Planning for a Working Class Lifestyle Upgrade, a Template for the Sydney Garden Suburb: Daceyville, NSW

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Built Environment, Environmental, Heritage & Conservation, Local history, Town planning

At the tail end of the decade that the Haberfield model suburb (1901) made its appearance, the southern Sydney suburb of Daceyville was on the cusp of undergoing a comparable urban planning experiment. Like Haberfield, Dacey Model Suburb drew inspiration and impetus from the British Garden City and Arts and Crafts Movement which advocated new urban centres with an emphasis on better and genuinely innovative planning to create self-contained communities comprising ‘greenbelt’ areas (farming one’s own crops, community beautification programs, aesthetically designed formal gardens and so on)✱.

Whereas the creative and financial impetus driving the Haberfield project [see ‘Planning for Suburban Bliss, a Template for the Sydney Garden Suburb: Haberfield, NSW’] was private enterprise and it was targeted at a market of middle class clients, the Dacey “Model Suburb” was a government-funded program, public planning aimed at improving the lot of the working class. Both though were born out of a desire to provide a social reform model to planners to avoid the trap of overcrowded, slum suburbs which were plaguing Sydney’s inner city at the turn of the 20th century.
⍐ Dacey Model Suburb (Sydney), map circa 1920

JR Dacey MLA, catalyst for change
State Labor MLA (Member for Legislative Assembly) for Botany John Rowland Dacey worked tirelessly for much of his parliamentary term to create a low-cost housing community for the working class in his electorate. Dacey urged that Sydney adopt the British Garden City model introduced in Letchworth in the West Midlands✥. In 1909 there was a Royal Commission “for the improvement of Sydney” which pointed the way, the following year’s election of the first NSW Labor Government clinched it! In 1912 the newly created NSW Housing Board’s⍟ first task was to construct a new, model suburb seven kilometres south of the city. Unfortunately it occurred too late for Dacey to see its completion, the MP died that in April of that year, posthumously the suburb was named Daceyville in recognition of Dacey’s efforts to make it a reality [Sinnayah, Samantha, ‘Daceyville’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2011, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/daceyville, viewed 25 Jul 2018].

⍐ The land allocated for the Garden City prior to the project’s commencement

⍗ Solander Road, DGS (www.records.nsw.gov.au)

Dacey Garden Suburb
Dacey Garden Suburb was Australia’s first (low-cost) public housing scheme, promising to free those on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder from the spectre of exorbitantly high rents and woefully sub-standard accommodation, giving members of the working class a better quality of life. Not everyone in public life approved of the Daceyville project…the conservative forces in state parliament labelled it ‘Audaciousville’, arguing, predictably, that government should not be in the public rental market. Led by Charles Wade, the outgoing premier and leader of the NSW Liberal Reform Party, the dissenters vigorously but unsuccessfully opposed the 1912 Housing Bill that brought the Daceyville estate into being [ibid.].

profusion of blueprints
Three distinct street layouts were drawn up for the Dacey Garden housing experiment. The first was a Public Works plan, the second by John Sulman (who also had a guiding hand in the early planning of Haberfield) in association with John Hennessy. After outside criticism was voiced about the scheme by Charles Reade (from the British Garden Cities and Town Planning Association), government architect William H Foggitt was called in to produce a third, extensively revised street plan. Viewed today, Daceyville bears the distinguishing marks of both architects: the layout of the broadly expansive Cook and Banks Avenues (designed by Sulman) are in sharp contract with the smaller, more curvy lines of the streets to their east (designed by Foggitt)❂ [ibid].

As a new and novel planning project Dacey Garden Suburb (DGS) was ambitious and broad in its scale…intended to occupy 443 acres with a density of seven cottages per acre. It was to be a self-contained residential unit and made provision for shops, schools, churches, amusement halls, police and fire stations and a technical college. A tram line was connected to Daceyville in 1913. Industrial and manufacturing activity was to be excluded from the site [‘Federation-House – Dacey Garden Suburb’, https://federationhouse.wikispaces.com/].

The first task facing the government and its contractors was preparing the land which proved a surmountable task but one that was particularly formidable. Sand dunes and sandy scrub soil had first to be removed before work could commence on shaping the streets into an orderly pattern. Constructing a giant stormwater drain was also a preliminary step. After these obstacles were overcome, things went ahead with some 67 houses finished by June 1913 [‘Daceyville – The Creation of a Garden Suburb’, NSW Anzac Centenary, www.nswanzaccentenary.records.nsw.gov.au

A prescriptive suburb
The first families to move in were selected by ballot. The Housing Board, with JD (Jack) Fitzgerald directing the bureaucratic wheels, determined that the Garden Suburb would adhere to certain, strict principles (somewhat analogous to Richard Stanton’s ‘covenant’ for his Haberfield estates): some heterogeneity in cottage designs and room sizes and arrangements but no front fences were permitted (facilitating a merging of private and public green space), residential streets were to be curved to create vistas, no back lanes or pubs – which were “synonymous with slums” [‘Dacey Garden Suburb: a report for Daceyville Heritage Conservation Area within its historical context’, (Susan Jackson-Stepowski, Botany Bay Council – 2002), www.botanybaycouncil.nsw.gov.au]

Financial encumbrances to work
House production in the estate experienced a slowdown after 1915 however due to a lack of funds available for the project. Rising building costs partly accounted for this, but officially the government cited the existence of an “acute financial position” as a result of the national commitment required for the war effort in Europe [‘Daceyville – The Creation of a Garden Suburb’, op.cit.; Sinnayah, op.cit.]

