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  By 1923 William Woods, now about 70 years old, was probably doing little of the day-to-day work in the pub as he was running a business as a hotel broker from the Terminus. He would have been doing this with the blessing of Tooths because he advertised openly and often in the press. The advertisements could have done with a copy editor, and he was clearly not worried about kerbing his word count: ‘We advise you to have a look in and see us and have a chat and see our list before buying elsewhere. We have a car to inspect. Our only address: Woods and Co., Hotel Brokers, Terminus, 61 Harris St, Pyrmont. Phone MW1918.’120 This was probably the first time a publican’s car was regularly parked outside the hotel. The phone number is intriguing – Margaret Woods, and 1918, the date they arrived at the pub, perhaps?

  LICENSEES OF THE TERMINUS: 1918–55

  1918 LESLIE ALEXANDER PIPER121

  DECEMBER 1918 PHILLIP WOODS

  JULY 1927 JOHN KEANE

  SEPTEMBER 1927 LIONEL AUGUSTINE DEMPSEY

  FEBRUARY 1944 VERA OLIVE DEMPSEY

  In 1927 Phillip Woods relinquished the license, and William and Margaret Woods moved to Five Dock. They had moved into the Terminus when it was in mint condition after its 1917 remodelling – it was noted as a ‘building of good appearance, good bar and ample accommodation’.122 They had enjoyed some good years during the 1920s, and were getting out just in time to escape the Great Depression.

  DEMPSEY’S HOTEL

  Lionel Dempsey held the license of the Terminus from September 1927 until his death in February 1944. Then his wife, Vera, took over and ran it for a further 11 years until 1955. Thus the name of Dempsey became associated with the hotel through the dark days of the Great Depression when profits dried up and, through World War II, when the beer dried up and then into the peacetime of the 1950s when supplies still remained erratic.

  Dempsey had longstanding connections with the area. He had previously been the publican at the Bristol Arms in Harris Street in Ultimo. Then he was at the Kauri Hotel on Pyrmont Bridge Road in Glebe where he had taken over from Rebecca Mulholland. This is where Lionel married her daughter, Vera Mulholland. This marriage placed him inside another of Sydney’s large hotelier families. When the Dempseys arrived at the Terminus, they would already have been known to some in the community.

  No descendants of the Dempseys were located when this book was being written, but we know something of them through the Tooth & Co. records, which are more detailed for Lionel Dempsey than for any other licensee of the Terminus. This was probably because Dempsey caused the company more grief than anyone else and because the years of the Great Depression were difficult times for anyone to be a publican.

  For many years Dempsey did not make a profit from the Terminus: and if he did, those profits went on expenses rather than paying the hotel’s bills. In 1927 he paid £4000 cash and took on a loan of £1035 from Tooths to get a two-year lease.123 Tooths’ practice was to pay upfront for the licence. Then the new licensee would pay the company back whatever amount had been agreed between them as soon as it was granted. A year passed before Dempsey could see his way clear to pay anything. His modus operandi was to write letters fending off his obligations with vague claims that he was a good bloke and ran a good hotel. Tooth & Co. told him that this wasn’t good enough. With payments routinely missed, at the end of 1929 the company told him that he should sell out ‘as we understand that you would not be able to finance a new lease … ’124

  Dempsey sat on the letter for a couple of weeks, and then wrote:

  the notice to sell came as a big shock to me. Since first I took over this hotel I have had to face strike after strike, which means that in an industrial suburb such as this, whilst the spending power of the people is curtailed, one is practically compelled to give a good deal of trust, failing which one is boycotted when the trouble ceases.

  He also wrote that he had ‘absolutely refused to put the license in jeopardy by serving during prohibited hours’ and that he had been ‘complimented by the local police officer in charge, who by the way is a very strict but just man, on the way the business is run and the building kept.’ He said that while others were making illegal gains on Sundays, he usually spent his time fixing up things around the hotel. As to the little matter of not being able to pay his bills, he hoped that the company would allow him to pay in instalments. This presumably referred to the last lease; not the new one coming up.125

  One of Lionel Dempsey’s many letters to Tooth & Co. This letter is annotated with the word ‘predicted’ and the marked cross meant that no interview would be granted.

  Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Tooth & Co. papers, N60/2633.

  NEGOTIATING THE DEPRESSION

  Tooths probably decided that the way to get Dempsey out of the hotel was to offer him the new lease and wait until he was unable to stump up the money. This is what actually happened. Dempsey kept proposing ever more lenient payment options and Tooths kept giving him deadlines until he admitted defeat, although he suggested that if only the general manager would grant him an interview, he could put his case ‘in a better light’. And maybe he did, because he did finally get an interview at 11 am on a Saturday in February 1930. Following this meeting, the payment of a lease was shelved and Dempsey was put on a weekly tenancy of £30 ‘until trade improves’.126

  Trade was on the skids. Dempsey was right to argue the effects of the strikes. There had been a particularly serious one on the waterfront in late 1928 when a conservative government’s attempt to give preference for non-unionised labour had resulted in violent clashes. Today, waterside workers are considered to be well paid, but back then the work was dangerous and erratic, and the wages uncertain. Aside from strikes, it was a long downturn in the economy that would provide the most significant cuts to his hotel trade. Woods had traded about 750 barrels and over 1800 dozen bottles in 1927. By the end of 1929, these amounts had fallen to 454 barrels and 1272 dozen bottles. During 1930, Dempsey saw an even more dramatic fall in trade, which was down to 292 barrels and 856 dozen bottles.127 A Tooths’ internal memo later that year recorded that they had changed their mind about Dempsey: it had been thought that ‘Dempsey has been unable to hold the trade, but of course, it is quite likely that in the past a lot of after hour trade was done’.128 This was surely a reference to Woods and to the attitude of the police. Dempsey told them that the police were ‘strict but just’, which was code for saying they were watching him like a hawk.

  Whatever they had thought of Dempsey earlier, it was now time to believe that he was a loyal publican who purchased all his goods from Tooth & Co., and that he was doing his best in impossible circumstances. The company was facing a drop in liquor sales everywhere, but especially in a hard-bitten place like Pyrmont. Tooth & Co. was coming to terms with the reality that by now economic conditions were seriously depressed and that this was not the time to let go of a publican in the hand.

  Tooths had done the figures, which indicated that Dempsey really did make very small earnings. It concluded that if the company was to take possession of the Terminus, ‘trading expenses would exceed profits’. It was decided to lower his weekly rent even further to £20 although the company ‘expected an improvement shortly’.129 That is the trouble with economic depressions: no-one thought it would bite as deep or drag on as long as it did. There was no improvement. Dempsey’s rent was again reduced to £15, then by the end of 1931, it was reduced to £10. He was still on this weekly rent in 1936.

  The mood across Pyrmont was sombre. The out-of-work people intensified their efforts to live off the land, pinching goods from the wharves and the markets, getting meat offcuts from the Darling Harbour meatworks siding, begging or stealing the wood blocks used to build the roads from the Council depot in Wattle Street to heat the kitchen stove. By mid-1928, the Pyrmont Soup Kitchen in Union Street was providing over 1000 free meals a week, as well as soups and ‘edible dripping’. The depression in Pyrmont was such that this organisation was still operating at the end of the 1930s.130 Pa
rt of the large, old sandstone building that still stands on the corner of Union and Harris Streets opposite Union Square operated as the Pyrmont Hostel for the Unemployed. It provided beds for 160 men and it also functioned throughout the 1930s.131

  Those who were still in work had their hours cut, and wages fell. Competition for wharf work intensified and often men at the pick-up went home empty-handed. Award wages for bar staff were cut by 10 per cent in 1931 and a further 10 per cent in 1932. This would not have compensated the Dempseys for the lack of trade. Probably Lionel and Vera tried to manage as best they could with a minimum of staff.

