Baroness Brenda Dean, former print union leader, aged 74

Brenda Dean, Baroness Dean of Thornton-leFylde, has died aged 74.

Baroness Dean became one of the best-known trade union leaders in Britain as a result of her leadership of Sogat during theWapping dispute in 1986-87, a brutal confrontation with Rupert Murdoch’s News International that would prove a watershed for the future of the print industry.

She was a forward-looking pragmatist whose attempts to resolve the strike enhanced her status within the wider trade union movement but undoubtedly at the eventual cost of her own long-term career within it.

She was bitterly denounced by some people in the militant Fleet Street chapels (union branches) as a “Judas”, she was derided as “a film star” because of her blond good looks, and her leadership was decried when she put the survival of the union, with 90% of its members in the provinces, ahead of what was essentially a London dispute.

Moves resumed later to merge Sogat (the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades) with the much smaller National Graphical Association and in 1991 Baroness Dean was narrowly defeated for the post of general secretary of the new Graphical, Paper and Media Union (GPMU), which is now part of Unite.

In 1992 she resigned from her No 2 post in the GPMU after what she described as the only unhappy year of her working life.

She was appointed to the House of Lords, which she described as having “some aspects of a dinosaur park”, on the recommendation of the then Labour leader, John Smith, the following year. She joined the privy council in 1998.

Baroness Dean was the elder of two children of Hugh and Lillian Dean, who were both from Salford families. Her father was a railway signalman and her mother worked in a carpet factory. The family, including brother Bobby, moved to Eccles.

She attended St Andrew’s Church of England Primary School and completed her formal education at Stretford High School for girls.

In 1976, she met Keith McDowall, a former journalist who was then a government press officer, and they became partners the following year. He later became deputy director general of the Confederation of British Industry and they married in 1988. He survives her.

Picture: PA. Baroness Brenda Dean became the first woman to lead a major trade union in the UK.