People Australia

May McConnel, c.1890

State Library of Queensland, 99183513872102061

Mary Emma (May) McConnel, née Jordan (1860-1929) teacher and trade union official

Birth: 6 September 1860 at Brisbane, Queensland, eldest of ten children of Henry Jordan (1818-1890), dentist and Queensland parliamentarian, born at Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England, and Sarah Elizabeth Hopkins, née Turner (1836-1903), born at Hokianga, Northland, New Zealand. Marriage: 24 December 1890 in St Matthew’s Anglican Church, Sherwood, Queensland, to David Rose McConnel, MA (1856-1940), secretary, later director of the Brisbane Technical College, born at Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland. They had one daughter and three sons. Death: 28 April 1929 at the residence of her son at Stockton, Jan Joaquin, California, United States of America. Religion: Methodist. 

• As an infant travelled to England with her parents when her father was agent-general for Queensland (1861-1866). The family returned to Queensland in November 1868. May was reputedly later her father’s private secretary.
• Worked as a teacher. Was a member of the Tailoresses Union, Brisbane, and sometimes its secretary. Active in women's political affairs. Obtained nursing certificate “with much credit” in first aid to the wounded in St John’s Ambulance Association examination in August 1890.
• Appointed first secretary of the Brisbane Women's Labour Union when the union was established at the first annual general meeting of the Australian Labour Federation, August 1890, delivering the inaugural address later in the same month.
• In 1891 she was recommended by the ALF for appointment to the Factories and Shops Commission. She read a paper on “The better protection of Children” at the September convention of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
• Between 1891 and 1900 she gave birth to at least four children, two of them — a twin son and daughter — died in infancy.
• In May 1906 she visited England with an introduction to Labour leader John Burns.
• In 1909 her husband left the Technical College when the Government assumed control. When she was about to move with her husband and sons to California, she gave her home, ‘Robgill’, at Indooroopilly, to the Methodist Church to accommodate the children of parents in necessitous circumstances. A year later the home moved to Coorparoo and became the Queen Alexandra Home for Children which operated until 1960.
• In October 1910 McConnel represented the Queensland Society for the Prevention of Cruelty at the first International Humane Conference in Washington, United States of America. She was in Brisbane and Sydney with her eldest son in mid 1911.
• The family had moved to England by 1914, when her younger son David Ewen McConnel (1900-1918) enrolled in Bedales school, Hampshire. He was killed while serving with the Royal Air Force on 7 December 1918. Her elder surviving son, Frederic Jordan McConnel (1894-1971), an engineer, was commissioned in the Royal Air Force, and appointed head of the Experimental airship station, under the Admiralty in December 1917. After World War II he returned to the USA as did his mother and father.
• David McConnel reputedly worked in Albania. After May’s death he returned in the 1930s to Queensland where he died in 1940. Her surviving son Frederic also returned to Queensland and died in Brisbane on 27 August 1971.
• May’s sister Annie Powis Dunn (1863-1936) was an author and poet. Her mother-in-law Mary McConnal, née McLeod (1824-1910), founded the first children’s hospital (later the Royal Children’s Hospital) in Brisbane and the first public school in Queensland at the family’s Cressbrook estate.
• May’s sister-in-law Mrs Mary Macleod Banks, née McConnel (1861-1951), a noted folklorist, published Memories of pioneer days in Queensland (London, 1931).
• A niece Ursula Hope McConnel (1888-1957) was an influential anthropologist. Another niece, Dorothea McConnel (1877-1962), married the Australian psychologist George Elton Mayo.

Sources
Duncan Waterson, A Biographical Register of the Queensland Parliament (Canberra, 1972), p 96; information from Margaret Reynolds, 1991.