Roy Shaw

Roy Edwin Shaw (21 July 1925 – 4 January 2008) was a Labour Party politician in London, England. He was the Leader of Camden London Borough Council from 1975 to 1982, serving on Camden Council and its predecessor councils continuously for 51 years until just before his death, making him the longest-serving councillor in the UK. Shaw was known nationally as an expert on local government.

Early life and education Roy Shaw was born in 1925 to Edwin Victor and Edith Lily Shaw in Hampstead as the only son in a family of six children. His family home was in Highfield Road, West Hampstead. He was educated at Emmanuel Infant School and Beckford Junior School, before winning a scholarship to William Ellis, which was a grammar school at the time. His academic ambitions were stalled by his father's sudden death, and Shaw left school aged 16 to work as a clerk for the tobacconist W.D. & H.O. Wills. In 1952, he moved to Kentish Town, and became secretary of Hampstead Constituency Labour Party. He was an alderman in the Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, a borough which he was a member of from 1962 to 1965. These were two of the three boroughs which were merged to create Camden Council in 1965. He was elected to represent Haverstock, Grafton's successor ward, in 2002 and 2006 (when he almost lost his seat). He resigned from office in 2007 and was made the borough's first Honorary Alderman by the council in June that year, in a town hall ceremony which he was too ill to attend. There were tributes from the then-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell (herself a former Camden councillor), Holborn and St Pancras MP Frank Dobson and Lord Clarke of Hampstead. including being a founding member of the Labour Solidarity Campaign and backing Roy Hattersley's ultimately unsuccessful campaign to be leader of the party.