Trade unionist devoted to socialism, the print workers and Robert Burns
by Robert Burns

Wed 17 Jan 2001


Last month, Ross Pritchard, who has died of cancer aged 62, was presented with the Graphical, Paper & Media Union's gold badge of merit by its general secretary, Tony Dubbins. Responding, Ross, inveterate organiser and socialist, reflected on the 1959 Glasgow apprentices' strike, when, still a teenager, he had represented young printers on the strike committee.

The committee's membership included Sir Alex Ferguson, Billy Connolly and the current transport minister Gus (now Lord) Macdonald, with whom Ross struck up a lifelong friendship. "Everyone who was on that committee," said Ross, "is now a lord or a millionaire, or both. Look at me. All I've got is this wee gold badge." He would not, he added, have had it any other way.

A trade unionist from the time of his mid-1950s Glasgow lithography apprenticeship, Ross was boundlessly energetic, with an impish humour. He was also vice-president of the National Graphical Association (NGA), its highest lay officer, in the year leading to the creation of the GPMU. He was also a superb chairman, whether at a union conference or the Hackney Literary and Philosophical Society.
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A teenage absorption in politics took him into the Glasgow Labour party, which, in the late 1950s, had a large Young Socialist organisation, influenced by several Trotskyist currents. He turned to revolutionary socialism, going against the stream of the official communism which then had major importance in Glasgow's workplaces.

National service took him to the School of Military Survey and map production. The working-class Trotskyist instructed officers on how to run field presses and make maps from aerial photographs. He turned down a commission; it was a lifelong theme.

After the army back in Glasgow, he met his wife, Anna. In 1961, he moved to London, sharing a flat with Gus Macdonald, who he claimed he taught to drive, and others who built a spectacular London labour movement reputation as the "Scots Trots".

Ross worked as a general printer until the May 1968 uprising in France. Then his working-life became devoted to politics. France, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the movement against the Vietnam war led the International Socialists, of which he was a member, to launch the weekly Socialist Worker. For its initial two years, Ross and the paper's first editor, Roger Protz, ran its press inside a Tottenham porn publisher's printshop.

In 1974, Ross returned to the general print, but refused work in Fleet Street's highly-paid press rooms. He struck up a relationship with Dave Caudle, a gregarious National Graphical Association fulltimer. Fighting for the less well paid, Ross, recalled Caudle, used his bargaining skills to map out the chapter and verse of deals while Caudle, clinching the last tanner of the claim, challenged print firm managers to swimming matches and ballroom dancing competitions.

Ross had a hungry mind. In the 1980s it led him, with another East Ender by adoption, the late writer and doctor David Widgery, to revive the Hackney Philosophical and Literary Society after 150 years. In a room above a Dalston pub, everything - politics, art, history, madness in Hackney - got discussed by a splendidly diverse group. His love of Burns, and of 18th-century radical politics, led to an annual Stoke Newington Burns night.

He is survived by his wife, his children Lindsay, Lucy, and Ross, and a granddaughter, Saskia.

Murray Armstrong

Tony Dubbins writes: Ross Pritchard was one of print trade unionism's best-known, most influential and best loved lay activists, hugely influential in the ASLP and later on the executive councils of both the NGA and the GPMU. Although an implacable enemy of craft elitism, he had unrivalled expertise as a lithographic printer. His vast knowledge was recognised throughout the industry and led to his appointment as a visiting lecturer in lithography at the London School of Printing.

Ross knew everyone from government ministers to half the bar staff in London. He used his great intellect with respect for those with lesser understanding, and with sharp deflating humour for the self-important.

He wrote to me six months ago to say that, despite his cancer treatment, he would not be resigning from the GPMU executive council. He did not, he explained, want to be replaced by a Blairite. The fact that he retained his humour when so ill was a measure of the man.

Very active - and respected internationally - Ross was an activist in all the confrontations forced upon our members by newspaper employers through "new technology" in the 1980s and 1990s, and I am glad that he lived to see the union he loved re-establishing proper recognition agreements across the industry.

Ross will be remembered for his wisdom, integrity and comradeship and also for his humour, appetite for fun, and love of a good story. Never was the award of our union's gold badge so well deserved. He was a giant, and we have lost a true friend.

Ross Pritchard, socialist and lithographer, born March 25 1938; died January 9 2001