Researching James Sharpe

Born in York, he converted when young, and made his priestly studies at the English College, Valladolid. He was ordained in 1604, and returned to England in 1606, where a trial awaited him. Believing that he must convert his parents to Catholicism, he visited them in Everingham, but was kept a prisoner at home, and subjected to pressure, threats, violence, and constant surveillance to induce him to renounce Catholicism. While his mother begged him to yield, his father begged the authorities rather to keep him under house arrest in England, than to let him go into exile. But the "Annals" of his college state that Sharpe was a man "of great courage and learning". He was eventually taken to the archbishop's prison, then deported. Having entered the Society of Jesus (1608), he became professor of Scripture at the Catholic University of Leuven for three years, after which he returned, and worked on the English mission until his death. He wrote The Trial of Protestant Private Spirit. (s.l., 1630)

Sharpe was born at Berry in New South Wales and was educated at public schools. He went to Sydney at the age of 18, where he worked in a warehouse and established a reputation as a talented athlete in quarter-mile and hurdle racing. He later moved to Queensland, where he was the proprietor of the Kedron Park Racecourse and established and promoted night-time athletics events in Brisbane. In 1912, he funded the new Labor-aligned newspaper The Daily Standard and served as its managing director until his election to parliament in 1913. He was an unsuccessful Labor candidate at the 1912 Queensland state election.

In 1913, he was elected to the Australian House of Representatives as the Labor member for Oxley. He held the seat until his defeat in 1917 following the fallout of the 1916 Labor split.

After losing his federal seat, Sharpe worked as an auctioneer and land agent. He was a City of Brisbane alderman from March 1924 until October 1925, when the old Brisbane council was abolished with the creation of the current, much enlarged City of Brisbane. He attempted to regain his old federal seat in 1919, 1922 and 1925, but was unsuccessful.

He later relocated to Sydney, and was vice-president of the Federal Labor Party in New South Wales when most of the state party broke away as Lang Labor during the 1931 Labor split. Sharpe died at the Jenner Private Hospital in Sydney in 1935 from influenza, although he had been unwell since December 1934. He was cremated at Rookwood Crematorium and his ashes sent to Brisbane to be buried alongside his late wife in Toowong Cemetery.

Sharpe studied financial economics at Tilburg University, participated in hurdling competitions, among others for the Netherlands Antilles at the 1992 Summer Olympics, and performed several management jobs in telecommunication.

He is married twice and lives in the Romanian municipality of Sângeorgiu de Mureș.