"Roy Grantham, who has died aged 86, was a principled, pragmatic, old-style trade union leader. From 1971 to 1989, as general secretary of Apex (now part of the GMB), he significantly influenced the trade union movement and the Labour party on major policy decisions affecting the European Union, government pay policies and single union agreements. His achievement was the more impressive in that it came at a time when the political left of the Labour movement were in the ascendancy and opposed these policies. Grantham's biggest trade union battle was the Grunwick dispute, where he learned that however just your cause, you can still lose. Grunwick, a mail-order film-processing company based in Willesden, north London, was owned by George Ward who dismissed 137 workers, many of them newly arrived Ugandan Asian immigrants, for striking for trade union recognition. Apex took the matter to Acas which ruled in favour of recognition, but Ward refused to accept the decision. It then went to the high court. which ruled in the union's favour. Ward again would not go along with the judgment and took the matter to the court of appeal, which declared the Acas report void. When the Scarman report commissioned by the Labour government recommended reinstatement of the strikers, Ward rejected it, effectively ending the dispute. It had lasted two years, starting in 1976. This trade union defeat was made the more galling because throughout one of the bitterest and longest disputes of the period Grantham had tried to win by the "rules", only to be let down by a legal system prepared to search diligently for reasons to disown its previous decision. Grantham was born in Birmingham, went to what is now King Edward VI Aston school and then became a wartime Bevin Boy. After that he worked for the Inland Revenue. But early in his career his future life was shaped by his decision to become an area organiser for the Clerical and Administrative Workers Union. He became the union's Midlands area secretary in 1959 and four years later was made the assistant secretary, which took him to work in London. During his first few years in the capital the union's membership doubled. In 1970 he took over as general secretary of the union, which in 1972 changed its name to the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff (Apex). Apex joined GMB in 1989." http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/19/roy-grantham
