A Balliol graduate who, to his eternal regret, just missed an Oxford rowing blue, Leif Mills was an unlikely figure to have been elected president of the TUC and to have regaled its general council for a decade with Greek and Latin tags and witty interjections.
With a briar in his hand, Mills, who has died aged 84, played up to his image as a pipe smoker and beer drinker. As chairman of the Covent Garden Market Authority (1998-2005), he had a brewer’s tap installed in the offices and would regularly join market porters for an early-morning pint.
But he was a serious and respected union leader who led the National Union of Bank Employees (Nube), later the Banking, Insurance and Finance Union, as general secretary for 24 years (1972-96).
Joining as a research officer in 1960, he became an assistant general secretary just as the huge expansion in white collar unionism was taking shape. Union membership was becoming attractive to professionals, even conservative bank staff. But recruitment was fiercely competitive and company staff associations with substantial memberships were targeted by rival unions.
Nube found itself in particular conflict with Clive Jenkins’ fast-growing Association of Scientific, Management and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS), which was bolting on diverse groups of members and sizing up the financial sector. It also had to pitch against the entrenched bank staff associations favoured by managements, who in turn refused to recognise Nube. Nonetheless, membership increased, passing six figures, and negotiating rights were eventually conceded.
Against this background, Mills was elected Nube’s general secretary just as the Trades Union Congress instructed its members to refuse to register under the Heath government’s Industrial Relations Act, which sought to impose greater regulation on the unions. With its particular membership, Nube elected to register and was expelled from the TUC, so losing its protection against poaching of members by other unions. When it successfully applied to rejoin following Labour’s repeal of the act, the votes against included its two leftwing rivals, the ASTMS and MSF, the manufacturing, science and finance union.
By now insurance companies were the competitive battleground, but Mills resisted TUC pressure to leave the field clear to the ASTMS. In 1979, Nube renamed itself Bifu – the Banking, Insurance and Finance Union – and retained its insurance members.
Mills became a valued member of the TUC general council, part of a tight-knit group of so-called moderates, and recognised as someone who punched above the weight of his comparatively small union. He set out his stall in his presidential address to the 1995 conference: “Our job is to press and cajole those who have power, not to seize power for ourselves.”
Contemporaries remember his irreverent interventions. At one philosophising session to discuss what trade unions were for, Mills said that they resembled first world war soldiers: “We’re here because we are here, because we are here.” But he chaired the TUC’s education and training committee as well as a financial services committee.
When the Labour party split in the 1980s, he was pressed to join the fledgling Social Democratic party but Mills, a former parliamentary candidate, remained rock-solid Labour. However, he rejected the TUC policy of non-cooperation with the Thatcher government and had private meetings with the government about its treatment of the unions. His appointments in the 80s included membership of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and the Armed Forces’ Pay Review Body. When he was appointed CBE in 1995, it was for services to industrial relations and training.
In 1989 he became an unexpected, but perhaps predictable, hero of the traditionally Conservative brewing industry. He was a lone voice of dissent against a Monopolies Commission’s report recommending limits on large brewers’ ownership of pubs. Praised by one brewer as “the only actual consumer of our products; all the others are gin-and-tonic men”, Mills argued the proposals could lead to a reduction in competition and less consumer choice. Four years later, he claimed vindication: “There are fewer pubs, higher prices, less consumer choice and less competition.”
Among other appointments, he was a trustee of the Civic Trust, a governor of the London Business School and a council member of the Consumers’ Association.
Mills was born in London, the son of Victor Mills, a clerk with Shell, and Bergliot (nee Strom-Olsen), a Norwegian who sold skiwear at Selfridges. The family lived in Raynes Park, south-west London. Leif was educated at Kingston grammar school and studied philosophy, politics and economics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was president of the college boat club and first reserve for the 1956 Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, graduating with what he called “a rower’s third”. He would claim to have scaled “the last unclimbed peak of British life for the college” when he became TUC president.
After national service as a second lieutenant in the military police, he joined London county council as a graduate trainee. He moved to Nube in 1960.
In 1958, he married Gillian Smith, a primary school teacher. They had two sons, Adam and Nathanial, and two daughters, Susannah and Harriet, who survive him. Gillian died in 2003.
He still continued to row and was president of the Weybridge Rowing Club. But he developed a consuming fascination for polar exploration, writing biographies of the lesser-known polar explorers Frank Wild, Alister Forbes Mackay and Cecil Meares. He visited the North Pole and Scott’s hut in the Antarctic. Two novels, about the “redoubtable Mrs Smith”, a deputy general secretary of a white-collar union, were published privately.
• Leif Anthony Mills, trade unionist, born 25 March 1936; died 17 December 2020
