Terminus Read online

  First published in 2018 by Impact Press

  an imprint of Ventura Press

  PO Box 780, Edgecliff NSW 2027 Australia

  www.impactpress.com.au

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Shirley Fitzgerald 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Fitzgerald, Shirley, author.

  Terminus: the pub that Sydney forgot / Shirley Fitzgerald.

  ISBN: 9781925384352 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925384369 (ebook)

  Australian history.

  Cover and internal design: Deborah Parry Graphics

  CONTENTS

  Prelude

  1On the corner of Harris and John

  2The pub as a meeting place

  3Trouble at the Coopers Arms

  4A ‘tied’ hotel in a new century

  5Some peace, the Great Depression and another war

  6An industrial landscape

  7The downhill run

  8A long time between drinks

  A few words on crime

  Terminus timeline

  Sources and acknowledgements

  Abbreviations

  Endnotes

  PRELUDE

  WHERE is the Terminus? For that matter, where is Pyrmont? Today it is a fashionable precinct of Sydney, favoured for its proximity to the city centre, and its water views and amenities, including the newly refurbished heritage hotel called the Terminus. It stands on the corner of Harris and John Streets, close to high-rise apartments and high-tech offices. A far cry from the historical Pyrmont that was isolated and invisible for most of its history.

  The Pyrmont peninsula is mainly rock; beautiful sandstone. Not very hospitable for living. Or dying. No-one is buried in Pyrmont. You don’t dig graves into rock. A recent archeological dig next to the Terminus did not reveal any significant indigenous traces. There were Aboriginal people fishing the waters of the harbour, including the edges of Pyrmont, which they called Pirrama.1 There are records and stories of their presence until well into the nineteenth century at the southern end of the peninsula, on the alluvial soils surrounding the Blackwattle Swamp. But not on the rock.

  The European settlers who were granted land in Pyrmont in the colony’s early years were not much interested in this rocky, windswept place either. Private Thomas Jones of the NSW Corps was the first to be granted 55 acres of land that includes the block on which the Terminus now stands. The grant was made in 1795 on condition that he cultivated the land that became known as Jones’ Farm. But he never tried to farm it, nor did he live in Pyrmont, and he sold the land the following year to Obediah Ikin. Ikin never bothered with cultivating the land either and, according to his granddaughter, sold it to John Macarthur in 1799 for five gallons of rum.

  Around this time Thomas Jones and his wife, Elizabeth, were both hanged for the grizzly murder of a man called Samuel Clode.2 In one of those fateful twists of history, the Jones name is commemorated in Pyrmont by Jones Street, Jones Bay and Jones Bay Wharf, simply because they were the first Europeans who took the land from its indigenous owners. This was not a very propitious beginning.

  John Macarthur wasn’t much interested in the land either. He was one of the colony’s most powerful men and was too focused on political intrigues and a threatened court martial in England to even think about it. When he finally got around to organising a picnic party to inspect the property in 1806, they ‘discovered’ a spring of fresh water, which was undoubtedly well known to the local Aboriginal people. That’s why they called it ‘Pyrmont’, after a fashionable spa town of the same name in Germany. But Pyrmont in Sydney was far from fashionable, and the spring of water became known as Tinkers Well, a place where some of Sydney’s most marginal citizens eked out an existence in the late nineteenth century.

  Macarthur, famous for his involvement in establishing Australia’s wool industry, saw no farming potential in the area. He did establish a small salt-making plant at Pyrmont and he built a mill on the high ground that was located near what would later be known as Mill Street. Customers could row across Cockle Bay from town to have their grain turned into flour, but this probably wasn’t a very attractive proposition, and the mill was closed after a few years. In 1832, long after the mill had been abandoned, John Thompson painted what he referred to as a ‘haunted mill’ standing in bushland of a still-uninhabited Pyrmont.3

  John Thompson, View from Sydney of the haunted mill in Cockle Bay, 1832.

  Dixon Library, SL NSW, DL PXX 31.

