After a four week dispute, he refused to return on reduced conditions and, after a number of jobs building a railway in Hertfordshire and working on the wharf at Wapping, he settled in Southend-on-Sea.After working as a plasterer’s labourer, in 1914, he took a job in the sewerage works run by the local corporation. Volunteering for the Middlesex Regiment, in February 1915, he saw considerable service on the Western Front, fought bravely, and was wounded several times.At the end of 1915, he was “shot through the face and sent home to Blighty” to recuperate. However, he was back in Flanders and was hit again – this time in the hand – in July 1916, before being captured in a trench raid in the spring of 1918.After seven months in a German prison camp, he finally returned home to Southend in February 1919, and “after a short holiday I was back at work and a regular member at the meetings that were held at that time in a top room at the Royal Stores” in the town. In 1924, he was recommended by his members to be the card steward for his branch, collecting and checking their dues, and taking an obvious pride in their trust. He remained in this role for 17 years and was honoured for recruiting ten new members to the union. Retiring from work with Southend
Corporation in June 1954, after forty years’ service, WalterVincent enjoyed “a very happy retirement” and treasured a certificate of long service “and loyalty to the trade union movement” signed by L.G.Wright, his District Secretary, Tom Williamson, the General Secretary, and Jack Cooper, the National Chairman. Yet, in the long hot summer of 1976, “having just come back from a visit to the General and Municipal Workers’ Union branch, which I do four times a year to pay my subscription”, he packed away his little treasures into an envelope and posted them off to the offices of London District in the hope that they might be safeguarded and inform posterity. GMB – his union – was the essence of his identity and invested his life with a meaning and a dignity that radiates through the faded and folded pages of his letter.Working people lack the glamour and
Mementoes of a life devoted to the union.
exposure of the media, their words, thoughts and deeds often go unrecorded or are so easily lost as lofts are cleared and families move away. Yet, figures great and small have contributed in equal measure to the survival and the success of the union and letters such as that penned by WalterVincent, thrown into the time stream, if rescued and preserved can illuminate the past just as surely as they can inform and inspire our present with a simple, undeclarative sense of loyalty and love. 257