Kevin Maguire, The Mirror https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/trade-union-titan-who-changed-11280337
Rodney Bickerstaffe was proof you could disagree without being disagreeable.
Nobody who met or knew the bespectacled trade union titan had a bad word to say about a warm, good-natured bloke with steel behind the wit.
And many millions, individually and collectively, owe the popular Unison former general secretary a great deal.
Because Bick, who has died aged 72, never stopped fighting to the very end for workers to be paid and treated decently and for first class, properly funded public services – particularly the NHS.
Without him the country might still have no minimum wage.
As unbelievable as it might sound today, he had to first convince those trade unions opposed to what they saw as interference in collective bargaining then nail down the policy in the Labour Party.
To mangle Churchill on Attlee: he was modest man with nothing to be modest about.
Not for him the airs and graces which occasionally go to the heads of even some of the labour movement’s finest, Bick turning down a knighthood and peerage.
He made time for everybody with no meeting too small to address in a retirement which saw him as busy as ever.
Bick first came to prominence as an official in the Nupe public services union and was pivotal in a three-way merger with Nalgo and Cohse to create 1.3m-member Unison.
After he stepped down from Unison he took over the leadership of the pensioners’ movement before making way for an older man.
The rebel with causes was never forgiven by Tony Blair for beating the PM at a Labour conference by refusing to withdraw a call for the party to link state pension rises to the growth in earnings.
Once he was rang by Gordon Brown’s office and asked to attack a Budget as stingy to give the then Chancellor political cover for an increase in public spending Bick actually backed.
I went to the launch a few years back of A Spanish Civil War Scrapbook, newspaper cuttings kept by his mother of that country’s democratically elected Republican Government’s unequal, ill-fated struggle against the military coup of Franco’s fascists with the backing by Hitler and Mussolini.
Bick was brought up in Doncaster without knowing his birth father, the family weaving a story of how he was the love child of a pretty young nurse from Yorkshire who enjoyed a brief romance with a carpenter from Ireland in wartime London.
Seventeen years ago, aged 53, he tracked down that dad, who’d died, and discovered three brothers in what he called his “other family” including one who’d watched him speak at a Labour conference without knowing the relationship.
“It’s wonderful,” declared a Bick holding back the tears. “I’ve got a whole new family and they’re such lovely, friendly people.”
Bick was lovely, friendly.
A humanist who searched for the best in everybody, he led services to bid farewell to many a comrade who’d passed away.
The ailing started joking they mustn’t have long when he’d arrive at a hospital bed.
The last funeral he’ll attend is his own. RIP.