People Australia

Hugh Gilmore, n.d.

Pictorial Australian (Adelaide), 1 October 1891, p 161

Gilmore, Hugh (1842-1891) clergyman and Christian Socialist 

Birth: 1842 reputedly in the slum district of Townhead, Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Scotland, son of John Gilmore, husbandman. Marriage: 29 July 1869 at the Primitive Methodist chapel, Gateshead, Durham, to Louisa Dean (1847-1928), born at Bishop Auckland, Durham, England. They had four daughters and four sons. Death: 24 October 1891 at the parsonage, Wellington Square, Adelaide. Religion: Primitive Methodist. 

• Little is known of his ancestry. Gilmore experienced dire poverty as a child in Glasgow: ‘I was thrown amongst the poorest of the poor’. He spent a year in an “industrial school”, probably an orphanage, where he learned to read and write. Aged 13 he was apprenticed as a bottle-maker at the Clydesdale Bottle Works in Charles Street, Glasgow.
• Aged 19 he became a lay preacher for Primitive Methodists in the north of England and was a notable preacher and a leading figure in its ministry and author of a number of stories for young people.
• Gilmore migrated to South Australia in 1889, hoping to improve his health, reaching Adelaide with his family aboard the steamer Liguria on 5 June that year. He excelled as a preacher at the Primitive Methodist Church, Wellington Square, North Adelaide, extolling the need for social justice and opposing institutional religion — ‘men should strive to make God’s Kingdom on earth’ — and believing in ‘The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man’. Charismatic sermons blended ‘Methodism and millenarianism, single tax and gospel’.
• One disciple recalled ‘(Gilmore’s) clenched hand raised above his head, his whole frame shaking…the effect was marvellous. It stirred the soul of his hearers, and gave courage to faintest heart and weakest kneed listener’.
• He became president of the Society for the Study of Christian Sociology and an ecumenical group, the Christian Commonwealth, which assisted the poor, unemployed and sick, aided London dock strikers in 1889 and maritime strikers in 1890.
• President of Adelaide Single Tax League in 1890, he saw single tax as peaceful road to socialism. He was a major figure in Adelaide radical politics and a source of inspiration in the colony’s working-class movement.
• Cause of death: cancer of the stomach after six months illness.
• His funeral was preceded by 100 members of the North Adelaide Working Men’s Association and included 400 members of labour organisations. Poem published in Weekly Herald, Labor Party publication, began ‘Hugh Gilmore stood and cheered us in a voice like rattlin thunder’. 

Sources
Jim Moss, Sounds of Trumpets; history of the labour movement in South Australia (Adelaide, 1985); Verity Burgmann, In Our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885-1905 (Sydney), 1985; Bruce Scates, A New Australia: citizenship, radicalism, and the first republic (Cambridge, 1997).