Gavin Laird

Sir Gavin Harry Laird CBE (14 March 1933 – 26 October 2017) was a Scottish trade unionist, who became General Secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (AEEU) and a Member of the Court of the Bank of England.

Growing up in Clydebank he attended a local high school then began working for Singer.[1] He became an Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) shop steward there, then convenor.[1]

Three years after taking up a full-time position with the union, he was elected to the AEU executive and later elected AEU general secretary, remaining in that position after the merger which created the AEEU.[1] He addressed the Confederation of British Industry annual conference in 1986 – an unusual move for a trade unionist at the time.[1]

He appeared as a castaway on the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs on 25 October 1992,[2] received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1994,[3] was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) under Margaret Thatcher's government and knighted in 1995 at the behest of Tony Blair.[1]

He retired from the AEEU in 1995[1] and died in October 2017 at the age of 84 after a long illness.[4]