Jane struggled against taking Tom out of school at such a young age, but she had little choice. Her family needed to eat. While she loved her husband John, she also felt bitter. A skilled stone mason and a kind man, he had nevertheless drunk away his earnings and many lucrative contracts.

It was the reason they had moved from her beloved Wales to Liverpool when Tom was a baby. It seemed to Jane they had fallen from the frying pan into the fire - into a damp slum house crammed in amongst the misery and hardship - no running water, always hungry, always cold, with leaden skies hanging over their heads. And since Tom’s birth in 1852, there were two more mouths to feed – Lizzie and Mary.

So there it was. The child was only nine, about to begin a long apprenticeship to his father. Only a few weeks before Tom had been caught with some other boys nicking apples, and didn’t whimper when John belted him. Hunger was no excuse for stealing, but Jane ached for her son, acutely aware that his body was undernourished for the hard manual labor of stonecutting. Despite being illiterate herself she would do her best to nourish his soul and mind by showing him common sense and decent values, and encouraging him to go to Sunday School and night classes.

At his ‘penny’ school he had been amongst kids of his own kind, from trades families. But Sunday School would cater for children from all classes including wealthy landowners and merchants, so Tom needed a presentable jacket. After a few weeks on the job he earned enough money to buy one from a pawn shop, but the sleeves were oversized. Jane did her best to alter them, but the result was embarrassing.

That first Sunday a rich snob laughed at Tom and his jacket. To avenge the insult on his mother, Tom ambushed him after class and punched him down the stairs. The teachers were shocked, and Tom was on the brink of being expelled. Next Sunday the snob with his mates ganged up on Tom who shocked them all by fighting back with such ‘berserker courage’ he flattened every single one. Somehow Tom wasn’t expelled, and less than twelve years later he was superintendent of that Sunday school.

As for night classes, three generous Welshmen, recognizing Tom’s passion for justice and his natural brightness, nurtured him in the reading of books championing liberty equality and fraternity, and votes for all people regardless of wealth, status and gender. These were dangerous notions which had threatened the powerful aristocracy and founded the Chartist movement. Only thirty years before one of Tom’s relatives, the brave old parson Humphrey Price, had been thrown into Stafford jail for his Chartist beliefs.

Under the guidance of his Dad Tom became a skilled stone mason, and they forged a lasting friendship. Tom quite quickly encouraged John to leave off drinking, and together they worked hard and ‘in sync’. The business began to flourish. Although another girl was born in 1871, the family now could afford better food, a better house, and had managed to buy a row of old tenement houses which gave them a modest extra income.

John died in 1879 at the age of 53, leaving the family grieving. However, thanks to Tom, they were now comfortably well off, Jane a life-long ‘annuitant’ with income from the property, and Tom employing no fewer than 28 stone masons plus three apprentices.

From the moment Tom set eyes upon the petite Annie at Sunday school, he was smitten. But there was a problem. The daughter of a wealthy timber merchant, her family did not want their daughter marrying a no-body stonecutter, no matter how successfully he ran his business.

Despite obstacles deliberately put in his way while Annie was kept out of his way, Tom persisted until he won the heart of Annie Lloyd and married her in 1881.  A year afterwards baby Jack was on the way. Life seemed perfect. 

Then Tom was diagnosed with phthisis, a type of tuberculosis caused by fine stone particles massing in the lungs. His doctor urged him to go and live in a warmer climate. Tom resisted. Annie insisted. Finally surrendering, Tom refused to emigrate to any country with the taint of slavery or corruption.

And so in 1883 Tom, Annie and baby Jack, with £100, a chest of belongings and Tom’s stonecutter’s kit, landed in South Australia. Tom had always dreamed of farming his own land. But a kind South Australian advised Tom against it. South Australia was the driest state in the driest continent on earth - very different to the lush green pastures of Wales.

Heeding the advice, Tom fronted up to a building contractor asking for work. Jimmy Shaw didn’t need any more stone masons. Tom offered Shaw one week’s free work to test him out, and seven years later Tom was still on the payroll. One of the buildings he worked on, shaping its impressive stone columns, was Adelaide’s Parliament House. Eventually his skills as worker and leader were acknowledged by the government, and he was appointed Clerk of Works.

In Tom’s own time he built a humble cottage on a big block of land a few miles from the city centre, extending it as his family grew. The garden flourished too, a forest of fruit trees and vines. Tom could not have been happier.

In 1891, as a member of the newly-formed United Labor Party, he turned up at a hall to hear two ULP candidates speak, but in a strange twist of fate the guest speakers had got lost in fog and failed to turn up. The crowd became restless. Tom was urged to say something, anything. He began hesitantly, but as he touched on human rights his confidence increased until he held the people in the palm of his calloused hand. It was a speech they would never forget, and won for him a place as Member of Parliament in 1893.

Tom’s fiery parliamentary speeches demanded decent conditions for workers, fair trade for small farmers, and the right for all adults to vote. Often his passion was such that he coughed up blood, his oration powerful enough to occasionally persuade even die-hard conservatives to ‘cross the floor’ and vote with the ULP.

In 1905 Tom Price became Premier of the State, and Minister of Education! Even merchants and landowners had reluctantly come to admire the plain-speaking stonecutter, and by now the working classes adored him. Known as ‘The Children’s Friend’, Tom often visited schools where he told the children he was living proof that they could be anything they aspired to be. As long as they did their best and were kind and considerate, and as long as they worked hard at whatever occupation they had chosen, that was good enough for Tom.

During his premiership he achieved many reforms and basic liberties we now take for granted. In 1908, 12 years after adult females in South Australia had won the right to vote but 20 years before their British counterparts achieved the same, Tom and his beloved Annie visited the UK. Tom’s mission at the Franco-British Exhibition was to explore new trade markets for South Australian produce with produce as diverse as olives and wine, apples and wool. Annie and Tom were treated like royalty wherever they went, paraded through the streets of big cities and small towns, Tom delighting huge crowds with his humor, his reminiscences, his undiminished passion.

The couple took the time to visit the homes of their relatives in Wales and Liverpool. We can only imagine that Annie’s parents, had they still been alive, must have regretted their past snobbish behavior especially when, to top off the spectacular visit, the former nobody stonecutter was asked to give the toast at a royal dinner where their daughter was formerly presented to the King and Queen.

After the strenuous overseas trip, Tom’s health failed. He had finally succumbed to ‘Stonecutter’s Disease’. Thousands of mourners huddled six deep in drizzling rain as the horse-drawn cortege traveled some miles from the family’s humble cottage to the local cemetery.

Tom Price the man died in May 1909. 

But how a self-educated stonecutter became a life-changing reformer, outstanding statesman and minister of education is a powerful story that deserves to live forever.