John Curtin
Personal life

Curtin was introduced to Elsie Needham on a visit to Tasmania in April 1912. Fred Katz, an acquaintance from the Victorian Socialist Party, had taken Curtin to visit Elsie's father Abraham Needham, a candidate in the 1912 Tasmanian state election. Curtin proposed to her in Melbourne in 1915, and they were married in Perth on 21 April 1917. Their first child, a daughter also named Elsie, was born at the end of that year. Their second child, a son named John, was born in 1921.

Curtin had an ambivalent relationship with religion and has been described as agnostic. A Catholic priest called at The Lodge as Curtin lay dying, but he was turned away. Curtin had refused to so much as set foot inside a Catholic church throughout his adult life, not even to attend the weddings of friends. However, he was known ask his press secretary, Fred McLaughlin, to join him in prayer while Prime Minister. On the day that Singapore fell, Curtin made time to speak at the re-consecration of a church, because, "The fatherhood of God was closely related to the brotherhood of man." Near the end of his life, he asked his friend Hector Harrison, the Minister of the Presbyterian Church by Parliament, to conduct a Christian memorial service on his death. Kim Beazley Sr., who succeeded Curtin as the Member for Fremantle, didn't believe Curtin was agnostic at all, saying, "though Curtin never lost his distrust of religious institutions, faith grew within him."
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