THE great-grandson of a forgotten Labour pioneer and North-East MP is on a mission to have his ancestor’s achievements recognised. Mark Tallentire reports.

HE helped found the Labour Party and reduced a British Prime Minister to tears in the House of Commons.

He led the miners’ union for ten years, was a close ally of Keir Hardie and spent much of the First World War in and out of Downing Street.

He co-founded the Save the Children charity and was president of what would become Liberty.

And for six years he was the MP for Morpeth, Northumberland.

But chances are you’ve never heard of him. His name: Robert Smillie.

Now, 70 years on from Smillie’s death, his great-grandson, Blair, is fighting a personal campaign to honour his memory.

Last week, accompanied his father, who was named after the great man but is known as Bob, he addressed the Durham branch of the Historical Society.

Robert Smillie was born in Belfast in 1857, the son of a Scottish crofter.

A penniless orphan by the age of three, he lived with his grandmother and started work aged five.

Having moved to Glasgow at 14, he worked in boiler shops and went down the mines at 17.

It was there, amid talk of socialism and revolution, that his interest in politics was sparked and his first foray into the field came when he stood against and defeated a local doctor for a school governor post.

Through the 1880s and 1890s, he helped form the Scottish Miners’ Federation, the Scottish Trades Union Congress, the Labour Party in Scotland and the Independent Labour Party, the forerunner of today’s Labour Party.

When he became president of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, later the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), in 1912, it was during the first national strike.

He was involved in tense talks with the Liberal government and it was from this that he caused Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister of the day, to break down and cry in Parliament.

“Asquith’s wife knew it was affecting his health so he asked my great-grandfather for a secret meeting,” Blair says, eyes wide with pride.

“She pleaded with him to discuss the strike but he refused, and shortly afterwards Asquith broke into tears in Parliament.”

With the country at war, the coal industry was nationalised and Smillie found himself feted by the new PM David Lloyd George – twice refusing ministerial posts.

When peace returned, Smillie was appointed to the Sankey Commission, set up to decide whether to re-privatise the mines.

Its leader, Sir John Sankey, supported Smillie’s demand that national ownership continue, but Lloyd George betrayed him and returned the mines to their old aristocratic masters.

By the time he was elected Morpeth MP in 1923, Smillie was burnt out, his health failing – which led him to refuse office in the historic 1924 Labour government.

He retired due to illness in 1929 and spent much of his last decade in and out of Crichton Hospital, in Dumfries, where he died in 1940, aged 82.

Bob Smillie recalls meeting the great man twice.

“I found it quite daunting,” the 85-year-old says, with a smile.

“He was quite a big man and I was just a toddler.

“My father and him were talking business and, after getting a nod of recognition, I remember being bored,” he jokes.

“But I had a distinct feeling that what was going on was tremendously important.”

Bob’s politics closely aligned with his grandfather’s. He left Labour in the 1980s for the Communist Party, was prominent in the National Union of Railwaymen and is now part of pressure group Unlock Democracy.

Blair, however, was a bit different.

“I was always an entrepreneurial businessman,” the 60-year-old says.

He runs an interiors company in Chester and, God forbid, even considered standing for Parliament as a Conservative.

But he has undergone a political revolution of his own, partly due to rediscovering his own family history.

That led to Labour of Love, a novel telling Robert Smillie’s life story, written by Torquil Cowan.

Blair is now toying with running against Tony Blair’s son Euan if, as rumours suggest, the 29-year-old is parachuted in to a safe Labour seat in Liverpool.

“Tony Blair ruined the Labour Party. He used the party as a tool. What’s required now is politicians of the people.”

One imagines Robert Smillie would have agreed with that.

Labour of Love: The Story of Robert Smillie is available now, priced £14.99.