The new ‘deserving’ for Dacey’s low-cost housing
The onset of the Great War eventually led to a shift in Dacey Garden Suburb’s raison d’être from workers to war veterans. It started in 1916 when 50 war widows were provided housing in the new estate…three years later resettling returning WWI servicemen became the overriding imperative in housing policy❆, relegating the needs of the working class to a secondary status [Sinnayah, ibid.]. The naming policy for the estate’s streets also reflected this trend – when the project started in 1912 DGS streets were mostly named after famous explorers (or the ships of famous explorers) from the past…there was Wills Crescent, Burke Crescent, Banks Avenue, Solander Road. After the Australian experience in Gallipoli, the street names chosen gave tribute to military figures from the campaign…Captain Jacka Crescent, Sargeant Larkin Crescent, and so on [Anzac Centenary, ibid.].

Banks Ave ⍗

A quantitative shortfall!
The difficulties (production costs, etc) meant that when the Daceyville Estate’s last rental property was finished in June 1920, only 315 out of the planned 1,473 cottages had been built. Construction of the amenities and infrastructure for the Dacey Garden Suburb also fell well short of what had been planned [Sinnayah, op.cit.].

Later Nationalist governments in NSW (forerunner of the Liberal-Country Party) did their best to undermine the Daceyville scheme by introducing private ownership in the model suburb (eg, the southern part of Daceyville, now in Pagewood, was subdivided and offered for sale to the public). Other ongoing threats came from government proposals in the 1960s to bulldoze the estate to make way for the Eastern Suburbs railway route through Kingsford, and from developers seeking to transform the suburb’s character by flooding it with high-rise, high-density buildings [Jackson-Stepowski, op.cit.].

DGS’s legacy
Despite the setbacks and checks placed on it, the Dacey Garden Suburb site has survived substantially in government hands (eg, only a tiny proportion of residents accepted the government’s offer in 1965 to buy their properties). The estate’s future character and use is protected by a strict Development Control Plan (administered by Housing NSW) and its heritage listing safeguards it from the bulldozers [Sinnayah, op.cit.].

⍗ Public housing, Gen. Bridges Cres.

DGS’s achievements were limited and the experiment failed to grow beyond its initial (Daceyville) area size and it failed to become self-sufficient (a British Garden City imperative). As well its early low-density advantages were somewhat undermined by subsequent subdivisions. However the experiment managed to achieve a number of pioneering advances in construction and urban planning…innovative building materials and techniques were employed, especially in the early cottages which incorporated tuck-pointed brick work, roughcast rendered walls, tiles roofs and local federation style joinery details. Over time, as the project’s finances ebbed, the size and quality of the houses diminished♦. Colonel Braund Crescent is one of the more innovative street features of DGS – being Australia’s first planned cul-de-sac [Jackson-Stepowski, op.cit.].

The garden suburb’s centrepiece
The very deliberate planning of DGS from the start resulted in the creation of a large garden park which formed a “central gateway’, a focal point off which the main avenues of the suburb fanned out to form a curved grid triangle. The park and other communal open spaces helped to foster a sense of civic identity among the Daceyvillites. The suburb’s commercial use facilities were grouped together near this hub to clearly separate them from the residential sector. John Sulman’s street layout reflected the architect’s predilection for wide, sweeping boulevards à la Paris. All roads were asphalted and footpaths were concreted and turfed. The public domain reserves and parks were all landscaped to match the street symmetry⊡ [ibid.].

The early residents benefitted tangibly from the delivery of services – such as sewerage connection, water, gas and electricity, curb and guttering of streets – these boons of modernity reached the Daceyville estate well before they got to many other parts of Sydney. Moreover, large verandahs and attractive backyard gardens gave residents access to fresh air and natural sunlight houses.

A win for the working class?
Dacey Garden Suburb was “a test case for state intervention in the real estate market” and it did demonstrate that the government could be “an effective provider of housing” [ibid.]. How much however individual working class families benefitted from the opening-up of DGS, is a matter of conjecture. To be eligible to participate in the ballot that determined the lucky beneficiaries of low-rent and low-density accommodation in the suburb, the sole stipulation was that applicants did not own land with a dwelling on it…being wealthy was not a barrier, the process was sorely lacking a “means test” to satisfy the criteria of financial hardship and genuine need! Moreover, as mentioned earlier, the practice after 1918 changed to one of allocating houses to war veterans and their families in preference to workers.

