Frank Chapple

Frank Chapple

Frank Chapple, Baron Chapple (8 August 1921 – 19 October 2004) was general secretary of the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (EETPU), a leading British trade union.

Life

Frank Chapple was born in the slum area of Hoxton, east London, in a flat above his father's shoe-repair shop. There was no bath or running hot water in the Chapple home, later, on Pitfield Street.

A Communist Party member early in his adult life, Chapple left the party after, and partly as a result of, the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He became a forceful anti-communist, and with Les Cannon ran a successful campaign in the late 1950s to counter communist vote-rigging in his union. He joined the Labour Party in 1958.

Chapple served as a member of the Trades Union Congress general council for 12 years to 1983, having first joined the union in 1937, and he had held offices at every level in the electricians' union. From 1966 to 1984 he was the general secretary of the EETPU. After his retirement, he was elevated to the House of Lords as a life peer on 4 February 1985 taking the title Baron Chapple, of Hoxton in Greater London. His successor was fellow anti-communist Eric Hammond. One of Chapple's sons, Barry Chapple, was a regional official of Amicus, which succeeded the EETPU. Amicus merged with the TGWU in 2007 to become Unite the Union.

Further reading

• Aikman, Calum, 'Frank Chapple: A Thoughtful Trade Union Moderniser', in Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain: Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth Century, eds. Peter Ackers and Alastair J. Reid (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 211–42.
• Chapple, Frank, Sparks Fly: A Trade Union Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1984).
• Lloyd, John, Light and Liberty: The History of the EETPU (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990)

External links

• BBC obituary
• Catalogue of Chapple's papers, held at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick