John Beard (trade unionist)

John C. Beard CBE (1871 – 25 September 1950) was a British trade unionist and politician.

Beard was born in Ellerdine Heath in Shropshire in 1871, son of a farm labourer. His family were Primitive Methodists, whose local chapel ran an elementary day school at Ellerdine where Beard had his full-time education until leaving at the age of ten years.

After leaving school he helped his father when then working in a brickyard carrying bricks for the building of an extension to Peplow Hall, then as labourer on a farm at Muckleton, Shawbury and at age fourteen for a builder at nearby Wytheford who was then working on the Apley Castle estate at Wellington. He briefly left Shropshire when he worked down a mine in north Staffordshire where he joined the Miners' Association union before he took up work as an insurance agent, becoming a founder of the Planet Insurance Company.

He was a founder member of the Workers' Union in 1898, and it appointed him as its Shropshire organiser. In this role, after a failed attempt to organise in the Ironbridge coalfields he recruited large numbers of farm labourers to the union, and successfully campaigned for an increase in their wages. By 1900, the union in Shropshire grew to 20 branches, although most had an ephemeral existence. He moved to Birmingham in 1904 to become the union's national agricultural organiser, and there became involved in the Labour Party.

Beard, who had been one of ten self-described Labour members elected at the founding of High Ercall Parish Council in Shropshire in 1894, was elected as a member of Birmingham City Council in 1910, representing Saltley, in which post he was leading figure in the creation of the Birmingham Municipal Bank. He left Birmingham in 1920 when he became more involved in union affairs in London

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