Our Mary: The Life of Mary Turner, 1938–2017 by John Callow (review)

Mary Turner (1938–2017) came to the fore of the trade union and labour movements in Britain in the 1980s, working her way up to become president of the GMB (General, Municipal and Boilermakers' Union) for two decades. This biography presents a complex story through a lively and engaging narrative. It is beautifully produced and generously illustrated with photographs on almost every page. It is also undoubtedly contentious. John Callow, its author, is avowedly left of centre, a socialist who sees the history of contemporary Britain from this perspective, one, it would appear, that his subject shared unequivocally with him.

Mary Turner's life is told here almost entirely as that of a public figure. There is some acknowledgement of her family of origin in the account of her childhood in Thurles, a Tipperary market town in Ireland overlooked by the local sugar beet factory. Her father was committed to trade unionism and the labour movement in Ireland, and latterly in north London to which he and his family immigrated in the late 1940s. Mary married there and had two children. Family was clearly very important to her. But we learn little here of her everyday life as daughter, sister, wife and mother: how did she manage her domestic tasks and extensive family commitments alongside her work as a "dinner lady" (preparing and serving hot lunches for children in their schools), her untiring community involvement, her unceasing trade union activism and her pursuit of a socialist society? You will not find the answers here. Possible linkages between everyday and public life are suggested by Mary's early involvement with tenants' associations, a close and continuing childhood friendship, her search for a job as a dinner lady that was a direct result of that friendship, and the shared values evident in her husband's and friend's support of all her activities. But such issues are not central to this account.

Its primary and understandable aim is to celebrate the undoubted public achievements of a much-loved, successful trade union organiser and labour activist. Its greatest strength lies in its situating of these individual achievements in the social and political history of Britain in the post-war era. In particular, in the course of this biography the writer traces the history of unionisation among general workers such as dinner ladies like Mary Turner. Her practice on starting a new job was always to make contact with the union concerned with her workplace, in this case the General and Municipal Workers' Union (which later became the GMB). She was shocked to find that such work was poorly regarded by her employers, the local council. So she set about the unionisation of her co-workers with the aim of securing better wages, work safety and pensions for a group previously neglected, if not ignored, by trades unions and employers alike. Soon she became a shop steward, then a branch secretary, all the while developing her skills in organising. Within a few years, she was appointed a delegate to the annual conference of her union, successfully putting forward a motion that explicitly committed an otherwise conservative union to a socialist vision.

It is impossible here to cover all of Mary Turner's pursuit of social justice. She first came to national prominence in the campaigns during the Thatcher era against unemployment, austerity, and the dismantling of local government. Her career was built on rank-and-file support, not the increasingly professionalised pathway of many of the male trade union officials alongside whom she worked. In the 1980s, she was at one point the only woman on the union's executive, at another its first woman vice-president, and she worked constantly to support the appointment of more women officials. She was also committed to industrial democracy and, on becoming president in 1997, a role she understood as the representative of the rank-and-file, helped reinstate the importance of the union's conference...