As a child he worked in the coalmines, but won a miners' scholarship to a summer school at the University of Oxford, where he became a Methodist lay preacher.

He married Edith Hartshorn on 4 August 1903 and the couple moved to New South Wales in 1912, when Davies became a miner in the Wollongong area, soon rising to become an official of the Australian Coal and Shale Employees' Federation.

[1] Davies won the New South Wales Legislative Assembly seat of Wollongong in 1917, representing the Labor Party, having defeated the sitting John Nicholson who had been elected as a Labor member but joined the Nationalist Party following the 1916 conscription split.

[2] His 1920 election campaign concentrated on the 1917 strike, John Brown's contract compensation, business profiteering and the wheat pool scandal.

[5] In 1949 Davies resigned from the Legislative Assembly in order to contest the new federal seat of Cunningham, which he held until his death on 17 February 1956.