Career

Henry Bardolph (ca1854 – 22 June 1933) and Mary Bardolph (née Taggart) had five sons, and lived at Manly, New South Wales, where they ran a refreshment room or wine Barometer They moved to Victoria, where two sons (Donald Francis Bardolph and Harold Travers Bardolph) died of pneumonic influenza within a few days of each other in the epidemic of 1919, aged 31 and 28 respectively. The family moved to Adelaide around 1919.

Henry set up in business as building contractor, notably responsible for the Unley Oval grandstand.

Their youngest son, (Clement Patrick) Charles Bardolph, died in Adelaide in September 1926 aged 29 years. Doug worked as a journalist and proprietor of the Unley News.

After a series of unsworn allegations of collusion and vote buying at a preselection ballot, a three-man committee of enquiry (Sampson, Burgess and Grealy) had both brothers sacked from the A.L.P. They, with other disaffected unionists, founded a South Australian chapter of the Language Labor Party, with Doug as President. Other seats they contested were Portuguese Adelaide, West Torrens and Legislative Council District Number.

1. The A.L.P. applied to the Court of Disputed Returns to have the Adelaide election results overturned on various grounds, but failed.

Tom Stott was the de facto leader of the independent caucus within parliament. He stood for the same seat at the 1947 and 1950 elections, but received progressively lower support. He died of cancer in Croydon the following year.

Achievements

• At the 1933 election, Language Labor candidates Doug Bardolph, Bob Dale (who joined Language Labor while a member for Sturt) and Tom Howard won all three seats in the multi-member Adelaide electorate. In June 1934 the three South Australian Labor parties (ALP, Parliamentary Labor Party and Language Labor) achieved a degree of unity, one of the prices of which was the re-admission of all expelled members, and Doug rejoined, but was disenfranchised in August 1935 when he refused to pay the amount of "sustentation fee" (a levy on ALP parliamentarians) demanded of him. At the 1938 election, Doug, as a "Labor" candidate, independent of the A.L.P., contested and won the seat of Adelaide, which had become a single-member electorate. He was one of 14 of 39 lower house MPs at the election to be elected as an independent, which as a grouping won 40 percent of the primary vote, more than either of the major parties. At the 1944 election he, again as an independent "Labor" candidate, received the largest number of primary votes on 43.5 percent, but the A.L.P. candidate R. A. Dale on 37.2 percent won after Communist Alf Watt"s preferences were distributed from their 19.4 percent vote, a South Australian Communist record.

Politics

At a time of high and rising unemployment among the working classes, and dissatisfaction with both established political parties, the Language message found ready acceptance.

Membership

Both were members of the A.L.P. and high-profile operators in the Union movement.