LEGENDARY Daily Worker and Morning Star photographer for over three decades, Pat Mantle, has died in Cork aged 83.

Fulsome tributes have been paid to Pat from his adopted home in Ballydehob where he became a well-loved mover and shaker in the community.

Widely known and liked by trade union and labour movement activists and leaders across the UK and Ireland, Pat was there to capture all the big events from the 1960s onwards in a period of intense industrial activity, whether it was the Ford seamstresses’ equal pay battle, release of the Pentonville dockers, Grunwick, the miners’ strikes or the Wapping printworkers.

“Pat was a bloody good photographer,” says former Communist Party industrial organiser and Star industrial correspondent Mick Costello.

“He had a wonderful manner and was respected across the movement.”

One-time Star features editor David Whitfield recalls Pat had joined the paper straight from school and as pictures editor “worked fast in the darkroom in the days when it was a physical and mechanical world” in the hive of activity which was 75 Farringdon Road.

Alex Apperley and the late Ernie Greenwood were part of Pat’s team snapping for socialism, and Alex remembers Pat being in the right place at the right time with uncanny prescience.

“We changed shifts at the Iranian embassy siege and Pat was there for the denouement.”

He also captured the moment when Ernie had his elbow crushed by a horse as he lay on the ground when the police cavalry-charged a demo by the sacked Murdoch printers in 1986 at Wapping.

One of Pat’s most significant pictures was used to exonerate Arthur Scargill when he was arrested at a mass demonstration outside Grunwick (anti-union photo developers). The images showed Arthur being pushed from behind so the police plot to stitch him up on an obstruction charge was discredited.

But he wasn’t so lucky when operating in the sports arena. Pat told me that he had lost the Daily Worker’s best camera when sitting beside the goal at White Hart Lane. Marauding down the wing the great, and huge, Welsh striker John Charles crossed the ball just before it went out of play, clattered into Pat and booted his prized possession into the crowd. Happily, Gentleman John then shelled out for a replacement.

Then when Jimmy Greaves signed for Spurs in 1961 for £99,999 from Milan, Pat, at the club’s training ground shouted out “show us your famous bicycle kick, Jimmy.” 

Greaves duly obliged but scored a direct hit on the hapless photographer. This time the requirement was new glasses. Own goal, Mantle!

Pat also claimed to have got a picture of Mandy Rice Davies as a scoop for the paper when he encountered her at a motor show before she had reached her peak of fame/notoriety.

Sadly, it was the one that got away. Someone back in the office was said to have ruled out using it on the grounds that “we’re not giving publicity to some posh bird with a double-barrelled name.”

Pat’s skills all came together when he captured the Gang of Four (Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, Bill Rogers and David Owen as they left the Labour Party to form the ill-fated SDP) under a conference hall sign which said “EXIT.”

Paying tribute, fellow photographer PJ Arkell of Newsline says: “Pat and I covered many of the same jobs. I never saw Pat rush, even when late, strolling onto the scene with his single trusty Leica camera (everyone else held at least two Nikon or Canon SLR cameras with an array of lenses). But unlike everyone else he knew where to point it.”

His knowledge of the labour movement — he took pride in building friendships with union and shop-floor leaders — told him who and what was important. It gave him his many scoops like the seamstresses at Fords, Dagenham, in 1968 striking for equal pay.

Pat took his camera, his knowhow and his communism to Co Cork when he moved to Ireland in the 1990s. He continued to cover conferences and labour movement events for many trade union journals in the UK and Ireland, including the T&G Record which I edited at the time.

Paying tribute to Pat on news of his death, local journalist Noel Coakley commented on “the sadness of all those who knew and respected Pat at the Southern Star — a newspaper he kept supplied with photographs that expertly illustrated stories of local and national interest. The go-to man for local events.”

With his second wife, the late Phil O’Flynn, Pat helped run two antique shops in Ballydehob: she ran Ballydehobbits and he ran Overmantles where they served such local luminaries as Jeremy Irons and Kevin Costner.

Pat became a pillar of the community, driving his Russian Lada car and taking on the role of public relations and chairman of the parish council.

I caught him assiduously picking up discarded crisp packets in Ballydehob main street and he explained they were entered for the best-kept village award. He also rejoiced in the thirst-quenching job of visiting all the local pubs to announce the lottery results.

Pat died on August 22 2024, leaving behind his daughter Kate married to Adrian and their children James and Donnacha. He was granted lifetime membership of the National Union of Journalists in recognition of his distinguished service. But what a lifetime!

Chris Kaufman is former national officer of Unite and the Transport and General Workers Union.