William George Ballinger

William George Ballinger was born on 21st of September in 1894 in Britain. In 1928 he was sent to South Africa by the British Independent Labour Party as an Advisor to the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) of Clements Kadalie. He found the union already in a state of disintegration and was unable to reconcile its hostile factions. In 1930-1931 he was a delegate of the ICU to the Non-European Conferences, and in 1943 he aided the African National Congress(ANC) in preparing evidence for a commission investigating labour on the mines.

In 1934 he married Violet Margaret Livingstone Hodgson,at the time she was a senior lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand. In 1936 Hertzog Bills  created seven seats in Parliament for Whites who were to represent Africans.In 1948 his campaign became a success and he remained a Senate until 1960,when the Verwoerd government stopped all Africans representation in Parliament.In 1953 he was a founding member of the Liberty Party.

In 1937 he got defeated for nominations , he became a senator from 1948 to 1960, elected by Africans in the Transvaal and Orange Free State. He was the husband of Violet Margaret Livingstone Ballinger and like her, was out of sympathy with the Liberal Party’s shift to more radical positions. He was the author of Race and Economics in South Africa published in 1934. He died in 1974.