Terminus Page 6

  The official party at the Ultimo tram depot with the C-class tram used for the trial route to the Pyrmont terminus, 25 October 1899. The NSW Governor, Lord Beauchamp (wearing the top hat), is surrounded by the official party that included the Minister for Public Works, Mr. E. W. O’Sullivan, Mr. R. Hickson, Under-Secretary, Mr. H. Deane, Engineer-in-Chief for Railway Construction and Mr. J. Kneeshaw who was to become Tramway Traffic Superintendent.

  Photo reproduced from D. Keenan, The Ryde Line of the Sydney Tramway System.

  Whereas the name Pleasanton exuded respectability, the first event of any note that occurred under Gallagher’s watch set the tone for what the Terminus really was – a tough pub in a tough area. A seaman called Fredrick Edelsten had just arrived in port. It was Saturday night and he went up to the Terminus about 10 pm to have a drink. A local lad called William McCauley took offence when Fred refused to shout him a drink, and the upshot was that there was a stoush outside the pub. Fred ended up in hospital with stab wounds. Later that evening McCauley was taken to the hospital for identification and the police took a deposition from Edelsten because they thought he would die. He lost a leg to gangrene and was still in hospital four months later when McCauley was finally committed for trial on a charge of malicious wounding.86 He was found guilty, but didn’t change his ways. A couple of years later he was admitted to hospital with a fractured skull following a street brawl in Pyrmont.87

  4

  A ‘tied’ hotel in a new century

  THE Terminus was now a ‘tied’ hotel, meaning it was tied to the Tooths’ brewery and served only Tooths’ beer. This was probably how it had always been because the brewery was down the end of Harris Street in Chippendale and its Clydesdale horses had long been carting kegs to the many pubs that were dotted around the Pyrmont Peninsula.

  Being a Tooth & Co. hotel meant more than just buying their beer. Other products – spirits, cordials and mixers – even cigarettes – were supplied by Tooths. Although publicans could not be entirely prohibited from sourcing these things elsewhere, Tooths always recorded whether a publican was ‘loyal’ to the company in these matters. Tooths held a tight rein on their licensees, constantly walking a tightrope between extracting as much profit from them as the company could get away with and keeping them in the game. Hotel licenses were not cheap; anyone who could afford one was part of the aristocracy especially in a working-class area like Pyrmont. But now the possibility of becoming a licensee was made less onerous. Provided you had some kind of deposit, Tooth & Co. would sign you up to a contract whereby it took the balance of the money from the takings over the life of the license. Payments to the company were calculated and recalculated each time a lease was renewed according to real and projected earnings. Weekly rents were paid to the company and the costs of upkeep, and renewal of the hotels and bar equipment were shared with the licensees, although it was always the company that got the quotes and chose the preferred suppliers. There were elaborate formulae for determining who paid for what and when. Nevertheless, for many people wanting to get on in the world, a publican’s license was just one step on the ladder. If the cards were played right it could be a very profitable business.

  In 1901 John Devereux obtained the license to run the Terminus from Hugh Gallagher. It was for five years.88 This was renewed several times. In the end he and his wife, Margaret, stayed for 16 years and everyone referred to the pub as Devereux’s Hotel. While it had been advantageous to be Protestant in earlier decades, by now the population was more mixed. An Irish Catholic publican was not only perfectly acceptable to many; it was just what you would expect if you were in the temperance camp.

  The Devereuxs haled from Kilbride in County Wicklow. John Devereux’s wife was Margaret O’Brien, from Tipperary. In 2017 a descendant of the extended family, Julia Garling, remembered the affection her mother, Julia Barrett, had for the hotel way back in the early part of the century. Julia Barrett was a cousin of John Devereux and ‘whenever we drove past the Terminus, she would regale us with her memories of sing-a-longs around the piano there on Sunday nights with the family. It was a very strong childhood memory of hers.’ Julia Garling explained that her mother had been born in a pub in Redfern.

  They all owned pubs. How it worked was one brother would come out from Ireland and buy into a pub, then another would come. This was a pattern in the family – emigrate, put down roots and sponsor other family members. My mother told me that her parents brought out the Devereux family. Becoming hoteliers was a huge step up for all my Irish relatives who prospered well.89

  The trajectory often included spending some time in the United States. Margaret Devereux had brothers and sisters living in the States. Other family members visited them there from time to time. Connections with the Irish diaspora kept loyalties focused on Ireland as well as on the local scene.

  PYRMONT AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

  The depression was over and the new Federation of Australia had been proclaimed. A new era of social legislation saw the beginnings of an arbitration system, implementation of a basic wage and the first welfare payments for families. Many people however, continued to rely on the charity of the Benevolent Society in Thomas Street down in Ultimo, or the parsimonious pawnbroker James Rabinowich, whose business stood on the corner of John and Pyrmont Streets, or, no doubt, the largesse of Devereux. Publicans had to loan money if they wanted to keep their customers.

