People Australia

Ignatius Singer, 1898

Weekly Herald (Adelaide), 26 February 1898, p 1

Singer, Ignatius (c. 1853-1926) writer, lecturer and industrial chemist and journalist

Birth: about 1853 in Budapest, Hungary, son of Maurice Singer. Marriage: 17 May 1887 in the office of the Registrar General, at Adelaide, South Australia, to Charlotte Louisa (Louisa) Trumper (1857-1939), a music teacher, born at Birkenhead, Cheshire, England. They had one daughter and one son. Death: 6 June 1926 at Manningham, Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. Religion: from a Jewish family, proclaimed himself an atheist. 

• A self-taught linguist and “man of letters”, Singer was educated in Budapest and had moved to England by 1882 when he published in London his Simplified Grammar of the Hungarian language.
• He arrived in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1885 and on 8 February delivered his first lecture entitled ‘An Atheist’s Apology and Defence’. It was well-received, though his thick foreign accent was a problem.
• From May 1886 he and Lewis Henry Berens (1855-1913) established, and Singer edited, a weekly newspaper, Our Commonwealth, which advocated labour and land reform.
• He was a popular speaker at Adelaide’s Botanic Park and at the Democratic Club, which he and Berens had helped to form in 1887. His father-in-law Oliver Trumper (1837-1904), a blacksmith and “well-known London platform lecturer”, also spoke at the Democratic Club.
• Singer also assisted in setting up the Anti-Poverty League in Adelaide. He developed, as well, a machine for cleaning sheep’s wool. In May 1888 he and his wife left Adelaide for London.
• An advocate for Henry George’s single-tax cause, he was said to be “largely instrumental” in getting George to visit Australia in 1890. In 1891 Singer was a consulting chemist living with his wife at Keighley, Yorkshire; his father-in-law, who had left Adelaide in February that year, lived with him.
• With Berens, he wrote a utopian novel, The Story of My Dictatorship (1893), which had been first serialized in Our Commonwealth and which reputedly sold more than 100 000 copies. It was reprinted, with an introduction by William Lloyd Garrison junior (1838-1909), journalist and abolitionist.
• For some eight years, Ignatius was engaged by an English dyeing firm, near Leeds, Yorkshire, as an analytical and consulting chemist. He became “well-known in Bradford”. In 1895, from Yorkshire, he and Berens sent a criticsm of the “New Australia Movement” to Gilbert Casey, which was published in the Australian Workman and later as a pamphlet.
• He returned to Adelaide with his family aboard the Barbarossa on February 1898, together with Michael Flürscheim (1844-1912), a wealthy German industrialist and economist, also a Henry Georgist. They were en route to New Zealand, where both families settled for a few years and lived together. The two men established a large “chemical and soap manufactory” at Petone, and a loan society, but soon fell out.
• Though his health was poor, Singer actively promoted his single-tax theories and pursued his single tax advocacy. In September 1898 he was reported to have become a member of the Philosophical Society. He returned to England in 1902. Flürscheim moved to California about 1905.
• In 1911 Singer was a textile chemist living at Bradford, West Yorkshire, employed by the Bradford Dyers’ Association.
• Other publications included New Australia: a criticism (Sydney, NSW, 1894 co-authored with Lewis H. Berens – reprinted from the Australian Workman); Some Unrecognized laws of Nature: An inquiry into the causes of physical phenomena, with special reference to gravitation (1897, 2 volumes, with assistance from Berens); Government by the People (Melbourne, 1909?, with Berens), The Problem of Life (London, 1913); The Theocracy of Jesus (1918), and The rival philosophies of Jesus and of Paul (London, 1919, revised edition 1923).
• Some references indicate that he was FCS (fellow of the Chemical Society?).
• At his death, certified by his daughter, he was described as an analytical chemist. Cause of death: fatty heart, cerebral atheroma and general softening.

Sources
Jim Moss, Sound of trumpets: history of the labour movement in South Australia (Cowandilla, 1985) p 106; Wikipedia article, accessed 4 October 2025: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_Singer