Andy McMahon
Born on March 18th 1920, he left school at 14 and was apprenticed as a carpenter at Fairfields shipyards. Joined YCL in his teens and then, in the 1940s, the Communist Party, in which he remained for the best part of two decades. He was in the Merchant Navy on the Murmansk runs during World War II and retained an admiration for the Soviet people arising from this.
He was a shop steward after the war but was sacked and blacklisted in the late 1950s. Emigrating to Canada and then the USA, he found himself deported as an `undesirable alien’. After he returned to Scotland, he gravitated to the Labour Party and became a councillor in Fairfields ward from 1973. A stalwart of the `Glasgow Wheelers’ ‘ cycling club, he became the Labour MP for Glasgow Govan from 1979-83. McMahon died on April 26th 2005.
Source: Guardian May 20th 2005
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