Mary Josephine Turner CBE (15 June 1938 – 19 July 2017)[1] was an Irish trade union and political activist.
[3] She married and took time out of work to bring up her children, returning to employment as a dinner lady in Brent in 1970.
She recruited many of her colleagues into the General and Municipal Workers' Union, hoping to improve their pay and conditions.
[5] She was a candidate for the Labour nomination for the seat again in 2000, after Livingstone was expelled from the party, but on that occasion lost out to Paul Daisley.
During the 2010s, she suffered from increasingly poor health, but she remained active in the union until her death in 2017.