People Australia

Annie Beatrice Westbrook, née Bradley (1862-1952) IWW activist 

Birth: 1868 at Mount Buninyong, Victoria, daughter of Charles George Mortimer Bradley (1834-1909), a farmer, born at Hobart, Tasmania, and Annie Ford, née Craig (1841-1916), born at Aberdour, Fife, Scotland. Marriage: 1888 at Yarra, Victoria, to Alfred Edmund Westbrook (1862-1920), a boot maker, born at Hobart, Tasmania. They had three daughters and four sons. A son and a daughter died in infancy. Death: 30 May 1952 at Claines Rest Home, Marrickville, Sydney, New South Wales; usual residence Dillon Street, Paddington. Religion: Buried with Anglican rites. 

• In 1895 was living with her husband, a bootmaker, in Prahran, Victoria. She gave birth to her second daughter Dorothy Imogene at Blackwood, Victoria, in June 1899. The Westbrooks had arrived in Western Australia by 1903, and were living at North Fremantle. Her last child, a daughter, was born in Fremantle in 1905 and died as an infant.
• Her husband, Alfred Westbrook, was associated with the North Fremantle Methodist Church and with the WA Psychological Society. In 1906 he was elected secretary of the North Fremantle Literary Institute. The couple had separated by November 1914 and Alfred returned with his eldest son Frank to Victoria. Annie and the other children remained in Western Australia.
• ‘Ma’ Westbrook was an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) activist in Western Australia during World War I, and was secretary and treasurer of IWW Perth local from December 1915. In August 1916 she was elected as a committee-member of the Anti-Conscription League. With Lilian Foxcroft, Montague Miller and others she was a prominent speaker at its demonstrations; at one meeting disrupted by soldiers, she informed the hostile audience that she was the mother of two soldiers then in France.
• In 1913 she contributed to the International Socialist (Sydney), and in 1916 she wrote several columns for the IWW publication Direct Action (Sydney).
• A regular speaker on Perth Esplanade, from 1916 Westbrook organised the defence committee in Perth on behalf of the imprisoned 'IWW Twelve'. She agitated for the release of other IWW members arrested in Perth in November 1916. The arresting police officer, when asked why Westbrook had not been arrested, replied that “it was quite possible that, had she been a man, she would have been in the dock beside the male accused”. In January 1917 she left Perth for Melbourne and Sydney to alert fellow members to the plight of Western Australian activists.
• A combative speaker, she disrupted a meeting called by pro-war Loyal Women of Australia by moving an amendment congratulating IWW ex-prisoners on their release. Police and military authorities believed she was also known as "Mrs. Bray".
• Several newspaper reports refer to her wrongly as the daughter of Monty Miller. In fact, in evidence to the inquiry into the actions of W. W. Siebenhaar in December 1916 she swore that she had known Miller’s activist daughter Mrs Blake for six years.
• In 1917-1919 Westbrook spent some time in Victoria and NSW. After World War I she joined the Western Australian branch of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). In September 1921 she addressed a demonstration of unemployed outside Parliament House, Sydney. She was connected with the Melbourne branch of the IWW in October 1924.
• In 1925 Betsy Mathias wrote to the CPA journal Workers’ Weekly that she and Westbrook “toured almost every job in the mining district of NSW on the release of the 12 I.W.W. men in Australian jails”. She also reported that in 1925 Westbrook who was then working at Morwell, near Yallourn, Victoria, asked Matthias “to join her on the Yallourn job in order to propagate the O.B.U on class-conscious I.W.W. lines and to agitate for a boycott of the American Fleet and for the release of the I.W.W. men in Californian jails.”
• In August 1929 Westbrook appears to have participated in CPA anti-imperialist demonstration in Adelaide.
• In 1931 her son Hugh, and his family, and her daughter, Dorothy Davies, and her family, lived in adjacent houses at Carlisle, in Perth. In the evening of 20 August that year Roderick Australia Davies killed his wife and five children in their home and then committed suicide. Evidence at the inquest indicated that it was a death-pact, and that the murdered wife had written a farewell letter to her mother and other family members.
• By 1935 Westbrook had moved to Sydney, New South Wales, where she lived at Paddington and died in 1952. Cause of death: myocardial degeneration and arteriosclerosis.
• Two sons joined the Australian Imperial Force during World War I and both served at Gallipoli and in France. Francis Edmond (Frank) Westbrook (1889-1976), a cook, enlisted on 16 September 1914 in Victoria and was a trumpeter then gunner with the 4th Battery, 2nd Australian Field Artillery. He was also a poet, and published Anzac and After (London, 1916). He was discharged in Melbourne on 10 January 1920. His brother Sergeant Alfred Baxter (Baxter) Westbrook (1891-1925), a labourer, enlisted on 8 September 1914 in Fremantle, WA. He served with the 11th Battalion, was wounded in France in July 1916 (where he was wrongly reported to have died of his wounds). He was wounded a second time, this time seriously, in September 1918 and his left arm was amputated below the elbow. Returning to Australia, he was discharged medically unfit in Perth on 25 October 1919. He died of war related causes in 1925.

Sources
Joy Damousi, Socialist Women in Australia, c.1890-c.1918, Ph.D thesis, ANU, 1987; information from F. Cain, 1992; information from Anne Morrison, 1994; additional research by Chris Cunneen 2025.