obituary of t.u.activist
remembrance | 05.04.2002 10:45
Walter Cunningham
Dockers' leader whose militant reputation belied his straightforward decency
Martin Wainwright
Guardian
Wednesday April 3, 2002
Walt Cunningham, who has died of mesothelioma aged 75, was a hugely respected Hull dockers' leader, whose lifelong insistence on the dignity of labour overcame a prolonged national campaign to portray him as a militant industrial wrecker.
He briefly held the British economy in the palm of his hand, when the high court threatened him with jail during one of the fiercest of the early 1970s industrial struggles, the illegal blacklisting of shipping firms which were leading the container revolution. A group of London dockers, the Pentonville Five, had already been imprisoned by Lord Justice Donaldson, and when the spotlight turned on Hull in 1972, the Trades Union Congress prepared for a general strike.
In the fevered atmosphere of the time, with miners also on the warpath and the mass power blackouts of Edward Heath's three-day week only 18 months away, Cunningham transferred the ownership of his terraced house to his wife Sadie and prepared to pack his bags for jail.
Largely because of his much-publicised defiance, the crisis passed; the Pentonville Five were released, and the national dock labour scheme survived until the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. But the image of "Big Walt" became part of the political battle for the rest of the decade, especially his laconic television appearances, which made no bones about holding the country to ransom.
In fact, as everyone in Hull knew, Cunningham was actually the last person to bully or threaten anyone. His life was based on restoring decency and equilibrium to the lop-sided relationship between dockers and employers, something he had seen at first-hand as the sensitive son of a more-or-less permanently downtrodden docker father.
Cunningham Sr seemed to his son to have worked relentlessly, fighting for stevedoring work in the cattle-market job auctions conducted by early 20th-century employers at the Humber dock gates. When he died, he left what Walt described as "just a few sticks of furniture". Fighting such grinding poverty became the boy's mission.
He was brought up - and lived and died - in Hull's socialist world, being educated at Buckingham Street elementary school and spending his retirement in East Hull's garden village, part of a municipal ideal that includes a pioneering park with the country's only surviving council-owned splashboat, long predating Disneyworld.
Cunningham's horizons were broadened beyond east Yorkshire by military service just after the second world war, which took him to the mountains of Austria, the lush valleys of Italy and the industrious low countries, whose huge container ports were later to feature in his industrial struggles. In the aftermath of war, he saw more of the damage to humanity that drove his work as a union official. After labouring in Hull docks during the early 1950s, he became a shop steward with the Transport and General Workers' Union.
His personal mark in the job was an insistence on individual worth and his colleagues' dignity. However rough their work, he wanted their negotiations with office-based management to be on an equal footing. He insisted that his workers' delegations wear suits and ties, and moved their mass meetings from the open-air into Hull's noble Guildhall. He would never call anyone "sir" - a common, deferential usage at the time. The effect was described by the then T&G leader Jack Jones in two adjectives which Walt valued: "straightforward" and "decent".
The Cunningham attitude did not, however, brook bullying when it came from the union, and Walt was one of a group of stewards who set up an unofficial committee, the blue-whites, in the 1960s. Together, they helped demo-cratise T&G proceedings on the Hull waterfront - which had started to smack of the cosy deals satirised by Peter Sellers in the Boulting Brothers' film, I'm Alright Jack -and initiate lasting reforms in internal union elections.
Walt always refused to take any personal credit for these changes, insisting, "I did nothing. The men did it all." This was not false modesty but an accurate description of his method of consulting, and then acting, on the properly agreed decisions. The high point of his work came in 1967, when Lord Devlin's reforms created the dock labour scheme, which gave security and stability to the industry.
It was, however, shortlived. The heroics of the early 1970s were swept aside within 10 years by technological change and the vast, impersonal forces of economics. The dock labour scheme was abolished in 1989 and Cunningham retired, only to resume local political and community work as a Hull city councillor.
Characteristically, his death will not silence his campaigning. He died younger than he might have expected because of exposure to asbestos during his stevedoring days, when protection against the material was rudimentary. Sadie, a retired headteacher, is working with their three sons and three daughters on a claim which will keep the name, and principles, of Big Walt in the news for some time to come.
