People Australia

Charles Howard (Charlie) Roe (1884-1948) labourer, water board employee, trade union official and alderman

Birth: 14 May 1884 at Stepney, South Australia, son of English-born parents Joseph Roe (1845-1922), a labourer, from Leicester, and Mary Ann, née Connolly (1854-1925), from London. Marriage: 1907 at Broken Hill, New South Wales, to Annie Trembath (1884-1964), born at Cross Roads, SA. They had four daughters and two sons. Death: 10 May 1948 in his residence, Stewart Street, Paddington, Sydney. Religion: Anglican. 

• By 1913 he and his wife Annie had moved from Broken Hill to live in Paddington, Sydney, where they raised their family.
• Charlie was a temporary labourer with the Metropolitan Water Sewerage and Drainage Board in 1913-1915 and a permanent sewer maintenance man from 1915 to 1948.
• He was an active rank-and-file dissident with the Metropolitan Board of Water Supply and Sewerage Employees’ Association in the late 1920s. Part of Les Kirkwood’s team which defeated W. A. Macpherson’s ruling group in 1929, he was vice president of the union in 1929-1931.
• A member of the Australian Labor Party, as State Labor candidate he was elected alderman on Paddington Municipal Council in December 1934. Remained on the council until his death, his campaigns supported financially and logistically by the union.
• In 1948 he was discharged from the Water Board as totally and permanently unfit due to silicosis.
• Was a dog breeder and prize-winner in the Fox Terrier Club of NSW championships at the Royal Agricultural Society showground.
• Cause of death: tuberculosis and silicosis.

Sources
Water Board staff records; Metropolitan Water Sewerage and Drainage Board Minutes 18 Feb. 1948; Metropolitan Board of Water Supply and Sewerage Employees’ Association Minutes; Staff, Woolahra Municipal Library Local History Section; Peter Sheldon, Maintaining control: a history of unionism among employees of the Sydney Water Board, PhD thesis University of Wollongong, 1989.