Bob Tennant died on Monday January 6, his 65th birthday.

He came originally from Gloucestershire and was always a stalwart supporter of his county’s cricket club.

Tennant moved to Walthamstow following a teaching spell  at Sussex University and was employed by the London Borough of Waltham Forest (LBWF) in its adult education service.

He became a leading member of the local High Street branch and the Walthamstow constituency Labour Party.

Towards the end of the 1980s, he was the secretary of the Waltham Forest Council branch of the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU, now part of Unite).

Under his leadership a branch of 60 members was built up to over 1,000, a large part of whom formed the separate Sainsbury’s branch.

When he was an activist and secretary of Waltham Forest Trades Council, he succeded in establishing the Workers’ Memorial Day — celebrated on April 28 — in the borough.

This annual event was first inaugurated by planting a memorial tree in the grounds of the William Morris Gallery in the presence of local MPs, trades unionists and campaigners.

Tennant was an EC member of the Greater London Association of Trades Union Councils (GLATUC) and its secretary from 1992 until 2003 and steered GLATUC through some interesting times including the attempt by the TUC to remove county associations and downgrade trades councils.

He was very important in the fightback against that proposal, which was stopped by winning trade union support at congress.

For most of the time he was secretary there was no London-wide government and GLATUC took a leading role in raising London concerns through many channels.

He also sought to put GLATUC at the heart of support for union industrial battles, including notable work on the SkyChef dispute at Heathrow, the FBU dispute in 2002, Friction Dynamics in Wales, anti-privatisation battles, London weighting, and many others.

He also took a leading part in maintaining and developing GLATUC’s international work — particularly with other European capital cities.

When led by him GLATUC took a prominent role in the London May Day organising committee, resisting attempts by new Labour and some of its union allies to  stop the annual rally and later fought to get the rallies returned to Trafalgar Square. At the time he worked with other leading union figures like Anita Halpin.

Tennant sat on the executive committee of the South East Region TUC (Sertuc) and the TUC joint consultative committee, which administered the work of trades union councils nationally promoting them within the TUC and the union movement. He was also a good friend of staff at Congress House.

Eventually he left the Labour Party to join the Communist Party.

He wrote on economic policy and political issues, was the trade union organiser for the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, a member of the management committee of the Morning Star newspaper and treasurer of Trade Union CND.

In the summer of 2003, having parted company with LBWF, Tennant moved to a small farm in Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland where he lived until his death.

He also returned full-time to academic research at the University of Glasgow where his specialism was the Anglican sermon. The philosophy of Joseph Butler, an early Bishop of Durham, underpinned his later work.

While presenting papers at international conferences he also worked on the development of computer-assisted tools for the analysis of sermon rhetoric and was the author and collaborator on a large number of articles  on that subject.

In 2006 he was a visiting scholar at the Armstrong Browning Library, a research facility at Baylor University, Texas.