Ernest Farrar

Ernest Bristow Farrar (7 July 1885 – 18 September 1918) was an English composer, pianist and organist.

Life

Ernest Farrar was born in Lewisham, London. The son of a clergyman, he was educated at Leeds Grammar School, where he began organ studies and in May 1905 won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. There he studied with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and Sir Walter Parratt. He also took up several posts as organist in Dresden, South Shields and Christ Church, High Harrogate. At Harrogate, he worked closely with Julian Clifford. In 1913, he married Olive Mason in South Shields. His best man at the wedding was Ernest Bullock.

His career was cut short by the outbreak of World War I, as he enlisted in the Grenadier Guards in 1915 and joined the regiment in August 1916. He was commissioned as Second Lieutenant, 3rd Battalion Devonshire Regiment on 27 February 1918.

Farrar was killed on the Western Front at the Battle of Epehy Ronssoy, near Le Cateau in the Somme Valley south, west of Cambrai, in 1918. He had been at the front for two days.

Ernest Farrar (politician)

Ernest Henry Farrar (3 February 1879 – 16 June 1952) was an English-born Australian politician.

He was born in Barnsley in Yorkshire to iron moulder Henry Farrar and Mary Elizabeth Buckley. His family migrated to Sydney very soon after his birth and he was educated at Granville and Petersham, becoming a shearer. At the age of seventeen he joined the Australian Workers' Union, and travelled around Tasmania and New Zealand as a saddle maker. In 1902 he helped to found the Saddle and Harness Makers' Union, and from 1907 to 1912 he was foundation president and state secretary of the Australian Saddlery Trades Federation. In 1908 he married Susan Whitfield, with whom he had one son. He was also a member of the Trades and Labor Council from 1906 and its president in 1910. From 1908 to 1916 he was a member of the Australian Labor Party's central executive, serving as its vice-president in 1909, 1911 and from 1915 to 1916, and as its president from 1912 to 1913. In 1912 he was appointed to the New South Wales Legislative Council. He left the Labor Party in the split over conscription in 1916, following fellow pro-conscription members into the Nationalist Party. He was Minister for Labour and Industry from 1922 to 1925 and from 1927 to 1930. Later a member of the United Australia Party and the Liberal Party, he was Chairman of Committees from 1934 to 1936, Acting President of the Legislative Council for six months in late 1938, Deputy President in early 1941, and President of the Legislative Council from 1946 until his death in Manly in 1952.