The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
A man who began working at age 15 in the coal mines of England and rose to become one of the top executives at Inco died Sunday at Trillium Health Centre in Mississauga after a short illness.
James William “Big Jim” Ashcroft is being remembered this week, by friends and by people who didn’t always share his views, as both a company man and a miner’s miner.
A fifth-generation coal miner, Ashcroft worked in Lancashire in northwest England before apprenticing as a surveyor and studying to be a mining engineer.
He left the United Kingdom in 1968 and began working for Inco at Levack Mine, working in many roles for the International Nickel Company before being transferred to Thompson as vice-president of mining and milling for the Manitoba division.
He returned to Sudbury in 1991 as president of Inco’s Ontario division, a position he held until retiring in 1997. He then sat on boards for FNX Mining, Hudson Bay Mining, Guyana Gold and Thompson Creek Metals. He also ran a mining consulting company for several years.
Along the way, he married Margaret, to whom he was wed for 44 years. Margaret Ashcroft is well known in Sudbury as an educator and former member of the board of the North East Local Health Integration Network.
The Ashcrofts have three sons and seven grandchildren.
Dave Campbell was president of United Steelworkers Local 6500, which represents production and maintenance workers at Inco and now Vale operations in Sudbury, when Ashcroft was president of Inco’s Ontario operations.
Campbell said Ashcroft was tough, “he was a company man,” but one of the things he respected most about him was if he said something was going to happen, it did.
“You didn’t get a lot out of him, but when you did, you got it,” said Campbell.
He and Ashcroft worked together on a continuous improvement system in which USW Local 6500 members were asked for ideas to make Inco operations more efficient and cost-efficient. That resulted in better negotiations when they sat down to bargain.
As tough as he could be, Ashcroft was a compassionate man who would help employees who “got in trouble through their working lives, on the job or off the job,” said Campbell. “He would go out of his way to help us get these people on the straight and narrow.”
Ashcroft would also go the extra distance to help the children of workers killed on the job, said Campbell.
Dan O’Reilly, a retired area co-ordinator for USW, said Ashcroft was kind to anyone who had issues missing time at work because of substance abuse.
“He would give them a break to let them go and get help, and bring them back to work,” said O’Reilly.
Lionel Rudd, who taught mining engineering at Laurentian University and is now retired, said Ashcroft was very supportive of students Rudd taught, particularly women trying to break into jobs in mining.
At a conference on women and mining Rudd organized at Laurentian years ago, Ashcroft commented publicly: “How can Inco possibly survive if it does not utilize the brain power of 51% of the population (women)?”
When computers came into wide use and there was a surplus of secretaries at Inco, Ashcroft offered the mostly female employees the opportunity to train for jobs underground, said Rudd, “and he was villified for it.”
But Ashcroft was offering them the opportunity to move from $30,000 a year jobs to earning $100,000 annually.
He also invited female students to receive common core training at Inco so when they applied for summer jobs at Inco and elsewhere they would have that on their resumes, said Rudd.
He credits Ashcroft for “opening the flood gate” to getting women involved in mining jobs.
“He was a true miner,” said Rudd of Ashcroft. “He empathized with them because he had been one of them.”
He was also what Rudd called a miner’s miner. Rudd recalled years ago some students calling him at 3 a.m. from a mining competition in B.C., to ask a question about coal mining. Rudd didn’t have the answer so he called Ashcroft in the wee hours. The Inco executive simple asked Rudd: “What’s their number?” and called the students to answer their query.
Retired broadcast executive George Lund got to know Ashcroft when he sat on the transition committee Lund chaired when the seven municipalities in Sudbury Region were becoming one under the City of Greater Sudbury.
Ashcroft wasn’t high profile in terms of publicity, “but he was a great guy. It was great having him on the board. He’d lend his expertise to the job we had to do,” said Lund.
Ashcroft was a good businessman who believed in doing the right thing and didn’t play games or play politics, said Lund.
Visitation for Ashcroft will be held Oct. 26 from 2-5 p.m. and 7-9 p.m. A funeral mass will be held Oct. 27 at 10 a.m. at St. Patrick Roman Catholic Church on Walford Road.
Donations to St. Joseph’s Foundation or the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research would be appreciated. To light a memorial candle, make a donations or leave messages of condolences, go to www.lougheed.org
For the original source of this article, click here: http://www.thesudburystar.com/2014/10/14/inco-exec-started-in-coal-mines