Family, friends and others who knew and respected Alan Haworth (Lord Haworth) continue to mourn his death on 28 August while on holiday in Iceland. There have been many tributes, including the obituary linked here in the Guardian.

I first got to know Alan in the visceral days of 1970s Newham North East Labour Party. It was a difficult time for many people but Alan never lost his sense of humour nor his steely determination. There will always be a rich variety of accents amongst the people of the East End, an indication of its historical role as a place for newcomers. What Alan brought to it was the warm Lancastrian lilt of his native Blackburn. Something he never lost, despite his many years away.  

More recently, as a labour historian I found in Alan a generous source, as the Guardian obituary makes clear. In particular, from the huge effort he and Diane Hayter put into cajoling a host of Labour luminaries to sit down and each write an essay about one of the 1906 ground-breaking intake of twenty-nine Labour MPs. They were published in 2006 as The Men Who Made Labour. Alan contributed a superb essay on fellow Lancastrian David Shackleton, the ‘Lancashire Giant’, and I can imagine him absorbing Shackleton’s advice: ‘Use your opportunities. Don’t waste time and breath crying for the moon … If you rightly use the power that you have, more will come to you at the proper time.’ Alan never lost that belief. Despite all the ups and downs of his beloved Labour Party he remained resolute in his optimism, his empathy with friend and foe alike never failing him.

The photograph below, taken at one of our later meetings in Newham, says it all for me.

Mike Mecham