William Andrews

William Henry Andrews (20 April 1870 – 26 December 1950) was the first chairman of the South African Labour Party (SALP) and the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa. He was also active in the formation of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union. Biography Born in Leiston Suffolk, to Francis Andrews, a fitter, and Sarah Hannah Belmoor. Andrews left school in 1883 and was apprenticed as a fitter and turner. He joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers in 1890. In 1891 he became a journeyman fitter and turner. He travelled to Johannesburg in 1893, holding jobs on gold mines in the West Rand until the 1899. With the beginning of Second Boer War in 1899, Andrews and his family returned to Britain but returned to the Cape in 1900. He joined the British forces for six months before joining the Imperial Military Railways. Increasingly prominent as a trade union organiser, he became the official organiser of the South African ASE in 1904 and its president in 1905. Andrews was the President of the Witwatersrand Trades and Labour Council and the Political Labour League in 1905, the Labour Representation Committee in 1906 and the South African Labour Party in 1909. In 1907, when the Transvaal Colony obtained self-government, Andrews, as Labour party leader, was elected to one of three seat his party won in the election. Andrews was first elected as a Labour MP at the 1912 Georgetown by-election. Andrews served as a Member of Parliament until the 1915 general election after he had resigned from the Labour Party in August 1914, opposed to the country's participation in World War One. On 22 September 1915, he was elected chairman of the International Socialist League.