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  The circled house was Peter Brennan’s first hotel, the Coopers Arms, at 88 Harris Street. This was close to where he built his second one, now the Terminus, on the other side of the street. This house was demolished in the 1970s for a car park next to the Schute, Bell, Badgery and Lumby woolstore, now known as 100 Harris Street, which can be seen to the right.

  Thanks to Paul Gye for explaining the significance of this 1941 photograph. City of Sydney Archives SRC10402.

  Having three pubs in Pyrmont must have been disheartening for the temperance push. Two years earlier, in December 1842, when there was only Cameron’s Pyrmont Hotel, the Teetotal Society of Pyrmont was founded. It met in Mr. Baker’s Temperance Coffee Shop in Harris Street and boasted about 60 members. Its impact on Pyrmont was miraculous. Four months after it was formed, the society reported that Cameron was going to abandon his trade for lack of patronage as ‘nearly all who formally prostrated their souls and bodies at the shrine of intemperance are now members of our society. Drunkenness is now seldom seen.’ This was qualified by acknowledging an ongoing problem on Sundays, when the ‘lowest drunkards from every den of infamy in Sydney come across to the secluded hotel in semi-rural Pyrmont to get what they could not get in the city.14 The Society thought that the solution would be to station a policeman at Pyrmont.

  In 1846 Cameron did leave Pyrmont, taking the sign of the Pyrmont Hotel with him to a different pub in Newtown and his successor, William Barrie, also decamped after a few months to a pub in George Street in the city centre that he also called the Pyrmont Hotel. If this was the result of pressure from the Teetotal Society, it did not seem to be working as Pyrmont Hotels were proliferating across the city. Meanwhile, Pyrmont was back to having only two hotels and the original Pyrmont Hotel located on the corner of Harris and John Streets was advertised for sale, without a license.

  Auction notice for the Pyrmont Hotel.

  The Sydney Morning Herald, 31 August 1846.

  The advertisement claimed that it was built of stone and in excellent condition, and it had ample rooms. It commanded magnificent views and was close to the ferry wharf.15 The building allotment had a frontage of 88 feet (27 metres) to Harris Street and had a depth of 52 feet (16 metres) along John Street, which are still the measurements of the block in 2017.

  The Pyrmont Hotel was bought by William Lee and rented out as a private house until 1853, when James Pratt moved in and traded for a few years as a publican under the sign of the Land’s End.

  AN ISOLATED OUTPOST

  From its beginnings in the 1840s, and its subsequent history up to the twenty-first century, residents of Pyrmont believed that the City Council did not provide adequate services to this outpost of its empire. In 1845 residents petitioned the council about the parlous condition of Pyrmont, which was, as they reminded the city fathers, part of the City ‘though decidedly an isolated one’. Harris Street was impassible in wet weather. There was insufficient water in the dry months and supplies had to be brought in at considerable expense. It was therefore difficult to find tenants for properties and there were a number of houses that stood empty.16 This was the first of many such petitions that emphasised Pyrmont’s isolation. Another petition complained that although the rates were the same as those paid by people living in the centre of town, Pyrmont received no services. Pyrmont Road (Harris Street) was in such a bad state of repair that carts were damaged and recently a horse had been killed by falling into ‘one of the ruts or rather chasms in this road’.17 In 1846, when it was decided to exempt any property that was more than 150 yards from a corporation gas lamp from paying lighting rates, this included the whole of Mount Street, Harris Street, Union Street and Pyrmont Street. It was dark outside!18

  Part of an 1855 petition claiming that ‘it is true that Pyrmont is included within the City but yet does not enjoy scarcely any one of the benefits derived by ratepayers in any other locality.’ The long list of signatures is headed by James Pratt and includes Peter Brennan and Charles Saunders, Pyrmont’s largest quarrymaster.

  City of Sydney Archives, 26/20/1141.

