Chris Kaufman writes: 

IT TAKES a special sort of journalist to work for such polar political opposites as the Morning Star’s predecessor, the Daily Worker, and the Daily Mail, and still keep your friends. 

But nobody who knew Monty Meth, who died two weeks ago aged 95, could doubt his knowhow as an industrial reporter, integrity and commitment to working-class causes.

I knew him first when as an official of the Transport and General Workers Union, I saw how general secretaries Moss Evans and Ron Todd were able to trust and confide in Monty and his longtime journalistic colleague Geoffrey Goodman. 

Later, when I followed Monty’s route from east London to Enfield, I encountered him as the leading campaigner in the borough as president of the Enfield Over-50s Forum who had transformed a small pressure group numbered in double figures to a major force of several thousands.  

He had become a true champion of the elderly, well meriting the MBE he got for services to the community.

Monty was indefatigable and irrepressible in his campaigning against swingeing cuts in funding for local services and health; in maintaining the triple lock for pensioners, for improving public transport, welfare and leisure facilities. 

He would engage at every level; on the local clinical commissioning group, leading lobbies of MPs and Parliament, penning a regular, fact-filled column in the Forum Newsletter and the local press, joining anti-cuts rallies.

A peerless cajoler, Monty would often ask me (as chair of the Enfield Alliance Against the Cuts) “how many sheets of  petitions have you got for us?” as we inched towards the magic 10,000 signatures for properly funded health and local services.

It was a far cry from Monty’s first experience in journalism as the Yorkshire-based Daily Worker correspondent. 

In his own notes Monty says: “I was surrounded by the Yorkshire coalfield, the biggest in Britain at the time; the Yorkshire woollen mills around Bradford; the Sheffield steel industry; the shipbuilding in the north-east where the once great boilermakers’ union was based in Newcastle-on-Tyne.” 

Mixing with “the tribe” of industrial correspondents from other newpapers Monty recalls: “I took the view that ‘exclusives’ were not as important as getting the ‘line’ out to as many papers as possible and so try to get them to relay our message. 

“The man from the Worker was known by other journalists as having the inside track on what was going on. 

“In return they gave me their intelligence gleaned from right-wing union leaders — so between us we got a balanced story.”

When he and Betty moved into Enfield in the early 1960s they were living on £7.50 a week. 

Now they live in the hearts of local people who have benefited from their loving partnership, experience and commitment to improving their lives and prospects.

John Goodman writes:

Monty was a pressman, one of Nick Jones’s “lost tribe” of industrial correspondents that included my father Geoffrey. 

Beyond that, though, he was a perennial campaigner and organiser. Having retired from wage slavery in 1999 (aged 73) he became leader of the Enfield Over-50s Forum and developed it from 70 members to an influential organisation with more than 6,000 members. 

Early in life he’d learned the art of organising, as a full-timer for the Young Communist League in Yorkshire, where one of his 1995 recruits was a 17-year-old Arthur Scargill.

Indeed only last week in the Morning Star’s letters page, Arthur paid tribute to Monty as “a great organiser who helped convince young people that we could change the rotten system of capitalism by getting rid of it.” 

He cited campaigns to end conscription, demand equal pay, oppose Britain’s war against North Korea and win all miners the same wage.

Monty was an East End boy from London’s Bethnal Green. He joined the local boys club, a formative experience where he learned photography, and then in 1944 signed up for the navy. 

After the war he worked at the Topical Press Agency until the YCL drew him to Yorkshire.  

There he met and married Betty, a leading young communist from Scotland, a powerful partnership of almost 70 years that also produced their two children, Ian and Gilly.

The great leap into journalism came when Monty transferred to the Daily Worker, which sent him to London. 

Not long after came another transfer, hard to imagine today, from the Daily Worker to the Daily Mail as industrial correspondent, later industrial editor and in 1970, the News Reporter of the Year award.

In 1972 he transferred again, from the newspaper to the business world: Beechams’ PR department, run by another ex-member of “the tribe,” Ron Stevens until finishing in a PR consultancy with another former journalist, Keith McDowell.

Monty was a loyal Spurs supporter through thick and — predominantly — thin. 

Many cold afternoons at White Hart Lane were enlivened for Dad and me by the banter with Monty and Ian in the adjacent season ticket seats.

Great memories of a man who never stopped working for the cause. Monty, we’ll miss you.