Martin Flannery (UK politician)

Martin Henry Flannery (2 March 1918 – 16 October 2006) was a British politician. Originally a communist, he continued to hold decidedly left-wing views after he joined the Labour Party, and was Member of Parliament for Sheffield Hillsborough for 18 years, from February 1974 to 1992.

Flannery was born in Hillsborough, in Sheffield. His father, who was born in County Tipperary, was a foreman at a steel works (and a former soldier in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers). His mother was born in Sheffield, but was of Irish parentage on both sides. He was educated at the Sacred Heart School in Hillsborough and the local Catholic grammar school De La Salle College, which is now All Saints. He attended Sheffield College of Education and Sheffield Teachers' Training College, and began to work as a teacher, but then volunteered to join the British Army in the Second World War. He joined the 1st Battalion, Royal Scots; he was sent to India in 1942, and was wounded in Burma in 1945. He was a warrant officer when he was demobilised.

He married in 1949, and had one son and two daughters.

He resumed teaching at a primary school in Sheffield in 1946. He was opposed to corporal punishment. He became headteacher of Crookesmoor Junior School in Sheffield in 1969. He was a left-wing member of the National Union of Teachers, and was a member of the NUT national executive from 1970 to 1974. He had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain following his demobilisation in 1945, but left after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when he realised that Soviet claims of democracy were a sham.

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