PostScript 1: Dacey model suburb theatre
Photo (above) (NSW Archives and Records Office) Dacey Garden Suburb had its own theatre, Daceyville ‘Little Tivoli Theatre’, General Bridges Crescent…initially it showed silent films, but later it provided ‘live’ performances of Vaudevillian style (Music Hall) entertainment with a variety of stage acts – including comedy skits, acrobats and jugglers, magic acts, kids and animals acts, musical performances and so on – as the billboard below indicates. The theatre burnt down in 1985.

Top of the bill at the Little Tivoli – tuning up for Broadway!

PostScript 2: Earlier, unsuccessful Sydney attempts at “forward-thinking” estates and subdivisions
In the late 1880s there were several attempts, both within Sydney and outside, to create a garden suburb – including San Souci (1887) (advertised to attract middle class families as “safe from the horrors of city living” (ie, the inner city slums!), Harcourt (1888) (Canterbury, NSW) and Kensington Model Suburb (1889) (which promised to combine the benefits of rural and urban life). All of these ventures came to zilch due to the prevailing conditions of (the 1890s) depression, drought and labour unrest [ibid].

︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺
✱ the Garden City Movement in Britain itself tapped to some extent into the contemporary City Beautiful Movement (CBM), a 1890s North American reform movement in architecture and urban planning. CBM, characterised by urban beautification and monumental grandeur, aimed at boosting quality of life in the cities and promoting a harmonious social order [‘City beautiful movement’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org]
✥ when the green light was eventually given for the Dacey model suburb, the scheme sought to faithfully adopt the Letchworth template – an overabundance of green spaces, a happy mix of town and country
⍟ forerunner of the later Housing Commission of NSW (now called Housing NSW)
❂ having several individual architects taking charge at different periods resulted in considerable variety in dwellings – free-standing cottages, attached, semi-detached, some two-storey houses, etc.
❆ already in 1916 a 40 acre soldier settlement had been established at nearby Matraville
♦ the estate’s houses reflect the range of architectural styles in use at the time – “Arts and Crafts” cottages, Californian bungalows and the adaptation of some local Federation style designs
⊡ all of which no doubt contributed to Sulman’s fulsome assessment of Daceyville as “an exemplar of what a Garden Suburb should be”

Planning for Suburban Bliss, a Template for the Sydney Garden Suburb: Haberfield, NSW

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Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, Local history, Town planning

In previous blogs I described one architect’s attempt to bring his vision of an ideal garden suburb to fruition – Walter Burley Griffin’s shaping of a suburb and a community (Castlecrag) out of Sydney’s Middle Harbour bushland✱. Griffin’s Castlecrag project was in fact not the first attempt at a model suburb in Sydney. Preceding it by a decade or more were three separate experiments at Daceyville, Haberfield and Rosebery. Each were very different in nature and purpose to Griffin’s “democratic utopian” vision for the remote, leafy North Shore promontory. This post will address the first of these garden suburb concepts to be launched, in the inner-west suburb of Haberfield.

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Background: Slum city
In the aftermath of the gold rushes in the 19th century, the larger cities in Australia, especially Sydney, experienced surges in population. This brought with it social problems and dire health and hygiene implications for the inner city urban centre. Around the city terrace buildings were flung up with masses of people corralled together within them. Sanitation issues – a lack of sewerage, dirty alleys with no drainage, poor ventilation, toxic substances, infectious diseases, systemic poverty and low wages, made for slum creation. This mirrored the same problem facing town authorities elsewhere overseas. Almost inevitably, the appalling health conditions around the overcrowded inner city led to an eruption of Bubonic plague in Sydney in 1900◈ – this starkly brought home to city planners the extreme perils of life in Sydney’s slums.

The British Garden City Movement
Reformers in Britain around the turn-of-the-century, observed the Dickensian effect industrialisation was having on contemporary British cities and were determined to do something about it…the British Garden City Movement (BCM) was the outcome. As an antidote to the dystopian urban landscape of Victorian Britain, proponents of BCM advocated a new, greener type of community. Spearheading the movement was social reformer Ebenezer Howard whose influential 1898 book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform book⊟ pointed the way.

