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and his wife Amelia, nee Ferguson. He was educated in Brisbane and on leaving school joined the staff of the
Commercial Banking Company of Sydney. After transfer to Broken Hill, New South Wales, he was promoted to
Palmerston, shortly to become Darwin, in 1909.
At that time, only single staff members were employed so in 1911 he resigned from the bank in order to marry.
On 5 July 1911, he married Alice Mona Finniss, the daughter of Fairfax Ingeham Hassard Finniss and there were
five children of the marriage. A few days before the wedding, they had attended a large fancy dress ball dressed
as Pierrette and Pierrot. About 100 guests attended the wedding and Watts was commended for putting aside his
bachelor status, unlike numbers of the other young men about town.
As a young man, he was a keen sportsman. He played football and tennis and at the latter sport was among
the best players in Darwin. In July 1911 he was appointed Secretary and Auditor of the newly resurrected North
Australian Cycling and Athletic Society, a position he was to hold for a number of years. He was a Mason and in
1914 was Senior Warden of Port Darwin Lodge Number 41 as well as being President of the short-lived Darwin
Workers’ Amusement Club. As with most of his contemporaries he was involved in the Racing Club. He was
Secretary for a short time in 1914 and the 1916 season saw him Clerk of Scales.
He began business as a shipping, commission and indent agent with premises in Bennett Street and this he ran
until April 1919. In 1913 he was agent for the West Australian State Shipping Company and among commercial
firms represented Dalgety and Company, Ray’s Pleuro Vaccine, Johnston Tyre and Colonial Rubber Company,
National Mutual Life Assurance and Spaldings Sporting Goods. By 1918, he represented the Bovril Company and
held the Buick agency. He also dealt in pearl shell.
But he also had other interests. In July 1913, he was appointed to the part time position of Clerk of the Darwin
District Council and Secretary of the local Board of Health at a salary of 150 Pounds per annum. He resigned in
May 1914 apparently due to poor remuneration. He then offered himself as a contractor and the same month won
a contract valued at 25 Pounds and 15 Shillings to erect a windmill and tanks at Myilly Point. In November of the
same year, he erected, in something of a record according to the press report, a large building to house the Cable
Guard, which had been stationed in Darwin due to the outbreak of war. From about the middle of 1919 A E Jolly
and Company, on behalf of Burns Philp, employed him to be their wharfinger and foreman stevedore.
Watts joined the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) when it was formed in Darwin in 1911 and was elected
to the Darwin District Council in July 1914 though was not successful when a party political field stood in 1915.
He was re-elected in 1916 and was chosen as Mayor in July 1917 by his fellow Councillors after the elections saw
Harold Nelson, who proposed the motion, and Robert Toupein, both AWU members, take their seats. According
to the historian Frank Alcorta, the Council was effectively under Nelson’s control. Alcorta suggests, for example,
that Nelson allowed Watts to become Mayor because the position entailed certain duties and responsibilities that
had nothing to do with their power. Nelson’s first act was to raise the Council’s labourers’ wages but Watts, as
Mayor, was to wear the community’s anger when of necessity the rates were increased. Watts’s later career does
suggest that he was easily manipulated. As early as October 1917 he presided when a presentation was given to
Mrs Nelson to show the ‘high esteem’ in which she was held by Darwin workers though she had lived in Darwin
for only three years.
An incident in 1917 was a portent of things to come. The Administrator, Gilruth, was seen as a capitalist
puppet and when in 1917 he returned from Melbourne, where his appointment had been extended, neither Watts,
as Mayor, nor his fellow Labor councillors were present to meet him, as protocol demanded.
At the 1918 Council elections, held annually in July, all successful candidates were ‘Labor’ men and Watts
was re-elected Mayor once more. He was, however, not present at the Council meeting when Nelson introduced
resolutions condemning the judiciary and the administration, a move that might have been designed to keep the
Mayor out of the wrangling which followed.
By December, relations between the town and the Administrator had been reduced to such a level that a group,
variously estimated at between 400 and 1 000 people, marched on Government House in Darwin. As Mayor Watts
was to introduce the leader of the march to the Administrator but was hindered by special constables present at
Gilruth’s request. Watts tried desperately to negotiate between the people and the Administrator but the latter
stubbornly refused to meet them, saying that he was answerable only to the Minister and ‘did not recognize the
citizens’. As Douglas Lockwood put it, Watts was called upon in his capacity as ‘high sheriff of the city’ to eject
Gilruth from the Territory as an undesirable. The situation was ugly but even though there was some violence and
Gilruth was manhandled, Watts and Nelson kept the crowd under control. That they were successful was a measure
of the respect in which they themselves were held, a fact that Justice Ewing in the subsequent Royal Commission
was to acknowledge.
On 26 June 1919, Watts resigned from the Council ‘worn out by the ongoing struggle’, according to Alcorta.
But he returned to local government politics in 1926. The following year he was again elected Mayor. After Gilruth’s
departure and the closure of the Vestey’s meatworks the economic climate in Darwin had become grimmer and
grimmer yet the Council paid Watts a monthly allowance of eight Pounds, six Shillings and eight Pence which
it could ill afford and which raised the ire of the townsfolk. It was claimed that this amount had been ‘arranged’
specifically for Watts, and without reference to ratepayers, as previous Mayors had only received out of pocket
expenses. At this time, Watts was also an elected member of the Advisory Council of North Australia though it
rarely met.
In the citizen protests which erupted after short-sighted Commonwealth governments had refused to restore
the vote to Territorians which they lost in the administrative changes of 1911, Watts was one of the ‘martyrs’
imprisoned for 28 days for refusing to pay taxes in May 1921. He told a public meeting after his release that while
Fannie Bay Gaol was no ‘bed of roses’, he would go again to defend his principles.