Eddie Coles (1937 - 2002)
Militant trade unionist and revolutionary socialist
Eddie Coles, who recently died at the age of 65 was not known very much outside of his native Oxfordshire. But Eddie was a militant trade unionist and a Trotskyist with a tremendous record of service to the working class.
He lived in the Cotswold town of Chipping Norton, 20 miles from Oxford, and had worked on the assembly lines in the Cowley car factories continuously for 38 years until his retirement four years ago.
Eddie and I were the same age, and both started our working life as farm labourers. He then went into the airforce and I went into the army. After that we both started work in Cowley the same time, in the summer of 1959. He started as a track worker in the North Works assembling the new Morris Oxford, which was just going into production at that time. I started as a forklift truck driver in the South Works feeding the new Mini Minor track.
We both participated in the building of the trade union movement in the plant during the 1960s. I became a shop steward in the early 1960s and Eddie in the early 1970s. By that time the shop stewards movement in the plant had developed into a powerful force and controlled many aspects of the functioning of the plant. It was forcing up wages and improving conditions year on year.
Eddie never held a position in the union above shop steward, but the role he played was more important than that of many who did hold prominent positions. The words "unsung hero" spring readily to mind. He, and others like him, were the bedrock of the trade union movement in the plant. He was always there, always standing by his principles, and always ready to help and defend his fellow workers.
It was a militant period with strikes in the plant running at well over 300 a year. Eddie was in the thick of it. When the shop stewards committee called strike action – in one of its many confrontations with management - Eddie Coles’ track would be one of the first out of the gate.
When the T&G officials led by Jack Jones removed the left from the leadership of the plant in 1974 and replaced us with right-wingers, Eddie was amongst those who continued the struggle for militant trade unionism. He was in the thick of the battles against the so-called "workers’ participation" plan introduced into British Leyland in the mid-1970s.
When four shop stewards in the North Works, the most militant part of the plant at that time, were famously victimised by management after Jack Jones called militant shop stewards "the enemy within", Eddie was amongst the group of North Works shop stewards who came to their defence in a bitter battle not only with management but with right-wing officials within the T&G.
When the left retook the T&G convenorship soon afterwards in a spectacular victory against the right, Eddie was in the forefront of the campaign for the vote. When the wages struggles broke out in BL in the early 1980s Eddie’s was a part of the struggle to get the strike votes of the membership implemented by the full-time officials.
When I wrote my first book on Cowley in the mid-1980s (after I had been victimised out of the plant in 1982) I met him to discuss several of the chapters and asked him how things were going.
He said that it was a constant battle, and at times he could hardly face another drive into the plant and another confrontation with management. But he always did. I fact he hardly ever lost a day.
In the latter part of the 1980s and into the 1990s, with the right-wing back in control of the plant and attacking the left, Eddie never compromised his principles or caved in to management as many others did. The picture of him was always with a group of workers around him in the canteen at lunch time discussing problems.
The legacy Eddie leaves behind is one of political trade unionism. He comes from a generation which produced a strong shop stewards and trade union movement. But Eddie was outstanding because he became political and worked from the basis of a socialist analysis of society. That is what allowed him to stick to his principles as others fell by the wayside.
There is now a generation of younger workers who have not had the experience of that militant period, and it is for those that the legacy of Eddie and his generation is so important.
Eddie’s political life was not just in the car factory. He was a member of the Labour Party and an active member of the Labour left, and a part of a militant tradition in the Chipping Norton area which goes back to Joseph Arch and the struggles of the Oxfordshire agricultural labourers. He remained a Marxist in the Labour Party (and chair of the Chipping Norton constituency) until quite recently, when he could not stand New Labour any longer.
He was also involved in local campaigning in Oxfordshire, whether it was defending asylum seekers, opposing privatisation, or defending hospitals against closure. Not long before his death he was in Oxford at a meeting of Labour against the War. In all these areas Eddie will be sorely missed.
He is survived by a son and a daughter and his wife Eve, who is still a member of the LP and a formidable campaigner against the effects of the policies of new Labour especially in defence of social services and elderly care.