  When John Macarthur’s son Edward had plans drawn up for a subdivision of the Macarthur land in 1836, he had hoped it might become a fine residential place with large villas. The plan allocated space for a church and some fortifications, as well as a large public reserve that included the land on which the Terminus stands today. But this was not what Pyrmont would become. When the first allotments of land came on the market in 1839, many of the original blocks were sold to speculators interested in industry, wharves and shipbuilding. They would choose to live elsewhere.

  By the time a second group of 59 allotments was put on the market in 1840 the public reserve had disappeared from the subdivision map. The lot that includes the block on the corner of Harris and John Streets where the Terminus stands was apparently ‘sold’, although the official paperwork reproduced here indicates that it was not transferred to Cornelius Lundie until the following year. He immediately sold it on to William Allison who held the land until 1847 when he sold it to William Lee.

  The story of the present hotel really begins in 1862 when Peter Brennan bought the block from Lee and built a hotel on the corner that he called the Coopers Arms. But this block was also the site of an older pub, Pyrmont’s first hotel, and many of the surnames that appear in the following document – Allison, Lee, Brennan, Clayton, Goodall and Pratt – are relevant to the history of a hotel on this block.

  Not all of the blocks were sold in these early land sales. However, by the 1850s industries and wharves had established themselves along the Darling Harbour waterfront and large-scale quarrying of the peninsula was underway. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the western half of Pyrmont was literally carted away as a huge tonnage of its sandstone was used to build Sydney. Pyrmont’s rock rose up again in the form of fine public buildings along the best streets of the city: the University of Sydney’s Great Hall, churches, banks and bridges.

  In Pyrmont itself, humbler buildings emerged. Shops, churches, schools, a post office, hotels and a police station were built to service a growing population – the families of men who worked in the quarries, the boat yards and shipbuilding yards, the industrial workshops and on the wharves. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the peninsula was home to many industries and factories, the city’s railway goods yards, great woolstores and powerhouses, meatworks and the sprawling workshops of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR). There were few public amenities, the air was polluted and the roads were congested with heavy, dangerous traffic. People did not visit Pyrmont for pleasure and, over time, fewer people lived there. The local population began to fall, and continued to fall all through the twentieth century as industry triumphed over houses in the struggle for a foothold on this stony ground.

  Equity search, Terminus, 1966 [CT issued 23/1/65].

  NSW LPI, Primary Application 16695.

  In 1933 the public school in John Street next to the Terminus was closed down due to lack of students. The Education Minister based in Mac
quarie Street in the heart of the city received a deputation of concerned parents. Afterwards, he scrawled on an internal memo a question for his staff: ‘Where is Pyrmont?’

  Pyrmont was not on the way to anywhere else. Traffic on the Pyrmont Bridge crossed through it to get to other places, but there had to be a reason for turning right and heading down Harris Street.

  In 1984, the Terminus was locked up and left untouched for over thirty years. As it became ever more shrouded in ivy, the memories of its publicans and its customers faded, and an air of mystery descended on the building. People remembered things about it that never happened and rumours spread…

  A lot of interest has been generated by its recent resurrection as a heritage pub, but the Terminus wasn’t always ‘heritage’. It was once an old boozer, a tough workers’ pub at the end of the tramline in an area of Sydney that most Sydneysiders hardly knew.

  What follows is its story.

  1

  On the corner of Harris and John

  IT was Saturday night on 5 February 1842, around 11 o’clock. Charles Cameron had locked the doors of his Pyrmont Hotel, located on the corner of Harris and John Streets, when there was a loud knock. Four armed men demanded to come in. Two of them stood guard outside while the other two ransacked the place and ‘carried off three gold watches, and one silver one, together with a quantity of wearing apparel, about £30 in cash, and a number of minor articles of property.’4 What they really wanted, they said, were firearms. When Mrs. Cameron pleaded with them not to enter the room where her children were sleeping, some chivalrous instinct stopped them from entering. Had they done so, they would have found Cameron’s two guns.

