My father, Roy Evans, who has died aged 84, was general secretary of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (ISTC) between 1985 and 1993, and a key figure in the expulsion of the Militant tendency from the Labour party.
In an age of high-profile “union barons”, Roy was a publicity-shy but principled trade union leader during a tumultuous period in industrial relations.
Born in Pontarddulais in south Wales to David, a dispensing chemist, and Sarah (nee Lyon), a housewife, Roy did not speak English until the age of seven, when he moved to Gorseinon near Swansea, where he grew up. He left school at 16 to work in the steel industry and to support his disabled mother. After national service in the RAF between 1949 and 1951, he returned to steel, working his way up the ISTC, most of whose members worked for the nationalised British Steel Corporation.
He became assistant general secretary in 1973, when the steel industry employed 225,000 people, and general secretary in 1985, by which time the workforce had shrunk to 80,000. He retired in 1993. Despite being involved in the 13-week national steel strike in 1980, which eventually saw workers win a 16% wage increase under the then general secretary, Bill Sirs, Roy was more about negotiation than confrontation. He was a passionate trade unionist, but also a pragmatic and moderate one who preferred to tackle issues away from the limelight in his own soft-spoken way.
He restructured the ISTC, was a member of the TUC general council between 1985 and 1993 and was on the Labour party’s national executive committee (NEC) between 1981 and 1984. A close ally of the Labour leader Neil Kinnock, he was an important figure in the expulsion of the Militant tendency from mainstream Labour in the early 1980s. It was a divisive and troubled time for the party, and Roy, along with other moderates on the NEC, was subjected to pressure and abuse.
On his retirement from the ISTC in 1993, he was made an OBE for services to the labour movement – a rarity at the time from a Conservative government. In later years he enjoyed travel, reading and returning to his native Wales from his home in Hertfordshire.
He is survived by his wife, Brenda, whom he married in 1960, by three children, Julie, Lisa and me, and by seven grandchildren.