  SEEING DOUBLE: TWO COOPERS ARMS ON HARRIS STREET

  Brennan’s first Coopers Arms had two storeys and seven rooms. It was built of local stone, and had a slate roof. He extended it over the years, so that by the early 1860s it had 11 rooms and attics, and a cellar.19 He built a second substantial house next to his pub with a bakery attached. Bakeries were for baking bread and also for cooking the dinners of neighbours who had limited facilities for cooking at home.

  In the following years, Brennan acquired more land in Pyrmont. By 1855, he owned two more houses on Harris Street (near Union Street) in addition to his pub and the house next door. One of these houses had an attached shop, and he had three houses in Mount Street. By the end of the decade he also owned several properties in Pyrmont Street. He was constantly advertising for tradesmen to build and repair his various properties and anyone wanting to rent his properties could call at the Coopers Arms.

  Brennan failed to mention that the mutant piglet would almost certainly have been dead.

  The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 April 1847.

  WHO DRANK AT THE COOPERS ARMS?

  The press liked to paint public houses in florid colours. The ‘caravanserai … where alcohol and the malty were dispensed by the good Mrs. Harman’ (Edinburgh Castle on Union Street) was apparently a hangout for gamblers, pugilists and low-life revellers.20 According to opinions being aired in 1845 when the NSW Parliament was considering a bill to regulate public houses, respectable publicans needed the protection of the law against ‘the vicious characters who frequent public houses, to wit, prostitutes, thieves, gamblers, vagabonds in general, beggars, smugglers, drunken sailors etc.’ The law had to strike a balance between curtailing the civil liberties of publicans and regulations ‘for the peace and protection of society.’ There should not be too many public houses as that would keep the publicans poor and tempt them into illicit means of profit. There should not be too few, as this would encourage sly grog shops. Licenses should be expensive enough to ensure that only good-quality houses received them. Opening hours had to strike a balance between the freedom of the house and the peace of the neighbourhood.21

  These questions would be addressed repeatedly as the licensing and liquor laws evolved. Theoretically the laws under which Brennan operated became more lax as the century progressed, but things were more or less unregulated in the 1840s and fifties. There was no permanent police presence in Pyrmont until 1865. It would not have been too difficult for cockatoos to give advanced warning of any stray constable who wandered into Harris Street, and there were complaints at the time, as there are today, that the police could be bought off. On the other hand, if any of the locals decided to keep an eye on you, it was difficult to avoid notice. It was said that on any Sunday you could find a few drunks in Pyrmont passing the day in oblivion: Brennan was fined a number of times for Sunday trading, and someone must have had it in for him in 1857 because they attempted to stop his license being renewed as ‘not needed.’22

  Apart from the prostitutes, thieves and so on, the Coopers Arms would have served the ordinary local population including workers from the shipbuilding works on Darling Island. A stone causeway had been built across to John Street around 1840, and the Hunter River Steamship Company had established engineering and maintenance shops. Other local shipbuilders in the area grew as a result of orders from this company that was absorbed into the Australasian Steam Navigation Company (ASN Co.), which had built a large patent slip on the island in 1855. By end of 1840s shipwrights, boat builders, quarrymen, stone masons, seamen and builders had made Pyrmont their home.23

  More women frequented public houses in Peter Brennan’s time than in the first half of the next century. All the various Liquor Acts from 1830 onward insisted that a public house have parlours or sitting rooms and bedrooms (the required numbers varied) in recognition of the need to cater for both women and travellers. Men stayed out of the pa
rlours, but not always, and women sometimes drank in the bar room. Children were not excluded from hotels or from ordering alcohol until the 1880s when it became illegal to serve anyone under sixteen years old.

