Background
Clancy was born at Redfern in Sydney to grocer Denis Edward Clancy and Olive, née Kitchen.
Clancy was born at Redfern in Sydney to grocer Denis Edward Clancy and Olive, née Kitchen.
He attended Street Peter"s De Louisiana Salle School in Surry Hills, leaving at the age of 14 to work in a boot pattern factory. He was briefly apprenticed in the printing industry before working in a battery factory.
He played with rugby league with the junior Balmain Tigers in 1936 and was also an amateur boxer. The 1938-1939 dispute over exporting pig-iron to Japan and the 1940 strike raised his political awareness. Clancy joined the United Operative Bricklayers" Trade Union Society in 1941 and was elected to the committee in 1942.
He became secretary of the South Coast district council of the Building Workers Industrial Union (BWIU) in February 1943.
He was also elected to the Labor Council of New South Wales, becoming a vice-president After his election as a state organiser of the BWIU in 1944 Clancy moved to Revesby, and continued his involvement in the Communist Party.
He became assistant secretary of the BWIU in 1947 and secretary in 1953, ultimately rising to federal secretary in 1973. He was a building group representative on the Australian Council of Trade Unions" executive from 1970 to 1973 and 1975 to 1979.
He retired as federal secretary in 1985 and became honorary chair of the union"s international department.
He had become completely blind in 1980 as a result of diabetes. Clancy had contested numerous elections for the Communist Party and was on the central committee executive during the 1968 split after the Soviet Union"s invasion of Czechoslovakia. He resigned from the party in 1971 and in December of that year became president of the new Socialist Party of Australia.
Disagreement among members led to his removal and resignation from the party in 1983.
Clancy"s interest in classical music saw him serve from 1973 to 1978 as the trade union representative on the board of the Australian Opera, and he was a passionate supporter of the South Sydney Rabbitohs. He died of a heart attack in 1987 at Mumbai in India, returning from a peace conference in Mongolia.