Fred Jarvis, combative leader of the National Union of Teachers – obituary

Fred Jarvis, the former general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, who has died aged 95, was regarded as a moderate in Labour Party terms, but in 1985 he led his members into a long-running dispute over pay which damaged the standing of the teaching profession and provoked the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher into abolishing the Burnham Committee on teachers’ pay.

A cheerful workaholic, Jarvis was popular among his union rank and file, “possibly,” as one observer remarked, “because he reminds them of other Freds – shambling eccentrics in the staff room”. Balding, straggly-haired and disorganised-looking, Jarvis was famous for speeches which rivalled those of Fidel Castro for length. His filing system consisted of mountains of paper on the floor.

He seemed to personify the belief that arguments can be won by presenting a just case which, sooner or later, everyone would accept. But his unshakeable conviction of the justice of his cause sometimes had the unintended consequence of catching friendly bystanders in the crossfire.

The teachers’ strikes began after the Conservative government refused to provide the funds to finance a massive pay rise the unions were demanding and which had been sanctioned by the Burnham Committee, which was dominated by Labour and the NUT. They dragged on for more than a year, from the start of 1985 to March 1986, and continued sporadically until the 1987 general election.

At first Jarvis seemed to be opposed to strike action, which was generally assumed to have been fomented by his more militant deputy, Doug McAvoy. But the dispute aggravated Jarvis’s more aggressive side and, like Arthur Scargill before him, he appeared to be waging a campaign against the government rather than trying to settle a normal pay claim.

The strike continued after the teachers had been made a generous pay offer by the government, and after it had become clear that the NUT’s intransigence was damaging the prospects of a generation of state schoolchildren. Jarvis appeared to be convinced that the government would get the blame: “Our actions reach into nearly every home in the country”, he boasted, “in a way the miners never did.”

In the end though, the NUT’s stubbornness led the Education Secretary Kenneth Baker to impose a settlement and abolish the Burnham system, which the NUT had dominated to its own advantage ever since it was founded after the First World War.

He refused to heed the pleas of Labour’s education spokesman, Giles Radice, that the NUT should not embark on another round of classroom disruption lest it damage Labour’s chances in the run-up to the general election – on the grounds that the union was not affiliated to the party; this undoubtedly contributed to the scale of Labour’s defeat in 1987.

The son of a flour mill worker, Frederick Frank Jarvis was born on September 8 1924 in West Ham, East London. When his father’s workplace was bombed during the war, the family moved to Merseyside, where Fred attended Oldershaw Grammar School in Wallasey.

He left school aged 16 because his parents could not afford to let him stay on and found work in Wallasey education department as a clerk. By this time he was active in youth organisations and was co-opted on to the council’s youth committee.

His crusading spirit was further nurtured in the Army. He went over to Normandy on D-Day +4 with the 76th Highland Field Regiment and spent the first two years of peace time as a sergeant in the British military government of Schleswig-Holstein, where he began the re-education of German youth by forming clubs and running discussion groups.

After demob, he won a scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, but opted instead to pursue a diploma in social administration at Liverpool University. Because he got a distinction, he was advised to reapply to Oxford and he spent the next three years at St Catherine’s College, where he took a degree in PPE and stayed on to do research.

By the time he arrived in Oxford, Jarvis was on the national executive of the National Union of Students. He rose to be vice president, and, from 1952 to 1954, president. He proved highly effective in the post, working to establish the union as a lobby for student rights and student grants.

He came to public notice when he waged a famous campaign over Sheila Davis, a teacher-training student at Bangor Normal College who was sent down for publicly criticising the college’s disciplinary regulations. Jarvis’s campaign, waged through letter writing and lobbying MPs, culminated in a House of Commons debate. Sheila Davis was duly reinstated.

It was in this period, too, that Jarvis’s reputation for ferocious opposition to the extreme Left was established. Believing that the International Union of Students, to which the NUS was affiliated, was a front for the Communist Party, he and Olof Palme, later prime minister of Sweden, formed an alternative pro-Western body, and much of his time as president was occupied by, as he put it, “interminable wranglings” over which body the NUS should join.

His record at the NUS made his name with the Gaitskellites in the Labour Party and a promising parliamentary career seemed to beckon. He fought Wallasey, unsuccessfully, in 1951 and also applied for a producer’s job at the BBC, but was turned down on the grounds, so he claimed, that he had suggested during his interview that it might be a good idea to televise darts and snooker.

Meanwhile, his defence of Sheila Davis had caught the attention of Ronald Gould, general secretary of the NUT. In 1955 Gould was looking for someone to set up a new press and public relations department and Jarvis got the job.

The new NUT department came to be regarded as a model in the trades union world and Jarvis was in his element lobbying journalists and politicians for changes in the education system. As a result, he helped to identify the NUT with the expansion and modernisation of schooling that took place in the 1960s.

Jarvis became deputy general secretary of the union in 1970 after failing to get the top job. With his lack of teaching experience and the growing influence of the Left on the NUT’s 44-man executive, few expected him to go any further.

In the run-up to the 1975 leadership election, the executive voted to increase the salary offered in order to attract a rising star from outside. But no outsider could be tempted and Jarvis’s two opponents were likeable but lightweight internal candidates. He won by two votes.

Jarvis inherited a membership whose opinions were spread fairly evenly across the political spectrum. He led them towards more unionised attitudes and in the process alienated some of the less politically active members.

His interminable harangues at meetings of the Burnham pay committee were legendary and his obsession with pay and conditions, kneejerk opposition to reform, and his comparative lack of interest in such matters as teaching standards, exasperated politicians of both major parties.

“In all my many dealings with the NUT,” remarked Bernard Donoughue, director of the Number 10 Policy Unit under James Callaghan “I never once heard mention of education or children. The union’s prime objective appeared to be to secure ever-decreasing responsibilities and hours of work for its members, and it seemed the ideal NUT world would be one where teachers and children never entered a school at all – and the executive of the NUT would be in a permanent conference session at a comfortable seaside hotel.”

Jarvis’s prickly nature sometimes got the better of him and he had a talent for upsetting allies as well as enemies. In 1984 there was an almighty row over who should be president of the European Trade Union Committee for Education. Jarvis thought it was his turn but his continental colleagues thought otherwise. Jarvis lost the fight after 12 months of bitter squabbling.

On another occasion Fred Smithies, Jarvis’s opposite number on the National Union of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers, emerged from pay talks and began interviews with the press before Jarvis could get his version across. Jarvis stormed across the street towards the television cameras and started to berate the press for listening to “lies and rubbish”.

Jarvis served as a member of the TUC General Council from 1974 and as chairman of the TUC in 1986-87. He retired as leader of the NUT in 1989. He wrote or edited several books including The Educational Implications of UK Membership of the EEC (1972) Education and Mr Major (1993) and an autobiography, You Never Know Your Luck (2014). Away from union politics, he enjoyed horse racing, jazz and gardening, and was a lifelong supporter of West Ham United. He was appointed CBE in 2015.

Fred Jarvis married, in 1954, Ann Colegrove, a fellow executive member on the NUS, who predeceased him. They had a son and a daughter.

Fred Jarvis, born September 8 1924, died June 15 2020