Terminus Page 7

  www.melbournehistoricalcrimetours.com

  Worker unrest and strikes continued to be a feature of the prewar years. The radical International Workers of the World (IWW), known as the Wobblies, took over where the Socialist Labour Party left off and established some presence in the area. Specifically, their involvement in the Meatworkers Union encouraged union slaughtering of meat on Glebe Island during a meat shortage in 1914. Two union butchers shops were set up: one at Sampson’s Terminus Butchery across the street from the Terminus.104

  World War I divided society like nothing else had before. It was initially welcomed by some as a chance for a decent pay packet and adventure, and everyone said it would all be over by Christmas. But as the war dragged on and the telegrams started to arrive, enthusiasm fell away. For some with Irish connections, it was to be resisted as an imperialist war. Women handed white feathers to conscientious objectors, but also to ordinary family men who chose to keep working on the homefront. The authorities were worried by the difficulty in getting men to sign up. The first anniversary of Anzac Day in April 1916 was treated as a recruitment day with rallies and entertainment in the city. A number of trams, including the Pyrmont tram, were dragooned into service. The tram was illuminated, and there was a band on board, along with officials and soldiers. Their job was to inspire the youth of Pyrmont on the terminus corner between 7.30 pm and 8.45 pm to sign up for King and Country.105 Luckily for the tills of the pubs on the corner, whatever crowd gathered would have also enjoyed a drop of the amber, but this was soon to end. Two months later, the official closing time of 11 pm would be reduced to 6 pm.

  WELCOME TO THE SIX O’CLOCK SWILL

  Voters in a referendum in June 1916 were offered a range of potential closing hours that could be voted for, including keeping the 11 pm closing hour. The temperance lobby was urging a vote for 6 pm. Sensing defeat, the United Licensed Victuallers Association (ULVA) which later became the Australian Hotels Association (AHA), urged people to vote for 9 pm. Pyrmont voted for 9 pm, but overall ‘6 o’clock closing’ won the vote. The federal government claimed that early closing was a temporary wartime austerity measure, but in 1919 it was made permanent. Its introduction was a great victory for the temperance movement, but not for civilisation. Opponents were right when they predicted that it would only increase sly grog trading, and encourage barbaric drinking habits. Hotels became less convivial places and the main game was to consume as much alcohol as possible before the clock struck six.

  This put pressure on bar staff. These workers came under a new federated union in 1910 and the first award from the Arbitration Court was handed down in 1914. This stipulated 54 hours a week for barmen and 50 for barmaids who were paid at 75 per cent of the male rate. There were provisions for a half-day holiday a week and two weeks annual leave.106 How much these rules were honoured in the breach, especially in pubs run as family affairs, will never be known.

  At the start of the century most people were still drinking English type ales, but there was an increase in the importation of lagers. Local brewers were slow to introduce lager because the production processes were more expensive and couldn’t be brewed in the same plant used for producing ale. But when the war resulted in a collapse of importation of lager from enemy Germany, Tooth & Co. decided to invest in new equipment. By 1918 KB Lager (as in Kent Brewery) was available both on tap and in bottles. One of the effects of six o’clock closing was to increase the amount of bottled beer sold. Older hotels like the Terminus had limited space for storing bottled beer. This possibly explains why Tooth & Co. also supplied the Royal Pacific across the road with bottled beer even though it was a tied Tooheys hotel.107

  ON THE HOME FRONT

  An August 1916 photograph shows houses in Bayview Terrace that were pulled down along with 150 others to make way for the new rail line. The Australian Thermit Co. Ltd in the background was a German company, and in 1915 trading with it was prohibited under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

  City of Sydney Archives CRS 51/2887.

