My friend Bert Ward, who has died aged 94, was a working-class intellectual and activist who played a key role in changing Labour party attitudes to Ireland through his tireless campaigning and his friendship with Mo Mowlam.
Born in Middlesbrough, son of Joseph Ward, a riveter’s helper, and his wife, Florence, a hospital ward maid, Bert attended Marton Grove primary and then Hugh Bell school, which he left at the age of 15 without any qualifications, and joined the Royal Navy, serving as a gunner on north Atlantic convoys during the second world war.
After the war he worked in the shipyards, on the railways and then as a rigger at ICI Wilton, on Teesside. He married Elsa Dybell in 1946 and they had two children, Victor and Dave. In 1948, thinking Labour too middle-class, Bert joined the Communist party, which, he said, “introduced me to books, to serious reading and study”. He was secretary of the Middlesbrough CP branch, stood for election to Middlesbrough council, and led the squatters occupying an empty army camp on the edge of the town.
In 1957 he won a scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, to study politics, and then another to the London School of Economics. He worked as a national organiser for the British Council for Peace in Vietnam, before being appointed as a lecturer in local government studies at Catford College of Commerce in south London.
Elected secretary of his ATTI (Association of Teachers in Technical Institutes, later to become Natfhe) branch in 1965, he was also secretary of the Sydenham branch of the CP, and a member of the party’s London District. In 1974, following a visit to Belfast with the London District, he joined the party’s Irish advisory committee, editing (and often writing) the committee’s monthly information bulletin.
Bert’s first marriage ended in divorce. In 1985 he moved back to Middlesbrough with his second wife, Ruth (nee McIntosh). In retirement he taught politics courses in adult education, and published an autobiography, several books of poems and short stories, and a three-volume fiction memoir, Dear Bob (2002-06). For several years he and Ruth taught Scottish country dancing at the Communist party’s annual summer school in then East Germany.
After the CP dissolved in 1991, Bert joined the Labour party. He remained involved with Irish politics as national secretary of the cross-party peace group New Consensus, later New Dialogue. Convinced of the need to include the unionists in any future settlement, Bert patiently educated MPs and the media about the complexities of Northern Ireland, on one occasion providing a platform for David Trimble – an Ulster Unionist politician – at a fringe meeting of the Labour party conference. Above all, through his close friendship with his local MP and later secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Mo Mowlam, it can be argued that Bert’s thinking about Ireland made a long-term contribution to the Irish peace process.
Bert is survived by his sons, and two grandchildren. Ruth died in 2015.
