Greg Douglas
Greg Douglas died on Thursday 13 November. He had been battling Alzheimer’s disease and cancer but died peacefully surrounded by his family.
He will be a tremendous loss to his wife Irene and sons and grandchildren. We have also lost one of the leaders of the shop stewards’ movement of the 1970s.
He was a lifelong fighter (a champion boxer at one stage), born in Glasgow into a Catholic family in 1939.
I first met him as a young organiser for the International Socialists in Sheffield in 1973. But I had seen him from afar at a strike rally in a football stadium in November 1972.
Greg was the chairman of the Joint Sites Committee on the Anchor steel construction site at the time. He was a steel erector.
The workers had voted, as had others, to go on strike to call for more support for pensioners in the middle of the government’s wages freeze, not content with the TUC trade union federation’s lobby of parliament.
Greg and the other shop stewards had organised a mass meeting to be addressed by Wally Preston, union convenor at Trafford Park power station and Tony Cliff, founder of the International Socialists (the forerunners of the Socialist Workers Party).
Like a number of militant shop stewards, Greg was a member of the International Socialists at the time.
The rally was electric. It seemed the most natural thing in the world that workers should strike on behalf of workers poorer than themselves, namely pensioners, such was the confidence workers had at the time.
Action was decided at mass meetings with an open show of hands. In the same way, the death on site of a worker would be followed by a one-day strike and collections made for the widow and family.
But Greg wasn’t just a highly respected shop steward. He loathed racists and fascists. I only had to phone him about a suspected appearance of the Nazi National Front and he would be there.
Two occasions stick in my mind: the first was the occupation of a school where the NF intended to meet in Sheffield. We turned up well ahead of time. Since no one else was there we just went in and occupied the school so the meeting had to be cancelled when the NF did turn up.
The second time was at the university. I just remember Greg towering over a fascist with his hand on his chest and the guy gazing up at Greg’s calm face and beating a hasty retreat. It was best for racists and fascists not to tangle with Greg.
Greg was not a “natural” supporter of the right to abortion with his Catholic background, as he explained to me when I approached him about raising opposition to the anti-abortion James White Bill in his union branch.
But he listened and the argument that finally won him over was when I likened the need for women to be able to control their own bodies to the need for safety at work, safety for workers over what happened to their bodies.
Greg was a great lover of poetry, particularly Rabbie Burns, who he loved to recite by heart.
The upsurge in struggle in the early 1970s was a moment when worker leaders were thrown up who began to look to revolution as the solution to capitalist ills.
Greg was one such leader. As times changed he moved away from the revolutionary tradition but remained a steadfast trade union activist, anti-racist and anti-fascist. He embodied a tradition we need to remember.
