Pat Clancy

Who was Pat Clancy?

Patrick Martin "Pat" Clancy was an Australian trade unionist and communist.

Clancy was born at Redfern in Sydney to grocer Denis Edward Clancy and Olive, née Kitchen. He attended St Peter's De La Salle School in Surry Hills, leaving at the age of 14 to work in a boot pattern factory. He was briefly apprenticed in the printing industry before working in a battery factory. He played with rugby league with the junior Balmain Tigers in 1936 and was also an amateur boxer. In 1937 he won 22s 6d in a professional fight at Leichhardt, which allowed him to afford a fare to Port Kembla where he was apprenticed as a bricklayer. The 1938–39 dispute over exporting pig-iron to Japan and the 1940 strike raised his political awareness. On 10 August 1940 at St Francis Xavier's Catholic Church in Wollongong he married machinist Alma May Thomas.

Clancy joined the United Operative Bricklayers' Trade Union Society in 1941 and was elected to the committee in 1942. He became secretary of the South Coast district council of the Building Workers Industrial Union in February 1943.