A tribute to Steve Sinnott 1951 - 2008

When Steve died on Saturday 5 April 2008 the working class lost, quite simply, one of its finest. Unusually for a death in the family of organised labour, Steve made prime time media and, amazingly, broke the barrier which BBC News places round most things to do with workers unless, of course, it involves knife crime.

Even the opponents of organized labour knew that his passing was significant.

The response to the loss has been unprecedented in a generation. Workers had lost a thinker and a strategist. From the Prime Minister to supply teachers, from Sierra Leone to Sunderland, literally thousands have expressed sadness at his passing, and many, a new resolve.

There was something different about Steve and he knew it. But he saw himself not as an exception but as a general secretary of a new type. This, because he knew unions were changing and the old ways would no longer do. Steve died just when his thinking and his strategy were making an impact within the TUC.

 

 

 

Steve was fascinated by knowledge – what it was – how it had developed historically and was shared across the globe, how it was acquired and how it was passed on between generations. He recognized intelligence in everyone and thought all had a role to play, somehow, somewhere. He was truly a teacher. He must have been the only general secretary in recent years whose election campaign included an undertaking to retire at the end of his second term so he could go back to the tools. Steve loved books – a word he relished applying his Liverpudlian accent too.

 

One of the things Steve was working on when he died was the outline of a speech he asked to give as part of the Monday evening lecture season at Marx Library – http://www.marx-memorial-library.org

His chosen subject was ‘Education and Religion’. He delayed giving it once so that he would not be seen to influence the NUT Working Party on Faith Schools, then deliberating. In 2007, in part to prepare for the speech, Steve and I visited the Library for an ‘out-of-hours’ tour. It was a magic moment, and although he booked out of Union headquarters for two hours, he lingered at the Library much longer, looking longingly from shelf to shelf stacked to the brim with ‘must reads’.  Those who have been to the library will know what I mean. We continued the tour to the Crown Tavern next door an important and very old pub frequented by characters such as Wilkes, Chartist leader George Julian Harney and Russian revolutionaries including Lenin, and talked long in to the evening. When we got together to talk in this way one subject bound to reappear was:  what to do with the shift of unions away from asserting their own history as a record of working class achievement? We plotted how to return it to the agenda way beyond the ranks of the NUT. Another constant was how to secure one union for all teachers?

Our modern understanding of what constitutes a general secretary is a largely Victorian creation, when unions were still in formation and relatively small. General Secretary's then were self sacrificing, cultured and vigorous and very close to shop floor - read the memoirs of Tillett or Thorne, Joseph Arch or Mary Macarthur, Gertrude Tuckwell or Tom Mann. The office of general secretary today retains echoes of this past, but the organisations they lead are quite different. The modern union has annual income in the tens of millions with hundreds of thousands of members, officers and offices, hundreds of staff, training colleges and auditors. They have influence in workplace and right up to Ministry and Cabinet - as well as a national campaigning role. Few have had as much impact as the NUT in recent years. Steve was about to lead the first national teachers’ strike in 21 years on April 24.

Steve was a modern general secretary replete with a degree in economics - on top of his brief - able to deal with complex budgets or appearances in front of parliamentary commissions, key note speeches at international conferences, or his very favourite, an hour spent in a school wherever, and a chance to sit with teachers and share ideas, or just natter. Ordinary teachers dominate the book of condolence at teachers.org.uk. Many include a tale of one of his visits. He had personal qualities, which are in nature's gift and qualities developed through training and experience, gained through a life of relentless struggle. He was an archetypical product of his comprehensive education, the first with such an education to be NUT president, then deputy general secretary, and then general secretary.

The NUT, now 138 years old, spans three centuries and Steve was immersed in its history. He was energised by it and often came up with solutions to current day problems, which had strong legacies of the past. I recall I once tried to persuade him not to call his outline plan for a new democratic structure for school governance  'a school board' with all the echoes of Lansbury, Burns and Annie Besant.