  An outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900 affected people in waterside areas. A healthy person one day could be gravely ill the next, and those who were diagnosed with the disease, or who lived in the same house, were banished to the quarantine station on North Head. They were often taken across by boat in the dead of night. Areas of the waterfront were cordoned off, houses whitewashed and furniture dragged out into the streets to be burnt. The waterfront was dredged and tons of garbage punted out to sea.

  The plague, with all its medieval connotations, put the wind up everyone and gave the government the excuse to do what it had wanted to do for years with Sydney’s privately owned waterfront. It established a Sydney Harbour Trust, which later became the Maritime Services Board, known as the MSB or usually just The Maritime. Miles of waterfront land and wharfage were resumed and over the next three decades modern, publically owned wharves were constructed from Woolloomooloo to White Bay. The Sydney Harbour Trust immediately took over work on Darling Island, which already had been purchased from private hands in the 1890s and was operating facilities for handling wheat, wool and coal in 1900. In the opinion of the new authority, Darling Island was ‘the best of the wharf properties vested in the Trust’, because of its connections to the railway system and to the woolstores.90

  An advertisement promoting a public talk on the cause of the bubonic plague. What Dr Ashburton Thompson said was that it was not the rats that caused the plague, but the fleas that lived on the rats. His work in understanding how the plague was transmitted was internationally ground-breaking.

  The Sunday Times, 25 February 1900.

  Working conditions had not improved much from the dark days of the depression, but jobs were more plentiful as industries expanded across the peninsular. Dredging and wharf reconstruction in Pyrmont Bay provided work and there were available jobs at a new power station opened in Pyrmont Street in 1902. This provided electric lighting to the city for the first time and dumped a fine powder of coal dust all over Pyrmont. A new council incinerator built on the western edge of Pyrmont in 1909 also contributed to the air pollution of the area. On the positive side of the ledger, improvements in handling waste at the abattoirs on Glebe Island and a reduction of sewage discharging into Darling Harbour resulted in a cleaner harbour. The old Pyrmont baths that had fallen into disrepair were rebuilt and enlarged to include a gymnasium, refreshment rooms, showers and toilets. This was better than home for most people and the general consensus was that these new baths were the best thing about Pyrmont.

  The Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR) opened the first stage of i
ts distillery in 1901 and over the next decade, expanded into land west of Jones Street and south down to John Street. In 1911 eviction notices were served on residents in company-owned houses in Mount Street. People were given seven days to quit and those who didn’t found the demolition crews at the door, ready to literally pull the house down over their heads.91 The CSR constructed laboratories on this land behind the Terminus. The steady takeover of houses by industry was to continue for decades to come and the residential population was in decline. All the same, there were still a lot of people living in Pyrmont and a lot of them were considered to be trouble. By 1903 the Pyrmont police station was the second largest in the metropolitan area with a sergeant, a senior constable, nine ordinary constables and three holding cells.92 There were a lot of very old and very small houses with nothing much in the way of amenities. Large families with six children, or seven or eight, crowded into cottages of two or three rooms, but even so the two large schools built in the 1880s were already struggling to find enough pupils to fill them.

  There were about 15 hotels in Pyrmont, all of them offering accommodation to single men and itinerant workers, and providing social space for men and, to a lesser extent women, whose private accommodation was very cramped. The NSW Liquor (Amendment) Act established in 1905 raised the age of drinking from 16 to 18 and introduced a more stringent version of ‘local option’. At state elections, if an electorate voted to reduce the number of hotels, then a Local Option Court decided which ones would close. After a vote in 1907, about 300 hotels were closed down across NSW.93 The criteria used to decide which ones closed might well have knocked out some of the pubs in Pyrmont, but it never came to this because the electorate did not vote for closures. In the end the whole idea of ‘local option’ was discredited because the leafy middle-class suburbs ended up with fewer hotels while those residents in the inner city drank on.

  LICENSEES OF THE TERMINUS: 1901–18

  OCTOBER 1901 JOHN DEVEREUX

  DECEMBER 1917 MICHAEL LEHANE

  COME THE REVOLUTION

  The Deep Sea Fishing Club’s headquarters were the Terminus. It was also the meeting place for the Pyrmont Swimming Club, which was very active after 1902 when the old baths at the end of Point Street were rebuilt and expanded. Devereux had himself elected to the committee in 1903.94

  He also made the Terminus available for meetings of the Socialist Labor Party. This had been formed in 1887 as the Australian Socialist League and had its roots in American socialist politics. It did not officially change its name to the Socialist Labor Party until 1907, but this is what it was called when it met at local pubs, including ‘friend’ Devereux’s pub for a number of years from 1903. The party fielded candidates at federal elections from the beginning in 1901 and J. O. Moroney, who was the general secretary of the League for years, was a frequent speaker from the balcony of the Terminus. Speakers argued that the Australian Labor Party, new though it was, had sold out, and that a true working-class party was needed to fight capitalism. Moroney bemoaned the evils of the concentration of the ownership of industry. This trend was palpable in Pyrmont where CSR was rapidly expanding, and the wharves were providing unprotected and backbreaking work. League members hoped the paper they produced would garner a high vote in an election in 1903: ‘Pyrmont workers are slowly beginning to clearly see that their material well-being can only be secured by voting for a complete change in the ownership of the factors of production.’95

