Tony Martin, 1937 –2004
Tony Martin was District Officer of the Transport & General Workers’ Union, in charge of the Carlisle Road Office in Derry, with responsibility for a large number of workers in Derry and the surrounding area, from 1977 until his retirement in 1992.
With more members than any other trade union in Northern Ireland, the position taken by the T&G was a critical factor in the work of establishing Labour politics here. Tony’s support for this work was therefore particularly important.
Tony was born in Salford in Greater Manchester; his father was a Yorkshireman of Spanish Jewish origins; his mother was third generation Irish, related on her mother’s side to John McHale, the Mayo bishop who played a leading role in Catholic Emancipation, Famine Relief, and in the education and land reform movements of the 19th century.
Tony’s father died young and his mother and her five children found themselves in more difficult circumstances. Tony had a wild streak, and his policeman brother was sometimes obliged to take him home from the police station to which he was occasionally taken. He left home at age 15 to join the Royal Navy, which provided him with further education.
Naval service took Tony round the world several times; he saw action as an able seaman gunner in the Cyprus and Suez conflicts; and he participated in NATO exercises monitoring Soviet submarines in the Atlantic during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In less martial mode, he served as ship’s electrician – and bugler in the ship’s band – on HMS Crane, in a 1961-2 recreation of Captain Cook’s voyage round the islands of the South Pacific, including a visit to the island of Nomuka, the first time a warship had visited that island since Captain Bligh went there in 1789.
In 1963 Tony’s ship HMS Falmouth was stationed in Derry, where he met Jean Gillespie. He left the Navy in 1964 to become first mate to his new captain on board the ship of life. Jean and Tony married one week later, on 25 November 1964, and they lived with Jean’s mother in Fanad Drive in Derry’s Creggan area. The couple’s housing application to Londonderry Corporation was unfruitful.
With an address in Creggan Tony found it difficult to land a civilian job, and he became increasingly conscious of the social problems besetting Derry. Eventually he got a start in the Campsie scrap metal yard owned by Jean’s cousin’s husband, Jimmy Corry, and he worked there for about three years before getting a job as steel erector with the American Navy in their Derry naval base, working as antennae rigger in the communications system on Benbradagh Mountain near Dungiven.
Tony became involved in the Civil Rights movement and was appointed Public Relations Officer for the local NICRA Committee, and acted as Steward in civil rights rallies and demonstrations. He was involved in the Rent and Rates Strike, and was present when the 1968 rally in Duke Street was baton-charged and MPs bloodied, putting the situation here on the world’s television screens.
As the Northern political system became increasingly stressed, the Battle of the Bogside in August 1969 demonstrated the vulnerability of the Catholic population, which was relatively unrepresented in the police and armed forces of the state. In the communal division, Tony’s military background alerted him to a fact which became increasingly significant and troubling – that a massive preponderance of arms (legal, official and otherwise) and military capacity resided on one side of the community division. Undertakings by the Irish Prime Minister Jack Lynch to provide last-resort defence to Catholic areas were reneged on, throwing the northern Catholic population back on its own meagre resources.
The IRA had little military or political credibility at the time. Tony Martin’s disposition did not lean in that direction. As an ex-serviceman he helped organise the large numbers of former members of the British armed services in Derry, and, in the absence of any other disciplined resources, these played a key role in area defence and in stewarding the civil rights campaign during the late sixties and early seventies. They were also a politically significant factor in the line-up of contending forces at that particular time. (Under the name of “Services Club”, what would have been known elsewhere as the British Legion retained a presence on Derry’s Cityside throughout the Troubles, and was a social amenity frequented by Tony and many other ex-service people and their families.)
The loyalist B-Specials were disbanded in 1970 and the Ulster Defence Regiment was formed. To Tony this would have appeared to be a golden opportunity to introduce some communal balance into the disposition of arms and military training, and, with hundreds of other Derry people, he seized the opportunity and joined up. As did the former B-Specials.
Continuing aggression by state forces under the control of the Stormont government culminated in the deaths of Séamus Cusack and Desmond Beattie at the hands of trigger-happy soldiers on 8 July 1971, and Tony led a parade of ex-servicemen who burned their medals and military honours. He resigned from the UDR at this point.