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A synthesis of town and country virtues
Howard called for a new approach to urban planning, illustrated by his “Three Magnets” diagram (above) in which the best of town and countryside were combined in the one community. His radical new societal model envisaged “networks of garden cities that would break the stronghold of capitalism and lead to cooperative socialism” [‘Ebenezer Howard’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Two English garden cities based on Howard’s ideas❂ soon materialised, Letchworth Garden City (proclaimed as the world’s first garden city – from 1904) and Welwyn Garden City, both in Herefordshire (English West Midlands). Integral to BCM cities like Letchworth and Welwyn were formal garden plans. Although limited in their success they did inspire similar community projects in cities as geographically disparate as Canberra and Riga [‘Garden city movement’, Wikipedia,http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Haberfield, the Federation Suburb
It was John Sulman, an immigrant architect from the UK, who was instrumental in spreading the BCM ideas in Sydney. Sulman pioneered the practice of town planning in Australia and promoted garden city principles as seen in Canberra’s Civic Centre. Real estate agent Richard Stanton sought to apply those principles to the part of the area of the old Dobroyde⌑ ‘Farm’ Estate (about 6km west of Sydney’s CBD) which he purchased from the Ramsey family⍟.

image
⇧ Early map of the area with Ramsey St located between the two coves, Iron & Long

Stanton’s covenant for Haberfield
1901, the year after the Sydney Plague’s initial outbreak, Stanton launched his plans for a healthy, model residential suburb free of the pernicious squalor infecting the inner city…the property agent laid down a covenant for his new garden estate which future lot-buyers had to accept⌖ – cottages would be of single-storey◘, modest but of good quality (bricks and stone, slate or tiles); allotments would be of generous size; there would be integrated drainage and a sewered system on all lots; streets would have rows of planted trees; gardens would be established before owners occupied their lots; there would be no hotels, factories or corner shops. Stanton’s catch cry for the estate was “slumless, laneless and publess!” As the estate commenced in the year of Australian Federation, 1901, and because pro-Federation Stanton named many of the early streets after contemporary politicians (comprising most of the members of the inaugural Federal (Barton) cabinet), the label Federation suburb stuck to Haberfield[‘Haberfield Heritage Conservation Area’ (Ashfield Municipal Council, Development Control Plan 2007), www.state-heritage.wa.gov.au].

⇩ Stanton & Son , Summer Hill (architect: JSE Ellis)

From a blot on the landscape to middle class dreams
Stanton was clearly not trying to create a housing community for the working class, his new garden estate was intended to attract the aspirational middle class home purchaser. Turning “Ramsey’s Bush” into a better lifestyle community, a better class of suburb, made sure that it would not develop the slum-pattern at that time of much of the city to its east. The entire Dobroyd area was still only sparsely settled by 1900 (there were large chunks of bush and scrub being used as a rubbish dump). It was showing signs of becoming a haven for transients with the presence of vagrants (many made unemployed in the 1890s depression), some indigenous people and a “Gypsie camp” in Alt Street…hence Stanton’s haste to alter the landscape [Jackson-Stepowski, Sue, ‘Haberfield’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/haberfield, viewed 19 Jul 2018].

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⇧ Classic Haberfield Federation (Tressider St)

To avoid the unsightly rows of tenements most everywhere else in the inner-west, dwellings had to be detached…in the original (200 hectares) estate they were characteristically double-brick and sat on their own block of land with a size minimum 50′ x 150′. Initially, total house cost was set at £40 (raised to £50 the following year). All houses had front verandahs and the roofs were either slate or Marseilles tile [‘Haberfield, New South Wales’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

To create a garden suburb along the lines of the British model, Stanton, working with his associate WH Nichols, meticulously planned estates that would deliver space and fresh air to residents who could connect with nature, the covenant decreed that fences between neighbours were to be low so as to make the effect of a continuous garden. Streets were to be relatively wide (the “no lanes” credo), houses set back from them and there was to be a strict separation between the suburb’s commercial and residential strips [‘Haberfield – The Model Garden Suburb’ (Joshua Favaloro, Haberfield Association), www.haberfield.asn.au].

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⇧ Stanton & Son’s real estate reach extended across Sydney – advertisement for land at Maroubra, 1918 (State Library of NSW)

The Estate agent and councillor took a holistic view of the property business…marketing and selling properties was only part of Stanton’s business scope. In his work in developing Haberfield and other estates Stanton took a vertically integrated approach. Going beyond the standard estate agent’s purview, the company in addition provided term finance, building materials, fixtures and fittings and landscape gardeners [Jackson-Stepowski, op.cit.].

Architect on board
The many dwellings erected on Stanton’s Haberfield estates were the antithesis of the “kit home”, they were all individually designed (and therefore each one was a little different, but still each was harmonious with the whole)…Stanton and Son had the services of its own company architect, John Spencer-Stansfield [ibid.]. The architectural firm of Spencer-Stansfield and Wormald constructed around 1,500 (Fed/bungalow styles) houses in Haberfield and the adjoining areas.


⇧ Memorial sculpture to RPL Stanton, Haberfield

Stanton’s success in bringing his particular vision of an ideal suburb to life, getting things done, was no doubt made easier by his twice being elected as Mayor of Ashfield (Haberfield’s council area) during this period.

Things didn’t turn out quite so well for Richard Stanton in the end. Despite his success in developing Haberfield as a desirable residential location for homebuyers and in his company’s track record in house sales right across metropolitan Sydney (by 1924 he had eight suburban offices), he took a huge hit in the Depression (like so many in business), his investments stagnated and he died in debt during WWII [Terry Kass, ‘Stanton, Richard Patrick Joseph (1862–1943)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/stanton-richard-patrick-joseph-8626/text15071, published first in hardcopy 1990, accessed online 18 July 2018].