  As the young men went off to war, labour shortages resulted in pressure to extend the railways in order to increase efficiency on the wharves. Around 1910 the first steps were taken to clear housing for many sidings that would link to a rail loop through Pyrmont back across Wentworth Park to Glebe and beyond. In an article headed ‘Doomed Pyrmont’, The Sun outlined the devastation in 1913, announcing that 150 houses were slated for demolition north of John Street. Sixty houses had already gone, some fine houses in Jones Street, many from Pyrmont’s earliest days, little stone cottages with smoke-blackened rafters and some tin shanties. ‘Not many years back Pyrmont was a populous residential quarter but the warehouse, store and factory are claiming their own and the people must live elsewhere.’108

  A Sydney Harbour Trust drawing, dated 1919, is labelled ‘Birdseye view showing new wharves and approaches, Jones Bay Pyrmont.’ John Street’s historic connection to the waterfront has been severed and whole blocks remain empty, but the Terminus and the Royal Pacific, standing alone inside one of the cleared blocks remain perfectly located to attract customers from the wharves, the large woolstore, the powerhouse on the left-hand side of the image, and the CSR works on the point.

  The Sydney Harbour Trust Commissioners, The Port of Sydney N.S. W.: official handbook, 1919.

  These resumptions left swathes of vacant land for decades. From 1916 quarrying re-emerged in Pyrmont as the railway line cut a deep scar through the peninsular. By 1917 quarrying was also creating a new Jones Bay Road that connected with the two levels of the new Jones Bay wharves. In 1918 Glebe Island, finally rid of the slaughterhouses, was levelled for new wheat silos.

  The landscape in which the Terminus now stood was desolate, but its fortunes did not suffer. These reclamations took out some of the other hotels nearby, including the Lord Clyde down on the corner of John and Pyrmont Streets, and the O’Toole’s old Green Tree that stood on the corner of Harris and Harvey. It was thought that the Royal Pacific might come down too, but in defiance a third storey was added in 1913109 and the corner of Harris and John remained strong.

  Some of the drinkers were visitors wearing khaki as the wharves became busy with military troop movements. More of the locals were local workers than residents. The new Ways Terrace flats, built in the mid-1920s eventually provided some new housing, but not as much as had been pulled down. Only half as many flats were built that had been promised.110 In 1926 the new railway line was finally opened, but residents had to wait for over half a century for the promised road bridge to reconnect streets that were severed by it construction.

  1917

  Tooth & Co. clearly thought that the Terminus was worth investing in. Under Devereux’s watch, various improvements were made to the hotel. In 1911 minor renovations included installing an internal toilet upstairs and opening the back parlour onto the yard. Tooth & Co. was gradually upgrading its pubs to give them all a unified ‘Tooths’ appearance and where possible, older small pubs were expanded. In 1917, despite wartime shortages of building materials, the Terminus was given what the plans labelled as a ‘remodelling’. The company employed reputable architects, in the case of the Terminus, Copeman & Lemont. In their later iteration as Copeman, Lemont & Keesing, this architectural firm was responsible for some of the best Art Deco work in Sydney, but this 1917 work for the Terminus fell more into the category of Art Nouveau. Because the plans for the minor alterations of 1911 still exist, it is easy to compare them with the 1917 plans to find out how much the Terminus was rebuilt. The 1897 extension along Harris Street for the Hotel Pleasanton remained more or less untouched, and it is possible that Devereux kept trading from this section during the upgrade.

  These 1911 architectural plans were designed for minor alterations to the Terminus. Notice that there is a formal ‘bar’, excluded from the earlier plans of 1896 in Chapter 3. City of Sydney Archives, BA 1031/11.

  Importantly, the design of the older 1863 corner section of the Coopers Arms was not radica
lly changed. The layout of rooms and window openings suggest a partial rebuild at most. Unfortunately, only a very damaged black-and-white scan of the 1917 plans was located, but these were obviously missing the colour coding that architectural plans use to indicate new work. When these almost illegible 1917 plans were redrawn, they are shown to be labelled with instructions such as ‘remove fire place’, ‘take out existing door’, ‘brick up existing skid’ and so on – instructions for a remodelling, not a rebuild. The cellar was enlarged and at least the rear of the old 1863 section of the hotel was definitely rebuilt because it was pushed out to cover a larger footprint, shown by the ‘old footings’ on the 1917 plans. The altered alignment of the rear wall in the old corner hotel, compared with the rear wall of the newer 1897 wing shown in the 1896 plans in the gloss section of this book, shows the extent of this rear enlargement. Behind this new rear wall a new storeroom and a laundry were constructed. The bar in the front corner room was extended into a back parlour and made into a horseshoe shape. This was one of the primary interests of Tooth & Co. in ‘remodelling’ its hotels. Bars needed to be as large as possible to accommodate growing numbers of drinkers whose drinking times were crushed into reduced hours. Usurping this parlour space was compensated for by relocating the kitchen into the 1897 section of the building, along with a dining room on the Harris Street frontage. Pushing back the rear wall enlarged the rear upstairs bedrooms and possibly required a substantial rebuilding of this older section of the upper storey.111 A new parapet unified the height of the two sections of the hotel and on this parapet is written the date of 1917. Customers coming into the pub would have recognised the older building well enough. The bricks on the ground-floor level are beautifully laid English bond with immaculate pointing and, according to people who know about these things, these walls could well date from the 1860s.112 The 1917 plans suggest that this was the case.

