My friend and former colleague Caroline Shelton, who has died aged 67 of cancer, was a tutor in trade union studies and a trade union activist, with a special interest in health and safety.
Having been a shop steward while working in the computing sector, in the early 1990s she became a lecturer in trade union studies at South Thames College in London, where she was elected as health and safety officer of her Unite union branch and nominated to join me and other colleagues on the board of the London Hazards Centre, which helps Londoners to assert their right to live and work in a safe, healthy environment.
She was also a Unite delegate to the Kent and Medway Trades Union Congress, a Labour councillor in Gravesend, Kent, for a number of years, and a Labour delegate to Gravesend constituency Labour party.
Caroline was born in Gravesend, and was raised in a trade union-supporting family. Her bookbinder mother, Joy (nee Mitchell), was a mother of chapel in the Sogat printing union, and her lorry-driver father, Gordon Shelton, was an enthusiastic member of the Transport and General Workers’ Union.
In 1967, when Caroline was 11, the family moved to Wellington in New Zealand, where she attended Wellington East girls’ college before returning to Gravesend in 1972, after which her education continued at Wombwell Hall school in nearby Northfleet. She also attended the Royal College of Music on Saturdays before going on to study music at Goldsmiths College (now Goldsmiths, University of London).
After graduating from there in 1980, Caroline began working as a peripatetic music teacher for the Inner London Education Authority, travelling around various schools, before deciding that computing offered her better prospects.
A year studying computing at Bristol Polytechnic (now University of the West of England) followed, after which she worked for Bowater-Scott and Wellcome Dartford (later subsumed into GlaxoSmithKline) in Gravesend. There she was elected as the shop-steward of her MSF/Amicus trade union branch, as well as a delegate to the MSF/Amicus London regional council and its annual conferences.
In 1992 she changed tack again to become a lecturer at South Thames College in Lewisham, teaching trade union studies there while also freelancing for the Workers’ Education Association and Ruskin College Oxford. In 2011 she was elected as a Labour councillor in Gravesend, and in 2018 she became health and safety officer of her Unite trade union branch.
Caroline attended pickets and protests with her branch banner for as long as she could, and saw active trade union branches as being essential to challenging all social injustices and mitigating all work-related hazards. When ill health forced her to resign from our board in March, she was elected honorary president “in grateful appreciation for her many years’ service as a determined fighter for a safer London”.
She is survived by her younger brother, Craig.
