In Memory: Jack Jones
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Jack Jones, General Secretary of the British Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU) from 1969 to 1978, died on 21 April 2009. The obituary writers reached for the old cutting recalling the opinion poll from the mid-1970s making him out to be the most powerful man in the land. Nonsense of course, but an unconscious compliment , he would insist, to his union.
General Secretaries of the TGWU invariably ended up on the ITF Executive Board (EB) but his arrival was delayed when the TGWU decided that his predecessor, Frank Cousins, should see out his three-year term on the EB and as Vice President which would end at the 1971 Congress. Frank had been closely involved in the ITF for some twenty years. If Jack had had any prior experience in the international movement it would have been in the International Metalworkers' Federation (IMF). Son of a Liverpool docker and a docker himself as a young man, he had moved to the engineering sector when he became a full-time union official and it was from there that he had progressed through the TGWU ranks.
He was in constant demand at a time of recurring industrial and economic crises, working twice as many hours as any employer would dare extract from his members. But when at last he joined the EB at the ITF's 1971 Congress he proved to be an exemplary member, thinking nothing of coming to meetings straight from the airport, ready always to take a 'phone call or call back without fail.
His commitment was grounded on his early years in the impoverished Liverpool
docklands (the house he was born in was condemned by the local health authorities as uninhabitable while he was still a baby). Solidarity at work and in the community was the key, first to survival and then to social and political advance. And there was a moral duty to extend that solidarity to the yet more underprivileged workers from many parts of the world that he came to know in what was then probably the most cosmopolitan city in the country. As a young trade union activist he spoke out, for example, against the wage discrimination suffered by Indian or 'Lascar' seamen.
He made himself quickly at home in the ITF, getting on well with Charlie Blyth, the General Secretary. They were of much the same age, both working-class boys who had taught themselves more than they had ever learned in their very brief formal education. Their easy and trusting relationship was reflected in Jack's constructive response to the ITF's frequent appeals for the TGWU's help in
numerous industrial and political disputes. On the great issues of his day he fiercely attacked repressive regimes such as apartheid South Africa and Pinochet's Chile.
As Assistant General Secretary until 1977 and then as General Secretary in his final year before his retirement in 1978, I got to know him well. I was with him, for example, on a truncated ITF mission to Chile in 1974 (the Junta's idea of subtlety was to take away our passports and tickets and re-book us out of the country the
next day). His retirement, much of it spent as champion of Britain's pensioners, was almost as hectic as his full-time working life.
He could have his explosive moments and did not take no for an answer very readily. But there was a humanity about him which, allied with a natural warmth, deep intelligence and wide reading (he loved poetry), gave him a rare and inspirational stature. We kept in touch almost to the end, in later years meeting at University of Warwick, which had honoured him with a Doctorate and where the Modern Records Centre held the TGWU and ITF archives. He nursed his beloved Evelyn through her last illness and losing that remarkable woman (much loved in the ITF Secretariat) after sixty years was a terrible blow.
I am pretty sure Jack did not believe in an after-life of any kind. He thought you just had to strive to make the best for everyone of the life you had. Which is what he did and what he will always be remembered and thanked for.
-Harold Lewis
27 April 2009
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