People Australia

John Robert Hartley (1890-1964) shearer, salesman and trade union activist 

Birth: 1890, Swan Ponds, Cowra, New South Wales, son of English-born parents Benjamin Thomas Hartley (1850-1933), a railway fitter from Manchester, Lancashire, and Louisa, née Davidson (1846-1929), from Lyme Regis, Dorset. Marriage: 1918 at Woollahra, NSW, to Uriel Mary Callanan (1899-1973), born at Broken Hill, NSW. They had three daughters and one son Death: 25 July 1964 in a convalescent hospital at Summer Hill, Sydney; usual residence Paul street, East Balmain. Religion: Anglican. 

• Parents and older siblings had arrived in Sydney as assisted immigrants aboard the North on 24 December 1883.
• Young Hartley worked as a shearer and joined the Australian Workers’ Union and the Industrial Workers of the World.
• Was secretary of Moree district shearers’ committee in 1917. Played an active part in the anti-conscription campaign.
• Secretary, of Mayfield East (Newcastle) Unemployed Workers’ Movement. Participated in the Tighes Hill anti-eviction struggle in 1932-33, resulting in a lengthy and costly trial at Singleton of ten men which ended without a conviction.
• All his life a firm supporter of the Communist Party of Australia.
• Cause of death: coronary occlusion, arteriosclerosis, hypertension (essential), left hemiplegia.
• Body was delivered to the University of Sydney.

Sources
Maritime Worker, 19 August 1964.