Labour Australia

David ‘Di’ Williams (1861-1951) coalminer, gaoled trade union leader

Birth: 22 April 1861 at Forest Creek, Victoria, son of William Williams (1829-1890), collier, and Hannah ‘Ann’, née Williams (1831-1903). Both parents had been born in Glamorgan, Wales, and arrived in Melbourne aboard the Marian Moore in December 1854. Marriage: 29 October 1881 at Lambton, NSW, to Jane Bullerwell (born in Durham, England) by a Congregational minister. They had six daughters (one died in infancy) and one son. Death: 5 July 1951 in a private hospital at Paddington, Sydney, NSW. Cremated. Religion: Congregational? Or Primitive Methodist (like his father).

• Came to Newcastle about 1871 with his parents and siblings. Worked in the Lambton colliery as a trapper boy then as a wheeler in New Lambton before “going on the coal” there.
• From 1881 lived at the Glebe, near Hamilton, Newcastle, where he raised his family.
• From 1885 to 1919 Williams was a suburban correspondent for the Newcastle Morning Herald.
• In 1909, when he represented the Shortland miners’s lodge on the miners’ delegate board, he and twelve other men were charged, under the Industrial Disputes Act, with inciting a strike and fined by Judge Charles Heydon £100, or two months imprisonment. All refused to pay the fine and were gaoled. Williams surrendered to the police on 4 March 1910 and was taken to East Maitland gaol on 8 March. He was released after only four weeks without explanation.
• For thirteen years he worked at the government quarry at Waratah obtaining stone for the breakwater extension at Nobbys. After retiring in 1919 he moved to live in Bondi, Sydney.
• He had joined the Independent Order of Oddfellows in 1879, and the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows in 1883.
• On a return visit to Newcastle in the 1940s he called on his old comrade, and gaoled trade unionist, Amram Lewis.