My father, Norman Howard, who has died aged 95, was a councillor for the Labour get together from the mid-Nineteen Sixties onwards, and for plenty of years from 1973 was chair of the Better London council’s planning committee.
In that place he performed a key position in choices corresponding to granting permission for Concorde to fly into Heathrow and on the redevelopment of Covent Backyard. He additionally dug the primary turf for the beginning of the London Docklands growth at St Katharine Docks, and was significantly happy with signing an settlement with London Transport to hold out a 1973 election pledge permitting free bus journey for London’s pensioners.
Having been a member of the Labour get together because the age of 16, he started his political profession as a public consultant in 1964 when he was elected as a councillor for Kingston upon Thames in south-west London.
Norman was born in Acton, west London, to Harold, a haulage contractor, and Alice (nee Goater). Alice died when Norman was eight, and two years later he, his older brother, Don, and youngest sister, Hazel, have been evacuated within the first week of the second world conflict. Don left faculty earlier than the conflict ended, however Norman and Hazel spent the subsequent six years billeted, individually, with a wide range of host households in Devon.
Norman grew to become head boy of Southwark Central faculty, which had been evacuated to Newton Abbot in Devon. Nevertheless, when he returned to Acton on the finish of the conflict, he had barely began within the sixth type earlier than he was referred to as up for nationwide service, and his formal training ended.
In 1949 he began work as a darkroom assistant at a photographic printers in Ealing, west London, then moved to Southampton in 1951 to turn into a political agent supporting the profitable re-election of the Labour MP Horace King (later to turn into speaker of the Home of Commons). They fashioned a lifelong friendship, with King describing him as “a tough employee and a person of excessive integrity and honesty”.
In 1956 Norman was invited to affix the brand new London workforce of the leftwing newspaper Ahead, and he subsequently labored as a journalist on Farmers Weekly, Reynold’s Information (later renamed Sunday Citizen) and on the Board of Commerce, earlier than changing into assistant secretary on the Put up Workplace Engineering Union in 1966. In 1984 he was appointed as chief press officer at British Telecom, for whom he labored, latterly on a consultancy foundation, till he retired in 1998.
Norman was then an energetic member of the Labour Heritage Group, and based and have become secretary of the Aneurin Bevan Society. He additionally wrote a guide, A New Daybreak, concerning the 1945 Labour common election victory, which was revealed in 2005.
It was in Southampton that Norman met and married Joyce Randell. She died in 2014. He’s survived by his youngsters, Jane and me, 4 grandchildren, 5 great-grandchildren, and his sister, Hazel.
