Ron Todd (trade unionist)
Ronald Todd (11 March 1927 – 30 April 2005) was an English Trade union leader who served as the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union (which is now Unite the Union) from 1985 until 1992. He was a member of the General Council of the Trades Union Congress, served as the Chair of the (TUC) International Committee, a member of the National Economic Development Council and president of the Trade Union Unity Trust and was an honorary vice-president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He was a committed Internationalist, a relentless campaigner for Nuclear disarmament and an active campaigner in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, who counted Nelson Mandela as a close friend. He was one of the most respected union officials of his generation and led the biggest trade union in the country during most of the Margaret Thatcher years, a period that could be counted as one of the most difficult ones for the trade union movement in the 20th century. Early life Born in Walthamstow, London, Ron was the fifth child of Emily (née Pauline) and George Thomas Todd. His father was a stallholder in a local street market and his mother was a pianist who accompanied silent film. Owing to his mother's influence he grew up with a love of Victorian ballads and music hall songs and became an accomplished pianist himself. The family was Roman Catholic and Todd attended St Patrick's school, where he was an altar boy. During the war, a German bomb that landed on the family's air-raid shelter knocked Todd out cold. When he came round, he and his mother sang for two hours before they were dug out. Todd left school at the age of 14 to sweep floors in a barber's shop; he then worked as a plumber's mate. In 1945 at the age of 18 he married Josephine Tarrant. In the same year he got a call up to the Royal Marines. He had initially favoured the Royal Navy, but he later recalled with pride that he and his father were the first father and son in the Marines to appear on the parade ground together. For a time he served alongside his father in the Marines when they were posted to Hong Kong with 42 Commando. While in the Far East he took part in the liberation of British, Australian, New Zealand and some American troops from Japanese prisoner-of-war-camps, and then guarded captured Japanese. On demobilisation in 1947, he returned home and worked in the Labour Party (UK) for his local MP, the Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Todd became a gas fitter in Walthamstow, but then in 1955 he went to the new Ford plant to work as an engineer. During his working days on the Ford assembly line at Dagenham, his elder brother was a supervisor while Ron remained a shopfloor "spanner-and-screwdriver" man on the line before becoming deputy convenor of Ford shop stewards. He joined the Transport and General Workers' Union. Trade union career and