The last knight to lead Manchester City Council, Bob Thomas

His autobiography, ‘Sir Bob’, is refreshingly frank in places.  Born in 1900, son of a miner, one of six children, grew up in Ince near Wigan, a paper boy at eleven, working in a mill at twelve, going down a local pit at fourteen. At 22 he gets a job in a nearby bus garage in Atherton, gets involved in the union, moves to Manchester where he becomes a local union official and is active in the Labour Party in Rusholme.  A trade union delegate to the City Labour Party,  he is elected to the executive.  January 1944 he's elected to the city council.  At that point, he tells us, the council was at the height of its powers controlling water, education, housing transport, police, fire service, ambulance and other health services, wholesale and retail markets, restaurants, libraries, museums, baths, laundries and the airport. There are 34,000 council houses but near to double this figure are unfit to live in. Slum clearance is a priority.

1951 he is elected Labour group secretary, 1954, chair of the important General and Parliamentary Committee, 1957 chair of the Labour group, 1962 Lord Mayor.  Labour loses control of the council in 1967.  When it regains control in 1971 he becomes leader, moving on to become leader of the newly formed Greater Manchester County Council in 1974

Fluent and impressionistic, full of family detail,  there is much that is left out.  Nowhere is there any sign of any conflict inside the Labour Party, no mention of falling membership figures through the 1960s into the '70s, no explanation why Labour loses control in 1967 and does even worse in 1968. 

Another parallel with recent times: much of the time he is part of a knightly duo, working with the Town Clerk, Sir Philip Dingle.  Dingle, he explains, is the senior partner. The General and Parliamentary Committee

grew out of the need for the town clerk to have a committee to which he could report to the council on new legislation affecting local government in general or Manchester in particular

Not that Dingle is any kind of democrat rather

one of those people who believed that party politics should not enter local government and tried to avoid recognising the leaders of the political parties or giving them any facilities.

So it is Dingle who is ‘the spearhead’ driving house building schemes at whose monthly meetings Thomas tells us

I thought I detected a little 'what is he doing here' attitude from one or two of the officers

He’s also refreshing transparent in his role as a TGWU official.  Holding some principled positions, for example, against the check off system for collecting union subscriptions, in favour of councils having Direct Works Departments for their building programmes, against ‘OMO’, one man operated buses and against  NHS consultants being able to continue being paid for work in private practice.

At the same time he boasts that there were only two unofficial strikes (i.e. not sanctioned by the union’s national executive).  One over payment for split shifts was run by officials, involving a number of token strikes before being settled.  The other, came out of punishment of drivers for accidents. Starting at Queen’s Road it lasted ten days and stopped all Manchester’s buses. Thomas argues that the issue had been exploited by Communists. He is however remarkably frank about his role as an official

the relationship between the union and the management at my committee lLabels
evel was good. We had a works committee that met monthly.  This was conducted in a reasonable and even friendly way. But at grassroots level there was an explosive resentfulness in the air. The pay was not good, the hours were awkward and unsocial, the disciplinary systems pin pricking and irksome and punishment for accidents did not help.  In a situation like this strikes sometimes take place which are not really about the surface issues and if my committee didn't give the men a lead they would follow anyone who said "come on lads, let's do something". The result would probably have been a silly irrelevant wildcat strike.

He recognises that most people prefer living in houses rather than flats. Clearly wanting to be part of running the system, good at understanding how the system worked and how to be acceptable to those with power, so good at getting promoted.   And proud of being invited to eat with Prince Philip and sit between Sebastian de Ferranti and Lord Dorchester.

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