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Federation continuities
A saunter through the streets of Haberfield today reveals the extent of Richard Stanton’s legacy. The 1900s bungalows – both the Californian and the Arts and Crafts style (such as the Bunyas above, in Rogers Ave) – still survive and in their original form. And unlike the neighbouring suburbs of Summer Hill and Ashfield, Federation Haberfield has avoided the blight of having block-to-block rows of multi-level units and flats dominating its streetscape.

image
⇧ Ramsey Street (1910s-20s) (Source: State Lib. of NSW)

PostScript: Subdividing Dobroyd
Stanton followed the original Haberfield Estate with a second estate south of Ramsey Street (St David’s Estate) in 1902…by 1912 the company had opened up three more estates (including Dobroyd Point) for settlement in the suburb. In 1905 a rival land agent, the Haymarket Land, Building and Investment Company entered the turf, opening up part of its Dobroyde Estate as well as the new Northcote Estate (designed by another Sydney realty luminary of the day, Arthur Rickard, who was also involved in the selling of the Dobroyd Point Estate). Haymarket LBI Co was less prescriptive than Stanton & Son in its earlier subdivisions permitting some narrow weatherboard houses [Ramsey Family History, ‘The Dobroyde Estate’, http://belindacohen.tripod.com/ramsayfamilyhistory/].

___________________________________________________________________

✱ see the earlier posts ‘The Wizard of Castlecrag I: Utopia in a Garden Suburb’, ‘The Wizard of Castlecrag II: Keeping Faith with the Landscape’, ‘Dreaming the Ideal Community: the Brilliant Collaboration of Mahony and Griffin’, September 2014

◈ The Rocks and the waterfront areas of the city were the initial eruption points for the plague (Ashfield was also affected)

⊟ revised in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-Morrow

❂ Howard’s own influences were Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 and Henry George’s equalitarian treatise on political economy, Progress and Poverty

⌑ the ‘e‘ was later dropped

⍟ Dr David Ramsey was one of the early land-holders in what became Haberfield, known informally for many years as “Ramsey’s Bush”. Haberfield’s main road, Ramsey Street, which bisects the suburb from east to west, is named for him

⌖ prospective homeowners were given interviews in an office in Ramsey Street where they could propose what design they wanted for their home – which had to conform with the covenant to be approved to go ahead

◘ Stanton breached his own covenant designed to safeguard the single-storeyed character of Haberfield’s homes when he built the disproportionately large, two-storey ‘Bunyas’, [‘The Dobroyde Estate’, op.cit.]

 

Remembrances of a Juvenile Bookworm: Old Street Directories I have had the Pleasure of … (Part 3)

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Built Environment, Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Local history, Media & Communications, Memorabilia, Social History

The further I delved into my “war-ravaged” copy of Wilson’s 1922 Authentic Director of Sydney and Suburbs, the more snippets of hitherto unearthed information, little gems of Sydney’s yesterday, I stumbled upon.

Among the minutiae of miscellaneous info contained in the directory’s index, one item that got my attention was a list of the consuls and overseas government agents in Sydney in 1922. Interesting to see that at that time there were consulate offices established in Sydney for tiny international entities like Latvia, Nicaragua, Columbia, Ecuador, Honduras, Serbia and the Czechoslovak Republic, but being not yet four years after the cessation of the hostilities of WWI, no consulates for the countries deemed by the victors to be the “guilty parties”, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Turkey. So much for moving on!!!…and we all know where that path catastrophically led!

Another curio I discovered was that among the State and Commonwealth government departments listed in the index, there were several with city addresses in Richmond Tce, The Domain. The questionably named Aborigines (spelt ‘Aborogines’) Protection Board, the Pharmacy Board of NSW, the Dental Board of NSW, the Medical Board of NSW, the Metropolitan Meat Industry Board and the Inspector-General of the Insane(sic) were all located in this east side of the city street…interesting in that this street, Richmond Terrace no longer exists!

Ad for the Orient Line

A total of forty-six shipping line companies were recorded as having offices in Sydney’s CBD. These included British-India SN Co, China-Australia Mail SS Line, Nippon Yusen Kaisha, the Adelaide Steamship Company, New Guinea, New Britain and the Solomon Islands (Line), the White Star Line✲ and the more contemporarily familiar P & O Line. Only one of the 46 placed a (full-paged and quite detailed) ad in the directory, the Australia to Britain Orient Line.

