People Australia

Victor Kroemer, 1929

Truth (Sydney), 31 March 1929, p 15

Victor Eugene Kroemer (1883-1930) linotype operator, editor, socialist and spiritualist

Birth 5 November 1883 at Tanunda, South Australia, son  of native-born parents John Stephen Anthony Kroemer (1853-1887), storekeeper, and his wife Alice Jane, née Trotter (1850-1927). Marriage: 1908 in Paris, France, to native-born Lillian Hammett Dyer (1877-1969), an elocutionist. They had two twin daughters and one son. Death: 2 February 1930 in Cabarisha Private Hospital, Castlecrag, at Sydney, New South Wales. Religion: buried with Anglican rites. 

• Trained as linotype operator on the Advertiser (Adelaide) and later worked at the Bendigo Independent (Victoria) in 1903, then the Federal Government Printing Office, Melbourne.
• Involved in socialist work, by June 1906 he ran the Socialist Sunday school and began contributing to the Socialist journal. In June 1907 he left Melbourne aboard the Kleist as Australian delegate to the International Socialist Congress in Berlin, Germany. A send-off social gathering and concert was addressed by Tom Mann.
• Kroemer lived in London from 1907 to 1911 to examine the socialist movement in other countries, and visited Paris in 1908. He was briefly editor of the Buddhist Annual (Ceylon) in 1912 and returned to Australia the following year.
• For a time he was a journalist on the Daily Herald (Adelaide).
• In 1914 he was prominent in the formation of the Workers’ Educational Association of South Australia. He was its secretary from 1914 to 1920, although the prolonged drought and World War II hampered its growth.
• In 1916 he published a pamphlet Why this World Crisis.
• From about 1916 he began to use the surname Cromer and in the last decade of his life was active in spiritualism and faith healing.
• He wife Lillian Kroemer (later known as Cromer) was an active public speaker, suffragist and story-teller.
• Cause of death: appendicitis and peritonitis. 

Sources
H. J. Gibbney and Ann G. Smith, A Biographical Register 1788-1939, vol 1 (Canberra, 1987); Socialist, 22 June 1907.