People Australia

Cecil Herbert Sharpley (1908-1985) trade unionist and Communist apostate 

Birth: 3 November 1908 at Mangotsfield, near Bristol, Gloucestershire, England, son of Arthur Henry Sharpley (1865-1945), clergyman, and Cecilia Lucy Chambers, née Stubbs (1864-1956). Marriage: 9 April 1938 at the office of the government statist, Melbourne, to Veronica Theresa Connolly (1912-1987), a machinist, born at Collingwood, Melbourne. Death: 6 July 1985 at Islington, London, England. Religion: Anglican upbringing. 

• Educated at Weymouth College, England. He was the son of an English country vicar and studied for the Anglican ministry in youth but ended religious studies at the age of 20.
• He arrived in Australia under the Big Brother scheme in 1928 and was befriended by Archdeacon Hancock of Bright, Victoria.
• Sharpley became a member of the Australian Labor Party and was attracted to journalism through the ALP but failed in his attempt to enter journalism. In 1935 he joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) during four years of unemployment.
• When the branch wound up after the war he was appointed secretary of the CPA industrial committee in Victoria. He was a full-time CPA official from 1937 to 1948 and a sometime member of the Victorian State Committee of the CPA. He went into hiding in late 1948 and left the party in December that year.
• In 1949 Sharpley wrote a series of press articles exposing alleged CPA practices in union affairs such as ballot rigging. He claimed to have been involved in rigging the ballot of the 1948 Building Workers' Industrial Union of Australia and Federated Clerks Union elections as ‘chief executive’ of operations. He alleged that Ernest Thornton had made arrangements to rig 1937 FIA Victorian elections if necessary.
• His allegations led to the appointment of Royal Commission by premier Tom Holloway in 1949. Commissioner Lowe’s 1930 report found Sharpley’s allegations unproven through lack of corroboratory evidence.
• He was assistant secretary of Victoria No 2 (munitions) branch of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association (FIA).
• He had reputedly organised himself into the post of assistant Victorian secretary of the Munition Workers’ Union in 1942 at the request of the CPA to help engineer an amalgamation with the FIA which was ordered by Thornton to persuade Metal Workers Union secretary Eric Taylor, to support amalgamation.
• Sharpley separated from his wife, who remained an active Communist, and returned to England under police escort in November 1949. He published The Great Delusion; the autobiography of an ex-Communist (London, 1952).
• Cause of death: coronary occlusion. 

Sources
John Playford, Doctrinal and strategic problems of the Communist Party of Australia, 1945-1962, PhD thesis, ANU, 1962, p 432; Robert Murray and Kate White, The ironworkers: a history of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association of Australia (Sydney, c1982).