KEVIN HALPIN, whose funeral takes place today in east London, was at the centre of Britain’s labour movement for over half a century as a workplace militant and Communist activist.

Born into grinding poverty in Preston in 1927, he graduated at the university of hard knocks, joining the world of work at 13.

His first job was dismantling a factory chimney, climbing up it by ladder, sitting on high and dislodging the bricks into the shaft, unaware of health and safety provisions that he would champion in later life.

He joined the Royal Navy, working on a minesweeper in the Adriatic before being demobbed, taken on at Briggs Motor Bodies in Dagenham as an inspector and, shortly thereafter, joining the Communist Party.

Engineering, trade unionism and Communist politics would colour the rest of his life.

Briggs was closely linked to Ford and Kevin was instrumental in reviving and developing the CP workplace branch established there in the 1930s.

Fellow Communist and Ford worker George Wills remembers seeing Kevin address a packed-out party education meeting in a local school. “He was impressive, down to earth, solid and dependable. I always listened to whatever Kevin had to say.”

He recalls marching alongside Kevin much later at a minimum wage demo in Newcastle, proudly carrying the Liaison Committee for Defence of Trade Unions (LCDTU) banner.

Kevin’s autobiography Memoirs of a Militant, published five years ago by Praxis Press, details many of the mass industrial and political struggles he was involved in before being sacked by Ford in 1962, along with 16 other mainly Communist shop stewards.

He found himself blacklisted, which was very difficult, but he drew comfort from the company’s public announcement that it had no gripe about his work or qualifications.

“His time-keeping record is first class. We are dismissing him because he is hostile to Ford Motor Company.

His public statements as parliamentary candidate of the Communist Party are there to prove it.”

Kevin continued to stand for elected office for the Communist Party, being supported in 1974 by, among others, a Communist student called Charlie Whelan who was living in a Fieldgate Mansions squat, where the end wall was emblazoned: “Vote Halpin. Vote Levitas,” the two Communist candidates.

Whelan went on to work for the AEU engineering union before becoming Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown’s spin doctor.

“I couldn’t believe then that Kevin Halpin wasn’t on the party executive committee, so at one congress I went into the electoral preparations committee to make the case for his inclusion on the EC recommended list,” he recollects.

“I always looked up to him and kept in touch. We’d meet up at Labour and union conferences and have a drink together. Kevin was always great with me. He might not have always agreed with what we were doing, but he respected me and I respected him. He was a great man who’ll be sadly missed.”

Strong trade unionism was his saviour after Ford since well-organised workplaces were capable at that time of insisting on suitably qualified trade union activists being employed.

And so it was that Kevin found work in ship repair at Harland and Wolff and was elected shop steward again.

He was among the founders of the LCDTU that was brought together to oppose the anti-union proposals of Harold Wilson’s 1964-70 government brought together in Minister of Labour Barbara Castle’s In Place of Strife document.

The liaison committee drew its strength from militant shop stewards committees in engineering, print and construction as well as docks, railways and coalmining.

Its proposals were backed by trade union delegate conferences and mass unofficial strike action and demonstrations were organised as the government was obliged to withdraw its plan.

The LCDTU was instrumental in organising or supporting many industrial struggles in the 1970s, not least the successful battle to secure the release from jail of the London dockers known as the Pentonville Five.

Mick Costello worked closely with Kevin at this time, noting the liaison committee’s success in following up the Pentonville victory by “making the Tory Industrial Relations Act inoperable.

“It nullified the effectiveness of the Tory law and its court by generating mass action that, after securing the backing of the TUC general council, forced the release from prison of London dockers who had broken the law.

“I was industrial correspondent of the Morning Star, the only daily newspaper that, then as now, maintained total support for resistance to anti-trade union laws,” he recalls.

Costello stresses that Kevin “was a Communist, a working-class intellectual trained within the party. He benefited from such party theoreticians as James Klugmann.

“He valued James’s stress on explaining the imperative process for Communists of changing militants into revolutionaries.”

Costello is anxious to dispel any impression of a Kevin as a sort of “political automaton,” pointing out that he wrote pamphlets, spoke at meetings large and small, had broad interests and kept his interest in the arts, literature and music and political theory as it evolved.

“His freshness in approach to new ideas was helped by a natural curiosity. He liked company and a pint, as well as good wine and food.

“He never lost his Lancashire accent — and the distance he could make it carry — and it even seemed to come through his frequent bouts of laughter.

“Those who knew him best could be treated to his performance of an Irish jig towards an end of a social gathering. His warmth and comradeship will never be forgotten.”

Retired Unite/GPMU national official Ann Field remembers being in awe of Kevin when she first attended liaison committee conferences and other demos and pickets.

“He was inspiring, knowledgeable and determined. He appealed to me as a raw young Communist and trade unionist because he spoke plainly and straightforwardly, no jargon, no mysterious hard-to-follow political theory but plain class politics rousing us all for the struggle, the class struggle.”

A little appreciated side of Kevin’s political/ trade union work was his recognition of the need to involve women by encouraging them to organise on issues most relevant to them.

This had been brought home to him by his dealings with women members at Briggs so the 1968 strike for equal pay by Ford sewing machinists did not arise from a vacuum.

He was prominent in insisting that more attention should be paid to the TUC women’s conference which was for too long treated as the Cinderella of the organised labour movement.

