Jack Cartledge reveals 25% of rental homes as slums, leading to 1940 Act; South Australian Housing Trust chair
South Australian Housing Trust chairman Jack Cartledge was pivotal to constructing the satellite town of Elizabeth. He is pictured (second from left) at a dinner hosted by the trust in 1964 at the Hotel Elizabeth to mark Elizabeth being declared a separate municipality. Also pictured are John Martin's stores directors Edward Hayward (at left) and Ian Hayward (third from left), and J.R. Fraser who presented the new councillors with robes on behalf of James Hardie and Co. Inset: Cartledge accompanying Queen Elizabeth II in 1962 at Windsor Green, Elizabeth, when she unveiled the Geoffrey Shedley fountain to commemorate the naming of the town after her in 1955.
Images (inset by Vic Grimmett) courtesy City of Playford Library Services and State Library of South Austral
Jack Cartledge became a key chairman of South Australian Housing Trust after impressing premier Tom Playford with his work on the Housing Improvement Act (1940) that identified 25% of the state’s rental properties as slums.
Jack Pickering Cartledge was born in 1900 at Adelaide ‘s inner west Southwark, son of locomotive fireman Herbert and his wife Eliza. Educated at Petersburg (later Peterborough) High School and on a scholarship at Adelaide High School, Jack won a law bursary to Adelaide University. He was articled to F. G. Hicks and admitted to the Bar in December 1921. Next year he joined the South Australian government’s attorney-general's department. In 1923, he married Margerie Vortmann in the registrar general's office, Adelaide.
Appointed assistant South Australian parliamentary draftsman about 1927, Cartledge worked with Edgar Bean on revising and consolidating more than 1,200 South Australian parliamentary bills passed between 1837 and 1936. They were published in nine volumes as The Public General Acts of South Australia (1937-40). Cartledge was appointed to the British order of St Michael and St George in 1947 and in 1959-65 was draftsman in charge of parliamentary statutes. An intensely private man who belonged to no clubs, Cartledge read, played golf and devoted much of his time after 1945 to the South Australian Housing Trust.
Having been chairman (from 1934) of the state government’s local government advisory committee 1937-40, Cartledge chaired the Building Act inquiry committee that considered the need to replace insanitary or ramshackle houses with new ones. In 1938, the committee made Adelaide's first survey of substandard housing, classifying more than 25% of rental housing as slums and recommended government action. Cartledge inspected the buildings that he described as “old, damp, decayed, badly-lit, ill-ventilated and vermin-infested”. The experience affected him deeply and influenced his drafting of the Housing Improvement Act (1940).
Cartledge impressed the new premier Thomas Playford, who was keen to expand the state's recently formed housing trust. Playford appointed him its deputy chairman (1940) and chairman (1945), succeeding William Goodman. Playford also made Cartledge chairman (1941) of the Building Act advisory committee.
Regarded as a “key official”, Cartledge became closely identified with Playford using the housing trust as a tool in the state's economic development. Cartledge chose the trust's staff astutely, notably Alex Ramsay as general manager 1949-78.
Cartlege and Ramsay directed the huge housing trust operation, building more than 48,000 houses, shops and factories, operating an immigration programme and constructing the satellite town of Elizabeth. Cartledge showed keen interest in the town's affairs. Carledge first opposed, then supported, Elisabeth becoming a separate local government area. He was also chairman of the South Australia’s local government officers classification board.
After Cartledge retired in 1965, Playford appointed him permanent chairman of the housing trust. Cartledge died in 1966 at North Adelaide. Ramsay praised his intellect, humanity and leadership: "Trust developments . . . continue to pay tribute to this service to the community, and Trust policy to bear the imprint of his fertile mind".
Known as a scholar and interested in libraries, Cartledge always envisaged a central library for the Elizabeth area although he didn't live to see it. The library auditorium later was named in his honour.
