The Mearns town of Stonehaven rightly points to connections with BBC founding director John Reith (1889 -1971) and pneumatic tyre inventor Robert William Thomson (1822 – 1873), but as far as I know there is no wee blue plaque recalling the towns links with Canadian communism.

Tom McEwan was born in the seaside town in 1891. Orphaned young he was taken in age nine by an aunt in Catterline until as a teenager he moved to Aberdeen to work on the railways. Marriage and children followed and in 1912 he emigrated to Manitoba where he worked for a while as blacksmith before joining the Socialist Party of Canada.
By 1929 Tom had become the party’s industrial director and a few years later he was lobbying the Canadian government for employment insurance for unemployed workers – an outcome rejected by the prime minister of the day who vowed “Never will I or any government of which I am a part, put a premium on idleness or put our people on the dole!”
Needless to say, Tom’s links with Moscow led to led to distrust and on the outbreak of WW2 he and many like him were arrested and imprisoned. He served maybe two years hard labour before a change of alliance meant that the Soviets were no longer the enemy. Hitler had invaded Russia and the banned Communist Party of Canada was now permitted to re-badge as The Canadian Progressive Party.
Tom McEwan went on to secure Canadian workers rights, enhanced employee pensions and campaigned for equality for Canadian indigenous people before dying at the ripe age of 97 in 1988. In 1974 he published an autobiography entitled ‘The Forge Glows Red’.
Yet, maybe few in his native Stonehaven have ever heard of him.
Location: Stonehaven, UK

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