Derek Simpson (trade unionist)

Derek Simpson was born and educated in Sheffield. He was an only child with an absent father. He attended Sheffield Central Technical School (a technical school, which transferred to the Ashleigh School in Gleadless and was then demolished having merged to become Myrtle Springs School which is now Sheffield Springs Academy). In 1987 he received an Open University BSc in computing and mathematics. He was appointed an honorary fellow of Sheffield Hallam University in 1999. ==Career==

From 1960 to 1966 he worked for Firth Brown Tools, then Balfour Darwin from 1966 to 1981, then working full-time as a union official. AEU He joined the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) on becoming an apprentice at the age of 15. He became an AEU shop steward at Balfour Darwin in 1967 and held a number of increasingly senior union positions in workplaces where he was employed, learning his politics in what described as "the socialist republic of South Yorkshire". Since becoming General Secretary, he has been supportive of the links between Amicus and the Labour Party. A member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until its disbanding in 1991, he joined the Labour Party in 1994. ==Personal life==

Simpson met his first wife Freda when working at a greyhound track, parading the dogs and setting the traps. They married on 23 December 1967 in Sheffield. They divorced in 1974, and in 1976 Simpson married Linda Gilliver; they have two sons (born 1980 and September 1986) and a daughter (born 1982). Simpson then divorced Linda, and remarried Freda, who has two sons (born 1979 and August 1984) and a daughter (born 1977) from her previous marriage. ==References==