John Medway Day, Date of Birth, Date of Death
TweetJohn Medway Day
(1838-1905) journalist and minister of religion
Date of Birth: 
About John Medway Day
- John Medway Day (24 February 1838 – 8 July 1905), generally known as J.
- Medway Day, was an English-born Australian journalist, Baptist minister and activist. He was born at Bedford to carver Samuel Day and Elizabeth Stamford.
- He worked for a local solicitor before studying for the Baptist ministry in the early 1860s.
- He migrated to South Australia in 1866, becoming the minister at Mount Gambier until 1869, when he moved to Kapunda.
- In 1870–71 he was the chair of the South Australian Baptist Association, but in 1875 he left the ministry to become a journalist for the Register.
- He was acting editor for the paper in 1883–84, attracting some controversy for his views on land nationalisation.
- He married Ellen Sandland on 12 August 1886; they had no children.From 1892 Day edited the Pioneer, the paper of the Single Tax League; then in 1893 edited his own short-lived weekly, The Voice.
- A strong reformist, he delivered many lectures on topics including land reform, women's suffrage, trade unionism and electoral politics.
- He ran unsuccessfully for the South Australian House of Assembly seat of Gumeracha in 1893, and later in the year a loose coalition had coalesced around him, the "Forward Movement", which included members from a wide variety of progressive causes.In January 1894 Day moved to Sydney to edit the Australian Worker, and thus was involved in the formation of the Australian Workers' Union.
- He ran for Labor Party preselection for the 1895 colonial election; losing endorsement for Grenfell to William Holman, he instead contested Gundagai but was defeated (Holman also lost).
- He was widowed in 1894, and on 8 September 1897 married Marcella Mary Carr, also widowed.
- In 1904 he moved to Hobart to edit the Tasmanian Mail, but he died the following year having suffered an intestinal obstruction.
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