Albert Willis

Who was Albert Willis?

Albert Charles Willis was an Australian politician.

Born at Tonyrefail in Wales to sinker James Willis and Louisa Morse, he was educated at Bryn Mawr Board School and worked in the Monmouthshire mines from the age of ten. He was a bursary to London Labour College and Ruskin College, Oxford, and became first secretary of the Cardiff Workers Educational Association. Ordained a lay preacher with the Church of God in 1899, he was a member of Abertillery Urban District Council and Monmouthshire County Council. On 1 October 1901 he married Alice Maud Parker in London, with whom he would have three children. In 1911 he moved to New South Wales and worked at Balmain Colliery, becoming president and secretary of the Illawarra Colliery Employees' Association from 1913 to 1915. The first general secretary of the Australasian Coal and Shale Employees' Federation from 1916 to 1925, he was arrested in 1917 as a member of the strike committee. From 1916 to 1919 he was a member of the Australian Labor Party's central executive, but he resigned in 1919 as part of the group that formed the Industrial Socialist Labor Party. Willis rejoined the ALP in 1923 and became party president until 1925, when he was elected to the New South Wales Legislative Council and became Vice-President of the Executive Council and Representative of Government in the Upper House. In 1927 he was Acting Secretary for Mines, but he lost his portfolios in 1927, regaining them in 1930. He left the Council in 1933 and was a member of the Federal Labor Executive from 1934 to 1936. Willis died at Cronulla in 1954.