Born: 15 June 1938, Ireland
Died: 19 July 2017
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Mary O’Brien
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Patrick Maume. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Turner, Mary Josephine (1938–2017), trade unionist, was born Mary O’Brien at 17 Derheen Road, Thurles, Co. Tipperary, on 15 June 1938, the eldest of four children (her siblings were Alice (‘Lally’), James (‘Jimmy’) and Margaret (‘Meg’); there were also stillborn twin boys) of Francis (‘Fred’) O’Brien, bakery worker and trade unionist, and his wife Josephine (‘Jo’), née Ryan, housewife and part-time worker. Turner and her siblings attended the Presentation Sisters’ primary school in Thurles, recalled as disciplinarian and offering a predominantly religious curriculum.
Family emigration and Irish London
In 1947 Fred O’Brien moved to the Kilburn area of north London in search of better employment and living conditions, working as a cleaner and security guard. (The deficiencies of the Irish health system contributed to the twins’ deaths, while Mary endured a near-fatal attack of meningitis.) He brought over his family in 1949 and became a factory worker while Jo worked part-time in childcare; the family lived in slum conditions at 47 Granville Road, Kilburn. Mary insisted on attending Carlton Vale Secondary Modern School, Kilburn, rather than a convent school. The family were observant catholics although Fred, a staunch trade unionist and member successively of the Irish and British Labour parties, supported the left-wing Connolly Association.
Turner’s view of collectivism as superior to individualism was influenced by the tribal catholicism of her upbringing, with its collective public devotions. Her later emphasis on solidarity with migrants and other marginalised groups reflected memories of the ‘No dogs, no Blacks, no Irish’ notices found in post-war London. In later life she emphasised her Cockney accent but boasted that she came from ‘County Kilburn … an Irishwoman proud of her heritage’ (Meath Chronicle, 2 May 1998). She used an Irish passport and was a strong supporter of Irish republican causes, including the H-block protests, and was a member of Trade Unionists for Irish Unity and Independence. Turner told a meeting in Ballygar, Co. Galway, that while people were entitled to emigrate they should not be forced out. She was a regular attendee around the turn of the century at the annual commemoration of Jim Connell in Crossakeel and Kilskeer, Co. Meath.
Early career and marriage
Turner left school aged fifteen with one O-level (mathematics) and briefly moved to Whitley Bay in Northumberland to stay with the family of a maternal aunt; failing to find work, she returned to London, and in June 1953 was recruited by an Oxford Street drapery store as an apprentice bookkeeper. Around this time she adopted the vivid red hair colouring which became her trademark. She joined the Tailor and Garment Workers’ Union on her first day of employment, and the Labour Party some months later. Turner subsequently worked in cafes before becoming a print setter (laying out advertisements) in a local print-works; she joined NATSOPA (National Society of Operative Printers and Assistants) and became ‘mother of chapel’ (equivalent to shop steward).
In summer 1958 she met Dennis (‘Denny’) Turner, a self-employed painter and decorator; they married on 25 August 1958 and had two children (Denise and John) while living in her parents’ attic. Despite family worries about their short courtship, youth and Denny’s protestantism (he may have subsequently converted to catholicism), their marriage was happy and supportive (Turner frequently joked in public about her henpecked husband). After the birth of her first child Turner became a full-time mother for some years.
Turner was active in the Granville Road Tenants’ Association. After her daughter was nearly killed by a falling ceiling in January 1963 she obtained a council flat by squatting in Godwin House on the nearby, newly constructed Toll Gate estate. Turner subsequently formed a Toll Gate Tenants’ Association and organised a rent strike; she campaigned against high-rise flats, arguing that working-class people deserved houses with gardens. (She was a keen gardener.)
