People Australia

Amalgamated Engineering Union Interstate Conference, Melbourne 1927

Dawson is second from the left in the top row

George Dawson (1865-1959) pattern-maker and trade union leader 

Birth: 9 January 1865 at Snowfields, Bermondsey, London, England, son of William Mark Dawson (1827-1875), licensee of the Miller of Mansfield Tavern, Lambeth, and his de facto wife Martha Ann Bell, née Hunt (1828-1871). Marriage: 22 January 1898 in Hobart, Tasmania, with Congregational forms, to Hobart-born Emma Matilda Ford (1878-1928). They had one son. Death: 19 February 1959 at Henley, Sydney, New South Wales. Religion: Anglican. 

• Baptised with three of his siblings in the parish of St Mary, Lambeth, on 16 August 1874.
• Orphaned by the age of ten, George, a pattern-maker, aged 16, and a brother and sister were living with his widowed aunt in Lambeth, London, in 1881.
• He arrived in Brisbane, Queensland, aboard the New Guinea, as an assisted immigrant, on 17 August 1885. By 1898 he was a pattern maker in Hobart, Tasmania.
• Dawson was a pioneer of the trade union movement in Tasmania. In 1913 he was the Hobart branch secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers [later Amalgamated Engineering Union, and in the following 14 years ‘rendered faithful and efficient service to the union’.
• He was also founding director Hobart Trades Hall building and a prominent member of Hobart Trades & Labor Council, secretary of Hobart 8 Hour Committee and representative at Sydney conference.
• After the death of his wife, retired to Sydney in 1928 to live with his son, also a pattern maker, who died in 1944, and his family.
• Cause of death: cerebral haemorrhage, hypertension, arteriosclerosis and congestive heart failure.

Sources
AEU CC Monthly Report, 1928; A.E.U. Monthly Journal, April 1959.