People Australia

Sid Lake, with his wife, n.d.

Sidney James Foch (Sid) Lake (1919-1999) rural worker, labourer, dump truck driver, carpenter and trade union official

Birth: 19 October 1919 at Glebe, Sydney, New South Wales, eldest child of native-born parents Sidney James McFarlane Lake (1894-1966), rockminer and trade union militant, and Hilda Irene Hough (1895-1966). Marriage: 17 June 1939 at the Presbyterian Church, Sydney to Mary Merle Mole (1918-2003). They had four daughters and five sons. Death: 17 January 1999 at Home, Indiana, Pennsylvania, United States of America. 

• His father had served in the Royal Australian Navy aboard HMAS Sydney, and was wounded at Gallipoli and in France while serving in the Australian Imperial Force — the last given name of his eldest son and that of his second son Ernest John Joffre Lake (1922-1941) referenced French generals of World War I.
• According to a family source on Ancestry, Sid spent his early days among horses and cattle and learning blacksmithing. He than worked on A. G. Hunter’s blood stock stud at Seymour, Victoria, became a stud groom for their Hereford cattle then engaged in share farming in dairy and pigs.
• He then returned to NSW. He was employed by the Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board in 1957 and from 1961 to 1970.
• Lake was a rank and file activist (especially among non-English-speaking migrant workers) in Water Board construction from 1964 to 1970, and a major force in the development of job level organisation.
• With John Glebe, he co-ordinated the defeat of George Brightman’s ruling group in the Metropolitan Board of Water Supply and Sewerage Employees Association.
• Sid Lake was organiser in the Water and Sewerage Employees’ Union from 1970 to 1975 and, defeating Glebe, secretary from 1975 to 1979.

Water Board staff records; Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board Minutes; Metropolitan Board of Water Supply and Sewerage Employees Association Minutes; Sid Lake interview 22 February 1983, in Sydney; Michael Tubbs interview 27 January 1989 in Sydney; Peter Sheldon, Maintaining control: a history of unionism among employees of the Sydney Water Board, PhD thesis, University of Wollongong, 1989.