Robin Beauchamp Thompson, solicitor: born London 15 September 1924; married (one son, one daughter); died London 31 October 2002
The trade union lawyer Robin Thompson devoted his life to the struggle for workers' rights, including health and safety and legal protection at work. Tony Benn called him 'one of the most important figures of his generation'.
The elder son of the radical lawyer WH Thompson and suffragette Joan Beauchamp, he was born in 1924. Before the Second World War he studied engineering at Lough-borough College and joined the Army (REME) in 1943. He was stationed in India and destined to be part of the intended invasion of Malaya, but Japan capitulated. He contracted dengue fever and spent Christmas 1945 billeted on a film set in Poona. Thompson was profoundly moved by the poverty and struggle in India and made lifelong friendships during his time there and in the Army.
WH Thompson died in 1947 and Joan had been seriously injured during a flying-bomb raid. Robin and his brother Brian were urged to join their father's firm; both started the month after his death. Robin qualified as a solicitor in 1950 and became sole principal of a firm with 70 staff in various locations and a political tradition. He was joined the following year by Brian and together they formed the most influential legal partnership the trade unions have known.
Robin and Brian were very different people but complemented each other: if Brian was the intellectual force of the partnership, Robin was its organisational genius and forged relationships with nearly every union. Together the brothers broke new ground in recovering compensation for injured workers, defending trade unions from the attacks of employers and governments, and advancing the interests of working people.
Thompsons pioneered much of the litigation concerning industrial diseases, defended the miners, fire-fighters and printers and strove to reform the law. Robin was a member of the Winn committee which reported to the Lord Chancellor on personal-injury procedure and produced a widely admired minority report. He was a founder of the Trial Lawyers for Public Justice and a life member of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America. He was respected by the legal establishment but never part of it.
The firm grew, opening offices in England, Wales and Scotland, but remained loyal to its roots: only acting for working people and never for employers or insurance companies. Robin Thompson was particularly proud of a clause of the partnership deed he drafted and which remains today:
The principal object of the practice shall be to assist Trade Unions and their members. It shall not be an object of the Partnership to earn for the Partners the maximum income which in general practice they are capable of earning.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the firm created and attracted some of the best lawyers available. Opportunities were given which would not have been available in traditional law firms, the firm recruiting from the ranks of trade-union activists.
Brian died in 2000. Robin retained in retirement a keen interest and involvement in the firm. In his later years he suffered from poor health and declining eyesight, but he was still as entertaining, mischievous and sometimes as cantankerous as ever. Always a source of historical insight, anecdote and - when he wanted to be - wisdom.
Rodney Bickerstaffe