  Tooth & Co. architectural plan for remodelling the Terminus.

  Redrawn from 1917 original City of Sydney Archives, BA 0055/17.

  To allow for the increased depth of the hotel along John Street, the old house that was once Pyrmont’s first hotel was demolished. The image we still have of this house in chapter 1 is from a series of City of Sydney Council records called the City Engineer’s ‘demolition photographs’. It was the practice to take a photograph every time a building came down. There is no demolition photograph for the Terminus, but there is a building application for the ‘remodelling’ – another reason to believe that the present building contains a lot of 1863 materials.

  In March 1917 there were 20,000 sandstock bricks on offer to anyone who would cart them away. Whether these came from the old corner hotel or from sections of the old stone house behind it, or from both, is unclear. Wherever they came from, they would be worth a fortune today, but back then it was decided there was no time to auction them, as the pressure was on to get the Terminus fully functioning as soon as possible.113 Plasterers were finishing off their work by July and Devereux would have been looking forward to some restoration of order at his pub.

  ALL OUT

  Instead of order, Sydney became embroiled in the Great Strike in 1917. There had been an unsuccessful referendum the year before when people were asked to agree to conscription for the war effort. This had generated a great deal of local anger over what waterside workers saw as a sellout by Prime Minister Billy Hughes, long-time local political representative and organiser on the waterfront. Tensions were already high when at the start of August 1917 thousands of workers went on strike over a perceived deterioration of working conditions. Eighty thousand workers stayed out on strike for six weeks. There were daily marches in the city of around 30,000 people and on the weekends, 100,000 people gathered in the Domain. The trams did not run and the Darling Harbour sidings were at a standstill. The CSR men were ‘out’ and so was just about everyone else. This unprecedented social upheaval politicised the workers like no speaker from any pub balcony ever could. The nation was at war and those who were on strike were called traitors. Those who stepped into the strikers’ jobs were called loyalists, or scabs, depending on your point of view. Tensions ran high. Everyone in the pub would have had an opinion when a scab/loyalist who was carting jam to Birt’s Wharf on Darling Island for shipment to the troops shot and killed a striking carter, Merv Flanagan, on Pyrmont Bridge Road. The ‘loyalist’ had political influence and the likes of Flanagan did not: the perpetrator was found to have acted in self-defence, even though a lot of people believed it was murder.

  Union medals were issued annually so that members could advertise their allegiance. The medal displaying the lily was struck specifically for the 1917 strikers. They were known as the ‘lilywhites’ who were opposed by ‘blacklegs’ otherwise called ‘loyalists’.115

  Courtesy Trades Hall Association and Bill Pirie, photographs by Greg Piper.

  The strike was a failure. Unions were deregistered and strikers were victimised and sometimes not re-employed for years. Right up until the 1930s records at the CSR marked men as ‘off 1917 strike’ or ‘AIF’, meaning that they had gone to the war and were to be given preferential treatment.114 Some men never got re-employed in the railways. There was a hardening of class attitudes in Pyrmont.

  Devereux renewed his license for another five years, but after what must have been an annus horribilis, he decided to get out at the end of 1917 and passed the license onto Michael Lehane.116 Lehane belonged to the same group of publicans of the extended family and friendship groups to which the Devereuxs belonged. When Lehane’s wife, Catherine, died of a heart attack at the age of 45 in 1914, the funeral notices in the papers read as a who’s who of inner city pubs. Back then friends and relations put notices in the paper inviting attendance at the funeral, and Catherine Lehane’s funeral elicited notices from the publican families of the Clifton Hotel, Waterloo, the Grosvenor Hotel and the Woolpack Hotel in Redfern, the Ancient Briton in Glebe, and the Devereaux family of the Terminus in Pyrmont. They were all interrelated. Some of these publicans and their families went on to social success in other better-heeled suburbs and they were recorded in the Catholic press as fine, upstanding citizens who gave generously to good causes. Devereux did not entirely forget his radical friends however, and his son Aiden, who spent his boyhood years living at the Terminus, became a leading industrial lawyer who worked for the trade unions.