  Life did not stop, of course. Local churches and sports clubs continued to offer free diversions and a visit to Wentworth Park to watch the midget car and motor cycle races did not cost much. The park was rundown, like everything else in the area, until the end of the 1930s when it was spruced up for a new greyhound track that brought the workingman’s races to the area.132 Cheap entertainment included a visit to the Pyrmont Baths. These had been partially destroyed in 1928 through a collision with a passing ship. Officially, it was an accident, although the locals believed it was a deliberate prelude to removing their much-loved baths to make way for additional wharves. Thanks to the Depression, these wharves were not built, and the locals spent weekends mending their baths that remained in use until 1946, informally administered by the Pyrmont Amateur Swimming Club. They became a symbol of community resilience and also of how little the government ever did for Pyrmont.

  THE TROUBLES OF DEMPSEY

  Lionel Dempsey had good reason to be careful around the police as he already had a conviction against him. A decade earlier, when he was at the Bristol Arms, he had been up on a charge for robbery from the Argyle Bond Stores in The Rocks. The alleged stolen items were whisky and many yards of material – silk, serge and velveteen. The total value of the haul was £1050. When the police paid a visit to the Bristol Arms and found a lot of Johnny Walker whiskey in the cellar, Dempsey told them that he had bought it from Tooths a few weeks back. When it was pointed out that the numbers on the cases corresponded with the numbers on the ones stolen from the Argyle Stores, he had to change his story. He said that he had found the cases in a shed at the rear of his hotel. Later, a returned soldier, whom he named, turned up at the hotel and he had paid him for the whisky. The charge of stealing was dropped and Dempsey was found guilty only of receiving stolen goods. He was bound over to appear for sentencing if the court called on him within the next twelve months. It seems that nothing more happened, and the implication was that the law needed to go easy because he was just helping out a soldier. Back then the town was full of disoriented and unemployed returned soldiers.133 Some of them never recovered from the horrors of World War I, and some returned soldiers were sleeping at the unemployed shelter in Harris Street when they weren’t lining up at the dole office in the city.

  By September 1930, Dempsey was £731 17s 4d in arrears to Tooths and there was a bill of sale over the stock and furniture in the hotel as security to the company.134 He did pay small amounts above his weekly rent in order to bring down his arrears, but for several years he couldn’t pay one-off large amounts such as the water rates, so the company paid them and added the cost to his account. By 1932 all property values had been written down, which meant the rates went down, but he still couldn’t pay them. As the depression wore on the Terminus, like other pubs in the area, became run down for lack of maintenance. By 1932 the plasterwork and plumbing needed attention and the floor of the private entrance was ‘falling away’. Police orders under the Licensing Act noted the unacceptable state of the bathroom ceiling in 1933, the state of the down pipes and the corrosion of the laundry chimney in 1934. And so on.

  The time-honoured practice at Tooths’ hotels was for the company to pay for some aspects of building maintenance of their properties, but the publican was to maintain the interiors and furnishings, and for one-off items such as upgrades of bar equipment, costs were to be shared equally. There were strict guidelines determining who paid for what, just as there were minutely calculated protocols for determining the rents and license repayments. In practice it often came down to a haggling match between publicans and the company.

  There was a small economic upturn by 1936, which was enough to persuade Dempsey to undertake a few internal repairs at his own expense while the company accepted a tender for some exterior paintwork. It also decided that something had to be done about the beer-drawing equipment that was old and inefficient. Dempsey put forward a half-baked plan that would cost him little, but the advice from the Tooths’ company man who had inspected it was that ‘as the plant needs replacing with an up-to-date one, I would not recommend lifting the ice boxes from the floor – as a matter of fact I doubt whether they would hold together if disturbed’.135 He outlined his recommendations for new equipment and said that he had suggested to Mr. Dempsey that he pay half as this was the usual arrangement. Predictably, Dempsey said he could not afford this payment although he would like the latest plant ‘considering the Tooheys opposition of the Royal Pacific hotel opposite’. The need to keep up with the competition was a winning argument and the report was annotated ‘Install without cost to licensee’.136

