Bob Mellish, politician; born March 3, 1913, died May 9, 1998
Lord Mellish, a former Government chief whip, was a tough-talking Londoner, patriotic and loyal to Labour's traditions, with a deep contempt for those he described as the ''new lefties'' in the movement.
He angrily resigned from the party in 1982 after 55 years' membership, having endured years of ferocious attacks from the Militant Tendency in his Bermondsey constituency and in his role as chairman of London Labour Party.
Mellish also resigned as an MP, partly as a protest that the Labour candidate to succeed him at the following election had been named as the hard-left Peter Tatchell, later to become a leader of OutRage!, the militant homosexual pressure group.
As a result, the Bermondsey seat, regarded as an impregnable Labour stronghold, fell to the Liberal-SDP Alliance at
the subsequent mud-slinging by-election in February, 1983.
It remained in Liberal hands
for years.
Mellish was always intolerant of the Militant factions, which he believed were destroying the Labour Party. He made no secret of his distaste for them, and was involved in some bitter public slanging matches at which the antagonists hurled unbridled venom and insults at each other on an almost daily basis.
He had an on-off-on relationship with Prime Minister Harold Wilson, more than once tendering his resignation as chief whip, only to withdraw it before it was too late.
Robert Joseph Mellish was born in March, 1913, in Deptford, married in Bermondsey, and first became an MP in 1946 for Rotherhithe.
He was a man with impeccable London dockland credentials. After leaving St Joseph's Roman Catholic School, Deptford, at the age of 14, he got a job in the docks as a clerk. He became a member of the Transport and General Workers' Union in 1929 and was a union organiser for the dockers from 1938 to 1940.
After the outbreak of the Second World War he volunteered and went into the Royal Engineers. He was demobbed as a Major, having served much of the war in the Far East.
Mellish was in trouble soon after his arrival at the House of Commons in 1946. As a Roman Catholic he voted with 12 other rebels against the Labour Government's Ireland Act, which arose from Ireland's decision to leave the Commonwealth and which altered the standing of Irish people in Britain.
This defiance brought swift retribution from Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who removed Mellish from his unpaid post
as parliamentary private secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty.
However, when Labour returned to power, Mellish became Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Housing and Local Government, with special responsibilities for London housing.
In 1967 he was promoted to Minister of Public Building
and Works.
His unpretentious political philosophy was what he called ''traditional Labour, devoted to improving the lot of working people''. He quickly acquired the tag of a right-winger in Labour Party terms because of his uncompromising views on immigration, abortion, crime, and defence.
As Chief Whip, from 1969 to 1976, in both Government and Opposition, Mellish had frequent cause to get tough with left-wing rebels and sometimes accused the party leadership of not supporting him sufficiently.
After resigning his seat in
the Commons, Mellish was appointed deputy chairman of the London Docklands Development Corporation.
In 1985, when he left this post, Mellish was granted a
life peerage and, despite the blandishments of the Labour Party, insisted on sitting on the cross-benches.
He was married with five sons, all of whom were London policemen.
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