People Australia

Frederick (Fritz) (Fred) Roels (1891-1939) engine-driver, trade union official, parliamentarian and grocer 

Birth: 17 August 1891 at Camperdown, Sydney, New South Wales, and registered as Fritz, son of native-born parents Sydney Fritz Augustus Roels (1867-1944), an iron moulder, whose father had been born in the Netherlands, and native-born Emily, née Furey (1869-1903). Marriage: 1921 to native-born Alice Mary Dolan (1895-1989). They had no children. Death: 21 February 1939 at Botany, Sydney, NSW. Religion: Catholic. 

• After his mother’s death his father, left with four young children, attempted suicide, for which he was sent to three months imprisonment in April 1908.
• Fred was apprenticed in an engineering shop at fifteen years of age. A resident of Newcastle, for many years he was a prominent figure in the Labour movement, active in the anti-conscription campaign and was representative of the Federated Engine-drivers and Firemen’s Association on the Northern District Defence Committee during the 1917 strike.
• Worked in a timber mill in the 1920s. Dismissed in the 1929 strike.
• Crane driver on Sydney Harbour bridge construction. Later became a grocer.
• Delegate to NSW Trades and Labor Council and president, 1929-1930.
• In 1929 was a TLC delegate to Pan-Pacific Trade Union Conference, Vladivostok, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and to Red International of Labor Unions, Moscow.
• Member of central executive of the Australian Labor Party from 1928 to 1931. Delegate to the February 1930 All-Australian Trade Union Congress in Melbourne. At the explosive ALP conference in Sydney in April that year his brother Eric Roels claimed that a secret inner group wielded power within the party and named his brother Frederick, Jock Garden, Emil Voigt, James Joseph Graves [and himself] as belonging to it.
• Appointed to the NSW Legislative Council on 24 November 1931. Defeated in election to reconstituted council in 1933 his term as a parliamentarian ceased on 22 April 1934. In 1936, a salesman, he was again an unsuccessful candidate ALP for election to the Legislative Council.
• Cause of death: chronic myocarditis and chronic rheumatism.

Heather Radi, Peter Spearritt & Elizabeth Hinton (eds), Biographical Register of the NSW Parliament 1901-1970 (Canberra, 1979), pp 240-41; Malcolm Henry Ellis, The red road: the story of the capture of the Lang party by Communists, instructed from Moscow (Sydney [1932]) and The Garden path (Sydney, 1949); N. B. Nairn, The ‘Big Fella’: Jack Lang and the Australian Labor Party (Melbourne, 1986), pp. 127,190, 203, 249 etc.