Jack Jones (trade unionist)
|
Jack Jones CH MBE |
|
|---|---|
| Born |
James Larkin Jones 29 March 1913 Garston, Liverpool, Lancashire, England |
| Died | 21 April 2009 (aged 96) Peckham, London, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Union leader |
| Known for | former general secretary, Transport and General Workers' Union |
James Larkin Jones CH MBE (29 March 1913 – 21 April 2009), known as Jack Jones, was a British trade union leader and General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union.
Jones was born in Garston, Liverpool, Lancashire. He was named after the Liverpool-born Irish trade unionist James Larkin. He left school at 14 and worked as an engineering apprentice. After the Wall Street Crash, Jones lost his job, eventually finding employment with a firm of signmakers and painters. He then joined his father as a Liverpool docker.
Jack Jones was converted to socialism by reading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, and he later explained how the book "was passed from hand to hand among people in the Labour movement and had a remarkable effect on our thinking". He became a member of the Transport and General Workers Union, and was elected shop steward, then a delegate on the National Docks Group Committee.
Strongly opposed to the British Union of Fascists and their leader Oswald Mosley, Jones organised protest-meetings against the fascists in Liverpool, and was beaten up by a group of Blackshirts armed with knuckle-dusters. A member of the Territorial Army since 1934 (he was promoted to bombardier in the Royal Artillery), in 1936 at the start of the Spanish Civil War, Jones joined and served with the British Battalion of the XV International Brigade as the political commissar of the Major Attlee Company, and was seriously wounded at the Battle of the Ebro in 1938.
...
Wikipedia