About

Lord Murray of Epping Forest

Lionel ‘Len’ Murray was most widely known for his trade union work and in particular for his service as General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress from 1973 until his retirement in 1984.

Lord Murray was born in Shropshire in 1922 and attended Wellington Grammar School.  He read English at London University but left early owing to the emphasis on Anglo-Saxon language. After a short period as a school teacher he served as a lieutenant in the Shropshire Regiment during the Second World War, taking part in the Normandy D-Day landings. After being invalided out of the army Len gained a place at New College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first in philosophy, politics and economics after just two years’ study.

In 1945 Len married Heather Woolf, and they had two sons and two daughters. Lord Murray lived in Loughton from 1954 residing at 29 The Crescent from 1967 until his death in 2004. Cllr Stephen Murray is one of Lord Murray’s four children. Len began his career in the TUC in 1947 as an assistant in the Economics Department, becoming General Secretary in 1973. In 1966 he was appointed an OBE and made a member of the Privy Council in 1976. In 1985 he was elevated to the peerage of Lord Murray of Epping Forest.

Locally, Len was a member of the Loughton Methodist Church and Loughton and District Historical Society, and a supporter of many charities. The Town Council’s Murray Hall in Borders Lane, which opened in 2006, was named in his honour.

Len Murray's war time experiences as related by his son, David.

Lionel ‘Len’ Murray, Baron Murray of Epping Forest, was part of the Shropshire regiment that landed and fought in Normandy, France on June 6, 1944. His son, David Murray, puts his father’s war time story on record:

"My father, Lord Len Murray, the former General Secretary of the TUC, was one of 160,000 young men who landed on the beaches of France on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Landing on Sword Beach during Operation Overlord on D-Day was the first time that my father, the then infantryman Lieutenant Lionel Murray, had directly engaged with the enemy. Leaving his landing craft, he made it to the back of the beach with bullets whizzing past his head, but lost many of his platoon. Many drowned in the sea or were mown down on the beach. On reaching cover, he took command of another platoon whose commander had been killed in action, and they charged on.

In the days that followed he and his men did not sleep and rarely ate. Exhausted physically and mentally, they eventually found themselves as the most forward platoon of the entire British Army. They came up against the German 21st Panzer Division, one of the best equipped and best trained Nazi divisions.

After fighting continuously for four days, without any sleep and with very little food, he suffered a complete physical and mental breakdown. He woke up with a diagnosis of “battle exhaustion” in Guy’s Hospital, London.

The experience scarred him for life and his breakdown led to electric shock therapy and months in hospital. Long term he also suffered badly with 'survivor’s guilt', not least because he realised that as an officer he had been afforded the luxury of treatment, something that many of his troops, facing the same demons, were not given. Despite the consequences of his service; he had survived D-Day and had received medical treatment for his ‘combat exhaustion’ as PTSD was known then. Consequently, he became a driven man, determined that the extra time that he felt that he had been afforded should not be wasted.

He used his experience and his time to give a lifetime of service to others in his work through the trade union movement. Like many others of his generation, he never spoke to his family of his war-time experiences when we were growing up. I mistakenly thought his reluctance to go into the sea on family holidays was because he could not swim. I had no idea of the hell he had endured or of the memories that the sea evoked for him”.