Obituaries Australia

Jack Pratt, n.d.

Hellfire Jack walked around with his head full of history and told stories that amazed us all with the events and people one life had compassed in its 93 years.

Keir Hardie, William Morris, Robert Blatchford, Harry Pollitt, William Gallagher, George Bernard Shaw, Sylvia Pankhurst — he had known them all before or after the turn of the century.

"You should write it down," people said, thinking it would be a tragedy if his first-hand knowledge of early socialist struggles went out of the world with him.

So sitting in the sun in the Fremantle suburb of Willagee or wandering from one to another of his many descendants in his independent way, Hellfire Jack turned out page after spidery page. But in the writing, the wonder somehow went out of his memories and his friends wearied of deciphering and typing them.

It was different when he talked.

Interviewed by the Fremantle socialist "Sentinel" in 1943, he told how, in 1875, he went into the iron and steel industry of his native Yorkshire, joined a trade union at 16, when it was still a dangerous thing to do, and quickly found himself elected a shop steward.

In the glare of the furnaces of the South Durham Iron and Steel Co., in the struggles with grim, hard-faced iron founders Jack Pratt earned the name of "Hellfire Jack."

At 19, he joined the Independent Labour Party under Keir Hardie, became a delegate for the iron and steel workers to the Labour Party and trade union council.

It was in 1912 that on Keir Hardie's invitation he met Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, martyred leaders of the German working class, and others — August Bebel, the German Social Democrat and Hyndman, who used to argue with Karl Marx.

About 1920, I.L.P. members and other Leftwingers formed the Communist Party of Great Britain. Hellfire Jack was a foundation member and on the national executive.

Something mysterious to do with gun-running to Irish revolutionaries made it wise for Hellfire Jack to emigrate to Australia in 1926. In the great damp forests of Northcliffe, he carved out a dairy farm and became a leader among the "group settlers" whose sufferings at the hands of a callous W.A. Tory government led to cream strikes and the threat of the farmers that they would turn their cattle loose in the bush.

But time ran out on Hellfire Jack. He died on May 17. Characteristically, his last words to his family were "Put a pound into the Party for me."

Hellfire Jack would have been pleased that the "Internationale" was played at his funeral, at the summing up of his life by Amalgamated Seamen's Union and Dockers' Secretary, Pacddy Troy:

"A little man who was also a big man in his love of people and wider love of mankind."