John Olday, birth name Arthur William Oldag, was an artist, cartoonist and writer, and an anarchist revolutionary.
17 Facts About John Olday
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John Olday was active in Germany, France and Britain in the 1930s and 1940s and resided in Australia during the 1950s and 1960s.
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John Olday's German-born mother moved to New York City, where he was brought up until age 8 when his mother returned to Germany and left him with his grandmother in Hamburg.
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John Olday turned to the anarchist movement and took part in a militia unit during the uprisings of October 1923, then was active in the Ruhr region of Germany, where the anarchists had thousands of supporters, particularly among miners and factory workers.
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The few available sources indicate that John Olday, having reached the age of 20, had chosen to exercise his talents as a draughtsman, cartoonist and writer, by which he could continue to advance revolutionary causes without offering himself as direct cannon-fodder.
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John Olday worked closely with Industrial Workers of the World union seafarers coming into the port of Hamburg.
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John Olday had been granted a British passport that year in Hamburg on production of his birth certificate.
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John Olday took with him to England the draft of an autobiographical book, Kingdom of Rags, written in German, which was translated into English and published by Jarrolds, London, in 1939.
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John Olday wrote the text of an appeal to German workers to sabotage the Nazi war industry.
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When compulsory military service was instituted in Britain in 1940, John Olday was to have served as a sapper, but he deserted before he could be sent to 'the imperialist war'.
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John Olday remained at large until 1944, drawing caustic political cartoons and caricatures, working as an editor and, with two well-known libertarian activists, writing a fortnightly anti-militarist broadsheet distributed to soldiers in the British Army.
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John Olday served eight months, gained early release then was immediately taken to prison camp by the military authorities to serve another 2 years for desertion.
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The Adelaide Quaker artist Mary P Harris believed that Olday drew passionate anti-war cartoons and pictures while imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector during the war.
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John Olday emigrated from the UK to Sydney in early 1950 and moved to Adelaide where he worked as an art gallery attendant and donated a collection of his paintings to the Art Gallery of South Australia.
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John Olday later spent time in Melbourne where he "continued his artistic-cultural-political activities" while employed as a hospital worker before returning to Sydney where he conducted "adult education classes, mime shows, recordings, radio broadcasts and exhibitions and advocacy of gay liberation".
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In 1967, John Olday opened a communal arts centre in the inner suburb of Paddington where he impressed visitors with his versatile talents and his sincerity, "the result of profound experience of sadness and life".
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John Olday returned to Europe in the late 1960s, settling in London in 1970 and remaining politically active until his death of stomach cancer in 1977.