People Australia

Ruby Margaret Kingswell McGrorty, née Kemp (1892-1967) clerk, typist, railway employee and Communist organiser

Birth: 1892 at North Shields, County Durham, England, daughter of James Kemp, master mariner, and Anne, née Mackay. Marriage: 12 February 1912 at St Bede’s Church, Jarrow on Tyne, Durham, England, to John Hugh McGrorty (1889-1917), carpenter. They had two daughters. Death: 4 November 1967 in the General Hospital at Warwick, Queensland. Religion: buried with Anglican rites. 

• In 1911 England census she was a boarder at Catchgate, Annfield Plain, Durham, working as a clerk for a brick manufacturer.
• The McGrortys arrived in Queensland in 1913 and lived at Salisbury. Ruby’s husband enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force on 18 February 1916. Six months later she gave birth to her younger daughter in Brisbane.
• Hugh McGrorty was killed in action near Bullecourt in France on 6 May 1917, serving with the 3rd Australian Machine Gun Company. Ruby then went to work for Queensland Railways and joined the Queensland branch of the Australian Railways Union (ARU) under the state's compulsory unionism law.
• Active in the union from the 1925 Queensland railway strike, she was also prominent in the Queensland railway lockout of 1927 and in support of the 1928 waterside workers strike.
• She was secretary and librarian of Queensland Labor College from 1928 to 1931. Organiser in Brisbane for the Communist Party of Australia from 1931.
• Was for many years publisher of the Queensland Guardian.
• Attended first ARU Women's Conference in Sydney in April 1936. In 1939 she gave a rostrum address as ARU delegate to the Brisbane Council of Action for Equal Pay for Both Sexes at North Ipswich Railway Workshops. She was a foundation member, and for some years was president, of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Trades and Labour Council.
• In March 1941 she stood as an independent Socialist candidate for the State seat of Kurilpa. She was a full-time helper at the Paddington Creche and Kindergarten, Brisbane, in 1947.
• Cause of death: cerebro vascular accident (4 days).

Sources
Smith's Weekly (Sydney), 21 November 1931; The Advocate (Queensland ARU), 15 July 1936.