Sidney Weighell
British trade unionist; (1922 - 2002)
Sidney Weighell (31 March 1922 – 13 February 2002) was an English footballer, trade unionist and the General Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen from 1975 to 1983.
Early life
Weighell was born on 31 March 1922, in Northallerton, to a family of the rail industry; his father was signalman Tom Weighell, his grandfather Bill was a guard and his brother Maurice was a driver. He was educated at a Church of England school, which he left at age 15 and became an apprentice mechanic.
Railway work
In 1938, he took an apprenticeship at the road motor engineering department of the London and North Eastern Railway company. He became active in the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) immediately upon starting work for the railways, believing in 'one union for all railway staff'. This brought him into conflict with the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF); Weighell was a so-called 'footplate grade', traditionally represented by ASLEF, not the NUR. Weighell considered craft unions (unions catering to a particular job within an industry rather than to the industry itself) as outmoded and elitist, and apparently said so on many occasions at the Northallerton Railwaymen's club.
In January 1940, he joined the locomotive department as a fireman, becoming a qualified engine driver in 1943. He left the railways in 1945 to become a professional footballer, but returned in 1947. In 1954, he was made a full-time divisional officer for the NUR, and moved to their headquarters in London. In 1965, he was elected Assistant General Secretary of the NUR, and his maiden speech at the Labour Party conference in 1966 was heavily critical of Frank Cousins' policies on income and pay restraint, further cementing his reputation as a "disruptive influence".
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This entry incorporates text from “Sidney Weighell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.