Arthur Drakeford

Arthur Drakeford

Arthur Samuel Drakeford (born April 26, 1878 in Fitzroy, Melbourne , Victoria , † June 9, 1957 in Moonee Ponds , Melbourne, Victoria ) was an Australian politician, member of the Australian Labor Party and from 1941 to 1949 Minister for the Australian Air Force and civil aviation.

He was one of the fathers of the two-airline strategy that enshrined a government-sponsored aviation cartel in Australia from 1946 to the late 1980s .

Youth and Union Time

Arthur Drakeford was born in 1878 as the second son of the jeweler Samuel Finch Drakeford, who had emigrated from England, and his wife Elizabeth Margaret, née Josephs, from Australia. After graduating from school, he moved to Benalla , where he worked on the railroad. On May 9, 1902, he married the widowed Ellen Tyrie, née Warrington. She died in 1906. The couple had a son, Arthur Harold Finch Drakeford (Jr.), who became a politician in the 1940s. 1903 took Drake Ford at a railway strike and it joined the local union section of LEDFA (Union of train drivers and heater ) as well as the Australian Labor Party at. After completing his training as a train driver, Drakeford was transferred to Melbourne in 1908. There he married Ellen Unger on April 19, 1911, who gave birth to 4 daughters. In 1914 he was elected representative of Victoria in the LEDFA union and in the following years was initially vice-president (1914–1915), president (1916–1917) and general secretary (from 1918) of the union, until it was absorbed into the federal union of Australian locomotive drivers in 1920 , in which he took over the post of managing director and from 1927 to 1948 president.

Political career

From 1927 to 1932 he represented Essendon as a member of the regional parliament of Victoria, he was voted out of office because he did not support the premier's plan to combat the global economic crisis . From 1934 to 1955 he then held the seat of MPs from Maribyrnong in the House of Representatives of Australia , and thus contributed to the election of John Curtin as party president in 1935. In October 1941, the new Prime Minister named Curtin Minister for Civil Aviation and Air Force. Drakeford, inexperienced in military affairs, focused on coordinating resources, finances, and personnel in his portfolios and relied heavily on guidance from the RAAF staff. Drakeford named Vice Air Marshal George Jones Chief of Staff of the RAAF in May 1942, sparking a rest of the war rivalry between Jones and his deputy William Bostock. Drakeford could not solve this crisis of command. After Norman Makin's resignation in 1946, Drakeford was also Secretary of the Navy for three months until Bill Riordan took office. In 1946, Drakeford ran unsuccessfully for the office of Vice President of the Labor Party.

Drakeford long sought the nationalization of Australian civil aviation and was helped by the head of the Aviation Authority, Daniel McVey. After the end of the war, Drakeford submitted a bill and established the ANAC (Australian National Aviation Committee). With the resolutions of the ANAC in 1946, the state airline Trans Australia Airlines was founded, which, together with the private Australian National Airlines, was to dominate domestic air traffic in Australia. Drakeford also nationalized Qantas Empire Airways from 1946 to 1947 and was assisted by Qantas board member Hudson Fysh .

In 1949 the Labor government under Ben Chifley was replaced by the Liberal government of Menzies . Drakeford's successor as Secretary of Air and Air Force was Thomas White. Drakeford campaigned against a ban on the Communist Party of Australia in 1951 , although he was himself a moderate social democrat. In the course of a split in the Labor Party in 1954, he lost his seat in Parliament in the 1955 election year. Drakeford was involved in the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne .

Drakeford died in Melbourne on June 9, 1957 and was honored with a state funeral.

Web links

• Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB Online): Biography of Arthur Drake Ford (English)
• Arthur Harold Finch Drakeford on the Victoria Parliament website