Mary Fitzgerald Citichat 22 November 2002

CITICHAT 46/2002 - 22 November 2002


Mary Fitzgerald

‘Pickhandle Mary’

About three years ago my wife and I spent a fascinating couple of days exploring the Cape’s West Coast. Our time would have been incomplete without lunching at least once at the famous ‘Muisbosskerm’ beach ‘restaurant’ where we happened to meet another Joburg couple who were also taking a break. Probably about a year later I bumped into Mike Alfred again and discovered that he had a great knowledge of Johannesburg and, in fact, also undertook a fair amount of city guiding. We have worked together from time to time since then and he recently sent me an article he has written on the feisty Mary Fitzgerald after whom the Newtown Square was named. Mary Fitzgerald Square in Newtown has of course been transformed as part of the revitalisation of that area of the city, today providing a great urban space for all city users. In the Square’s paving are set three large circles each using fibre-optic technology to depict the night skies over Johannesburg on three significant dates; our first democratic election – 14th April 1994; the opening of the transformed Square by the President on the 16th December last year and the date when Mary Fitzgerald defied the government of the day at a mass meeting of trade unionists on what was then Market Square – the 14th July 1913.

Mike writes: “Eighteen year-old, attractive, red-haired, fair-skinned Mary Sinnott arrived in Cape Town from Ireland with her father in 1900. Her mother and syblings followed. There she met and married handsome tram-driver John Fitzgerald. The now enlarged family moved to Johannesburg in 1902 where, struggling, living in a sprawling Belgravia house, all needed to contribute to the family’s livelihood. The town was recovering from war and former residents as well as new immigrants were streaming in. The mines were again producing but slowly. The City of Gold, now under Alfred Lord Milner’s administration, was hopefully poised for another period of expansion. Growing conflict between cost-cutting mine owners and their struggling-to-make-ends-meet workers, characterised the socio-economic climate.

Mary grew to maturity in the Victorian era. Economic necessity, an Irish protest spirit combined with her headstrong, powerfully responsive personality, enabled her to abandon traditional conventions. She lived a life of activism, easily recognisable today as feminist and thoroughly modern. She was never a homebody. Her first husband, Fitzgerald, wished and cajoled in vain for a more traditional wife. Although she bore five children, she left them in the care of her mother and returned quickly to work. Work usually became indistinguishable from crusade. Her first job, as a short-hand typist with the Transvaal Miner’s Association ( forerunner of the Miner’s Union) brought her face to face with the scourge of phthisis, the occupational lung-disease, which offered a living death. Mary herself wrote; “Once phthisis got hold of them there was no cure. It was just a matter of time till the end.” She was appalled at the family woes caused by mine owners who invalided phthisis sufferers without compensation. Thus started her first intense period of action. She became ‘a familiar sight as she pedalled her bicycle along duty roads with a collection sheet to ensure that the latest victim of phthisis could at least have a decent burial and not the indignity of a pauper’s funeral.”

She developed into a prominent, and the first, woman trade union organiser in the country, rapidly earning her place alongside men on speakers’ platforms throughout the Reef. Her rousing speeches delivered in her attractive brogue, made her popular with miners but caused her to be seen as an agitator by owners. The press promoted her as an eminently newsworthy personality. As labour problems in the industry grew in the period before the First World War, so she became more anti-capitalist, more pro-socialist in outlook and radical in behaviour. She played major roles in the strikes of 1907, 1913 and 1914.

Her first direct taste of power came when she orgainsed a work boycott by Johannesburg waitresses which resulted in their improved pay and conditions. She went on to form women commandos, which, in supporting their miner menfolk, often violently attacked non-strikers. She fell under the spell of a feminist journalist Nina Boyle, who convinced her of the power of the press. She joined fellow unionist Archie Crawford’s weekly ‘Voice of Labour’. There she became successively business manager, the country’s first woman master printer and co-owner of the press. She also became Archie’s lover, and later, after her divorce from Fitzgerald, Crawford’s devoted and emotionally fulfilled wife.

Fitzgerald’s chronicle offers a long list of ‘firsts’; first and only woman to attend the first conference of the SA Labour Party in 1908; first to lie on tramlines preventing scab drivers leaving the depot during the 1911 Tramways strike; first to retrieve a ‘momento’ pickhandle dropped by mounted police in their desperate efforts at crowd-control; first to stick a hatpin in a Dragoon’s horse pinning her to a wall during the riot on Market Square which made the 1913 strike so notorious; first woman trade unionist to be incarcerated in Johannesburg Fort; first woman elected to Johannesburg council; first woman deputy mayoress. The list is extensive.

Her appearance was described thus: “Mary was never to be seen in anything but the streetwear clothing of Eurpoe…it was severe, dignified perhaps; an ankle lenghth costume which could be maroon, olive green, navy or black – with a crisp white blouse and a tie and with shoes, hat and handbag imported from England. It became a distinctive uniform.”

The 1914 strike was immediately and forcible quelled by Interior Minister Smuts. He refused to contemplate the riotous outbreaks, injuries, arson and deaths that marred the infamous 1913 strike. Part of his powerful medicine involved the deportation of the ‘treasonous’ strike leaders. Archie Crawford was amongst those who, bearing little more than the clothes they wore , an overcoat, a spare shirt or two and a towel, compliments of the Union Government, were secreted aboard a ship bound for England. The deportees were feted in Britain, where Archie and a now divorced Mary who joined him, addressed trade unionists and socialists all over the country, ultimately speaking to a vast Albert Hall audience. Under intense pressure, Smuts organised the almost equally quiet return of the deportees after the outbreak of war.

Marriage to Archie Crawford seemed to quieten Mary. Her activism became more conventional and sedate but no less energetic after she was elected to the Johannesburg Town Council in 1915. Her success was all the more unusual at that time, as it would be another 15 years before South African white women would become voters. Her election poster showed her with the famous pickhandle which obviously appealed to underdog voters. As a councillor she became involved in child welfare, public health matters and poor relief for both white and black. In 1918 she was re-elected to the Council and in 1920 became Chairperson of the Public Health committee. When a resurgent Labour Party gained control of the Council at the end of 1920, Mary was elected deputy Mayor to Mayor John Christie. From 1921 Mary’s involvement in the Council waned and she did not stand for election again. Her grateful constituents bought her a car – the first to be owned and driven by a Johannesburg woman. She thereafter became the less visible helpmeet behind her husband who had become a national representative to the International Labour Organisation which had been formed after the First World War.

Neither Archie Crawford, renowned for his non-violent politics, nor Mary, played powerful roles in the 1922 “Rand Rebellion”. In 1924 when Mary was forty and more fulfilled than at any time in her life, her beloved Archie died of enteric fever. His death profoundly affected her and she withdrew from public life. There is rumour that she began drinking heavily. Little is known about her later years, she died in 1960 at the age of 78. She merited obituaries in the national press and the Mayor of Johannesburg described her as ‘the outstanding, indomitable woman who had made a great contribution to the early history of Johannesburg’. In 1986, Johannesburg’s centenary year, the Council renamed Newtown’s Market Square in Mary Fitzgerald’s honour. At the end of 2001 it became her splendid monument.”

Thanks, Mike. My favourite mind-image of Mary Fitzgerald is encapsulated in a black-and-white photograph of her displayed some time ago in Museum Africa. Tall and lissome in her ‘crisp white blouse’ and dark skirt – hurling a brick at a policeman! Of such are great cities made!

Regards, neil.