A unique figure of our times: Geoffrey Goodman pays tribute to a Spanish civil war veteran, great union leader and tireless pensioners’ campaigner
THE death of Jack Jones at the age of 96 has removed from the scene the outstanding trade union leader of our period; a man who in other circumstances might well have emerged as the nation’s socialist leader in the political as well as the industrial sense; a man born shortly before the First World War, then crafted by working-class life in Liverpool in the 1920s and 1930s and by a virtual genetic inheritance of the socialist ethos. In brief, he was a unique figure of our times in the tradition of men such as Aneurin Bevan and Ernest Bevin.
James Larkin Jones – which was his full name, bestowed by his Merseyside docker father, in honour of James Larkin, the famed Irish republican socialist and trade union leader – never failed to strive for a workers’ New Jerusalem. He believed that building the largest trade union in Britain – which at 2,250,000 members put the Transport and General Workers’ Union in that pole position – was an integral stepping stone toward a socialist country. The TGWU was, at that time in the 1970s, also the strongest trade union in any democratic country. It was a truly remarkable and historic achievement for any voluntary organisation, anywhere. So did it, as some claimed, become too large and dominant? Margaret Thatcher certainly thought so and began her crusade to reduce all union influence which, to Jones’ immense dismay, was not corrected by the Tony Blair years of “new” Labour Government. Even so, Thatcher and Blair were not the only critics of the kind of union power Jack Jones fought to build. By the mid-1970s even some former Labour supporters resented that kind of trade union influence represented by Jack Jones: people such as Paul Johnson who, on leaving the editorship of the New Statesman, denounced Jones with a memorable sobriquet. “Emperor Jones” was Johnson’s label. It was, to be sure, intended as malice – yet there was just a smidgen of truth in the absurd claim.
As Johnson moved to the Tories after attacking Jones, one opinion poll suggested that Jack Jones was indeed perceived by a majority of voters as “the most powerful man in Britain”.
This was in the critical days of the third Harold Wilson Government circa 1974, when Labour struggled to keep its head above water by adopting Jones’ formula for a social contract to curb inflation and tackle the economic crisis. At the TGWU biennial conference of 1975, Jones advocated a £6 maximum pay rise limit for everyone. His plan was then adopted by Wilson’ s Cabinet as the foundation for a social contract within which a whole range of social and economic priorities would take over from a free-for-all market system. Although it didn’t work out like that, in the attempt to make it work, Jack Jones effectively had as much power and influence as any member of Wilson’s Cabinet.
It even led friends as well as critics, rightly or not, to regard him as having as much political clout as the Prime Minister. Arguably, previous general secretaries of the TGWU have held as much, if not even greater, political authority. Ernest Bevin, the union’s founder, was in Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet as Minister of Labour and later served as Clement Attlee’s Foreign Secretary. Frank Cousins was Wilson’s first Minister of Technology in 1964. But no trade union leader since Jack Jones has ever matched his influence and political muscle.
In his final days, he would reflect with dismay on the decline of union power and influence, the damage inflicted by Thatcherism and above all the dismal failure of the Blair years to correct the fall of trade unionism. Yet he also lived to see the collapse of the neo-liberal global capitalism which he had long predicted. And, in his last audible moments, he remained convinced that a democratic socialist formula would ultimately triumph.
Jack Jones was born on March 29 1913 in York Street, Garston at the south-end of Liverpool in a typical terraced house – one of the thousands thrown up when the great Merseyside port was being built to house the impoverished from Wales, Scotland, all over England and especially from Ireland. He left school at 14, a year after the 1926 General Strike, to follow his father into dock work. However, there were no jobs available and so he managed to find employment as an engineering apprentice at five shillings a week. As soon as he could, he followed his father into dock work. That is where he was first launched politically – as a young agitator among the dockers. It is also where he made first contact with Ernie Bevin – at a dockers’ meeting. Bevin urged him to take one of the union’s correspondence courses with Ruskin College, Oxford – which he did and then combined it with an economics course at the Liverpool Labour College. That groomed him to become a shop steward in the docks.
In 1934, Jones helped to organise a Merseyside contingent for one of the hunger marches to London. In 1936, he was elected as a Labour councillor in Liverpool. Yet the real watershed in his political training came in 1937 when he joined the British wing of the International Brigade to fight in Spain against Franco’s fascist uprising. It was the turning point in his life. Around him in the hills of the Spanish battlefields, his friends and comrades were killed or wounded; he himself was badly wounded in the shoulder as he fought Franco’s troops to hold the famed Hill 481 on the Ebro front. Beside him, George Brown, his close friend and socialist comrade, was killed. When Jones was brought back to England to recover from his severe wounds, he visited Brown’s widow, Evelyn Brown. She later became Mrs Evelyn Jones.
I first met Jack Jones in the early 1950s when, as a reporter on the old News Chronicle, I interviewed him in his small TGWU district office in Coventry. That was where he had been appointed by Bevin at the outbreak of the Second World War to help organise wartime workers in Midlands’ car factories. From that base, he shaped a policy of shop floor power by developing shop steward influence in the factories turned over to producing tanks and aircraft for the war. It was a period that stamped his trademark as the mastermind of shop floor tactics – a credential which eventually helped to take him to the top of the TGWU.
Yet the impediments to his progress were considerable. Arthur Deakin, who stood in for Bevin during wartime and then succeeded him as general secretary, opposed any promotion for Jones on the grounds that he was a “fellow-travelling Communist”. Denials were pointless. Deakin simply stamped on any opposition. Jones remained as Coventry district secretary until Frank Cousins took control of the TGWU after the death of Deakin and Jock Tiffin. And it was Cousins who promoted him and paved the way for Jones to succeed him. Without Cousins’ transformation of the TGWU, it is likely that Jones would have remained a regional official. In the event, he succeeded Cousins, who retired in 1969, and went on to build a world record membership of the TGWU which reached two and quarter million by the time he retired in 1978 – the year before Thatcher was elected.
Of course, Jones never really retired. He set about re-building the TGWU’s retired members organisation and then created a national pensioners’ movement. Even into his late 1980s, Jones was still captivating audiences all over Britain—and often going off to Spain to view again the battleground of that first historic war against fascism. Shortly before he died, the Spanish Government awarded him a national honour of citizenship. His wife, who was also a remarkable campaigner for socialism, died in December 1998 after 60 years of marriage. Between them, they never ceased to maintain a simple, modest lifestyle – remaining in the south London council flat they moved into when first coming to the capital.