  PUBS WERE MORE THAN WATERING HOLES

  Pubs were used by clubs and societies for their meetings, and for auctions. Times and dates for local groups and societies would have been passed on by word of mouth. Auctions were most often held at the Pyrmont Hotel because the land in front of the hotel on Harris Street where the Terminus now stands, was ideal for tethering horses or displaying vehicles and anything else for sale. There were always items for sale or for inspection at the Coopers Arms as well. When Mort & Co. auctioned a 51-ton Brigantine Vixon at its auction house in the city, anyone wanting to inspect the ship, moored in Pyrmont Bay, was asked to call at the Coopers Arms for assistance.24

  Before there was a dedicated Coroner’s Court in Sydney, hotel parlours were in demand for inquests. They record the precarious nature of life and death in these decades. On Monday 10 October 1848, an inquest was held at the Coopers Arms regarding a Mary Fotheringham who was found ‘lying dead at the house of her husband in the vicinity.’ She had died suddenly around midnight on Sunday, and a post-mortem was carried out just before the inquest. For obvious reasons, these things had to be done in a hurry. Various people had seen her out and about, looking apparently healthy only hours before she died. The post-mortem had shown bleeding into the chest cavity and the verdict was ‘death by a visitation of God.’ A lot of people died by a visitation of God.

  Often the body was taken to the hotel. A verdict of ‘death by accidental scalding and injurious treatment’ was given in the case of an 18-month-old toddler who pulled a pot of coffee onto himself. The mother frantically applied potato scrapings and linseed oil and a variety of other useless things onto the toddler’s body. The doctor did not do any better when he applied a bread and water poultice. The child died after three agonising days.25 There were deaths through inexplicable ‘wasting’ and fevers in infants, and many deaths by accident, to children and to adults. By misadventure with runaway horses and carts. Or by drowning, in a waterside place where hardly anyone could swim. The body of a man that was discovered washed up on the shore and then taken to the Coopers Arms could not have been too pleasant. The body was identified as that of a man who had been in an accident with an upturned barge that had occurred several weeks earlier.26 And sometimes, the cause of death was attributed to alcohol. The grim nature of these coronial enquiries meant that when they were concluded, Brennan’s takings at the bar would have increased.

  THE BEST CORNER IN PYRMONT

  In 1847, William Allison sold land on the south-west corner of John and Harris Streets to William Lee. There were four houses listed on John Street between Harris and Mount Streets in the 1848 Assessment Book and shown on the following detail from an 1854 map. Behind them were also buildings with no street frontages.

  Three of the houses were subdivided early on into small tenements that housed some of Pyrmont’s poorest residents. The house on the corner, which had once been the Pyrmont Hotel, was rented from William Lee by James Pratt. Pratt was another one of those early settlers who gradually acquired holdings in the area and earned the title of ‘pioneer’. He traded there as a publican under the sign of Land’s End between about 1854 and 1857. At the end of this year, he moved his license across the street to the new Land’s End he had built on his own land on the northwest corner. This later became the Royal Pacific, and is currently known as the Pyrmont Point Hotel. Somewhere inside the present structure there are old walls and foundations of this older 1857 hotel.

  The house, which had two storeys and about eight rooms, was part of the block that Peter Brennan bought from William Lee in 1862. After Pratt moved out it was rented to various tenants, most of them women. Elizabeth Fleming ran a shop from this house, and for a few years announced herself as a school mistress, but for many years the house was run as a boarding house. James Pratt’s son, known as James C. Pratt wrote: ‘In part of the time between the years 1864 and 1866 I lodged in the house at No 77 with a Mr. Jenkins who was a tenant to Mr. Brennan.’27 In its day, it had been a fine house by Pyrmont’s standard but at this stage its value was falling and its condition was deteriorating.

  By the end of 1862, Peter Brennan was building his second Coopers Arms on Harris Street on his newly acquired corner, next to the old house and directly opposite the Land’s End. It seemed that you couldn’t have too many hotels in this little neck of the woods. The subsequent intermarriage between James C. Pratt and one of Brennan’s daughters suggests that there was amicability between these two families.

  Pyrmont was becoming a solid working class area. The Pyrmont Bridge had opened in 1858 on St Patrick’s Day. This, as well as the ferry that plied from the foot of Erskine Street across Darling Harbour to a wharf at the bottom of John Street, brought Pyrmont closer to the city. The first street lighting arrived in 1861 and, over the decade, water mains were laid in the central streets. A senior constable was permanently stationed in Pyrmont around 1865. By now there were enough Roman Catholics living in the area to support a little church and St Bedes in Pyrmont Street was famously built by local quarrymen in their spare time.

