Jock Garden

John Smith "Jock" Garden (13 August 1882 – 31 December 1968), clergyman, Australian trade unionist and politician, was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Australia.

Early life

Garden was born in the Branderburgh area of Lossiemouth, Moray, in northern Scotland (the same town where Ramsay MacDonald, the first UK Labour prime minister, was born). His early education was at the Drainie parish school and on leaving school he was apprenticed as a sailmaker to his cousin William Cormack. He graduated from a Bible college in Glasgow and ordained as a Baptist minister. Garden's elder brother James, also a sailmaker, migrated to Australia in the 1890s and the rest of the family joined him in Sydney in 1904.

The Labor politician

In 1906, Garden was a Church of Christ minister at Harcourt, Victoria. The next year on 6 May in Melbourne, with the forms of that church, he married Jeannie May Ritchie, from Leith, Scotland. By 1909 he was a member of the Labor Party and also a Baptist preacher at Maclean, New South Wales. In 1914 he was living at Paddington and working intermittently at his trade; he became the president of the Sailmakers' Union and its delegate on the Labor Council of New South Wales, which was to be his power base until 1934. In 1916 he was elected assistant secretary of the council, and in 1918 became its secretary. He failed as a Labor candidate at Parramatta in the 1917 State elections. Before that, Garden was employed from 1915 by the Department of Defence at its ordnance store at Circular Quay. In 1916 he was fined £10 for improperly accepting a gift from a supplier to the department and was dismissed on 14 March 1917 year after admitting that he had destroyed an important voucher.