Word: deakins
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...biennial conference of the Transport and General Workers' Union-Britain's biggest-met at Southsea, hard by Portsmouth docks. Bevanites hoped to make trouble. When bluff, able Arthur Deakin, 62, the union's general secretary, marched into the hall, packed with 800 representatives of the union's truck drivers and milkmen, trawlermen and stable lads, home helps and gravediggers, someone reminded him that Nelson's flagship Victory, with its hangman's yardarm, was not far away. Deakin smiled grimly. "We don't need the yardarm," said...
...Shout of Applause. "The test of nationalization," Deakin told his delegates, "must be, 'How will it serve the interests of the people?' Nobody can say that . . . it has achieved satisfactory success. There is no wholesale and general approbation . . . There is a feeling that . . . conditions of the work people in the nationalized industries have been improved at the expense of the consumer...
Should there be more nationalization, as the Bevanites propose? Boomed Deakin: "Where do you begin? Where do you end? We will have no precipitate action that would involve us . . . in chaos and confusion . . ." Next day he fought off a resolution that censured his anti-Bevanite stand. "I am perfectly sure I have 95% of the membership behind me," he said. The answer: a great shout of applause...
Next day, the Transport Workers' testy Arthur Deakin rose to make his speech as "fraternal delegate." Flushed with rage, Deakin cast all pretense at fraternity to the winds. "Organization was set up," he shouted, "to secure the Bevanites their place on the national executive. Very well, then, organization will be set up to counter them." This was equivalent to an open declaration of war on Bevan from the trade unions. "Tell him to sit down," shouted somebody, "he's losing us the next election...
...right, friends," said T.U.C. Boss Arthur Deakin, bluff, levelheaded general secretary of Britain's biggest union (Transport and General Workers). "Now you're going to hear from the other side." A lean Liverpudlian, Tom Williamson, boss of the 800,000 General and Municipal Workers, pitched in with the counterattack: "All over Europe, people are scared-who by? Not by Britain or her Allies, but by the Soviet Union." Mineworkers' Leader Ernest Jones chipped in with rough-hewn Socialist logic: "If British miners were called upon to rearm in the interest of American capitalism and the Tory party...