Flo Cluff
Australian trade unionist
Florence Amy "Flo" Cluff OAM, formerly Kershaw and Davis (4 November 1902 – 20 September 1990) was an Australian trade unionist, communist and pensioner activist.
Born at Chillagoe in Queensland to English-born railway carpenter Frederick William Davis and Florence Emma, née Nightingale, Flo attended school at Chillagoe, Einasleigh and Cairns. Her father died in a railway bridge accident in 1921 and she left her teaching position to care for her mother, who died within months. She married labourer Robert Dawson Kershaw at Einasleigh on 29 November 1921; she moved to Brisbane in 1931 and was divorced in 1932.
In 1935, Davis moved to Sydney and worked at a cafe in Pitt Street. During this time she became involved with trade unions and flirted with communism. After the birth of her illegitimate daughter, she joined the Communist Party of Australia in 1937. She married her child's father, soldier Geoffrey Brown, on 29 November 1940 (they would later divorce). Also in 1940 she was elected to the executive of the hotel, Club, Restaurant, Caterers, Tea Rooms and Boarding House Employees' Union of New South Wales (HCRU), becoming assistant secretary in 1941 and secretary in 1945. She was one of the first women elected to the secretaryship of a union and radicalised the HCRU during her tenure, requiring larger hotels to provide female cooks with equal pay and instituting the five-day working week, sick leave and weekend penalty rates.
The public source identifies “Flo Cluff” as australian trade unionist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cluff, Australian and trade.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5459804. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1902, 1990, 1921 and 1931.
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This entry incorporates text from “Flo Cluff” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.