Jack Egerton

Sir John (Jack) Alfred Roy Egerton (11 March 1918 - December 1998) was an Australian trade union organiser and member of the Australian Labor Party. Egerton was born in Emerald, Queensland and was educated at Rockhampton and Mount Morgan High Schools.

Egerton started work as a boilermaker. He became state secretary of the Queensland Boilermakers Union in 1943, and served as president of the Queensland Trades and Labour Council from 1967 to 1976; president of the Australian Labor Party state executive from 1968 to 1976; and as an executive of the Australian Council of Trade Unions and a member of the ALP's federal executive. In the 1970s, Egerton was Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's right-hand man in Queensland and frequently clashed with the state's conservative Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Egerton notoriously became the Australian Labor Party's first and only knight, and took to his grave the secret of why he broke Labor tradition and accepted the honour. Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser offered the honour for service to the trade union movement. The knighthood cost Egerton his ALP membership, and earned him the name of 'Jumping Jack the Black Knight', as well as prompting in some quarters the even more hostile epithet 'Labor Rat'. By odd coincidence, Egerton, the son of a boilermaker, received his knighthood from Governor-General John Kerr, also the son of a boilermaker. An outraged Whitlam would later say the knighthood was "the most appropriate conferral of the title since Queen Elizabeth I knighted Sir Toby Belch".

Egerton later served as the Deputy Lord Mayor of the Gold Coast.

References

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