Joan Maynard

An appreciation by Jeremy Corbyn

After Joan Maynard's funeral, Radio Five Live hack Andrew Roth unleashed his bile on Brief Lives, claiming that her examination of everything in class terms had "crippled" her judgement, presenting her as boring, extremist, irrelevant and very dangerous -- not the warm and very human Joan I knew.

At Joan's funeral there were speeches from Tony Benn, Chris Mullin, Peter Medhurst and Tony Gould from the T&GWU, and local activist Don Cartridge. The final singing of Jerusalem was pure Joan.

The capacity congregation in a village Church opposite her home included local Labour Party people, supporters from Sheffield and many friends and political activists of the left -- people who ordinarily would have plenty to argue about. I sat next to Michael Jopling, former Tory Agriculture Minister, who spent years profoundly disagreeing with Joan but respected her sincerity and honesty.

Joan grew up in North Yorkshire, campaigned for farm workers, became agent for Thirsk and Malton and was later on the Party's NEC and MP for Sheffield Brightside.

I knew Joan for many years. She never moved from an unshakeable belief in the cause of the working class. Always prepared to take up issues she believed in, her fights for farm workers, steel workers, Ireland and much more always had a clear class analysis. She once said that when a minister said that a decision was a "fair balance between employers and workers", she knew the workers had lost.

In her crusade for rural workers, she saw no common cause with hunters, landowners and Country Life magazine. Rather she sought to expose class interests in rural areas that thrive on poverty and the destruction of the environment through intensive farming.

From North Yorkshire, fighting on behalf of farm workers, she was selected for Sheffield Brightside. Her successful promotion of the needs of her new constituency and her own union, the Agricultural Workers, showed her strength and ability to unite apparently disparate forces around a clear agenda.

As a new MP after the 1983 election, I found Joan a friend and inspiration. She helped and encouraged, cheerfully telling me there was no shame in being unpopular in the PLP when we organised a visit for Gerry Adams to discuss Ireland. She chaired the Campaign Group with skill and leadership and was always prepared to travel and talk to any audience of any size on political affairs. She seemed happiest making speeches at Tolpuddle for the Annual Martyrs Rally and at the Burston School Strike Rally.

Her internationalism was clear. She saw the cold war for what it was and the way imperialism, having lost its colonies, was reinventing itself through punitive trade agreements. Delegations from liberation movements never forgot the experience of meeting Joan.

She seemed unworried by the way she was treated and described as "Stalin's Granny". She was not in the least sectarian. While very active in the Labour Party, she was prepared to work with other groups, opposing the witch hunts that started with the register in the early 1980s and gathered intensity. On the NEC she was a friend of the party activist and could sense the feeling of anger and isolation that we all feel when our party heads in a direction for which it has no mandate.

Joan came to Islington to launch our 1987 election campaign and spoke with such warmth and feeling that it was a pure joy to listen to her. I will always be grateful to her for coming to Wiltshire to address a memorial meeting for my parents, David and Naomi Corbyn.

Thank you Joan for all you did and the help and friendship you gave to so many; there never was a more honest and trustworthy person in parliamentary and union positions.

Funeral service

Councillor Garth Frankland

Joan Maynard's funeral service was held in the parish church of St Oswald's in the beautiful North Yorkshire Village of Sowerby. Tony Benn and Chris Mullin praised her political courage, kindness and encouragement. They stressed her internationalism including her support for a united Ireland, her opposition to the PTA and her support of the cause of the Palestinian people.

This straightforward support went well beyond the confines of the Labour Party when she helped arrange accommodation and food for the Young Socialist marches against unemployment in the early 1970s. It was Joan who suggested at a meeting of West Yorkshire Labour Briefing that the left should pull together and form a Campaign Group. This lead to the formation of the Leeds Campaign Group (still going strong), the first in the country outside of Parliament.

Her friend Don Cartridge emphasised how her completely non-New Labour politics had transformed her rural backwater by building a 2,000 strong CLP.

Dennis Skinner, Jeremy Corbyn, Audrey Wise, Tom Dalyell and many others travelled to her quiet village home to pay their last respects. The final hymn Jerusalem lifted the rafters off the church. Her example renews our faith in a socialist future.

previous article ·  May '98 index of LLB ·  write to LLB ·  LLB home page ·  next article