J. C. Kirby, minister at Port Adelaide, leads successful 1915 push for 6pm hotel closing; helps get votes for women
"Hands up for six!" Congregational minister J.C. Kirby(top right) among leaders of this 1915 meeting in the Adelaide park lands as part of the successful campaign for 6pm closing of South Australian hotel bars. Below right: Port Adelaide Port Dock Brewery Hotel's Old Preacher strong ale, in memory of Kirby, who had the original hotel closed down in 1909.
Main image courtesy State Library of South Australia and Port Dock Brewery Hotel, Port Adelaide
Congregational minister Joseph Coles Kirby was a force behind two important South Australian social changes: voting rights for women in 1894 and, more directly, getting hotel bars closed at 6 o’clock early in the early 20th Century.
Born in 1837 in Buckingham, England, Kirby was educated at the Quaker boarding school in Sibford Ferris, near Banbury. He absorbed a concern for social reform partly from his Quaker mother. At 13, he entered his father's flour mill business but stayed passionate about reading and self improvement.
After his father went bankrupt, the family migrated in 1854 to Sydney where Kirby worked in a flourmill and joined Pitt Street Congregational Church with prominent members including David Jones, John Fairfax and John West. They encouraged Kirby until he increasingly criticised the dominant social groups in New South Wales and advocated total abstinence. After short training by Barzillai Quaife, Kirby became an assistant minister at Ipswich, Queensland, before being ordained in 1864 and pioneer Congregational minister on the Darling Downs.
In 1871-77, Kirby was pastor of the prosperous Congregational Church in Ocean Street, Woollahra, Sydney, and active in the Public Schools League's successful campaign for free, compulsory and secular education. A militant and informed temperance reformer, his publications impressed New South Wales premier Henry Park, who carried the 1880 Licensing Act. In the 1878-79 seamen's strike, Kirby helped persuade the Australasian Steam Navigation Co. to stop employing Chinese labour.
From 1879, as chairman of the Congregational Union of New South Wales, Kirby attacked academicism in the ministry and offended voluntarists by advocating stronger central initiative in home missions and accepting land from the government to build churches. Between 1877-and 1998, Kirby published at least six pamphlets on social reform.
Kirby resigned in 1880 and went to the depressed Congregational Church at Port Adelaide. He set up several youth organisations and induced young men to enter the ministry to help get his denomination get solidly behind temperance, women's rights and social reform. As secretary of the Social Purity Society in 1882, Kirby spent his vacation advocating the cause in Melbourne and Sydney and, in 1885, won wide support in a campaign to raise the age of consent from 13 to 16.
Kirby was chairman of the Congregational Union of South Australia in 1886 and 1906 and chairman of the Congregational Union of Australia and New Zealand in 1910-13. In 1891, he was an Australian representative at the first International Congregational Council in London and travelled in Europe and India.
The South Australian women’s suffrage league, with strong campaigner Mary Lee as a link, was a spinoff from the Social Purity Society and led to women gaining the vote and the right to stand for election in 1894.
In retirement, Kirby led the successful campaign in 1915 for 6 o'clock closing of South Australian hotel bars. He also sought (less successfully) religious instruction in state schools and helped to persuade the South Australian Congregational Union to abandon its insistence upon purely secular instruction. Later, he became an advocate of an Aboriginal reserve in Arnhem land. In 1903 he visited the South Pacific, keenly observing the conditions of the peoples and race relations.
An evangelical, Kirby was devoted to “the theology of the glorious blood'” and steadfastly opposed higher criticism of the Bible but managed to be openminded about Darwinism and eugenics. Continuing to live in Jagoe Street at Port Adelaide’s Semaphore, Kirby was an active, alert and beloved patriarch but became increasingly eccentric.
From 1986, the Port Dock Brewery Hotel in Port Adelaide produced a strong ale named Old Preacher, in memory of Kirby, who had successfully campaigned for the original hotel to be closed down in 1909 – along with a third of the port's other hotels.