Former trade union official Philippa Clark met Kevin in the early 1980s when she was working at the AEU and involved with the Engineering Gazette broad left organisation.

She says: “We spent a lot of time convincing people it was an important conference that needed to be organised to make advances.

“Kevin was always there, selling the Morning Star, and getting a coffee if anyone needed one. (His wife) Anita’s birthday usually fell during women’s conference, so he’d put a notice in the Morning Star and then appear at lunchtime with a treat for her.

“He gave great support to our conference as part of his Communist Party industrial work.

“This helped to put women’s conference on the agenda as a conference to be fought for politically as it could effect change in the TUC.”

Institute of Employment Rights director Carolyn Jones remembers Kevin and Communist Party industrial organiser Bert Ramelson as regular visitors to her home in Kirkby when she was young.

The visits revolved around discussions with her dad Bill about the Building Workers Charter joining forces with LCDTU in support of the dockers and assisting the 1972 national building workers strike and the Shrewsbury conspiracy trials that followed.

“Those discussions clearly left an impression,” she notes drily. “In later life Kevin visited Liverpool once again to pursue me to take over his role as party industrial organiser of the CPB, a role I was honoured to take up.”

Vicky Knight is another female worker influenced by Kevin, recalling that she was staying with him and Anita “when I was appointed to the first ever seat for women on the Fire Brigades Union national executive committee.”

On turning in one night, she found a letter on her pillow from Kevin. “It is a letter I still prize today, outlining his delight at my appointment, the scale and gravitas of the task ahead of me and an unfaltering belief in my ability to rise to the challenge and make a difference in our movement.

“Kevin empowered so many people in this way — he made such a difference. I’m proud to have been able to call him a friend.”

One of Kevin’s most crucial involvements was when Tony Blair’s favourite trade unionist Ken Jackson announced that, by agreement of the union — by that point the AEEU — executive, his five-year term as general secretary would be extended by a year.

Kevin spoke to labour lawyer John Hendy who asked why this decision hadn’t been challenged legally since it was in clear breach of trade union legislation.

The upshot was that Jackson had to face election and AEEU leftwingers agreed to back a little-known official in the Derby office, Derek Simpson, who had previously been active as a Communist in Sheffield.

Simpson confounded the hopes of the right and the fears of the left by defeating Jackson by a whisker, ending sweetheart deals with employers and, as a pleasant side-effect, rebuilding close engineering union links with the Morning Star.

“I am so sorry to hear of the loss of Kevin. My memories are of a man never seeking the headlines but a facilitator second to none for the left,” he says.

“I personally benefited as it was he who introduced John Hendy to me when we were challenging Ken Jackson and indeed our first meeting with John was at Kevin’s home.

“Perhaps in latter years there wasn’t the prominence there once was for Kevin, but for those that followed and now follow there is a debt of gratitude.”

Morning Star Fighting Fund organiser Ivan Beavis, who worked with Kevin in LCDTU, says that he was always there when needed — “a bit of a rock.”

Once retired from fulltime work, Kevin had more time for his obsession with DIY and, since he didn’t drive, Ivan would take him to assorted builders’ yards.

“He was never happier than when he was squashed in the back of my car up to his eyes in bits of wood, roof tiles and bags of cement sounding off about politics.”

His retirement gave him more time to attend union conferences, selling the Morning Star and encouraging new comrades, including circulation manager Bernadette Keaveney.

“Kevin was very kind to me when I started work at the paper and we spent a lot of time selling papers outside conferences together — not always in sunshine,” she notes ruefully.

“Kevin was never late for a sales pitch regardless of the time we finished the night before and he always knew the best pub after the sale to get warm in and get a good breakfast.”

Kevin’s knowledge and experience of the labour movement, together with his all-round political maturity, ensured his repeated election to the Communist Party executive committee until his eighties.

He played a full role in his local party branch’s Marxist education classes, taking his turn in leading discussion and participating fully in debate.

Mary Davis says that he would always look to find a “21st-century application for Marx’s Wages Prices and Profit for instance — how to apply Marxism, drawing on his own experience as an engineering worker.

“He was not just a militant trade unionist but deeply interested in Marxist theory. “He was also a brilliant cook,” she adds.

Communist Party general secretary Rob Griffiths says that Kevin will be remembered “first and foremost as a fearsome, incorruptible organiser and leader of rank and file workers, but he was much more than that.

“While on the CP executive committee in the 1970s and 1980s, he took a firm stance against revisionism and then played a key role in rebuilding the party.

“Kevin was always full of fresh thinking and new ideas. For example, he urged communists and the wider labour movement to study and analyse developments in China, years before most people recognised their economic and political significance.

“He hugely enjoyed his visit there with a Communist Party delegation in 2006, where he asked many well informed and challenging questions of government officials, trade union leaders, teachers, interpreters and almost everyone else we met.

“Above all, his many comrades and friends will remember Kevin for his personal kindness and his warm — and sometimes raucous — humanity.”

Kevin is survived by wife Anita, son Boris, daughter-in-law Jerusa and grandchildren Sophia and Hans Kevin.

By John Haylett

• Kevin’s funeral takes place today at 2.30pm at City of London Crematorium, North Chapel, Aldersbrook Road, London E12 5DQ. Reception follows at Golden Fleece, 166 Capel Road, London E12 5DB.