  The Terminus was a good earner, but not a great place to live. Lehane stayed only a year, just in time to witness a couple of violent street brawls on the corner. A brutal bashing by a street gang of two brothers who lived nearby left Robert Sampson with a fractured skull and his brother Charles very cut up. By the end of 1918 the license had passed to Phillip Woods.

  5

  Some peace, the Great Depression and another war

  WHEN William Woods came to the Terminus in 1918 he was already in his sixties. He had been born in Dublin in 1854. When he arrived in Sydney as a fireman working on a steamer in the 1880s, he decided to stay. He first became a publican in 1905 but according to family lore he lost the license after his wife, Margaret, sold beer illegally on a Sunday. The Woods had a large family and when their sons were old enough, the parents put up the money for them to take out publicans’ licenses. The pubs were run by the family, but William the patriarch was in charge. Their son Phillip got the license for the Terminus.

  The Woods family took over their most profitable pub. The leasehold was from Tooth and Co. and the licensee was the fourth son, Phillip Woods. Bill and Margaret had twelve children and many worked in the pub. My grandmother, Agnes Woods, had to do the floors and keep the stairs clean. Her sister, Molly, had to make the beds. My grandmother married Tobias O’Toole in 1927 at St Bede’s, Pyrmont, and everyone walked around the corner to the Terminus for the wedding breakfast.117

  A Pyrmont wedding. From left to right is William Woods, father of the bride and the unofficial publican of the Terminus, Kitty O’Toole, Tobias (Toby) O’Toole, Agnes Woods, Bridget (Dorrie)
Woods and Michael O’Toole. It’s the roaring twenties: the era of loud socks; loosely fitting, drop-waisted dresses; and short hemlines – even for bridal gowns.

  Photograph courtesy of Leonie Low, granddaughter of Agnes and Toby.

  When Agnes Woods married Toby O’Toole she was marrying into the most famous pub family in Pyrmont, whose hotel antecedents went back to the Green Tree in Harvey Street that was demolished for the railway cutting in 1916. There was a Tobias in every generation of O’Tooles and many of them were publicans. At the time of this marriage, there was a Tobias O’Toole running the Royal Pacific across the street, but the Tobias in this photograph was a carpenter and a grandson of the original Tobias. This wedding at St Bede’s would have been a real community affair.

  It was a good time to be running the pub. The war was over and there would be a decade of economic growth before the next body blow when the Great Depression hit. Animosity between unionists and ‘scabs’ on the wharves spilled over into violent clashes in 1924 with the result that some order was finally achieved in the way men were allocated work. The shipowners’ labour bureaus were abolished and six union-approved places called ‘pick-ups’ were designated for men to gather to be selected for work. One of them was on the corner of John and Harris Streets, diagonally opposite the Terminus, where a new pick-up building was constructed.118 The police stationed in Pyrmont Street were still kept busy keeping the peace and there were many news reports in the 1920s of violent run-ins between the police and gangs, including Pyrmont’s ‘Spider Gang’. These often ended in hospitalisations, arrests, jailings and occasionally death.119 Probationary officer Constable Walton got a rough initiation when he decided to arrest a man outside the Terminus for using indecent language. Half a dozen men set onto him, punched him in the face and knocked him to the ground where the crowd that had gathered ‘put in the boot.’ He was treated for abrasions and shock. This was mild compared to his colleague Constable Hardy, whose injuries on the job had resulted in him being lame for months. On another occasion when this constable had been involved in a fracas where a man was shot dead, he had ended up in hospital with concussion and a possible fractured head. But this happened in Ultimo and by the 1920s it was widely believed – at least in Pyrmont – that Ultimo was a step lower on the social ladder. There wasn’t much in it.