People Australia

Adolph Timmann, n.d.

Herald (Adelaide), 26/12/1908, p 11

August Adolph Timmann (1860-1908) clerk, factory foreman, Socialist, newspaper editor, cigar maker

Birth: 29 January 1860 at Stade, Hanover (Germany), son of Wilhelm Timmann. Marriage: 24 December 1894 in the Registry Office, Adelaide, South Australia, to Bertha Augusta Umlauf (1869-1916), born in Germany, probably at Lauban, Silesia. They had three daughters and one son. Death: 18 December 1908 in his residence at Cairns Street, Adelaide, SA. 

• Arrived in South Australia from Hamburg aboard the steamer Barcelona on 7 November 1882. Was naturalised in April 1883.
• In 1885 Adolph was active in the Land Nationalization Society which fostered the principles of Henry George. A prominent public lecturer and contributor to the press in Adelaide, in 1889 he was a founding committee-member of the Taxation Reform League. The following year at the Democratic Club, he spoke before a large audience on socialism in Germany and the influence of Karl Marx.
• Worked in the tobacco manufacturing industry and was for several years foreman at Dungey, Ralph, & Co’s factory at Hurtle Square, Adelaide.
• Timmann was a leading member, for some years president or vice-president, and sometime secretary, of the SA Allgemeiner Deutscher Verein, an organisation of SA German socialists, established in 1886, which was formed for musical and social purposes. That year he was honorary secretary of the Adelaide Quartett Verein.
• He founded and was secretary of the East Adelaide committee of the United Labor Party and was a delegate on the council of the ULP from its inception. After the big strike of 1890 he was one of those who secured the election to the Legislative Council of R. S. Guthrie and D. M. Charleston, and in 1891 the election of J. A. McPherson as the first Labor member of the House of Assembly. He was later a member and sometime president of the East Torrens branch of the ULP.
• In November 1890 he began producing a fortnightly single-tax paper Pioneer from his own home. Was vice-president of the Adelaide Democratic Club in 1893.
• He suffered ill health for two years before his death from pulmonary tuberculosis.
• Following his death a benefit concert was held for his widow and children. His widow, who in 1909 was a member of the women’s branch of the ULP, remarried in 1911; her second husband was Paul Alfred Lorenz, a German-born labourer.

Sources
Verity Burgmann, In Our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885-1905, (Sydney, 1985).