Royal Autos in ‘Wilson’s’

City clubs and buildings of interest
In a section of the index Wilson’s lists the various clubs, chambers, banks and arcades that formed part of the cityscape in 1922. The more ‘highbrow’ of the clubs, predominately “Gentlemen’s” establishments, tended to congregate ‘uptown’ (the end closer to Circular Quay) considered to be the smarter and more affluent part of the city. The clubs included the Australian Club (corner of Bent and Macquarie Sts)[¹], the Automobile Club of Australia (132 Phillip St)[²], the Country Club (17 Castlereagh St), the Catholic Club (107 Castlereagh St ), Masonic Club (216 Pitt St)[³], the N.S.W. Club (Bligh St)[⁴], the Soldiers’ Club (426 George St), the Union Club (2 Bligh St)[⁵], the Warrigal Club (145 Macquarie St). Also in the city were clubs associated with the sport (and business) of horse racing – these three used to be situated in the CBD, the Australian Jockey Club (now the Australian Turf Club) (8 Bligh St), the Canterbury Park Race Club (15 Castlereagh St) and the Rosehill Racing Club (32 Elizabeth St). Another city club intricately linked to horse racing is Tattersall’s Club (202-204 Pitt St). Traditionally the haunt of old style bookmakers, “City Tatts” as it is better known, still stands and operates on its original land, 123 years after its foundation.

The 1922 city’s chambers are a predictable lot with numerous entities bearing largely homogenous Anglo-(Saxon)Celtic names scattered around Phillip Street, the traditional law hub of the city. That equally upstanding and status quo affirming pillar of society in that day, the banks, are spread over a wide radius of the CBD. The only point of note about them is discovering that in the 1920s Australia financial climate, with regulation of the sector very tight, two foreign banks had Sydney branches and were allowed to trade here at that time… the French National d’Escompté de Paris, a forerunner of Banque National de Paris? (24 Hunter St) and even more surprisingly, the Japanese Bank (Falmouth Chambers, 117 Pitt St).

The original (1907) Challis House

One of the city buildings identified in Wilson’s Director with a busy and interesting history is Challis House, N⍛ 4-10 Martin Place. Eponymously named after merchant and University of Sydney benefactor John Henry Challis, the House has a long association with the University as well as many financial tenants over the decades. During WWI it was used as the recruiting campaign headquarters for New South Wales. The office building at the time of Wilson’s publication was in its original Victorian architectural state…in the Thirties it received a new (Art Deco) facade and later in 1993 it underwent major renovations [‘Challis House’, Sydney Architecture, www.sydneyarchitecture.com]

Blue Mountains – a “Tourist’s Guide”
Although it’s a street directory whose ambit is Sydney and suburbs, the Wilson’s directory ends with an extensive section (73pp) on the Blue Mountains. The entry even encompasses the town of Lithgow (also called ‘Eskbank’ in 1922) which is 15 miles west of the Blue Mountains. The book has lots of detailed information on the BM suburbs, each suburb has an entry on accommodation and the scenic natural highlights of the Mountains with select maps indicating points of interest.

The “Half-way House” of Blue Mts

The directory gives a picture of Springwood, the largest of the Lower Mountains towns✥, that suggests a warm place in an otherwise cold region – “sheltered by its westerly walls from the cooler air of the higher altitudes…pleasant sunshine all year round…in winter the climate is so equable that many families make Springwood a permanent residence”. An opinion echoed by Springwood house and land agent R.F. Harvey’s ad extolling “The Best Winter Climate in the World”. For day visitors to Springwood, the Hotel ‘Oriental’ awaits their patronage (ad, right).

Katoomba, the “largest of the mountain tourist resorts” with its “wide choice of charming and picturesque views”. Despite being 68 miles from Sydney, “horses and vehicles are always obtainable” – as this advertisement (left) on page 706 offering trips to the famous Jenolan Caves in luxury Buicks testifies.

Nearby Leura is “celebrated for the beauty of its great showpiece – the Leura Falls…in themselves alone worth the trip to the mountains”. With unfettered enthusiasm the writer goes on to laud the town in extravagant terms: “the place has been so well laid out as a tourist resort that it offers a perfect kaleidoscope of the views”. The object of Wilson’s Director is clearly to sell the Mountains to visitors from Sydney which synergises nicely with the numerous accommodation ads (funny that!) that appear such as this one (right) for Leura’s Hotel Alexandria (still in business in 2018).

The spa town of Medlow Bath, is “a pretty little village, rising rapidly in tourist favour”. The tiny Upper Mountains town is famous for its Hydro-Majestic hotel resort where in the day the better-off citizens of Sydney would periodically retreat to benefit from its therapeutic mineral waters and clean mountain air. Built by retailer Mark Foy (Jr) as a hydropathic sanatorium, the “Hydro-Maje” in the Twenties was where the cream of Sydney’s elite flocked on the weekends to socialise.