Walter Cunningham, trade union leader, born September 3 1927; died March 20 2002
Dockers' leader whose militant reputation belied his straightforward decency
Martin Wainwright
Guardian
Wednesday April 3, 2002
Walt Cunningham, who has died of mesothelioma aged 75, was a hugely respected Hull dockers' leader, whose lifelong insistence on the dignity of labour overcame a prolonged national campaign to portray him as a militant industrial wrecker.
He briefly held the British economy in the palm of his hand, when the high court threatened him with jail during one of the fiercest of the early 1970s industrial struggles, the illegal blacklisting of shipping firms which were leading the container revolution. A group of London dockers, the Pentonville Five, had already been imprisoned by Lord Justice Donaldson, and when the spotlight turned on Hull in 1972, the Trades Union Congress prepared for a general strike.
In the fevered atmosphere of the time, with miners also on the warpath and the mass power blackouts of Edward Heath's three-day week only 18 months away, Cunningham transferred the ownership of his terraced house to his wife Sadie and prepared to pack his bags for jail.
Largely because of his much-publicised defiance, the crisis passed; the Pentonville Five were released, and the national dock labour scheme survived until the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. But the image of "Big Walt" became part of the political battle for the rest of the decade, especially his laconic television appearances, which made no bones about holding the country to ransom.
In fact, as everyone in Hull knew, Cunningham was actually the last person to bully or threaten anyone. His life was based on restoring decency and equilibrium to the lop-sided relationship between dockers and employers, something he had seen at first-hand as the sensitive son of a more-or-less permanently downtrodden docker father.
Cunningham Sr seemed to his son to have worked relentlessly, fighting for stevedoring work in the cattle-market job auctions conducted by early 20th-century employers at the Humber dock gates. When he died, he left what Walt described as "just a few sticks of furniture". Fighting such grinding poverty became the boy's mission.
He was brought up - and lived and died - in Hull's socialist world, being educated at Buckingham Street elementary school and spending his retirement in East Hull's garden village, part of a municipal ideal that includes a pioneering park with the country's only surviving council-owned splashboat, long predating Disneyworld.
Cunningham's horizons were broadened beyond east Yorkshire by military service just after the second world war, which took him to the mountains of Austria, the lush valleys of Italy and the industrious low countries, whose huge container ports were later to feature in his industrial struggles. In the aftermath of war, he saw more of the damage to humanity that drove his work as a union official. After labouring in Hull docks during the early 1950s, he became a shop steward with the Transport and General Workers' Union.
His personal mark in the job was an insistence on individual worth and his colleagues' dignity. However rough their work, he wanted their negotiations with office-based management to be on an equal footing. He insisted that his workers' delegations wear suits and ties, and moved their mass meetings from the open-air into Hull's noble Guildhall. He would never call anyone "sir" - a common, deferential usage at the time. The effect was described by the then T&G leader Jack Jones in two adjectives which Walt valued: "straightforward" and "decent".
The Cunningham attitude did not, however, brook bullying when it came from the union, and Walt was one of a group of stewards who set up an unofficial committee, the blue-whites, in the 1960s. Together, they helped demo-cratise T&G proceedings on the Hull waterfront - which had started to smack of the cosy deals satirised by Peter Sellers in the Boulting Brothers' film, I'm Alright Jack -and initiate lasting reforms in internal union elections.
Walt always refused to take any personal credit for these changes, insisting, "I did nothing. The men did it all." This was not false modesty but an accurate description of his method of consulting, and then acting, on the properly agreed decisions. The high point of his work came in 1967, when Lord Devlin's reforms created the dock labour scheme, which gave security and stability to the industry.
It was, however, shortlived. The heroics of the early 1970s were swept aside within 10 years by technological change and the vast, impersonal forces of economics. The dock labour scheme was abolished in 1989 and Cunningham retired, only to resume local political and community work as a Hull city councillor.
Characteristically, his death will not silence his campaigning. He died younger than he might have expected because of exposure to asbestos during his stevedoring days, when protection against the material was rudimentary. Sadie, a retired headteacher, is working with their three sons and three daughters on a claim which will keep the name, and principles, of Big Walt in the news for some time to come.
Walter Cunningham, trade union leader, born September 3 1927; died March 20 2002
remembrance