People Australia

John Holliday, n.d.

Daily Standard (Brisbane), 4 December 1923, p 1

John (‘Dad’) Holliday (1846-1923) carpenter, trade union official and political activist

Birth: 10 July 1846 at Langrigg, Cumberland, England, son of Jeremiah Holliday (1802-1868), gardener, and Barbara, née Johnstone (1808-1866). Marriage: 21 January 1872 at Manchester Anglican Cathedral, Lancashire, England, to Mary Owen (1853-1883). They had five sons and three daughters. Death: 30 November 1923 in his home at Dornoch Terrace, Highgate Hill, Brisbane, Queensland. Religion: Anglican. 

• He joined the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners (ASC&J), Salford branch, in 1868. In 1871 he was victimised for collecting funds for the Liverpool strike. He was working as a joiner and living at Strangeway, Manchester, in 1872, and in 1876 was active in the great Manchester strike, when the union was defeated and forced to return to work on worse terms than before, but had doubled its membership. In 1880 he was elected treasurer of the union and later held other offices. In 1881 he was a carpenter and lived with his wife and family at Manchester.
• A widower, he arrived at Cooktown, Queensland, with his eight children aboard the Nuddea on 15 November 1883.
• Despite having suffered a paralytic stroke in 1893, he was for forty years “a familiar figure in the industrial and political wings” of the Labour movement, and was “a tower of strength to Labor in all the political campaigns in South Brisbane”. He was elected to the first Labor Council in Brisbane in 1888. In 1891 he was a member of the building committee of the old Trades Hall and in 1892 was a foundation member of the South Brisbane Workers’ Political Organisation. He retained active membership up to the time of his fatal illness.
• A delegate of the South Brisbane branch of the Australian Labor Party and of the Oxley Federal Labor Organisation, he was also active in the old Socialist League and later the Social Democratic Vanguard. Among the men whose political and union careers he supported was Edgar Free.
• In April 1918 ‘Dad’ Holliday, “snow white of hair and beard”, celebrated his jubilee membership of the ASC&J with a smoke oh at the old trades Hall, during which the visiting R. S. Ross, from Melbourne, commented that the old veteran had been a great influence on him in his younger days.
• Cause of death: senile decay and dysentery (two weeks).