David Buckle obituary

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/01/david-buckle-obituary

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In the postwar years, my father, David Buckle, campaigned as a shop steward with the Transport and General Workers’ Union at the car body plant in Cowley, Oxford, to replace the hated piecework system with a guaranteed weekly wage. This led to him being appointed full-time TGWU Oxford district secretary in 1964, a role he fulfilled until retirement in 1988.

During those 24 years, Dad, who has died aged 92, fought many battles to improve the lot of the men at Cowley, against not only what he called the “appallingly bad senior management” but also a Trotskyist element that had infiltrated the union movement.

His achievements were all the more remarkable given his unfortunate start in life. Born illegitimate and given up by his parents at birth, he grew up with a woman he referred to as his “guardian” in an unregulated children’s home in Streatham, south London. She moved the home around, finally settling in Ramsgate, Kent. Dad recalled being “offered for sale to well-dressed men in large cars looking for strong young boys capable of physical labour in Australia”. Fortunately, he was considered too puny.

He worked as an errand and office boy, having little education, before being told to leave the home, aged 12, because the money given by his anonymous father for his keep had run out. He found shelter in a local church, where the vicar took him in as a house boy, paying the equivalent today of 10p a week before deducting 7p for board and lodgings, while always fining him 3p per week for failing to properly clean the fireplace, wash the floors or polish shoes.

In 1941, he was sent to a residential camp in the village of Radley, near Oxford, where he was set to work as a farm labourer. Outside the village pub, he met Beryl Stimpson, and they married in 1944.

He had signed up for wartime service in the Royal Marines in 1943, and by 1946 reached the rank of sergeant. On demob, he returned to Radley to work in a “mind-numbingly boring” job as a spot welder at nearby Cowley. He joined the TGWU (now Unite) in 1947, and fought to improve the pay and conditions of fellow workers in what he described as “that filthy black hellhole of a workplace”.

Having had little by way of formal education, David enrolled at an adult learning centre in Oxford, studying English and politics. Partially overcoming a stammer, he stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a Labour candidate in 1955 and 1959, in Tory strongholds. He served as a Labour member of Oxfordshire county council (1989-2001) and was its chairman in 1996-97. He also served on Radley parish council (1951-2002).

Among other public roles, he was a magistrate (1961-94), and director of the Oxford Stage Company (1979-93), and served on the UK Older People Advisory Group (2001-10). He was made MBE in 1988.

Beryl died in 2013. Dad is survived by two sons, Peter and me, four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. He described his family as his greatest achievement because he “started without one and made one of his own”.