People Australia

Whitford, Lillian Jane (Lilian or Lil), née Hyatt, later Collard (1885-1963) clerk and trade union official

Birth: 5 June 1885 at Keatings Cross, Ballarat, Victoria, second of four children of Thomas Hyatt or Hyett (1860-1888), a sawmiller, born at Sorrell, Tasmania, and Elizabeth, née Witnish, later Whitford (1860-1939), born at Ballarat. Marriage: as Lilian Jane Hyett, on 25 November 1925 at Carlton, Melbourne, with Methodist forms, to Frederick Fletcher Collard (1878-1964), born at Torquay, Devonshire, England, a tailor, later a farmer. They had one daughter. Death: 28 March 1963 in a private hospital at North Carlton, Melbourne; usual residence Hazeldene. 

• Her grandparents were convicts to Tasmania: William Hyatt (1800-1876), born at Stratford on Avon, Warwickshire, England, arrived in 1923 aboard the Commodore Hayes; Ann Carroll (1793-1880), born in Ireland, arrived aboard the Jane in 1833.
• After Lil’s father’s death, her mother married William James Whitford (1854-1931), a New Zealand-born commercial traveller, and bore him five children. The blended family lived at Bendigo, then later at Carlton, Melbourne.
• Lil’s step-father was a member of the Bendigo West branch of the Australian Labor Party, as, it seems, was his step-daughter — referred to in the press as Lillian Whitford or Miss Whitford. In early electoral rolls her name is shown as Lilian [or Lillian] Jane Hyett Whitford, a clerk. In 1924 she was described as an “organiser” living with her mother, stepfather and siblings at Neill Street, Carlton.
• She was a delegate of the Clerks’ Union to the Bendigo Trades and Labor Council until she resigned upon leaving Bendigo in March 1917.
• From 1917 to 1923 she was publicly prominent as an organiser for the Clothing Trades Union of Victoria, Melbourne. In March 1918 Whitford addressed Australian Socialist Party members on the need to organise women workers. In May that year she was a committee member of the Women’s Central Committee, together with Bella Lavender, Muriel Heagney, Alicia Katz, Sarah Lewis, Annie O’Brien, Kathleen Werner and others.
• She was also involved in the Industrial Clinic, Melbourne. In 1924 she became a journalist with the Industrial Herald (Geelong) edited by Robert S. Ross. Later that year, one of nineteen applicants, she was appointed women’s organiser for the Victorian branch of the Liquor and Allied Trades Employees’ Union at a salary of £6 per week and expenses. Her duties involved “organising women employed in cafes, restaurants, coffee palaces, hotels and guest houses”. She resigned as organiser in September 1925, having suffered from “a severe nervous breakdown”.
• President of the Trades Hall Girls’ Club, in November 1925 she formally opened a rest room for the club at the Melbourne Trades Hall. Previously, Trades Hall officials had presented her with a case of cutlery and felicitations on her forthcoming marriage.
• After her marriage she moved to Yarrara, near Mildura, Victoria, where her husband worked as a farmer. They seemed to live separately from about 1940. In the 1950s and 1960s she lived at Ladysdale in the Yarra valley.
• She was reputedly a successful tennis player in her youth. A report in the Australian Worker (Sydney) in 1924 described her as possessing “6 ft of height” [182 cm].
• Cause of death: carcinoma of left breast (3-4 years), secondaries in liver and ascites.

Sources
Worker (Sydney), 19 March 1924; Raelene Frances, ‘No More Amazons’: Gender and work process in the Victorian Clothing Trades, 1890-1939, Labour History No. 50, 1986, pp 95 and ff; Joy Damousi, Socialist Women in Australia, c.1890-c.1918, Ph. D thesis, ANU, 1987.