Recruitment to both Official and Provisional IRA surged, and the Stormont government introduced internment on 9 August 1971. As PRO of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, Tony helped to organise the protest march of Sunday 30 January 1972, and he helped to secure commitments from both wings of the IRA to stay out of the march. His military background made him a particularly useful witness to what happened, and he gave evidence to the 1972 Widgery Tribunal of Enquiry, and to the Saville Enquiry.
His testimony to the latter in year 2000 includes: “My role on the march was to act as a steward. I was working with Arthur Palmer, who was a war-time hero and had acted as a tail-gunner in the RAF. Me and Arthur were in touch by walkie-talkie. Arthur’s role was to drive around ahead of the march and let me know where the army had set up barricades. I would then tell the lorry which was at the head of the march where to go and whether to expect any blockades.”
Fourteen people were killed by the army. It is likely that the army expected a violent confrontation at the blockades it had erected against the marchers, and that this confrontation would provide cover for a massacre which had been authorised by the British government, in support of the Unionist government in Stormont. In the event, the march was turned away from the army blockades by Tony and his fellow-stewards. So the Paratroopers opened fire without the excuse of the provocation they had attempted to engineer. The army actually followed the retreating marchers down Rossville Street towards Free Derry Corner where there was very little cover from the Paras’ strategically placed snipers.
In the ensuing slaughter, Tony got people out of immediate danger of being shot, helped the wounded to safety under fire, and helped to move the dead. It is likely that the careful planning and discipline of Tony and the other stewards forestalled a much worse massacre.
Later he gave interviews to the media, including Peter Pringle of the Times newspaper. Following this he received death threats from the “Hooded Defenders”, with the result that he lost his US Navy job, because US Navy personnel travelling to work with him would also be in danger from the “Hooded Defenders”.
His next job was with Hutchinson Yarns in Campsie where he became shop steward and convenor. He went on trade union courses in Newcastle and Dublin, and in 1977 was appointed District Officer of the Transport and General Workers Union, with an office in Carlisle Road, Derry, to provide representation and support to union members of all religious hues in Derry and surrounding districts.
This became his life’s work, and Tony was notably successful at it, until health issues caused him to retire in 1992. He had a gift for organisation, and attracted a talented and energetic group of local trade union activists around him. He attended to the more public face of trade unionism through his involvement in Derry Trades Council, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, and in industrial, employment promotion and other forums. As Harbour Commissioner, and as recreational sailor, he continued his interest in things naval.
Tony played a leading role in various attempts to settle the NI conflict. It was notable that, on occasions when the troubles were particularly fraught or bloody, the community often turned to the trade union movement to give public expression to common humanity and to civilised values, in a way which governments, churches or other organisations could not express. The trade union and labour spirit has a lot more to it than wages and conditions and contracts of employment,
In 1988 I asked for his support for the campaign to get the British Labour Party to organise and take an active part in Northern Irish representative electoral politics.
Seeing merit in this, and also a possibility of success, Tony applied his organising and political skills to the issue within his own union, the largest and most influential in Northern Ireland, and at that time a powerful force within the British Labour Party itself. But it was a problematic issue within the T&G in Northern Ireland. The union was already politicised. It was an open secret that the leading full-time officials of the union in the Belfast area were affiliated to the Communist Party, whose policy was to oppose British Labour Party organisation in Northern Ireland. Therefore, in effect, the political might of the T&G in Britain and Ireland was directed against any serious effort to get Labour politics going in N. Ireland. Discussion of the issue could practically be stopped in its tracks when the representatives of the biggest organisation of labour in NI stated that there was no support for it.
Tony’s attitude to the CP was somewhat complicated. He was a faithful Catholic. The church was dogmatically anti-communist, and the CP in N. Ireland was dogmatically atheist. To make things worse, there was a sense that Orange attitudes carried over into some of the CP membership in Belfast. Whatever the truth of this, the CP got little support west of the Bann. But the party could be seen as a “hidden hand” wielding influence for or against this or that; for instance in advancement within the ranks of the union.
Tony resented this influence, along with the subtle (sometimes unsubtle) attempts to draw union members into the party, or to bring them under its control as “fellow-travellers”, as the Cold War expression puts it. On the other hand he thought that a union as complex, as large and as powerful as the T&G had to have some political coherence, and this could only be supplied by some coherent political agency. Tony accepted that the CP performed this role in the union. Perhaps part of his motivation for espousing the cause of Labour Party organisation was the hope that it would provide a more effective political direction to the T&G union to which he committed his life’s work.
