Will Lawther

William 'Will' Lawther (born May 20, 1889 in Choppinton , Northumberland , † February 1, 1976 ) was a British trade unionist and politician ( Labor Party ).

Life and activity

Lawther came from a family of miners. He grew up in the village of Choppington in Northumberland. The family later moved to Barrington (1898), Westerhope (1904) and finally to Chopwell (1905).

Lawther became a miner at Chopwell even at a young age. In 1909 he took over a union function for the first time as secretary of the ILP in Chopwell . He later moved to South View Highfield, where he worked as a checkweightman in the Victoria Garesfeld coal mine. From 1911 to 1912 he received Marxist training at Central Labor College. At that time, George Davidson became his mentor.

In the following years he made a name for himself as a member of the Durham Miners' Forward Movement and as a leader of the National Left Wing Movement, which aimed to raise the socialist profile of the Labor Party.

At the British general election of 1929 Lawther was a candidate of the Labor Party for the constituency of Barnard Castle in the House of Commons , elected the British Parliament, where he until the election of the year in which he in 1931 based at the Conservatives Cuthbert Headlam lost , as a member of parliament.

From 1934 to 1939 Lawther served as Vice President and then from 1939 to 1945 as President of the British Miners' Federation of Great Britain (MFGB). He then served from 1945 to 1945 as President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the successor organization to the MFGB.

In the 1930s Lawther served as chairman of the British National Committee of the Friends of Soviet Russia and as the organizer of an aid initiative of the British workers for the benefit of the republican side in the Spanish Civil War - in which one of his brothers was a member of the International Brigades was killed - a prominent figure on the European left.

At the end of the 1930s, Lawther, because of his engagement against the fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, was targeted by the police forces of National Socialist Germany, who classified him as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of People who were considered particularly dangerous or important by the Nazi surveillance apparatus, which is why they should be identified and arrested with special priority by the special SS commandos following the occupation forces in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht.

In 1949 Lawther held the office of President of the British Trade Union Congress for a year.

literature

• LH Mates: From Revolutionary to Reactionary. The Life of Will Lawther , Newcastle 1996.
• Current Biography , 1949, p. 344.

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Web links

• Newspaper article about Will Lawther in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .