People Australia

Thomas Henry Garraway also known as Garroway (1871-1909) labourer and gaoled trade union official

Birth: 16 September 1871 at Mount Gambier, South Australia, son of Thomas Garroway policeman/court bailliff and Sarah. Marriage: 1898 at Orange, New South Wales, to Catherine Mitchell. They had one daughter and one son. Death: 4 January 1909 at the Coast Hospital, Sydney. Religion: Anglican. 

• Went to NSW in 1894.
• Worked as a labourer and was elected president of the Rockchoppers’ Union in 1908.
• For encouraging strike action among rockchoppers, he was arrested and fined £40 or four months imprisonment with two other union officials under the provision of penal clauses in Wades’s industrial legislation. Refusing to pay the fine, he was gaoled at Darlinghurst, and released “some days afterwards, when his fine was paid by the contractors”. He resumed work as a sewer miner.
• Cause of death: enteric fever. According to the Worker ‘the mental strain caused by his confinement undermined an apparently sturdy constitution and upon the resumption of work in the sewers he fell an easy victim to disease’.
• He was connected with the United Labourers’ Protective society, which body made the preparations for his funeral from Sydney Trades Hall.
• Garraway’s death was later one of the matters used by Labor to attack the Wade government in 1910 and to win the election that year.

Sources
Worker (Wagga), 11 March 1909; Co-operator, 7 October 1912.