The British politician James Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), three-time prime minister of Great Britain, was one of the great architects of the British Labour party. In 1924 he formed the first Labour government.

Ramsay MacDonald, born in October 1866 in the little peasant and fishing village of Lossiemouth in Morayshire, Scotland, was the illegitimate son of Anne Ramsay, a farm servant, and John MacDonald, a plowman and a Highlander from the Black Isle of Ross. He was reared by his mother and his grandmother, Isabella Ramsay, a woman of strong religious convictions, remarkable intelligence, and character. He attended first the Free Kirk School in Lossiemouth and then, the Drainie Parish School, where at 15 he was the leading pupil and at 16 became a pupil-teacher. Politics fascinated him, and he became an ardent Gladstonian.

In 1885 MacDonald went south to Bristol to a position in a Church-sponsored guild for young men. He associated with...