Troy's parents were Ellen and Patrick Troy, both Irish Catholic immigrants from County Tipperary. He was born at Pimlico, New South Wales, the locality on the Richmond River where his father's farm was located. Troy's father died when he was very young, and his mother subsequently moved her ten children to the nearby town of Wardell, where she ran a store. Initially training as a schoolteacher, Troy left the profession after only two years, and instead worked various jobs in the country. He arrived in Western Australia in 1897 with the intention of prospecting for gold in the colony's Murchison region. There, he became involved in the local trade union movement, serving in leadership roles with both the Australian Workers' Union and the Amalgamated Workers' Association at various stages. Troy quickly rose to become secretary of the Murchison district AWA branch, succeeding John Holman.
Parliamentary career
Early years and speakership
At the 1904 state election, Troy contested the seat of Mount Magnet for the Labor Party. A resident of Cue at the time of his nomination, his only opponent was a mine manager from the Mount Magnet townsite, who was a Ministerialist. Aged only 26 at the election, Troy won with 61.26 percent of the vote, replacing Frank Wallace in parliament. When parliament first met after the election, in August, he was appointed assistant secretary to Frederick Gill for the Labor Party, a position which broadly entailed the duties of a whip. Later in the year, in November, Troy was also elected to a one-year term as state general secretary of the AWA. Troy again faced only a single opponent at the early 1905 election, which had been pre-empted by the defeat of Henry Daglish's minority Labor government. Running against a supporter of Cornthwaite Rason's new government, he increased his majority from the previous year, finishing with 66.15%. Following the election, Troy was made the Labor Party's chief whip, under the new Leader of the Opposition, Thomas Bath. He went on to be re-elected unopposed at both the 1908 and 1911 elections. Labor, now under the leadership of John Scaddan, won majority governmentfor the first time in 1911, and put forward Troy as their candidate for speaker, who was elected unanimously. The first speaker from the Labor Party, Troy was only 34 when he assumed the speakership, making him, according to a later source, "the youngest member of any Australian parliament to hold that office". Like almost all future Labor speakers, Troy shunned some of the regalia normally associated with the speakership, first not wearing the traditional wig, and then also dispensing with the gown. On at least one occasion, he also ceased use of the ceremonial mace, which was not received favourably. Nonetheless, Troy was re-elected speaker unanimously after the 1914 election, with his conduct praised by the leaders of all three major parties – Labor's Scaddan, the Liberal Party's Frank Wilson, and the Country Party's James Gardiner. At the election, he had been returned unopposed to his seat for a third consecutive time. After the defeat of the Labor government in July 1916, with Frank Wilson becoming premier for a second time, Troy initially continued on as speaker. However, he stepped down from the post in February 1917, in what he described as "purely a voluntary step", and was replaced by the Country Party's Edward Johnston.
Troy died in Mount Lawley, the Perth suburb in which he had long been resident, in January 1953, after a long illness. He had married Flora Brown Mackinnon in April 1913, when he was 35. It was the first marriage for both of them, and the couple never had children, with Flora Troy dying just over a year before her husband.
