An Irish Salute to International Brigadier,
Jack James Larkin Jones

The following statement has been issued on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 by SIPTU Head of Research Manus O’Riordan, in his capacity as Executive Member for Ireland of the International Brigade Memorial Trust

The death has taken place in London on Tuesday, April 21, of 96 year old Jack Jones, President of the International Brigade Memorial Trust in Britain and Ireland. As General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union from 1969 to 1978, Jack had also been the most outstanding British trade union leader of the post-war era.

On behalf of the Irish families and friends of International Brigaders, I particularly mourn Jack’s passing, not only as our IBMT President but also as a life-long friend of all members of my own family. For Jack had been a comrade-in-arms of my late father Michael O’Riordan in the Spanish Anti-Fascist War, where they were both wounded in the 1938 battle of the Ebro. In October 2005 Jack presided over the annual general meeting of the IBMT in Dublin’s Liberty Hall, and led a delegation of a British and International Brigade veterans to Áras an Uachtaráin, where they were received by the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese. His last public event was on February 10 of this year, at the London funeral of Irish International Brigader Bob Doyle. During a packed final year of activity, Jack and Bob had also been reunited this past October with surviving fellow-International Brigaders from all over the world at ceremonies held in Barcelona to commemorate the 70th anniversary of their departure from Spain.

I am delighted that Jack was able to make a final visit to Dublin this January as a guest of SIPTU on the occasion of our Union’s centenary celebrations. It was particularly appropriate that Jack attended the ceremony marking the anniversary on January 30 of the death of his fellow Liverpuddlian, Big Jim Larkin, who had founded the Irish Transport and General Workers Union in January 1909. Larkin had not only previously worked alongside Jack’s father on the Liverpool docks, but had been a personal friend as well. In fact, when Jack was born on March 29, 1913, his father christened him James Larkin Jones!

But the commemoration that was to mean most to Jack himself, as well as to his two sons Jack Jnr. and Mick, had taken place last June in the South Kilkenny village of Inistioge, in honour of that son of Inistioge and close personal friend of Jack’s, the International Brigader George Brown who had been killed in the 1937 battle of Brunete. [Jack’s RTE interview can be viewed at http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0628/6news.html which carries a report of that George Brown commemoration]. George’s widow Evelyn Taylor, a courageous anti-Fascist activist in her own her right, would marry Jack in 1938 and share six more decades of love, comradeship and struggle with him, until her own death in 1998.

To the very end, Jack James Larkin Jones lived life to the full in the world wide service of mankind. We salute his memory and mourn his loss.