Jenolan tourer (Blackheath)

One station further west, the mountains tourist resort of Blackheath, had the writer reaching for new superlatives! The bush trails and valleys (the “Valley of the Grose” as he calls it) lead to “world-famous Govett’s Leap (waterfall), a stream which plunges headlong over a perpendicular wall of dark-tinted rock on to a mass of boulders, some 520 feet below”. Mermaid’s Cave is “like a glimpse of a fairyland…a more picturesque scene cannot be imagined”, etc. The other attraction of Blackheath in 1922 was that “there is every probability of its having a permanent water supply in the near future”. The accommodation ad below is for Blackheath’s ‘Ivanhoe Hotel’, replaced in 1938 by the now quite old-looking ‘New Ivanhoe Hotel’.

Mt Victoria, 79 miles by paved road❂ from Sydney, the highest point of the Blue Mountains (the guide gives it at 3,424 feet above sea-level)⍍, is praised for the scenic countryside surrounding the town dotted with charmingly named spots like Fern Cave, Fairy Bower, Fern Tree Gully and Witch’s Glen, for the walker to explore.

Upper Blue Mts map (‘Wilson’s’)

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[¹] the Australian Club (still at the same address, 165 Macquarie St), is the oldest men-only club in the country, dating from 1838
[²] the Automobile Club changed both its name to the Royal Automobile Club of Australia (RACA), and its location to Castlereagh St North, in the year of the directory’s publication (1922)
[³] the Masonic Club still exists but the premises relocated to a new building at 169-171 Castlereagh St in 1927
[⁴] the N.S.W. Club House is still in existence at 25-31 Bligh St, but the Club itself amalgamated with the Australian Club in 1969 and the building has had a series of commercial tenants since (currently occupied by the Lowy Institute for International Affairs)
[⁵] still in operation (since 1857), these days at 25 Bent St and now called the Union, University and Schools Club

✲ of Titanic fame, White Star Line merged with Cunard in 1934 as White-Cunard, before eventually becoming defunct
✥ Blaxland and Glenbrook, two other Lower BM towns, get very short shrift from Wilson’s, relegated to brief, passing mentions only
❂ the Great Western Highway, which bisects the Blue Mountains, was still called Bathurst Road in 1922
⍍ although according to markers on the spot, One Tree Hill on the south side of Mt Victoria, is the highest point in the Blue Mountains at 3,654 feet

Remembrances of a Juvenile Bookworm: Old Street Directories I have had the Pleasure of … (Part 2)

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Local history, Media & Communications, Memorabilia, Social History

I remember getting my first street directory as if it was 55 years ago – which it was! It was a Gregory’s of course, it was 1963 and UBD hadn’t quite yet entered the road map reproduction game (they brought out their first street directory the following year!) I had just starting playing soccer (the St George and Southern Sydney’s A-League – Ankle-biters League!) and my parents bought it to get me to season games in tricky-to-find and awkward-to-get-to places across Sydney.

Soccer aside, the Gregory’s spent more time in my bedroom than it did in the glovebox of my father’s VW. I loved perusing its contents, examining the colourful maps, sometimes in piecemeal fashion, other times randomly, learning about all the different parts of Sydney that in most cases I never knew existed let alone had been to! I discovered all sorts of faraway places (to a 10-y-o!) with exotic, magical-sounding names like Avalon, Burraneer, Oyster Bay, Picnic Point and Chipping Norton.

The 1960s Sydney motorist’s Vade mecum

I used to spend long hours during my childhood pouring over the maps of Sydney, preparing me for the future career as a taxi driver that I never had (phew!)…instead I learned lots of useless stuff like the fact that there were two separate bushland places called Warrimo. The name is well-known to many as the small town in the Blue Mountains, but my 1963 Gregory’s showed me that it was then also a suburb adjoining St Ives. Later it was renamed St Ives Chase but Warrimo Oval and Warrimo Avenue in the suburb are reminders of its association.

I got a lot of mileage out of that vintage 1963 Sydney street directory, and continued to do so even after I brought a new Gregory’s when I got my driver’s licence and my first car in the early seventies.

Footnote: Not sure what my father did for road directions before the 1963 Gregory’s came into our family’s life. He certainly had cars before then, at one time I recall he had a crank-start relic of an Austin! Maybe he had one of those fold-out maps that in my hands often end up in a tangled mess.

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WAD: the ante-(now)dated street directory
I got my second street directory around the same time as we got the ’63 Gregory’s, and it was a very different animal to the current edition of the Gregory’s, it was in fact the nearest thing I have had to an antiquarian book. I have recounted in a previous post (Part 1) how I got handed down a 1922 edition of Wilson’s Authentic Director: Sydney and Suburbs and shared some insights into how the WAD depicted different parts of Sydney then and some of the idiosyncratic aspects of the maps contained in the book. I want to focus here on the advertisements contained in the directory which are legion in number and tell an interesting story about life in 1922 Sydney in themselves.

Ad-bonanza
In a book 735pp long, even if I count the pages comprising the indexes and maps there were considerably more pages with ads than without! Some ads were full-page, some pages contained two or more separate ads, some firms like Rickard’s’ (below) had multiple entries of ads in the book. The directory is so ad-rich that the advertisement sales alone were a nice little earner to Wilson & Co. And with each copy retailing to the public at 4/6p, there was obviously more than enough takers to warrant the cost to the advertisers to be in it.

