On more than one occasion, John Lebor was offered triple his salary to go and work for the very factories he had fought against in his legal work where he battled for workers’ rights. Every time, he turned the offers down.
A man who wore many hats, he was a highly-respected lawyer, a local politician, and a leader of a Zionist organisation, but above all, Lebor was a socialist.
His only child, Benjamin, who described him as a “true English gentleman who never bowed down to capitalists”, said his father spent his life helping others.
Lebor was born on January 18, 1929, in Queen’s Park, and lived his whole life in Brent – where he eventually became mayor.
In the 1940s, Lebor's father used his savings to pay for him to train as a lawyer, and by 1951, when he was in his early 20s, he qualified and got ready to begin his career. But military duty was compulsory in the 1950s, and he was shipped off to Hamburg in Germany for the next two years.
As a qualified lawyer, Lebor could have automatically joined as an officer, but true to his socialist values, he decided to join the lower ranks as a private. According to Benjamin, Lebor was the only private in the British army at the time who was a lawyer.
When Lebor arrived back in London in 1953, he began his career as a lawyer at Thompson’s Solicitors, focusing on cases involving personal safety, namely amongst factory workers, who at the time, had little rights and were often injured in workplace accidents.
Before long, factory bosses caught on to how many cases Lebor was winning, and decided it would be better to have him as an ally instead of an enemy. They began offering him handsome compensation to sell out.
Lebor never did. “He was a man of honour,” Benjamin said. “He was never in it for the money.”
His commitment to helping people led him to politics, where, in 1964, he became a Labour councillor on Brent Council. For many years he led the education committee, and by 1970, he was voted as council leader – a role he stayed in for three years. In 2,000, he was honoured with the mayorhood.
Lebor met his wife Rose, a Holocaust survivor, in 1961, and they got married in 1964 – a busy year for Lebor with his new seat on the council. Benjamin was born in 1967, and inspired perhaps Lebor’s greatest achievement when it came to his commitment to helping people.
He was born deaf and unable to speak, but instead of sending him to a special school, Lebor and Rose taught their son to speak and to lipread, to such a level where he could have a normal life.
Lebor also spent 18 years as one of the leaders of the Jewish Socialist Labour Party, (originally part of an international socialist Zionist group called Poale Zion).
Through all of Lebor’s work and family commitments, he did not have much time for hobbies – but every spare moment he did have would be spent either with his head buried in a book, or watching the cricket.
He died peacefully on August 8, 2026, at the age of 97 at his home in Cricklewood and is survived by his son Benjamin.
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