Patrick and Agnes Dollan were vocal in raising awareness of the plight of thousands of Glasgow tenants who were having their rents raised at a time when military conscription had reduced their earning potential. Government concern at the volatile situation in the city led to the Rent Restrictions Act of November 1915, freezing rents at pre-war levels. In the 1920s he was the author of a booklet, The Clyde Rent War!, a narrative of the Glasgowrent strikes of 1915–16,[4] which also contained proposals for housing policy reform.
In 1939 he won the inaugural St Mungo Prize, which is awarded triannually to the person deemed to have done the most to promote and improve the city of Glasgow in the previous three years. He dedicated the prize to his mother.[7] At the beginning of World War II, Dollan encouraged his fellow Glaswegians to support the war effort against fascism,[8] for which efforts he was knighted in 1941.[1][9] In 1940, he was a co-founder and co-chairman (with Jadwiga Harasowska) of the Scottish-Polish Society promoting friendship between the Scottish population and the Polish Army stationing in Scotland at that time.[10]
Keenly interested in town planning, he was a member of the council of the Town and Country Planning Association and of the executive of the Scottish Section. He was the Chairman of the East Kilbride Development Corporation, crucial in bringing industry to that new town. Renowned Scottish planner, Elizabeth Buchanan Mitchell, spoke about him fondly: "His work there was unique. It was there that he wrote his name in the social history of the Scottish nation."
^Melling, Joseph (1983). Rent Strikes. Polygon. p. 109. ISBN0904919722.
^ abcGallagher, Tom (2010). "Scottish Catholics and the British Left, 1918-1939". The Innes Review. 34 (1): 17–42. doi:10.3366/inr.1983.34.1.17 – via Edinburgh University Press.
^James Jupp, The Radical Left in Britain: 1931-1941, p. 47
^"Mr Dollan gives St Mungo Prize to his Mother". Daily Record. 26 October 1939.
^Kernberg, Thomas (1990). The Polish community in Scotland(PDF). University of Glasgow Library (glathesis:1990-704): University of Glasgow, Institute of Soviet and East European Studies (PhD thesis). pp. 89–98.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
