Cyril Chambers - Political Career

Political Career

Chambers was elected as the Labor member of the House of Representatives seat of Adelaide at the 1943 election and was appointed Minister for the Army in 1946 in the second Chifley ministry. In July 1949 he ordered troops to mine coal in the New South Wales to break a strike by the then communist-influenced Australasian Coal and Shale Employees' Federation. The Labor government lost power at the 1949 election.

Chambers' first wife had died in 1943 and in December 1949, he married a divorcee, Salamas Rickman, despite his generally strict Catholicism. She died in 1954 and in October 1956 he married Janet Sanderson Pullen. In 1951, he refused to take part in Labor's campaign against the 1951 anti-communist referendum and would have been expelled from the party except for the intervention of party-leader H.V. Evatt. In August 1957, he attacked Evatt's leadership and was expelled, but was readmitted in June 1958 when it was too late to gain preselection for a seat.

Chambers worked as an immigration selection officer in Belfast, Rome and Scotland from 1959 to 1962 and then worked in Adelaide as a welfare consultant. In 1968, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). He died in Hawthorn, South Australia, survived by his third wife, but he had no children.