This was a rather complicated perspective, and it had some surreal consequences. In the late 1980’s Tony set up the “Ireland-Soviet Friendship Society” in Derry, with some public flourish. If this sounds like a CP-type project, well, perhaps that’s what it sounds like. If it drew down some funds from God-knows-where, for the enjoyment and entertainment of T&G members in the Derry area, well, maybe some hard-working union activists got some well-earned recreation out of it.
As far as I know the mostly Republican left in Derry did not flock to join it. I can remember attending a meeting of the group addressed by – wait for it – a party of probably Lutheran bishops from the Baltic states, at a moment when Gorbachev glasnost was giving the Baltic peoples hope of some actual reduction of Soviet intimacy and friendship. Somehow or other, Tony’s endorsement and his enthusiastic high spirits made it all seem perfectly reasonable at the time.
Because of the strength of the CP in the T&GWU, it was going to be impossible to get any motion on Labour Party organisation passed – or even on the agenda – of any T&G forum east of the Bann. However Tony found a way of putting this proposal to the annual conference of the union in England. Of course it couldn’t be passed there without the unanimous support of the Northern Ireland delegates at the conference, and there was no way this would be forthcoming in the circumstances. But the mere fact that the motion was put, and that it came from west of the Bann, gave the lie to the CP dogma that, at that time, British Labour would be unacceptable in Republican areas, and that its entry would be divisive and potentially destructive to union cross-community solidarity on economic issues.
At that time the Labour Party spokesman on Irish policy was the SDLP-aligned MP for Hull, Kevin McNamara, who had T&G-sponsorship and was well known to Tony. They were very good friends, and despite political differences, Kevin’s frequent visits to Derry were often occasions for socialising and partying. In N. Ireland Kevin was aligned with the SDLP. No doubt, if the SDLP had an official and formal relationship with the trade union movement, Tony and other leaders would have endorsed such a link. Given the origins of the SDLP, I’ve never fully understood why it did not make more of an effort to be seen to be trying to develop these links. Of course, the inherent implausibility of this idea are at the heart of the problems of trying to generate non-confessional politics while staying within the bounds of the Stormont system – the so-called Northern Ireland constitution, whether in its pre- or post-Good Friday Agreement form.
Tony was also well-connected with union activists across Ireland and Britain. A frequent high-profile visitor was former T&G leader Jack Jones, who, especially in latter years, would travel the length and breadth of Ireland to visit fellow-veterans of the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigade. I don’t know the extent to which Tony would have discussed the British Labour project with Jack Jones. But he put it to him that, in seeking to govern Northern Ireland without even attempting to obtain an electoral mandate, the British Labour Party position was based on armed force, and its moral authority in this was less than those groups it condemned as terrorists, some of whom could claim at least some measure of electoral support in Northern Ireland. Jack acknowledged that these were powerful arguments, but never engaged with the issue.
Tony himself was prepared to submit his case to the electorate and stood for election to Derry City Council in 1993. He polled better than could reasonably be expected. In the same elections Mark Langhammer topped the poll for a seat on Newtownabbey District Council on a similar platform.
These developments coincided with a concerted push to bring the Labour representation campaign under the control of Unionism. It proved impossible to prevent this.
But elections in Donegal and Derry had generated useful collaboration between Labour activists on both sides of the border, adding to the existing collaboration in trade union work. The North East Donegal branches of the Irish Labour Party stepped into the breach caused by the Unionist hijacking of the Northern Labour representation campaign. In consultation with Tony, Mark and other Northern activists, agreement was obtained for gradual introduction of Irish Labour Party organisation in Northern Ireland, a development which gave Tony some satisfaction.
At that time it was not yet obvious that the Labour movement that Tony had grown up in – consisting of trade unions, the Labour Party, along with an historic array of voluntary, self-help and co-operative groups – had come to an end in Britain.
“New Labour” had introduced the world to the era of the blood-soaked war-mongers and mass murderers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
After retirement from the position of District Officer of the Transport and General Workers Union in 1992, Tony continued to play a prominent role in the local committee as a retired member. He pursued his many interests. Though he never stopped campaigning, he had time to spend with his extended family to whom he was devoted, and to enjoy his large circle of friends. He bore his final illness with the indomitable fortitude and cheerfulness which were his trademark.
Pat Muldowney