People Australia

James Victor (Vic) Stout (1885-1964) shop assistant, trade union official, political activist

Birth: 10 August 1885 at Port Melbourne, Victoria, son of James Stout (1841-1899), a labourer sometime engine-driver born at Delting, Shetland Isles, Scotland, and Agnes, née Lloyd (1844-1923), born in London, England. Marriage: 17 September 1912 in the office of the government statist, Melbourne, to Maud Mary Newton (1865-1955), born at Bendigo, Victoria. Death: 12 March 1964 in St Vincent’s Hospital, Fitzroy, Melbourne; usual residence Stanley Avenue, Cheltenham. 

• Worked as a shop assistant. Joined Grocers’ Union. Organiser for the Shop Assistants Union for fourteen years and president. Associated with Shop Assistants Union for twenty-eight years.
• Delegate to Trades Hall Council (THC) for twenty-three years. President of Melbourne THC; secretary from 1938 to 1963. Member, Victorian Industrial Appeals Court. Member of Australian Council of Trade Unions executive from 1943.
• Joined Australian Labor Party in about 1906. Member of Toorak branch of Political Labor Council of Victoria from 1914 to about 1923. Contested seat of Toorak twice and seat of Prahran in 1932, both in State’s Legislative Assembly. Member of Sandringham branch of ALP from 1946.
• After the death of his wife in 1955 he became a member of the Cheltenham branch of the ALP. Executive member of the Victorian branch of the ALP. President of the Victorian branch of the ALP twice in the 1940s. First post-split president of the Victorian branch of the ALP from 1955 to 1858. President of the Federal Executive of the ALP 1961 and vice-president. Victorian delegate to ALP Federal Executive and Federal Conferences.
• Connections with Temperance and Protestants.
• Cause of death (coroner’s report): thrombosis of the internal carotid artery. 

Sources
Labor Call (Melbourne), 26 May 1938; Recorder, Vol 3 No. 8, February 1969 pp 2-7; No. 88 June 1977, pp 8-12; Fact, 19 March 1964, pp 1-2; Tribune (Sydney), 18 March 1964, p 12; ALP Victorian branch central executive report 1963-64; Merrifield Card Index, State Library of Victoria.