George Henry Jenkins

Sir George Henry Jenkins CMG (21 September 1843 – 18 July 1911) was an Australian public servant. He served as a clerk in the Parliament of Victoria from 1882 to 1910. In 1901, following the federation of the Australian colonies, he also acted as the inaugural clerk of the Australian House of Representatives. In that capacity he managed the arrangements for the formal opening and first official sitting of the Parliament of Australia.

Early life Jenkins was born on 21 September 1843 in Bedminster, Bristol, England. He was the seventh of eight children of Mary (née Osland) and Henry Jenkins. His father, a schoolteacher by profession, was born in Abergavenny, Wales.

Jenkins and his family immigrated to Australia during the Victorian gold rush, arriving in Melbourne in January 1853 where his father worked as a draper. He attended Thomas Fenner's Collegiate School in South Yarra before completing his education at Melbourne Grammar School. He took up the role on a temporary basis while on a leave of absence from the Victorian parliament, and likely did not seek a permanent appointment as his salary in Victoria was substantially higher.

Simultaneously with Jenkins' appointment to the House, South Australian clerk of parliaments Edwin Gordon Blackmore was appointed as the inaugural clerk of the Senate. Jenkins was privately critical of Blackmore, who had published several books on parliamentary procedures and openly lobbied for appointment to the new federal parliament. He reportedly described him as someone who "wrote a few useless compilations of Imperial Speaker’s decisions for the sake of notoriety" and the South Australian parliament as having "the same importance as a parish council, no more than the Board of Works".

Jenkins' primary task as acting clerk was to organise the arrangements for the official opening of parliament by Prince George, Duke of Cornwall and York, which took place on 9 May 1901 at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne. His role in organising the proceedings gave him a public profile, with Melbourne's Punch magazine describing him as "probably the happiest, proudest, most important and most worried individual throughout the length and breadth of Australia".

Jenkins also collaborated with Blackmore and Barton in drafting the initial standing orders for the House and Senate, although Blackmore was the primary author. After the official opening, the parliament transferred to Melbourne's Parliament House for its first session, with he and other parliamentary officials seated at the centre table in accordance with Westminster tradition. Jenkins resigned his role as acting clerk on 6 July 1901 to return to the Victorian parliament, and was succeeded by the Senate clerk-assistant Charles Cashel Gavan Duffy. and his obituary in The Argus stated that "few men have been known in official and private circles in Victoria for such a long period".

However, some of Jenkins' contemporaries did not hold him in high esteem. He had a reputation for alcoholism; he was said to interject in parliamentary debates in order to delay the end of the session until he had finished his drink.

After his retirement in 1910, Jenkins moved to Ceylon to live with his daughter on a tea plantation near Hatton, hoping the climate would aid his recovery from bronchitis. He died in Colombo on 18 July 1911, aged 67.