Joe Owens Archive | ETOL Main Page
From The Guardian, 8 February 2010.
Transcribed by Iain Dalton.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
At the age of 19, as a miner at Polkemmet colliery, in West Lothian, Joe Owens was thrown into the year-long miners’ strike. Joe, who has died unexpectedly aged 44, emerged as a powerful leader, the youngest NUM pit delegate ever elected in Scotland, and was recognised as a great speaker.
The strike was the defining experience in Joe’s life. On its 10th anniversary, his book of interviews with miners and their wives, Miners 1984–1994: A Decade of Endurance, was published. His introduction is exemplary, revealing Joe’s wide reading (he loved poetry, particularly Bertolt Brecht and Pablo Neruda), astute political sense and wonderful command of language. On the 25th anniversary, Joe returned to the strike in his contribution to the edited volume Shafted: The Media, the Miners’ Strike and the Aftermath, in which he wrote how the strike “coloured and will, in all its brightness, shades and shadows, influence me until I pass”.
Joe was born in Blackburn, West Lothian, with three younger brothers and two sisters, and attended St Kentigern’s school, Blackburn. When Polkemmet colliery closed in 1985, Joe moved to the Bilston Glen mine and, when he lost his job there, he went to Napier University in Edinburgh to study journalism. In 1988 he was given an opportunity on the local Wester Hailes Sentinel.
I first met Joe in 1993 when he was the editor of The Northender, a community paper in Springburn/Possilpark, a tough area of Glasgow, where he had established a campaigning publication holding local politicians to account and challenging the drug dealers in that part of the city.
Joe worked on a wide range of papers as a casual sub-editor before securing a contract with the Daily Record in Glasgow. He also became active with the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and served as chair of both Glasgow branch and the Scottish council. An unexpected change for Joe happened when he met Breda Joy, a delegate from Kerry, at an NUJ annual conference. He went over to live with Breda in Ireland, where he became a senior sub and an extremely popular father of chapel (union official) at the Cork Examiner.
Later, he returned to Glasgow and worked as a casual on the Record before taking up the post of chief reporter on the Highland News in Inverness. His last job in journalism was with the County Press on the Isle of Wight.
Joe is survived by his son, Patrick, from his marriage to Liz Catterson.
Joe Owens Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 6 November 2016