Ken Gill

Ken Gill (30 August 1927 – 23 May 2009) was a British trade union leader. He was the General Secretary of the Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section (TASS), from 1974 to 1988, when it merged with ASTMS to form the Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union (MSF). He was General Secretary of the MSF, 1988–1992, initially jointly with Clive Jenkins. A committed Communist, he was elected to the TUC General Council in 1974, and was a prominent figure in the militant industrial relations of the 1970s. From 1981 to 1987 he was a member of the Commission for Racial Equality.

Ken Gill was born in Melksham, Wiltshire, in 1927. Gill was politicised when young, having experienced poverty in his childhood during the Great Depression. He attended a grammar school and was offered officer training during the Second World War, but refused this owing to a political opposition to the officer class. In 1943, aged 15, he became an apprentice draughtsman. During the war his family took in a lodger, a cobbler and communist who convinced the young Gill of the cause of socialism. In 1945 he was a prominent campaigner for the local Labour candidate, who was elected as the first local Labour MP.

In 1949, at the end of his apprenticeship, he moved to London. As a young communist at the height of the Cold War, he travelled to East Germany for the 1951 World Youth Festival, and was briefly arrested while journeying there by the US military police. By his early thirties Gill had become a director of a successful small engineering firm.

...
Wikipedia