Bert Edwards: great complex, combative, controversial early 20th Century enigma of Adelaide city's west end
Bert Edwards (sitting front row, third from left) as club official with West Adelaide Football Club players in 1922.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
Bert Edwards, one of Adelaide's most complex, combatant and controversial 20th Century figures, fitted the rumour that he was an illegitimate son of complex, combatant and controversial premier Charles Cameron Kingston. Besides being engaged in many disputes, Edwards’ generosity towards charitable cause and society reform withstood any loss of popularity through charges and a prison term in the 1930s for an “unnatural offence”.
Jobs as a stall keeper, marine store dealer and hotel keeper led Edwards to holding licences for the Brunswick Hotel, the Newmarket Hotel on North Terrace, Adelaide; Victor Harbor’s Hotel Victor and British Lion Hotel in Hindmarsh. He also ran a tea room in Sturt Street in Adelaide's west end.
In 1917, he was elected to the House of Assembly as Labor member for Adelaide and became a prominent Adelaide city councillor for the west end. In both roles, he frequently clashed with Angela Goode, a candidate for the Adelaide seat in 1924.
Goode and Edwards also were candidates for the city council’s Grey Ward in 1924. Edwards topped the poll but Goode refrained from formally charging him with breaking the law by driving voters to the polling place.
Edwards and Goode had interests in prison reform and both served, and often disagreed, as members of the State Children's Council.
In 1925, Goode criticised as lenient the jailing for one year of an indecent assault defendant. Edwards defended the judge, saying the girl was a consenting and above the age of consent. Edwards blasted Goode in 1927 for disallowing an increase in allowances from two to five shillings per week for state girls (wards of the state who were boarded out with generally well-to-do families or widows as companions and maids).
In 1921, West Adelaide Football Club nominated Edwards, a long-time follower, as its delegate to the South Australian National Football League's governing board. But Edwards was rejected on the grounds that he’d once used intemperate language at a junior meeting.
Edwards, who had no knowledge of the offence, refused to apologise, starting a fierce standoff that came close to having that league disbanded and reformed without West Adelaide.
Edwards served in House of Assembly until 1931 when he was been convicted of “an unnatural offence” with John Gaunt “Jack” Mundy, 16, a “sexually perverted boy”, and sentenced to five years jail. His appeals failed but he was released in 1933.
While in prison, Edwards had his brother Arthur and sister-in-law Millicent Edwards manage his Castle Inn, corner of Hindley and Morphett streets. In 1937, Millicent charged him Edwards assault and indecent language when she demanded money for work put into his hotel. She was unsuccessful.
A charge of gross indecency against Edwards in 1942 was dropped when the two principal witnesses refused to testify.
In 1961, Edwards endowed a men's refuge in Whitmore Square, Adelaide, and in 1963 he bought the property next door as a rehabilitation centre for prisoners, named the Frank Lundie Hostel for his friend, colleague and secretary of the South Australian branch of the Australian Workers’ Union. He contributed generously to a meals centre run by the Daughters of Charity in Hutt Street, Adelaide.
Edwards was a frequent and newsworthy visitor to Western Australia and in 1925 was appointed a justice of the peace for that state.
Edwards died in 1963 without heirs. His considerable assets were left to charities for the homeless and destitute.
