People Australia

Winifred Edith Hewison, née Tucker, late Eady (1892-1989) teacher, Labor delegate and women’s activist

Birth: 27 February 1892 at Bristol, England, daughter of John James Tucker (1869-1945), baker and confectioner, and Amy Mary, née Rummins. Marriages: (1) possibly 1915 at Bristol to Herbert Charles Eady (1884-1928), an Englishman who contracted tuberculosis shortly after WW I. They had one daughter. (2) 2 November 1939 at the District Registrar’s office, Perth, Western Australia, to Herbert Frederick (Hughie) Hewison (1877-1954), commercial traveller, a widower with two children, who had been born at West Hartlepool, Durham, England. Death: 28 May 1989 in hospital at Nedlands, Perth. 

• Worked as teacher in Britain and Canada, arriving in Western Australia in the late 1930s. In a letter in 1940 she described herself as “a member of the working class movement practically all my life, and [was] a child in the Labor Party Sunday School”.
• Joined Fremantle Labor women's branch, returning to UK after second husband died.
• Respiratory problems caused her to return to Perth. She transferred to the Perth Labor women's branch. Delegate to Australian Labor Party State executive, many State conference and Labor Women's Central Executive.
• A member of the Victoria Park branch of the ALP in 1952, she criticised the introduction of one-man buses as being a hardship to mothers with prams. In 1960s she was ALP delegate to Equal Pay Committee in WA.
• Keenly interested in politics and ALP affairs for eighty years.
• Cause of death: cardiac failure (2 days) and mesenteric occlusion (4 days).

Sources
Labor Voice, July-August 1989.