A personal tribute from Frank Pedley

NOEL Johns, who died recently, was an example par excellence of a public representative in the days before local government re-organisation, who devoted much of his life, his energy and indeed his personal finances (he never claimed a penny in expenses) to the people he served.

When I came for interview for the post of Borough Education Officer in 1955 the person asking the most pertinent and penetrating questions was a dapper-looking man with a rather precise way of speaking who, as Alderman Johns, had been the Mayor of Keighley in 1954 and was vice-chairman of the Education Committee. Shortly after that he followed Alderman John Taylor (now Lord Ingrow) into the chair and was involved in the changes which took place during the much-maligned sixties.

His concern, as it was of the whole council, was to ensure that by whatever means proved to be necessary, the highest possible quality of education at secondary level should be available to all our children and not just for those selected for a grammar school education. This objective in no way dimmed his regard for the Keighley Boys Grammar School, where he himself had been educated and to which he was a generous benefactor, a feature of his public generosity which continued with the establishment of its successor at Oakbank.

With the passage of time, goals which are now a routine part of school life are usually forgotten, just as Noel's major objective as chairman of the Street Lighting Committee - to provide electric street lamps in every street in place of the flickering gas lamps then commonplace - is now taken for granted. Yet in context, they were in their time a considerable achievement.

His public service was not, however, confined to his local government work, to which he had (he always claimed in his slightly self-deprecatory manner) been catapulted because the Liberal Party in Oakworth could not find anyone else to be a candidate. He was a magistrate for many years and a member of Keighley Rotary Club for much of his lifetime.

When the Keighley Third Age Group was formed in 1984, Noel could not at that time become a member, since, although in his eighties, he could not fulfil the only qualification for membership - that members are no longer in full-time employment.

He was still an active director of the pyjama factory which bears his name and even later was proud to continue his company's negotiations with hospital trusts for the supply of nightwear. But when he did finally join the group, he immediately made his mark, especially as chairman of the Current Affairs Group where his urban approach was ideally suited to containing the diverse views of its members.

He was particularly pleased that the group was able to respond to the government's invitation to comment on new developments and to receive from Lord Neill, of the committee on public funding of political parties, a letter of acknowledgement and a summary of the committee's findings.

His papers on money management and the intricacies of the markets were always appreciated. It was entirely consistent with his radicalism (though it seemed unlikely from a man who was conscious of etiquette and had even been declared Best Dressed man of the Year by the Keighley News, that he should hold strong views on such diverse matters as proportional representation, the monarchy (whose demise he forecast), holistic medicine and on organised religion.

Although a consistent benefactor of the Methodist Church in which he was brought up, he no longer believed in life after death or in the trappings of the established church.

Yet it was, I believe, this very background which led him to see anything less than perfection in his own life as comparative failure and his life was the apotheosis of the Protestant work ethic, inherited, one must accept, from his father, himself a giant in the world of local government at county council level.

Noel Johns was a man of the utmost integrity, an elected representative of the people who in every aspect of his long life set himself and others the highest standards of public service. It is to honour the name of this man, whose like we shall not see again, that the Keighley Third Age Group will hope soon to establish a Noel Johns Memorial Lecture, to be given by someone of national or international stature each year.

We shall be doing this, not for him, for he sought no memorial, but to remind ourselves of the human qualities and the standards we ought to try to attain, in our own lives.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.