John Cummings

John Scott Cummings (6 July 1943 – 4 January 2017) was a British Labour politician who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Easington from 1987 until 2010.

Early life Cummings was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, a fifth-generation coal miner. He was educated at the Murton Council Infant and Junior schools on Watt Street and Secondary school. He attended both the Easington Technical College and the Durham Technical College until 1962. He began his career with the National Coal Board as a miner in 1958, working as a pit electrician from 1967 until his election to the House of Commons twenty years later. He was elected as a councillor to the Easington District Council in 1970, was its chairman from 1975 to 1976, and was its leader from 1979 until he stepped down in 1987. Active on picket lines during the 1984–85 miners' strike, in which Easington was the location of several clashes with the police, Cummings later claimed his Jack Russell Terrier Grit had been trained to "nip at policemen's ankles". In September 2007, the Easington Constituency Labour Party (CLP) selected local councillor and CLP secretary Grahame Morris as their candidate for the 2010 election.

Personal life Unmarried and Roman Catholic, he died from lung cancer in January 2017 in Durham at the age of 73.