People Australia

Jeremiah Patrick Ring (1867-1941)  shearer, labourer, Water Board employee and trade union official

Birth: 18 February 1867 at Bathurst, New South Wales, son of Jeremiah Patrick Ring (1831-1916), policeman, and Ann, née Meade (1828-1900). Both parents had been born at Cork, Ireland. Marriages: (1) 1893 at Sydney, New South Wales, to native-born Jane, née Mann, late Gale (1865-1896), a widow with five children. They had two sons, one of whom died in infancy. (2) 8 April 1902 at Sydney, to native-born Ann Amelia Anderson (1883-1969), daughter of a policeman. They had one daughter and seven sons. Death: 16 January 1941 at Ashfield, Sydney. Religion: Catholic. 

• Worked as a shearer, quarryman and, later, a sewerage maintenance labourer with the Metropolitan Board of Water Supply and Sewerage.
• Active in Australasian Shearers’ Union.
• An early member of the Political Labor League. In January 1914 he stood as a candidate for North Ward, Granville Municipal Council. The following year he nominated for preselection as an Australian Labor Party candidate for the Australian Senate.
• Founding president of the Metropolitan Board of Water Supply and Sewerage Employees’ Association from 1909 to 1915. Union representative on Wages Board 1910.
• Cause of death: broncho pneumonia, bronchiectasis, chronic bronchitis and asthma.

Sources
Metropolitan Board of Water Supply and Sewerage Employees’ Association, Wages Board Hearing 1910 ‘Transcripts’; W. H. Ring interview 28 January 1986, Parramatta; Peter Sheldon, Maintaining control: a history of unionism among employees of the Sydney Water Board, PhD thesis University of Wollongong, 1989.