  The house on John Street, set back from the Harris Street corner was Pyrmont’s first licensed hotel, 1841–6. The building was also the first Land’s End for a few years in the 1850s.

  Detail from Woolcott & Clark, Map of Sydney, 1854.

  The 1863 Coopers Arms is clearly visible in this photograph detail of a panoramic view of Pyrmont taken in c. 1878. Adjoining the hotel is the old house, the original Pyrmont Hotel. There is a run of small places that were demolished in the 1880s where the John Street School would soon be built. The Land’s End is also visible opposite the Coopers Arms.

  ANU Noel Butlin Archive Centre, CSR Ltd, 171–835.

  Brennan’s move to the corner coincided with the introduction of the most lenient liquor laws ever to be enacted in the colony of NSW. Previously, pubs were supposed to close at 10 pm and all day on Sundays. They were supposed to have two sitting rooms and two bedrooms available for public hire. After the NSW Liquor Act 1862 they could open at any time between 4 am and midnight for six days a week, and for the first time Sunday trading was legal, although only for two hours between 1 pm and 3 pm. The act was silent on the requirements for accommodation and this encouraged public houses that were little more than taverns with no provision for accommodation. Brennan’s Coopers Arms, however, was a solid hotel with multiple rooms. Its scale and layout remain clearly recognisable in today’s Terminus.

  The construction went well. The land had earlier been quarried out for the old house, leaving a high wall on its western boundary that remains today. Now Paddy Ward, who lived a few doors up John Street, quarried more of the rock along Harris Street. This resulted in the Coopers Arms cellar being way below the original level of the land, ensuring the natural seepage of ground water through the sandstone. This cellar would become the bane of every publican and complaints about its dampness would forever dog the hotel. By December, Brennan was advertising for carpenters and joiners; in March the following year for plasterers; and in April for painters. The sign of the Coopers Arms would have been transferred from Brennan’s older hotel on Harris Street to this new public house by mid-1863.

  The floorplans show a bar, a kitchen and three sitting rooms downstairs, and six rooms upstairs. It is likely that the bar room did not contain a dedicated bar as we know them today, and none is shown on this plan. Most hotels of this period were furnished with tables and chairs, and operated in a more convivial way than they did in later decades. In an area full of tiny houses, many of them packed to the rafters with large families, the hotel offered much-needed social space. It is possible that the bathroom was not an original feature, but it may have been. There were no internal toilets; these would have been in the backyard, just as they would have been in most places in Pyrmont.
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br />   There was a balcony on the hotel. This was not built just to catch the harbour breezes. Many hotels built around this time included balconies that were used as vantage point for public declarations and political rallies. The Coopers Arms was used for this purpose just a few months after completion when James Murphy, who was standing in the local government elections, addressed a meeting of people standing in the street below ‘from the balcony’ because there were too many people to fit inside the pub.28

  These plans of the Coopers Arms were extracted from plans drawn in 1896 for extensions to the building. This would have been how Peter Brennan built it in 1863; perhaps the bathroom was added later.

  State Records NSW Plan 19420.

  Brennan’s wife, Elizabeth, died in the winter of 1866. She had given birth to 11 children to two husbands, run businesses and helped manage several hotels. She did not die from exhaustion, as she might well have done, but of a common bout of the flu. She was 59 years old. And so it went on, with Peter Brennan running his pub, constantly advertising for tradesmen to attend to his various properties, renting out the house behind the pub on John Street, the old pub across Harris Street, the house with the bakery, the shops down toward Union Street, selling drays and offering rewards for lost dogs, going guarantor for men standing for election to represent the community, signing petitions, being the contact point for the neighbours to collect things and meet people. In 1870 he advertised for someone to take over the running of the Coopers Arms because he wanted to retire. However the license was not sold until his death three years later, so perhaps he enjoyed no retirement. After a six-week illness he died in the hotel on 25 October 1873, aged 71. A few days later, in the early afternoon, a crowd gathered to solemnly follow his hearse along Harris Street to join his wife at the Camperdown Cemetery.