  However it seems the good people of Pyrmont were not as focused on the revolution as these men had hoped. In 1906 an article, ‘Pyrmont and Socialism’, in their newspaper, People, presented a defeated tone. The area was one of the most congested in Sydney and ‘boasts of slums galore and reeks with poverty and ignorance.’ After years of meetings:

  The Socialist who essays to illuminate their dark minds … undertakes a task almost beyond human strength and courage. It seems that years of hopeless struggle with poverty have damped out completely the spark of discontent that kindles into flames the spirit of progress. [They] resent any intrusion on the peacefulness of their misery, filth and degradation.96

  There was more of the same. The article presents the people as brutes, lower than the animals. It said that of course not everyone in Pyrmont was like this; that there were good people, but ‘the human derelict of brutalized nature’ was all too common.

  The immediate cause of this intemperate outburst was a meeting at the Terminus. The speakers had decided to address the crowd from the street, standing on a chair provided by ‘friend Devereux’. But the first speaker could not make himself heard over the interjections of ‘a couple of beery wasters’ and the mindless interjections of ‘a densely ignorant individual’ and the din raised by 30 or 40 youngsters. Then things started to get rough and they retreated into the pub. The speeches were given in the time-honoured way from the balcony to a more subdued crowd. The whole thing had really rattled these revolutionaries. After this event it seems that the Socialist Labor Party no longer held meetings at the Terminus.

  Perhaps Devereux became less accommodating. When this organisation was campaigning for the Senate elections in 1910 it commented that ‘the difficulty we find is to procure balconies from which to speak.’ On this occasion they managed to get access to the Lord Clyde’s balcony, down the hill on the corner on Pyrmont Street, but not at Devereux’s hotel.97 That meeting was ‘not too bad’, although the official report once again documented Pyrmont as a place that exhibited ‘the ignorance, squalor and brutality that capitalism breeds’. One can only speculate on what the locals who bought People made of it all. They probably didn’t buy it. W. M. (Billy) Hughes, the waterside union boss, local member and future Prime Minister of Australia pulled the biggest crowds in Pyrmont, and he too was making appearances at the Lord Clyde.98

  THE LONG ARM OF THE LAW

  Devereux’s new reluctance to host these meetings may have been because he was being harassed by the police. In 1905 Sergeant Ross had Devereux fined after discovering half a dozen men drinking at the bar on a Sunday. Thomas Ross was already well known in the area when he was posted to the Pyrmont Police station in 1907. When he retired in 1914 it was recorded that ‘among the sly grog sellers Senior Sergeant Ross was a terror, and many attempts were made to injure him for life.’99

  One such time was when he arrested a labourer called John Cobett, ‘at a political meeting in Harris Street’ and the magistrate remarked that both Ross and a fellow constable seemed to have been ‘knocked about’. About a month later Ross was assaulted when he went to the house of a man who had become enraged when he discovered his wife out walking with the lodger.100 Ross was particularly down on people congregating in public and he often hung around the corner of Harris and John Streets just to keep the peace. He did just that in 1909 when a couple of crew members of the steamer Fifeshire were found guilty of being drunk and disorderly in John Street. Sergeant Ross told the magistrate that the men had been ‘stripped to the waist and engaged in a pugilistic encounter’ watched by a crowd of about 100 people, including women and children.101

  Sergeant Thomas Ross was stationed at Pyrmont from 1909–14.

  Photograph courtesy of Robyn Hogan.

  Devereux would have seen the lot. The ignorant behaviour that the socialists complained of was often on display on this corner where fights and brawls were common. Usually they ended in cuts and bruises, and damaged egos, but there was a steady stream of reports of more serious outcomes. On Christmas Day in 1903 Margaret Murray, the daughter of the publican across the road at the Royal Pacific, was serving at the bar when someone lost control and lunged at her with a knife, severing an artery in her arm. In 1907 a wharf labourer called John Cavanagh ended up in hospital after a fight at the Terminus. This resulted in a court case where Devereux testified that he saw nothing as he had left the pub to look for a constable, which was always the better option in these cases. He said that he would be glad if Cavanagh never came into the hotel again. In 1909 a man who w
as picked up unconscious on the pavement outside the pub had a fractured skull and ‘little hope of recovery’. Nobody knew whether the man found lying at the tram terminus in 1914 had been in an accident or had been assaulted.102 It just was a tough corner.

  Then there was the Pyrmont Push. There were more famous pushes in Sydney, and this one seemed to ebb and flow, but the term had been used for a group of larrikins who had terrorised the neighbourhood since the 1890s. It was blamed for the death of a man in the Callan Park Hospital for the Insane in 1906 when he fell and fractured his skull. In Pyrmont two years before, he had been hit on the head with a bottle and suffered brain damage.103 Many of the exploits of this gang actually took place down the road in Ultimo, but were always reported as the handiwork of the Pyrmont Push, just another indication that the outside world really didn’t know the terrain.

  Interactions between police and larrikins were a favourite subject for cartoonists around the turn of the twentieth century.