  Charles Cameron set out immediately to alert the police on the other side of Darling Harbour, back in town. Presumably he knocked up a boatman to row him across, or perhaps he had his own boat moored on the shore. The alternative of riding through the night across undeveloped Ultimo, where the road was just a bush track, would have been too dangerous and taken much longer. In a place where convicts and ex-convicts mixed with everyone else indiscriminately, it was easy to be afraid for your safety. Cameron had been in the colony for less than six months and these surroundings would have provided few reminders of the life he had left behind in Scotland.

  He told the police that one of the men had visited his hotel earlier on the same evening, calling for rum and no doubt to reconnoitre the place. However, because he did not know the men, it was difficult for him to describe them. Three days later, with the scent going cold, one commentator observed, tongue in cheek, that ‘none of the ruffians have been taken, but with so numerous and efficient a body of pursuers at their heels, they can scarcely remain at large much longer.’5

  The search went on for days, but the police had no idea who they were looking for. The press reported that too many of these robberies were occurring; especially in out of the way places like the West Shore, a term used often to describe Pyrmont.

  This would have been a terrifying intrusion for Charles and Margaret Cameron, and there were few neighbours nearby whom they could have turned to for help. They had sailed from Glasgow on the James Moran, arriving in Sydney on 6 October 1841 with their two children, a one-year-old and a two-year-old. There were several other cabin passengers and 163 bounty immigrants on board. These people were sponsored by the fiery Presbyterian minister J. D. Lang, who would quickly organise a church to be built in Pyrmont by the same man who had recently built the house where the Camerons had established their hotel. Perhaps it had already been planned before they arrived, because James Cameron wasted no time getting a license and moving in.

  The Pyrmont Hotel, sometimes referred to as the Pyrmont Inn, was the first public house in Pyrmont, licensed on 24 December 1841.6 It stood on the block of land where the Coopers Arms, later called the Terminus, would eventually be built. The old house was still standing in 1917 when Sydney’s largest brewing company, Tooth & Co., knocked it down to extend the western wall of the Terminus in a major remodelling of the building.

  The first publican’s license for the Pyrmont Hotel on the site of the present Terminus.

  State Records NSW, Reel 1236 p. 463.

  Detail from a pencil drawing of Pyrmont c. 1844 showing some sheds on Darling Island in the foreground and a few houses. The two-storey house on the left could be the earliest image of the Pyrmont Hotel.

  James J. Martyr. View of Pyrmont and Balmain, from the drawing room balcony of James Martyr, Esquire, Sydney, New South Wales, after 1840. SL NSW a1528591.

  The first land subdivisions had only recently occurred at the end of 1839, so this meant that the Pyrmont Inn was one of the earliest houses to be built on the peninsula. Several other applications for publican’s licenses had been knocked back, possibly because the authorities thought that there wasn’t the population to support them.7

  Pyrmont was on the frontier of town and things could get rough at the pub. On Christmas Day in 1841, theoretically the first day the pub was licensed, it was allegedly a scene of drunken rioting and broken furniture, although the truth of this account should be taken with a grain of salt as this description was according to ‘Sobriety’, writing in a teetotal newspaper.8 At least it was legal. Pyrmont, or the West Shore, was a place to carry out illegal gambling or try an illicit trade in alcohol too. There are records of ‘dissolute characters’ playing pitch and toss, from which the Australian game of two-up evolved, ‘in the thick scrub of Pyrmont, on the west shore’. When a stonemason named Munro was fined for selling sly grog in 1841, he was just one of a long line of main-chancers who would do the same.9

  The house that was the Pyrmont Hotel, Pyrmont’s first hotel (later known as the Land’s End in the 1850s). Part of the 1863 Coopers Arms (and then Terminus) can be seen adjoining it. The old house was demolished in the early twentieth century when the Terminus was extended.

  City of Sydney Archives CRS 51/297.

