25 Facts About Jock Garden

John Smith "Jock" Garden was an Australian clergyman, trade unionist and politician.

Jock Garden was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Australia.

Jock Garden was the second son of Ann and Alexander Garden; his parents were both employed in the fishing industry.

Jock Garden was then apprenticed as a sailmaker with his cousin.

Jock Garden's brother immigrated to Australia in the 1890s and the rest of the family joined him in 1904.

In 1906, Jock Garden was a Church of Christ minister at Harcourt, Victoria.

Jock Garden failed as a Labor candidate at Parramatta in the 1917 State elections.

Jock Garden's speeches were quite often rambling tirades, but seldom unproductive.

Jock Garden read non-conformist and radical literature including Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin enthusiastically after the 1917 Russian revolution.

Jock Garden was expelled in 1919 from the Labor Party for advocating revolutionary socialism.

In November 1920 Jock Garden announced the formation of the Communist Party of Australia, which he had initiated with William Earsman.

Jock Garden was prominent in 1921 at the All-Australian Trade Union Congress in Melbourne, which wanted to impose a positive socialist policy on the Australian Labor Party.

In 1922 Jock Garden attended the Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, which endorsed his strategy.

In September 1926, Jock Garden announced his resignation from the Communist Party and his intention to seek readmission to the ALP; he was not formally re-admitted to the ALP until January 1929.

Jock Garden remained active in the labour movement and was involved in the creation of the Australian Council of Trade Unions in 1927, being narrowly defeated by Charlie Crofts in the election to become its inaugural secretary.

In 1931, when the Labor Party split over the Scullin government's response to the Great Depression, Jock Garden became a leading supporter of Lang's faction, which rejected Scullin's policies and favoured repudiating Australia's debt to British bondholders.

Jock Garden stood for the House of Representatives at the 1931 election as a Lang Labor candidate in the Division of Cook in inner Sydney.

However, when the Labor Party was re-united under John Curtin's leadership in 1936, Jock Garden was dropped as a candidate as part of the peace settlement, and at the 1937 elections he retired from Parliament.

When Labor came to office federally in 1941, Jock Garden was employed by Eddie Ward, a former Lang Labor man who was Minister for External Territories from 1943 to 1949.

In 1946 a Royal Commission found that Jock Garden had engaged in corrupt conduct, and he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to three years imprisonment.

In 1949 Malcolm Henry Ellis intent upon showing the connections between the Communist movement and the ALP of the later 1940s, and ignoring Jock Garden's 1920s leaving the party, wrote a book The Jock Garden Path: The Story of the saturation of the Australian Labour Movement by Communism.

Jock Garden was released from gaol in July 1950, having served two years and two months.

Jock Garden began his sentence at Long Bay, but was later moved to the prison farm at Tumbarumba and was granted early release for good conduct.

Jock Garden disappeared from public life and died in hospital on 31 December 1968.

Jock Garden was cremated with Church of Christ forms and was survived by his wife, one of his two sons and one of his two daughters.