Dinner lady and trade union organiser
In May 1970 Turner became a dinner lady at Salisbury Road infants and junior school, Kilburn; she had joined the National Union of General and Municipal Workers some months earlier. (After a series of reorganisations, mergers and name changes the union became the GMB in 1987, and is referred to as such hereafter.) Turner discovered that her colleagues (mainly recent Irish immigrants) received neither training nor protective clothing, and were regarded as working for ‘pin money’ while supported by a male breadwinner. Turner recruited the dinner ladies into the GMB and made successive demands with the long-term aim of raising the status and skill level of the employees and the nutritional value of the food. She developed a personal power base within the Hendon branch of the GMB, where she was secretary for twenty-six years. Throughout Turner’s career her signature issue was the provision of free, high-quality school meals by skilled staff for all children (she complained that limiting provision to children from low-income families stigmatised them).
Turner’s recruitment to the GMB coincided with trends which transformed the union and the wider British economy. The GMB had been dominated by the traditional but now declining industries of northern England, and was competing with other unions to recruit public sector employees and the growing ‘precariat’ of part-time workers; its top-down leadership culture was challenged as ‘corporatist’ by left-wingers who emphasised direct grassroots action. Throughout her career Turner was associated with this ‘left’ or ‘hard left’ strain across the wider trade union movement, allying with such figures as the future Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Turner organised food supplies for pickets during a trade dispute at the Grunwick photographic processing plant in her Brent/Kilburn area, which lasted from 1976 to 1978 and became a cause célèbre for both sides of the broader political conflict over trade union power in the 1970s. Turner always argued that the public sector strikes of the 1978–9 ‘winter of discontent’ (which contributed to the victory of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives at the 1979 general election) were justified by the need to secure better wages for traditionally underpaid employees, though she insisted on keeping the school meals service running. She regularly led groups of up to 200 dinner ladies on pickets.
Opposing public service cutbacks
The industrial base of Brent (and much of north London) was decimated by the recessions of the late 1970s and early 1980s, leaving the public sector as the principal local employer and placing Turner in the midst of the Conservative government’s efforts to restrict the political and socio-economic influence of local councils (especially those controlled by Labour leftists). Turner’s decision to close the school meals service during the 1982 nurses’ strike reflected the intensification of labour conflict. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Turner resisted the downgrading of Brent council’s dinner services through local government cost-cutting and contracting out. She predicted that the move from on-site cooking to reheated pre-prepared meals increased the risk of food poisoning and advocated for the type of universal school meals provision she had witnessed on trade union visits to Finland and Canada. She was finally made redundant early in 1996, after the meals service was outsourced to a private contractor; she suspected her dismissal was politically motivated, and had some difficulty in securing her pension entitlements. From that point Turner was a full-time trade union official.
In the early 1980s Turner was a school governor, a member of Brent Trades Council (she served on arbitration panels) and a branch delegate to the Brent East Labour Party. She organised a field kitchen to provide meals for the May 1981 ‘People’s march for jobs’ and repeated this support for the 1982 ‘Jobs express’ (a protest against government training schemes regarded as providing cheap labour for dead-end temporary jobs), as well as the second, less successful, ‘People’s march’ (April–June 1983). Turner was a lifelong opponent of racism and far-right parties such as the National Front and the British National Party; during the ‘Jobs express’ protest she helped prevent skinheads from attacking Black participants.
Shortly before the May 1982 local elections, Turner came to national attention when she appeared in a televised Labour Party political broadcast emphasising the threat to public services posed by the Conservative government’s cutbacks. In 1986 she was the subject of a West German television documentary. She was an occasional contributor to the Communist Party paper, the Morning Star, and was interviewed from time to time by national media, usually on trade union and local government affairs. Turner strongly opposed Conservative legislation restricting the activities of trade unions, was added to a security blacklist under the Thatcher government, and was briefly arrested after the 12 October 1984 IRA bomb attack on the Conservative Party conference in Brighton (where Turner was attending a trade union meeting).
Trade union leadership
Turner was elected to the GMB’s central executive committee in 1983 as its only female member (of forty) and only the third woman to serve on it. She was re-elected to successive two-year terms, despite initial opposition from some full-time officials who disparaged her as ‘just a dinner lady’ (Callow, 83). In 1988 Turner was elected vice-president of the GMB and in 1993 president of the union’s public sector section. Four years later she was elected as the union’s president, making her the ceremonial head of the union although the general secretary was the most powerful official. Turner was re-elected on six occasions, holding the post until her death in 2017. She presided over annual conferences by combining adroit use of the rule book with speeches whose blunt language compensated for a slightly awkward delivery.
