Our thanks to Robert Jones, Secretary IW Labour Party 1975 – 1991, for sharing these words about the late Kenn Pearson, 1987 and 1992 parliamentary candidate, who sadly passed away last week. He never married, but leaves behind twin brother, Keith.
Our thoughts are with all who knew Kenn. Ed
Kenn Pearson, MA (Oxon), 1940 – 2015
Kenn Pearson – Kenneth to his mum: he winced when she occasionally called him “Kennie” – was a one-off.
I never met anyone else like him, and don’t expect to ever again. I don’t now remember if he was actually born on the Island, but he certainly came from what he described as “a traditional Binstead family” – even if he never quite defined what that was.
He didn’t talk like a traditional Islander – by Jove…. He didn’t drink like one, either – if he went into the bar with you, he’d have a brandy and lovage, while the horny-handed sons of toil nursed their pints of brown ale or Guinness. He was something of a wine connoisseur, too. He liked, as was obvious just by looking at him, his food – indeed, he’d like your food as well, given half a chance.
Low times for Labour
In the 1983 General Election, the Labour vote collapsed to its lowest ever – at the time, indeed, it was the lowest in the country: a dismal record which has since been superseded. Our vote went to the Liberals, as people concluded it was the only way to keep the Tories out. And so far as it went, it worked – we’d have had Virginia Bottomley as our MP otherwise, so on the whole it was a merciful escape.
But it didn’t feel like that at the time.
New blood
And then Kenn appeared. He had come back to the Island, I think, to look after his widowed mother. The moment he bounced into the office to introduce himself, I knew I’d found the candidate we needed.
He was wholly different to the face we’d put forward since ca. 1978, when Militant dominated and our vote diminished. He was open, friendly, not obsessed by (or even very interested in) political theory; he was emphatically no Militant – I presume he knew who Trotsky was, but he had no interest in emulating him. He was completely impervious to others’ ideological obsessions – if anything, they amused him. He’d heard it all before, at Oxford University, in the Labour Party in those constituencies he’d lived in subsequently.
This was no narrow zealot who worried much about “raising the conscious level” of the electorate; he just wanted electors to vote Labour. And as that was what I wanted too, we got on well from the outset.
IW Labour Party Chairman
In the 1980s, then, when the party turned decisively against Militant following Neil Kinnock’s conference speech denouncing the Tendency, we came to our own local reckoning.
Kenn became party chairman – and provided his total support to my colleagues and me in removing a few individuals from the party, but far more importantly breaking the Militant grip.
Recovery began
The benefit showed in the General Election of 1987, when our vote picked itself up off the floor and the recovery began.
Of course, we didn’t exactly sweep the board, and haven’t since: but we also succeeded in electing a Labour councillor, George Orr, to Medina Borough Council – a seat to which Kenn succeeded when George died; and others followed.
It was a slow, painful process of re-establishing the Island Labour Party, which is still going on today, in others’ hands.
They are, I’m sure, aware of the debt they owe to Kenn who did so much to bind the party together when it seemed determined to pull itself apart into factionalism.
Funeral
Kenn Pearson’s funeral takes place on on Thursday 17th December 2015 from 1.30pm, at the Isle of Wight Crematorium.
Image: © Kenn Pearson
