Lady Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde obituary

Print union leader who played a key role in the 1986 Wapping disputeBrenda Dean, Lady Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde, who has died aged 74, became one of the best-known trade union leaders in Britain as a result of her leadership of Sogat during the Wapping dispute in 1986-87, a brutal confrontation with Rupert Murdoch’s News International that would prove a watershed for the future of the print industry. She was a forward-looking pragmatist whose attempts to resolve the strike enhanced her status within the wider trade union movement but undoubtedly at the eventual cost of her own long-term career within it.She was bitterly denounced by some people in the militant Fleet Street chapels (union branches) as a “Judas”, she was derided as “a film star” because of her blond good looks and her leadership was decried when she put the survival of the union, with 90% of its members in the provinces, ahead of what was essentially a London dispute. Continue reading…
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