Turner’s popularity with large sections of the union rank and file reflected her gregarious, extroverted personality, lack of puritanism and fondness for what were seen as working-class recreational activities, including bingo and holidays at Butlin’s. Eschewing the private cars used by some senior officials, she used public transport even as president, enjoyed herself at union social events (including Irish nights at conferences) and had a retentive memory for personal contacts and hard cases. In later life Turner was fond of late-night talk radio, frequently phoning in to express her opinions on air. Her working-class lifestyle and attitudes made her a valuable ally for supporters of controversial causes related to gender and sexuality, such as the GMB’s 2002 decision to incorporate the Union of Sex Workers. She defended this merger against critics in a speech to the Trade Union Congress (TUC). Between 2002 and 2005 Turner was to the fore in a battle over GMB’s future direction; she backed the (ultimately successful) ‘hard left’ faction that favoured restructuring the union and the centralisation of power in its congress.
Labour Party activism
In 1985 Turner was elected to the national executive council of the Labour Party, of which she was later vice-chair (2002) and chair (2003). She twice sought the Labour parliamentary candidacy for Brent East. In 1989 the party’s leadership tried to deselect the sitting MP, Ken Livingstone. Though ideologically similar to Livingstone, Turner complained that he paid insufficient attention to the constituency; his support among individual party members overcame her trade union activists. In 2000 Livingstone announced he would stand down at the next general election to concentrate on the London mayoralty; Turner was again unsuccessful in seeking the party’s nomination.
Turner was personally friendly with Tony Blair and admired his commitment to the Northern Ireland peace process (she personally campaigned against proposals to privatise services in Northern Ireland and called for more women in the province to join the GMB), but complained of the failure of post-1997 Labour governments to roll back previous Conservative cuts to public services. She was particularly hostile to the financing of infrastructure projects by private finance initiatives backed by venture capital firms, rather than by general taxation. Turner saw the 2008 financial crisis as vindicating her position, characteristically informing a political rally that financiers such as Fred Goodwin (head of the catastrophically-managed Royal Bank of Scotland) should be imprisoned for life: ‘I wouldn’t pee on them if they were on fire’ (Times (London), 20 July 2017). She campaigned vigorously against austerity measures introduced after 2010, was highly critical of the Labour Party’s refusal to commit to reversing public sector pay freezes and restrictions on trade union activities, and shortly before her death denounced the 2017 proposal by Theresa May’s government to replace free hot school meals with cold breakfasts.
Death and legacy
In 2002 Turner was elected to the executive of Public Services International. Between 2005 and 2010, she was honorary president of the British Dietary Association, a post previously held by senior medical personnel; she did much to co-ordinate its activities with the GMB, and the association named an award in her honour after her death. In 2010 Turner was awarded an MBE (member of the Order of the British Empire) for services to trade unionism, and received a CBE (companion of the Order of the British Empire) in March 2017. She was awarded the TUC women’s gold badge in 2012 and the GMB’s Eleanor Marx award in 2016.
In 2000 Turner underwent a major operation to remove a cancerous tumour, and thereafter was never entirely free of the disease; she underwent another major operation in 2010 and her public appearances were thereafter increasingly reserved for major events. Her husband Dennis died in August 2015, having suffered for several years from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease; Turner cared for him during this illness and participated in numerous events to raise funds for Alzheimer’s patients. Mary Turner died in hospital on 19 July 2017 and was buried beside her husband after funeral mass at the Sacred Heart church, Kilburn; on 27 February 2018 a memorial service was held in St Paul’s cathedral, London. Remembered as ‘probably the most influential dinner lady of all time’, as a first-generation Irish immigrant and female head of a major union Turner was practically unique within her generation (Times (London), 20 July 2017). When she died there were twenty-six women on the fifty-five-member GMB executive.