  PYRMONT IN THE 1840S

  In 1842 the City of Sydney was incorporated and Pyrmont was part of it, even though a lot of Sydneysiders never went there and knew very little about the place. When the first assessment of Pyrmont properties was made in 1845, there was so much undeveloped land that vacant space wasn’t recorded.10 The houses were mostly tiny cottages consisting of two rooms. Sometimes there were three rooms. Some are listed with only one room. Most were built from the local stone, had timber shingled roofs and no amenities. Some were recorded as having attached or detached kitchens, which meant that most cottages did not have a designated kitchen. Cooking would have been done over a fireplace in one of the few rooms. Outhouses and sanitation was up to the residents to sort out as best they could. Although most houses were very basic, Pyrmont was not the worst place to live in Sydney. There were older and more fetid places around the upper reaches of Darling Harbour, and people in neighbouring Ultimo were listed as living in slab huts with bark roofs.

  In Harris Street there were about thirty houses, most of them were located north of Union Street. For the whole of Pyrmont, there were six shops listed; two each in Harris, Mount and Pyrmont Streets. Mount Street was a favoured location because it was elevated, allowing all its drainage and effluent problems to run downhill onto other people’s properties. There was a blacksmith, a couple of wash-houses, several wharves and a number of sheds on Pyrmont Bay that housed small, ephemeral industrial enterprises. No hotels were listed, but there was a ‘house’ owned by William Allison and rented by Charles Cameron that was certainly the Pyrmont Hotel. It was listed simply as being in Pyrmont without a street address, and it had eight rooms plus a detached kitchen. This house was built by Allison in 1841 soon after he bought the land. It was still there when Tooth & Co. bought the block in the 1890s, and it remained until the Terminus was extended over its footprint in 1917.

  William Allison was one of the earliest owners of the corner block where the Terminus and its predecessor, the Coopers Arms, were eventually built. He lived in the area, married a local girl, Eliza Thompson, wo
rked as a builder and steadily covered his own land with houses for rent. Everyone in Pyrmont knew him and he could always be contacted at his home, ‘near the hotel’ or at Mrs. Thompson’s. Allison also built a chapel in Mount Street in 1843 for a breakaway sector of the Presbyterian church headed up by the Reverend J. D. Lang. This chapel isn’t mentioned in the 1845 Assessment Book because church property wasn’t rated. It was a small, weatherboard place with a ‘tasteful little belfry’ that had a bell to ring out the time for services. The dissident group of Presbyterians who were fleeing the city had very little money to build a church, and it did not go unremarked that the Macarthurs, who owned much of the land, were too stingy to even donate a small plot for this venture. On the other hand, there was a certain respect shown to a man like Allison, ‘one of the resident proprietors of Pyrmont’.11 There were landowners who were not residents, there were a growing number of residents who had no hope of ever owning their own home, and there was a group of men in between these two other groups who committed their presence to where their money was and actually lived in Pyrmont.

  Built on the rock, this old house in Church Street was photographed c. 1900. Note the water barrel and the pots lined up near an outside cooking place. All of the cottages in this area were demolished to allow for the railway cutting in the early twentieth century.

  City of Sydney Archives 000/000007.

  This group of early resident developers included Peter Brennan and James Pratt who both became publicans. At different times, both men had hotels on the site of the Terminus. The early years of the 1840s were years of economic depression in Sydney. Men went broke and insolvencies were an everyday occurrence. But there are always winners and losers in a depression, and Peter Brennan was a winner. With land going cheap everywhere, Brennan bought what was probably his first piece of real estate in Pyrmont on the eastern side of Harris Street, between Union and John Streets. By 1845 there was a two-storey house on this land and Brennan had successfully applied for a publican’s license to trade under the sign of Coopers Arms.12 In addition to the Pyrmont Hotel, there was a third hotel, Jack Straw Castle, established by this stage, and it was licensed to Clement Peat in 1844. Peat had made a name as a thespian in the 1830s before giving up the stage for the somewhat more remunerative career as a publican and later a pawnbroker.13 The Jack Straw Castle soon became known as the Edinburgh Castle that stood on the corner of Union and Edward Streets for many decades. That made Brennan’s Coopers Arms the third licensed premises in Pyrmont and the first where the publican was also the owner of the hotel.