Mary Turner was probably the most influential dinner lady of all time. After starting her vocation at a school in the London borough of Brent in 1970, she became a tireless champion of free school meals, successfully campaigned for better pay and conditions for her fellow dinner ladies, and was for many years the only woman on the executive committee of the General and Municipal Workers’ Union (now the GMB).
During the industrial strife that broiled Britain during the 1970s and 1980s, the feisty Tipperary-born redhead could be relied upon to turn up with her redoubtable band of 200 dinner ladies to secondary-picket on behalf of steel workers or nurses.
At a march in 1983 she was involved in a physical confrontation with the National Front, managing to wedge a door closed just in time as a group of skinheads launched an attack on black teenagers. During the People’s March for Jobs on May 1, 1981 she put her loyal dinner ladies to good use producing hot food for 600 unemployed young people from an improvised field kitchen. Her members donated a week’s pay to support the marchers.
Turner’s campaigning led to many local authorities introducing free school meals. When this was put under threat in Brent in the early 1980s, she defended the policy alongside Jeremy Corbyn, who had been newly elected as the MP for Islington North and who became a close friend. The indignation of the Labour Party at recent Conservative plans to replace free hot school meals for infant school children with cold breakfasts — changing a policy that was introduced by the coalition government in 2014 at a cost of £1.2 billion — was built on 40 years of campaigning by Turner.
She said that the biggest compliment she received was when the investigative journalist Paul Foot told her that she had been blacklisted by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. “I wore that badge proud,” Turner said.
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She joined the GMB executive committee in 1983, and from 1997 until her death served as president of the union that represents retail, security, schools, utilities, social care, the NHS and local government. She worked to recruit new sectors to the 600,000-strong membership, and in 2005 had a temporary tattoo etched on her arm after persuading 1,500 tattooists and body piercers to join. She was appointed MBE in 2010 and CBE in 2016 for services to trade unions.
In 2010 she told a GMB meeting in her distinctively husky cockney that Fred “the Shred” Goodwin, Royal Bank of Scotland’s former chief executive, should be locked up. Of exploitative employers, she declared: “Do you know, I wouldn’t pee on them if they were on fire.”
Mary Turner (née O’Brien) was born in Thurles in Tipperary, Ireland, in 1939. Her mother worked in childcare and her father was a cleaner and security guard. When she was 12 her family settled in the Irish expat enclave of Kilburn, northwest London, where she attended Carlton Vale Secondary Modern.
She left at 16 to train as a bookkeeper to a tailor in Oxford Street. The first thing she did, on the insistence of her father, was join the Tailor and Garment Workers’ Union, now part of the GMB.
In 1956 she met a painter and decorator, Denny Turner, who lived on the same street. They were married six weeks later and were together until his death from Alzheimer’s disease in 2015. She is survived by their daughter, Denise, a child protection officer, and their son, John, an upholsterer. Although a strong believer in women having a career, she gave up work when they were born because she didn’t want her children to be “latch-door kids”.
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She returned to the fray in 1970, when she became a dinner lady at Salusbury Road School in Brent. If a generation of people still have nightmares when they think about school dinners, Turner offered some explanation when she described the conditions she encountered in the school kitchen. She was appalled to find that the dinner ladies, mostly young Irish immigrants, had been given no training, and that some of them did not know how to cook. They were hunched over enormous steel vats of pulverised, mushy food in sometimes unbearably hot conditions with no protective clothing or gloves.
The management would make a cursory visit to the kitchens on a Monday morning and ignore the dinner ladies. They soon took notice after they learnt that Turner had recruited all of her colleagues to the GMWU for a 9p-a-week subscription. On being asked, “Who do you think you are?” she pointed to the other dinner ladies and said: “Their representative.” She would go on to campaign successfully for dinner ladies to have pension rights and opportunities for study.
“She once defended black teenagers from an attack by National Front thugs
Turner was so passionate about giving children the nutrition they needed that she kept meals going at her school throughout the public sector strikes of the Winter of Discontent in 1978-79. By the time of the nurses’ strike in 1982, she had changed her mind. The school meals service was closed in solidarity.
Turner was no admirer of Tony Blair and campaigned vociferously against New Labour’s PFI initiative, by which schools and hospitals would be privately funded and services outsourced. Days after Blair was famously booed and heckled at a Women’s Institute meeting in 2000, Turner told a meeting of workers in the ailing textile industry: “If Tony was a little upset about the WI he should worry about what we will do if he doesn’t pull his finger out and help our industry and our members.”
The dinner lady was close to being unleashed on Westminster. She was thought to be the natural successor to Ken Livingstone as MP for Brent East after he became the mayor of London in 2000. She fought a bitter campaign for the candidacy with Paul Daisley, the Blairite leader of Brent council. Having been moulded in Livingstone’s political image and likeness, she may have expected his support, but Livingstone backed Daisley. It later emerged that Daisley, who died in 2003, had campaigned for Livingstone to be readmitted to the Labour Party — he had been suspended for running as an independent after Frank Dobson had been declared the official Labour candidate for London mayor.
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Turner continued to be a greatly popular president of the GMB and was delighted to see female representation on the executive committee rise to 21. Cancer restricted her appearances in recent years, but if people thought they had heard the last of her they were mistaken. She loved radio phone-in shows and could often be heard late at night pontificating on the airwaves.
Mary Turner, CBE, president of the GMB union, was born on June 15, 1938. She died on July 19, 2017, aged 79