Albert Gerson

Albert Gerson, who died in Geelong on 11 August 1974, was a socialist activist and a successful labour journalist. Before the 1914-18 war, he formed a number of working class organisations and launched The Distributing Trades Journal for the Geelong branch of the Clerks' Union. (See Labour History, No. 14.) A fierce debate with the Geelong Advertiser over conscription led him into full-time labour journalism and in 1919 he began publishing The Industrial Herald, which soon became the official journal of the Geelong Trades Hall Council. For almost 40 years The Industrial Herald recorded the history of the labour movement in Geelong, attracted a wide range of special contributions from trade unionists and from state and federal labor politicians and printed extracts from the works of socialists as diverse in their views as Ramsay MacDonald and Lenin. It ceased publication in 1958. Among Albert Gerson's numerous interests were a long involvement with peace movements and a life-long opposition to conscription. He was secretary of the Geelong Trades Hall Council in 1931, and was campaign director for Arthur Lewis who won Corio at the Federal election of 1929. His wife Eileen, whom he married in 1921, shared his interests and his work. The daughter of a pioneer labour family, her father having been one of the founders of the Clerks' Union of Victoria, she worked on the production of The Industrial Herald, as well as helping Albert run an employment service for girls, and a concert party which performed for working class organisations and raised money for political and charitable causes. She died on 9 March 1969. Albert Gerson's daughter, Mrs. Alma Chinn, has allowed me to deposit her father's newspaper collection, which includes a complete file of The Industrial Herald, in the Library of the La Trobe University in Melbourne. An incomplete file of The Industrial Herald covering some years between 1919-1958 will be placed in the National Library in Canberra

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