I’m back — and there’s unfinished business

Councillor John Battye: lives and breathes Oldham

Martyn Meets... Councillor John Battye, the Labourite who lives and breathes Oldham
ELEVEN years ago, John Battye lost his seat on Oldham Council, ending an unbroken span of 30 years public service.

Many reasons were voiced, and some — it has to be admitted — were whispered, but the man himself has no illusions about his defeat in the Millennium elections.

Dismissing the oft-voiced idea that his rough-riding of the Mayoralty, when he allegedly took the robes in the borough’s 150th anniversary year when it wasn’t his or even Labour’s turn, the man is categoric, trenchant even, in his opinions.

“It wasn’t a shock, at least not to me. It wasn’t our time and in your heart of hearts you know it . . . especially on polling day when people won’t look you in the eye,” he told me during a fascinating two hours in one of the ruling Labour Group’s offices in the sprawling council complex in West Street.

Yep, he’s back.

Once again he is Councillor John Battye, having been returned to the council as a member for Failsworth East in May, last year.

Before I go any further let me state, unequivocally, that this piece is not intended as a shot at Battye-esque redemption, or an attempt to rewrite history.

The simple facts are that this man was enormously influential when he led Oldham Council for 15 years up to the Millennium, has been out of the public eye for a decade and is now back at the very heartbeat of Oldham, one of the powerbrokers.

This is the same man who once told me he would never return to public life, yet here he is once again getting involved in the town where he was born, educated and has worked all his life.

And that is a long time as he is now well into his 60s, although he certainly doesn’t look it.

I couldn’t help but wonder and I had to pose the questions: why are you back and where have you been since 2000?

His answers, as you would expect from a consummate politician — for he is a Labour man to his very core and thrives on the challenge of local politics, revelling in the rough and tumble — were candid, tinged with a hint of intrigue.

He had stood twice, previously, and came perilously close to winning once when he really didn’t want to.

Last year, when the chosen candidate for Failsworth East pulled out a week before nominations were due to close, the timing was right.

“A letter had been published in the Chronicle, by a member of the Liberal Democrats, which was about me and which I can only describe as vicious. I wasn’t in public life, hadn’t been for 10 years and yet I was the subject of this vitriolic attack.”

It was at the time when the vacancy in Failsworth East arose and when no local candidate offered to step in, and the party couldn’t find a “preferred” female nominee to take up the challenge the man who accepts he was once quite unpopular threw his hat into the ring.

And he was elected. So why did you come back, I asked? His answer was categorical: “Unfinished business.”

It was an unequivocal statement but I was able to pick and probe some detail from a man who is known for his single-mindedness and his oft-stated antipathy towards those whom, he claims, cannot see the bigger picture. “Or won’t make the difficult decisions,” he says pointedly. His biggest regret is not being around in 2001 to finish the SportsPark 2000 project which would have given Oldham Athletic a new home on Clayton Playing Fields.

He lays the blame squarely at the feet on the Liberal Democrats, who took charge of the council in 2000 when he lost his seat.

“One more year, that is all that was needed,” he mused, adding: “The majority of the money was in place, the planning permission was in place and we had permission from the Charity Commission to develop Clayton and replace the football fields on the site of the old stadium.

“Lots of untruths have been spoken and published about the project. There were three sets of plans: a 20,000-plus seater stadium with a roof at £27 million; a smaller stadium with a retractable roof at £20 million and a 16,000-seater standard stadium without cover.

“That last was our preferred option. We had £11 million in the bank from the sale of Westwood running track to B&Q, we had a further £2 million promised for stadium naming rights which left a shortfall of £3 million which could easily have been sourced at competitive rates on a stadium that was all-but funded.

“We had verbal promises from BSkyB to use the stadium as their northern hub for parking of their outside broadcast vehicles and as a northern studio.

“Everything was in place — and we just needed another 12 months.”

He sounded exasperated as he sighed the last sentence and then looked up, perked up and smiled again: “Unfinished business.”

Which begged the question of where are we then, with the stadium situation?

The response spoke volumes — nothing of substance was said other than “We as a party, as a group, are prepared to make and take decisions...’

His politics were forged by his father, Bernard Granville Battye, a former membership secretary of the party, and his grandfather, Percy Cotterill, one of the Labour movement’s great movers and shakers.

He was educated at Hulme Grammar — “I hated every minute’ he recalls — and it was a lecture by the head teacher, H B Shaw, which has clearly had a lasting influence on his life.

“It was a social studies lesson and he spoke about how he, as professional man with his own house, could have his vote for the Conservatives cancelled by a homeless man without a job voting for the Labour Party.

“I was 15 and this raised my hackles — I went straight home and joined the party and have been a member ever since.

Now he needed a job and his mother saw an advert in the Chronicle for a lab assistant at Oldham General Hospital. “The interview was on a Saturday morning, the same morning that tickets for Oldham Athletic v Liverpool in the FA Cup went on sale.

“I remember phoning my mum from the call box outside the Queens and she asked me how I got on.

“No problems . . . I got there in time in time to get two tickets for the match.”

Mum, of course, was more concerned with the interview, which was unsuccessful but 10 days later he received an offer to work at the hospital and he spent 34 years in the health service before being made redundant.

Those days, when he rose through haematology and played a “very small part” in the birth of the world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, have shaped his life and philosophy. He recalled: “I used to have to take blood tests of young children thought to be suffering from leukaemia. They were the bravest young people I have ever met.”

He also looks back on a full life which has encompassed the chairmanship of the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities, and a year as chair of Manchester Airport when it was spending £1 million a week completing Terminal Two.

But his outstanding pride is how Oldham rallied during the Kosovo crisis around the Millennium.

“Two hundred refugees came to Oldham and they didn’t have anything, literally nothing. We had an appeal in the all the local churches and mosques and raised £14,000.

“We were able to use some of that money to send back home a man called Osman Caka, who had seen his 17-year son shot in front of him and his body thrown in the river.

“He was later able to rescue his son from the water and buried him, with many others, in a shallow unmarked grave.

“Oldham people paid for a headstone and proper burial and to this day that is one of my proudest memories of Oldham. That’s what the people in Oldham are all about.”