  Tooth & Co. knew that in general the hotel trade was on the upturn and that investment in their hotels was now essential; however, the Terminus had barely turned the corner. Draught beer sales had hit rock bottom in 1931 with only 199 barrels purchased at the hotel. Things didn’t improve much until 1938. By 1939 sales had climbed back to 390 barrels and 814 dozen bottles, but this was still nothing like the sales that Dempsey experienced when he first began as licensee of the Terminus in 1927. Just how long the Great Depression lasted depends on how it is calculated, but the takings at Dempsey’s pub support the argument that for many workers, things remained tough right up until World War II.

  The company ran hot and cold on how many repairs it would finance, and Dempsey regularly received notices from the licensing police to limewash the cellar, replace the window sashes, replace the lino, kalsomine the ceilings and so on. By 1937 the roof was leaking and it was still leaking years later. The floors were in trouble; the company had to do something. A building application was approved for reinforcements to the cellar that included new piers and joists under the bar floor.137 When the bath heater collapsed and Dempsey asked for a new one, the company’s instructions were to require him to pay his half of the cost but that if he didn’t pay (and they knew he wouldn’t), then the company was to just ‘pay it – he has been loyal’.138 Loyalty meant buying only from Tooths, including their Blue Bow brand of cordial and drink mixers, cigarettes and equipment from company-preferred suppliers.

  WHAT IS A PUBLICAN?

  Strictly speaking, whoever owns a hotel is the publican and whoever runs a hotel is the licensee. From 1899 onwards, the publican of the Terminus was Tooth & Co. However, nobody ever thought of it in these terms. Most people understood the person who held the license and ran the pub was the publican. The term ‘publican’ is often used in this book to keep it simple.

  The complex role of publicans was highlighted by the difficulties of the Depression. In 1929 the Australian Labor Party conference debated whether to exclude from membership anyone who was a member of the ULVA (United Licensed Victuallers Association). This was a federation of employers, some said, while others argued that publicans were employed by Tooths and that if they weren’t workers, at least they were good friends of the workers. One such friend was John Armstrong. Known as the Golden Barman, this Pyrmont boy got his early education at St Bede’s Primary School, was the president of the Pyrmont branch of the ALP, a City Alderman, the Federal Minister for Munitions during the war and Australian High Commissioner in London. He was given a state funeral, but in the annals of Pyrmont history, he is always remembered as the publican of the Butchers Arms, now the Dunkirk, as was his father before him. In the end, the ALP conference did not take the step of expelling ULVA members.139

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p; Publicans were ambivalent. On the one hand, with the hotels tied to the large breweries that owned the property, applied strict rules and took a large share of the profits, the publicans often felt like employees. On the other hand, they were running a business and the ultimate aim was to make a profit. In good times, many of them made excellent profits that led to them becoming some of the wealthiest people in Pyrmont. Here, the vote went mostly to the ALP and publicans all knew that the support of the workers who drank at their bars was crucial to their livelihoods. All the publicans supported local charities and church bazaars. Lionel Dempsey and Margaret Singleton, the long-time licensee of the Royal Pacific across the road, both provided chairs from their bars for the election polling booth at St Bede’s Church.140

  WAR BRINGS PROFIT

  Tooth & Co. saw the upturn in the Terminus’s takings from 1938 as an opportunity to ‘try to get him to agree to greater payment in reduction of arrears’ and to put Dempsey back onto a regular footing with his payments. A three-year license was negotiated in 1939 with the company requiring ‘a thorough paint and repair throughout the whole hotel’.141 By the following year, much of the work had still not been done, and it was becoming difficult to obtain labour or materials as preference was given to making these available for wartime requirements. The war meant heightened activity on the wharves and in many industries across the peninsula. It was also bringing drinkers back to the pub, but it would be years before there were materials to restore the Terminus to the way it had looked in the 1920s.