Stalinist or Great Brit.
Her ``career'' was short-lived in that direction, as was her career as a Labour councillor, owing to uncompromising socialist principles. She joined the SNP in her latter years, and though too old to be active, was happy and unafraid to lend her name to the cause of independence.
She was also the ``honorary'' and active president of the embryonic Scottish Republican Socialist Party.
Nan was admitted to St John's Hospital, Livingston, suffering from shingles, where she prolonged her stay by falling from her Zimmer and breaking her leg. During her incarceration her loving soul-mate, fellow republican socialist and husband Ellice Milton, died in Blackfaulds Home on March 18 this year.
Nan, who spoke at the unveiling of her father's memorial cairn, was responsible for the inscription describing John MacLean as the Scottish link in the golden chain of world socialism. Nan and all she taught will aye be that unbreakable link.
Nan lost her elder son through illness a few years ago. She is survived by an elder sister, her son Ellice, and two grandsons. Friends will be welcomed to her service on Saturday, 10.30am, at Falkirk Crematorium.
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