Family background
Henry Edwin Rock (aka Harry Rock) was born in 1876. He married Jessie McRae at Sydney in 1900. There were five daughters and two sons of the marriage. He died at St Georges Basin NSW on 27 May 1945, aged 69 years. Jessie Rock died on 4 October 1951, aged 70 years.
Occupation & interests
Always a blue collar worker, Rock worked as a labourer, and later as a sawyer in Glebe’s timber industry.
Local government service
Henry ‘Harry’ Rock was the first Labor candidate elected to Glebe Council at a by-election in December 1913. It was a very brief triumph; he lost his seat six weeks later in the January 1914 municipal election. He was part of the first Labor controlled Council in Glebe.
The Labor Party wrested control of municipal affairs from local businessmen in 1925 when eleven Labor candidates, including Rock, were elected to Glebe Council. The manner and dress of the new councillors was very different to the non-Labor representatives previously ensconced in the town hall. Rock was an alderman on Glebe Council 1926-28.
References
Hogan, Michael 2004, Local labor: a history of the Labor Party in Glebe, 1891-2003, Federation Press, Annandale, NSW
‘Glebe’, Evening News, 2 February 1914, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article114502994
Sydney Morning Herald, 7 January 1914, p. 8
Sydney Morning Herald, 7 December 1925, p. 12
Sydney Morning Herald, 28 May 1945, p. 10