People Australia

Bert Davies, caricature by Dick Ovenden, 1926

Labor Call (Melbourne), 29 July 1926, p 10

Albert Edward (Bert) Davies (1894-1973), stenographer, trade union official, councillor and press reporter

Birth: 21 July 1894 at South Melbourne, Victoria, son of William George Davies (1851-1919), a cork-cutter, born at Llantwit Fardre, Glamorgan, Wales, United Kingdom, and Melbourne-born Charlotte Elizabeth, née Plummer (1854-1926). Marriage: 3 March 1917 at Broken Hill, New South Wales, to native-born Alice Ann Warburton (1895-1979), a fellow Socialist. They had one daughter and one son. Death: 19 October 1973 at Toorak, Melbourne; usual residence Crichton Avenue, Garden City. 

• Both his mother and father were members of the Salvation Army from the early eighteen-nineties.
• Bert worked for his father and in various clerical occupations. He was treasurer of the Socialist Party of Victoria from 1913 to 1915. He moved to Broken Hill about 1916, returning to Victoria about 1918.
• For some years he was honorary secretary of the Victorian Labor College. During the 1919 waterfront strike he was active in the Wharf Laborers’ Union relief committee, together with his wife and her mother and step-father Fred Riley.
• He was on the staff of the Meat Industry Union for five years and in the mid 1920s worked with the Clothing Trades Union.
• In 1926 he was appointed organiser of the Clerks’ Union.
• Elected councillor on the Port Melbourne Council in September 1927 he became its then youngest member. He was mayor in 1930 by which time he had been commissioned a justice of the peace.
• From 1936 to at least 1954 Davies was the industrial reporter for the Melbourne Herald.
• In later life, with his wife, he participated in demonstrations against the Vietnam war.
• Cause of death: carcinomatosis, carcinoma of liver (12 months).

Sources
Recorder, no.102, October 1979.