VICTOR ALAN HEATH died on Saturday April 26 2025 while in hospital. He was a truly remarkable person and will be sorely missed by his wife, Vera, his family and friends. A lifelong committed trade unionist, his life shaped, and was shaped by, the history of our times.

Vic was born in 1932, the sixth of seven brothers and an older sister, living in an industrial area of Camden Town, London. When war broke out, the three younger brothers and their sister were evacuated to a small rural farming village, where Vic acquired a love for nature that lasted for the rest of his life. His three eldest brothers served in the armed forces and survived, but the next eldest died in an accident assisting the fire brigade during the bombing of London.

He left school at 13, an option then, and went to work in a carpentry firm with his elder brother, Fred, who had just demobbed after the war. There, he encountered Hugo, a Hungarian communist, who initiated Vic into his passion for socialism and concern for world affairs, reading the Daily Worker/Morning Star for the rest of his life. Vic later joined the Communist Party.

Conscripted for national service, he chose to go into the merchant navy, travelled the world, and in South Africa was arrested for going into an African bar when avoiding the all-white alternatives, a formative anti-racist experience for him.

Returning to England, he worked again in construction, became a skilled scaffolder and militant trade unionist, helping to organise building worker demonstrations in support of Don Cook and the tenants’ rent strike after the Tories had lifted rent control.

Typical of the period, Vic worked on different sites for different companies, with no stable employment, becoming a shop steward and unionising the workforce as he went. He met and married Vera in 1954, and their son Gary was born in 1959. It was a lifelong partnership, each supporting the other through thick and thin.

Even though Vic had been blacklisted for union activity several times, he was able to get a start on the construction of the Barbican in 1963. Along with several other major sites in the City, the disputes, lockouts and strikes at the Barbican were a testimony to the strength of the trade unions at the time, winning major improvements in site safety, the provision of facilities, and the improvement of wages and bonuses.

During the lockout, fellow trade unionists tipped Vic off about secret pub-lunch meetings between the management and the police, plotting to ambush a union demonstration. Likewise, some Smithfield Market trade unionists helped prevent scabs from secretly going to work. They were followed and warned not to do so, only for Vic to be arrested, framed by the police, claiming he had threatened them with a gun. The case was thrown out in court for lack of evidence.

The solidarity of trade unionists overcame the lockout, defeating the combined forces of management and police. Vic continued at the Barbican until 1968. Before the corrosive spread of bogus self-employment, the period was one in which unionisation in construction was at its peak, with Communist Party activists playing a key organising role.

After working on several other major sites, he was finally blacklisted and, along with a number of other militants, turned to local authority Direct Labour Organisations. Vic started at Camden’s DLO with its workforce of 1,300 and continued there for 20 years, the most stable employment of his life.

While convener steward, the union achieved a 35-hour week parity with white-collar council “officers,” improved earnings, won a landmark equal pay case, and promoted female apprentices and craftswomen. But Thatcher’s government targeted DLOs, and along with the sale of council houses, privatised the workforce. After a decade of battles to retain the workforce, Vic was made redundant when under 70 were left.

He finished his working life as a TUC representative on employment tribunals and teaching for the Construction Industry Training Board.

Tragically, Gary died of cancer in 2006, aged only 47, after Vic had retired.

Vic’s primary loyalty was always to the workforce he represented, acting in their interest as he saw it, above any line that might have been taken by party or union. He was also non-sectarian among all the divisions of the left, again working with those prepared to work with him within the collective decisions taken by shop stewards committees or mass workforce meetings. These were some of the deeply held principles that were the guiding star of his working life.

He could be as hard as nails when required, but underneath was always a deeply compassionate and sensitive person. He had a wicked sense of humour, a master of the wind-up. Among all his other talents, he was a poet, and till the end embraced modern technologies, from the internet to air fryers. He published his autobiography titled Vic Heath: Just One of the Working Class (Life Books, 2019) — but he was a special one.

The greatest tribute we can pay to him is to continue to fight, each in our own ways, for a more just, equal and environmental society. At 92, Vic had never given up hope, nor stopped trying to make people laugh, even in these direst of times.

One of Vic’s poems, written during the Vietnam war, but which could not resonate more today.

Children at play

As I walked in the park the other day, I watched children at their play
With toy guns they ran around. Then, in pretence, one fell dead to the ground
A harmless game you say, no more, but this is their first practice for war
They will learn to fight and then to kill and many will die on some lonely hill
I sat down and felt a burning rage, reading the news front page
Of a war in some distant land where people’s blood stained the sand
I read this war was a testing place for the destruction of the human race
With gases and bombs and God knows what more they dropped on people
In this bloody war
Men, women and children lay in grotesque heaps
No more to play but dead for keeps
And as I sat in the warm sun that day, I heard the children laugh in their play
A harmless game you say no more.