One of the reasons he was such a strong supporter of MML was his love of literature. He felt guilty reading a book by Frank McCourt or William Morris – News From Nowhere was a favourite - or a biography of Atlee or Michael Foot, one of his favourite characters, or Tony Benn, when he thought he should be genning up on the next piece of education legislation. But he read all the time and many a colleague’s eye would glaze over as Steve and I swopped anecdotes about characters we were then reading about.  Scheer’s biography of Tillett was the last one we swopped.

Steve read as broadly as one could imagine and had a significant collection of labour movement and African Liberation Movement literature. His favourite was biography. We often bought each other books. I found him a copy of Nkrumah’s memoirs, a biography of Jack Jones and a 1st edition of Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. In return I received a biography of Sylvia Pankhurst and the Chief Rabbi’s To Heal a Fractured World – The Ethics of Responsibility. I had some of Steve’s speeches – for example, the Gaitskell memorial speech - an important contribution to working class internationalism - bound for him at the famous Wyvern Bindery – but avoided covering them in pigskin as he was a vegetarian! Green was his chosen colour.

It tickled him to stand at the Marx lIbrary in the same rooms frequented by Lenin or Quelch or Morris when it had been home to the famous Twentieth Century Press. He was always urging me to raise the possibility of reestablishing a Workers' Evening School at the Library so that the NUT, and other unions could send its activists on short courses of labour movement history. He was clear that, for example, the history of the National Union of Teachers and the development of Education since 1870 could only be understood in its unity.

Steve was convinced that the movement suffered by doing too little to pass on its history of thought and achievement. After all, history governed the boundaries within which we conduct ourselves in the present. Appreciation of it also helps us imagine futures. He put serious money into the NUT support for the TUC festival at Tolpuddle, he spoke at the Burston School Strike rally. He commissioned, along with the Black Country Living Museum [BCLM], a history of the women chainmakers strike of 1910 for distribution to schools. He planned to up NUT support for the Durham Miners’ Gala. None of this was romantic reminiscing. One of the peculiar features of Steve's way of working was a desire to impact and change for the better, the lives of teachers and all workers. He had no time for those who shouted instructions from the sidelines and sought glory in self-important factions. His history was a living history. When the NUT dealt with issues under his leadership, be it holocaust education or Tolpuddle, teachers’ notes always accompanied the narrative alongside model lesson plans. The aim was to make a difference.

As part of our work on the history of the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath, the NUT commissioned a serious study of the women involved and the events. Steve’s driving passion was the alleviation of poverty. This subject touched him especially. The writer of the history delved into a pre World War One Royal Commission into the Sweated Trades, which described their conditions. It included an Inspector’s observation that it was not unusual for a female chainmaker to give birth and be back at work that very same evening. When I read this I was livid and bounced into his office insisting that we do whatever we could to bring such facts to the attention of the thousands of teachers who would be taking children to visit the museum of the chainmakers’ strike at the BCLM. Steve was equally livid but was clear that it was the women organizing into unions, which made the difference. Poverty did not solve itself. Nor has it gone away. Nor will it until we meet it head on with organization and action. This was his conclusion. The history is soon to be published.

One theme that intrigued Steve was that of union mergers. I would tease him by saying of my craft, that where in 1900 there had been 91 print unions, by 2000 there was one. He would retort, “And by 2008 there was none!” referring to the decision of the then GPMU to merge into Unite. But we both knew a single union for all teachers was both doable and for Steve, essential. Unity is his legacy. Only a single teacher union could effectively tackle child poverty.

Many are now referring to a memorial for Steve and some have broached the question of a monument. The only monument he would have accepted was the creation of a unified, new union. It would be a force in education that could produce the changes Steve dreamt of. It would be a modern, radical, campaigning union. Steve’s understanding of living history, his instinct that workers are capable of so much more and of the need for unity as a principle to be fought for are the aspects of his legacy I have shared and will carry happily with me all my days. With his passing, he has become a part of the working class history he so forthrightly asserted.

Farewell friend. Thank you, teacher.

 

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