Charlie Crofts

Who was Charlie Crofts?

Charles Alfred "Charlie" Crofts was an Australian trade unionist.

Born at Bethnal Green in England to general dealer James Crofts and Ann Rebecca, née Luxton, Crofts entered the workforce at the age of twelve, leaving school to work in a sheet metal factory and joining the Tinsmiths, Braziers and Gas Meter Makers' Society of London. He married Agnes Humphreys at Bethnal Green on 6 August 1893. He and his family moved to Melbourne in 1898, where Crofts became a member of the Sheet Metal Workers' Union, serving as vice-president and president. In 1911 he was on the first executive of the Federated Gas Employees' Industrial Union and in 1914 was elected to the SMWU's national executive. He defied his employer, the Metropolitan Gas Company, to attend a union meeting in Sydney in 1914 and was subsequently dismissed, but soon after won the position of secretary to the Gas Employees' Union, a paid position, winning the national secretaryship two months later.

Crofts, an activist president, served on the Melbourne Trades Hall Council's executive and was its president from 1924 to 1925.