Billy Hughes - Early Years

Early Years

William Morris Hughes was born in Pimlico, London, on 25 September 1862 of Welsh parents. His father William Hughes was Welsh speaking and, according to the 1881 census, born in Holyhead, Anglesey, North Wales in about 1825. He was a deacon of the Particular Baptist Church and by profession a joiner and a carpenter at the House of Lords. His mother was a farmer's daughter from Llansantffraid, Montgomeryshire and had been in service in London. Jane Morris was 37 when she married and William Morris Hughes was her only child. After his mother's death when he was seven William Hughes lived with his father's sister in Llandudno, Wales, also spending time with his mother's relatives in rural Montgomeryshire, where he also spoke Welsh. A plaque on a guest house in Abbey Road Llandudno bears testament to his residency. When he was 14 he returned to London and worked as a pupil teacher. In 1881, when he was 19, William lived with his father and his father's elder sister Mary Hughes at 78 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London.

In October 1884, at the age of 22, he migrated to Australia, and worked as a labourer, bush worker and cook. He arrived in Sydney in 1886 and lived in a boarding house in Moore Park and established a common law marriage with his landlady's daughter, Elizabeth Cutts. In 1890 they moved to Balmain in Sydney, where he at first worked for Lewy Pattinson's pharmacy before he opened a small mixed shop, where he sold political pamphlets, did odd jobs and mended umbrellas. He joined the Socialist League in 1892 and became a street-corner speaker for the Balmain Single Tax League and an organiser with the Australian Workers' Union and may have already joined the newly formed Labor Party.