My friend Alan Haworth would have been 76 today, 26 April. Tragically he died while on a cruise last August. His partner Maggie Rae died, on another cruise, in November. It is such a sad story; I am privileged to have known them and walked with them both.
Alan was born in Blackburn in 1948 and educated at the Blackburn Technical and Grammar School. He studied medicine at St Andrews University but left after a year. During that time he discovered hill walking and climbing, through his membership of the University Mountaineering Club. He obtained a degree in sociology from the North East London Polytechnic, and was elected president of the students’ union there.
After graduating he soon went to work for the Parliamentary Labour Party as a junior clerk, and in 1992 became its secretary, a role he held until 2004 when he entered the house of lords. He took the title Lord Haworth of Fisherfield in his beloved Torridon mountains. He was at Tony Blair’s side in the 1997 general election. Blair spoke warmly and wittily of him at the memorial event for Alan on 12 December 2023.
In his maiden speech in the Lords on 23 February 2005, Alan said: I believe that I am the first member of your Lordships’ House ever to have climbed all the Scottish Munros. For me, mountaineering and hill-walking are the best ways of recharging the batteries and refreshing the soul. This may help to explain why I chose Fisherfield in Ross and Cromarty as the territorial designation in my title.
Alan was the first Munroist in the Lords (‘compleating’ (to use the spelling of the Munro list clerk) in 2001, and becoming a peer on 28 June 2004), but he was soon joined by Chris Smith in 2005, who compleated in 1989. Chris was delighted, on visiting Alan in the PLP office as the newly-elected MP for Islington South and Finsbury in 1983, to find that he had a map of the Munros on his wall. They climbed their first Munro together in 1987 and over the next 20 years climbed 54 Munros together.
As Chris said at the memorial event, Alan had a flair for a particular attention to detail (sometimes beyond reason), compleating on Ben More Mull on 28 September 2001, exactly a century after the first compleator, the Reverend A E Robinson, and then, although extremely unwell, compleating the ‘subsidiary tops’ on 20 July 2023 on Meall Coire na Saobhaidhe, exactly a century after the Reverend Ronald Burn did so.
Alan established the Radical Ramblers whose first walk was on 27 February 1983, the Sunday after the Bermondsey by-election, no doubt as an antidote to the shock of the event (the biggest-ever swing in a by-election, 44 per cent against Labour). The group consisted of left-wingers, a mix of parliamentarians, party workers, and supporters. I first came across the RRs when Paddy Tipping, then MP for Sherwood in Nottinghamshire, suggested to Alan that he invite me on the 21st anniversary walk on 28 February 2004, to Framfield in East Sussex, to visit the notorious ‘Hoogstraten’ footpath which I had succeeded in reopening, with support from the Ramblers, the previous year. The ramblers kindly listened while I told them the story at the site of the former obstruction (barn, refrigeration units, locked gates, and barbed-wire fence).
Alan kept a meticulous note of every walk and could readily tell you when they had last been to a particular place. His pace was, as Tony Blair said, ‘steady and relentless’.
The RRs enjoyed an annual tradition of visiting Scotland in May for the John Smith Memorial Weekend. Inspired by Alan and Chris, the late John Smith began climbing the Munros after his first heart attack but sadly did not manage to compleat before his untimely death.
So the RRs, usually accompanied by members of John’s family, would climb a hill every May and drink champagne at the top.
These were always enjoyable and memorable events, unpressured and convivial, largely due to Alan’s leadership. Much malt whisky was consumed.
I joined other walks too. There was one on 20 March 2005 entitled ‘Morning coffee in the Chilterns’, from the train station at Little Kimble to Wendover. I drove to Little Kimble to meet the group, and soon realised that the coffee was to be enjoyed at Chequers where the Blairs were at home en famille. It was enormous fun, and I had a brief word with Tony, to point out that there was shortly to be a right of access to Beacon Hill which overlooks Chequers, thanks to his government. (He had never walked on it, I hope he did so afterwards.)
After coffee, chat, photos, and a tour led by Cherie, we walked up Beacon Hill and then on to Wendover.
Other walks included Blackdown in West Sussex where, after some searching, we found the trig point marking the highest spot in the South Downs National Park
and Bredon Hill in Worcestershire.
But my favourite was the last one I did with Alan when, due to engineering works, he had to change a walk on the North Downs at short notice. I suggested that instead we might cross the River Mole on the stepping-stones exactly 75 years after Prime Minister Clem Attlee and his wife Violet ‘reopened’ them. The chancellor of the exchequer, James Chuter Ede had funded their replacement. I tell the story here.
The Radical Ramblers were unique—for their camaraderie, the disarray (there was never a backmarker and people often got ahead of the leader), and the crac.
And there was Alan the peer. He was ever willing to take a brief and to follow up like a terrier. One memory stands out, and it concerns the aforementioned Beacon Hill.
Alan’s first intervention in the Lords was during the discussion on the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill, on 5 April 2005. Among other unpleasant things, the bill proposed to criminalise trespass at certain ‘protected sites’ (royal, parliamentary, nuclear and government) to be designated by the secretary of state. Briefed by the Open Spaces Society and Ramblers, Alan won an assurance from the home office minister, Baroness Scotland, that no place where the public already enjoyed access would be so designated.
However, in March 2007, I was dismayed to discover that, contrary to this assurance, part of Beacon Hill had been designated as a protected site because of its proximity to Chequers. This campaign was right up Alan’s street as it required attention to detail, and to lines on a map. He immediately swung into action and accosted Baroness Scotland, the home office minister, in the division lobby (‘don’t let anyone tell you that voting in division lobbies in the UK parliament is a useless anachronism’, he wrote to me). The result was that a further order was laid before parliament to amend the map to exclude Beacon Hill.
There is a sign on the top of Beacon Hill to mark the boundary of the protected site.
Alan was a considerate person. When a RR walk (without me) went to Berwick Station in 2016, Alan polished the plaque which announces that I relaunched the Vanguards Way (which used to have its terminus here) on 6 May 1998, and then sent me a photo.
The event for Alan (there will be a separate one for Maggie) was a true memorial. We heard from his friends and colleagues of all that he achieved, and his singular character. Chris Smith said that he could be ‘incredibly kind and generous and warm and witty. He could also be incredibly curmudgeonly at times’, and (pointing out that no one should ever have to share a bothy or tent with Alan) ‘he could snore for Lancashire’, his home county.
Alan wrote obituaries for over a hundred MPs, some of them long forgotten, but once you read the obit you felt you had known them. They described people warts and all. Tony Blair quoted from a typical obit: ‘Most people doubted his capacity to be a minister, but that was never a doubt he shared himself.’ It is sad that Alan has not written his own obituary because it would have been honest, entertaining, and precise.
A recording of the memorial event is here, and a video of Alan and Maggie here. There is an interview with Alan by the walker and climber Myrddyn Phillips, in about 2013, here.
Alan Haworth, 26 April 1948 – 28 August 2023.
Maggie Rae, 20 September 1949 – 7 November 2023.
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