Lance Newbigging

I was sad to learn at the weekend that my good friend and former work and ICG colleague Lance Newbigging passed away last Friday.

Lance and I were colleagues at Skycaps at London Heathrow Airport between 1989 and 1991. He would have been around 62 at the time and was regarded by many of the younger porters with affection as a kind of father figure, often bestowing the benefit of his advice based upon the legal training that he had received as a younger man in his native India.

When I lost my job there in 1991 as a inevitable consequence of an ongoing conflict with the appalling management at the company Lance took my part, which led to his own arbitrary dismissal not very long afterwards. Skycaps, run at the time by a company called Valet Services Limited, was a flawless example of the kind of "hire 'em, fire 'em" set-up that the present government is keen to reintroduce under the guise of "competitiveness". Lance and I spend many a happy afternoon together at the Industrial Tribunals, then based at London's Russell Square.

When the ICG was set up a little while later Lance liked what we were doing and joined up. Prior to that he had briefly been a member of the now-defunct Hounslow Residents' Group (HRG) but preferred the ICG model. As a passionate union man its more socially progressive outlook was more to his taste. Lance stood as a candidate for the ICG in 1998 in the old Spring Grove ward.

I had not seen Lance for some time prior to his passing, although we had spoken a few times on the telephone. I would have dearly loved to have visited him and naturally regret not having done so, however with five jobs and counting it was a physical impossibility (I did not see my own parents for six months from November last year and they live less than a mile along the road!). It is sad, but I guess inevitable, that there are some who are retired and lead a sedentary lifestyle who simply (and rather stupidly) just assume that everybody else is in the same position as themselves.

Lance, I know, understood this. He was a very intelligent man. Our friendship was one that went back a lot longer than some others and when we spoke recently we spent a good deal of time reminiscing about our times at Skycaps and about the extraordinary events of 1998 which set the wheels of a whole era in motion.

Lance was very well known, and respected, in his locality. One particularly powerful recollection I have is of boarding a 116 bus in Bedfont after having spent a good few hours at his home, working no doubt on some tribunal case and being sustained with tea and curry by him and his late partner Daphne. Lance had walked me to the bus stop to see me off (and, I'm sure, to have a crafty ciggie). As I paid my fare the driver looked to the stop behind me and asked me "Is that Lance?".

I responded in the affirmative, and for much of the journey back to Hounslow he explained to me how Lance had helped him to save his job when he had fallen foul of his own employers.

It will probably never have occurred to Lance how widely missed he will be. My heartfelt condolences go out to his family and loved ones.

Ray Ferguson

I've just been informed by a mutual friend that Ray Ferguson, of Bedfont, sadly passed away on Friday. He had been suffering with lung cancer.

I first met Ray back in 1996. Having fairly much established itself in the south of Isleworth the ICG had had a letter published in a local newspaper inviting other independently minded individuals from around the borough to get in touch with us with a view to working together.

Ray was one of those who responded. Although a right-of-centre Conservative by disposition, Ray was a man of his own mind and was not completely happy with the direction his own party was taking. ICG founder Tom Reader (himself a Conservative) and myself visited Ray at his modest Staines Road home and we agreed to pool some ideas and resources. Ray and a couple of his associates attended an ICG meeting held at the old Jolly Gardeners pub in Twickenham Road, Isleworth and I even hand-delivered a few thousand leaflets for his newly-formed Hounslow Residents' Group (HRG). Ray lent us a PC, then a rare commodity, and a printing press but in the event I couldn't get either of them to work.

The HRG concentrated heavily on opposing the then rather substantial package of grants issued by the London Borough of Hounslow, then as now under Labour control, and it was indeed the case that many of these seemed to serve no purpose other than to sustain organisations that had delivered electoral and political support for the Labour Party. Indeed in one case it seemed likely that Labour was actually diverting public money to a group of activists in an unsuccessful attempt to arrest the growth of the ICG in Isleworth under the completely fictitious guise of an "anti-fascist" operation.

However the HRG's emphasis on opposing more or less all grants, and in particular its focus on single issue organisations, left some of us feeling uncomfortable and fairly soon the two groups effectively agreed to differ and to function separately. The goodwill between us remained but, in the view of many of us, there was no real common ground between the HRG's conservative ethos and the ICG's progressive communitarianism.

But whatever similarities or differences Ray and I may have had at certain times, one thing that always stood out for me was Ray's absolute honesty. In disagreement he was civil, but Ray was never two-faced or duplicitous. He was clear and open about the things in which he believed, and always took the trouble to call and offer his congratulations when I and my colleagues had experienced triumph, and his commiserations when we had experienced defeat. He called me on the telephone only a couple of months ago to express his displeasure both at the outcome of the recent local elections, and at some of the elementary political miscalculations by others, some of whom he considered friends, that had brought it about.

For those who knew Ray it was not possible to dislike the man. It was easy to disagree with him, but that is what honest discourse is about. He always demonstrated respect regardless of whether one agreed with him or not.

My sincere condolences go out to his family, friends and all who knew him.