▲ Webber’s “One stop shop”!

Who advertised in ‘Wilson’s Authentic Director’?
Well just about anybody who traded, who had a business in Sydney at the time! Professional men, financiers, engineers, builders, bakers, butchers, chemists, builders, undertakers, stationers, carriers, ironmongers, haberdashers, drapers, milliners, mercers and tailors, retailers of Manchester, furniture suppliers, lime and cement merchants, glass manufacturers, all manner of service or product providers. Where the business being advertised related more directly to the world of motorists or to moving people from place to place, was where you got the lion’s share of ads.

▲ Strathfield: free from “Influences of the Sea Air”

Purveyors of property
The footprints of the auctioneer, the valuator and the real estate agent are visible throughout the directory, often in prominently displayed ads. Some who could afford to, placed more lavish ads which mega-hyped the virtues of certain suburbs and their homes – such as the Orton Bros ad (left) pitching homes in the “favourite suburb” of Strathfield, pushing the (alleged) “health benefits” of the area, “away from the “Influences of the Sea Air”. Presumably if Orton Bros had been selling houses in Clovelly or Coogee Beach, they would have taken a different attitude to the “harmful effects of sea air”!

▲ The “Digger” Agents at Roseville

Another property heavyweight Arthur Rickard & Co, appearing and reappearing across the directory, specialised in sub-division and the creation of new estates, eg, selling as “the New Model Suburb” of Toongabbie✲. Rickard’s had a full-page ad offering a choice of two estates, Toongabbie Park (“a most promising estate, fertile soil and good rainfall”) – the buyer could opt for a large home or a Rickard Farmlet, 1 acre to 4½ acres from £50 10s. per acre; or the Portico Estate (“city water, proximity to consumers’ markets, building conveniences”) – “designed on the latest and most up-to-date town-planning – a wonderful scheme of beauty”. Some property agents like Hough and Barnard emphasised their WWI service credentials to help flog their homes, displaying ads (at right) which proudly announced their AIF associations⊡.

Newtown 1922: Hire-a-luxury wedding vehicle

Transport options a-plenty!
Up there with the estate agents and developers were advertisers for anything to do with the automobile. Hire car companies posted ads for vehicles available for any special purpose. Ads from proprietors of motor garages are liberally sprinkled through the directory, these business often rented out touring vehicles for people both wanting to explore the far reaches of Sydney using Wilson’s of course as their guide. The plentiful motor garage ads naturally catered for all the motorists’ touring and driving needs – ‘Bowserised’ (often Shell) fuel, Benzine oil, ‘vulcanised’ tyres, mechanical repairs, etc.

▲ Bulli Motors: cars, motorcycles, bicycles, for Bulli Pass

The reach of Wilson’s publication was not narrowly limited to the city and suburban district boundaries that encompassed Sydney in 1922… business advertisers buying space in the directory came from as far away as the Blue Mountains and from the Illawarra/South Coast, as evidenced by the ad at right from a Bulli motor garage who also specialised in automotive services for the motor(bike) cyclist.

▲ A horse-intensive removals firm!

The Removalists
Domestic carriers were also well represented in the ads in the street directory. Ads for businesses, describing themselves variously as removalists, carriers or furniture carters, filter through the book. The removal business ads signal an interesting crossover between the old and the new technologies…in 1922 motorised vehicles as a form of transport would still be numerically inferior to horse-drawn carts, the ads in Wilson’s show original horse-power still much in demand on Sydney streets, side-by-side with the new, motor-driven furniture vans and vehicles.

‘Tradie’ ads
Tradesmen were regular advertisers in Wilson’s Street Directory, keen to take advantage of Sydney’s growing numbers of home occupiers and new areas of urbanisation – carpenters, plumbers/gasfitters, electricians, tilers, slaters, painters and decorators, sign writers, metal workers, galvanised iron workers, etc. Some of the most refreshing and humorous ads were from 1920s tradies like the two in the directory reproduced here. ▼ ▶

A miscellany of ads
Most every other avenue of (legal) private endeavour that you’d expect to be plying its business in early 1920s seems to get a shout-out in the street directory. Several ads that popped up in the vicinity of the Lidcombe entry and maps were for stone and marble masons. Considering that Lidcombe was (and still is) home to Rookwood Cemetery, reputed to be the biggest cemetery in the Southern Hemisphere, it is of no surprise to find a troop of monumental masons showcasing their artisan wares here.▼

Rookwood handiwork

A trifecta of disparate WAD advertisers from north of the harbour:▼

▲ 1922: Home entertainment unit

The piano – pride of place in the living room of Sydney homes in 1922
Many of the domestic carrier ads that I have alluded to above emphasised “careful piano removal” as one of the fortes of their trade. This is a reminder that in the early twenties, before the advent of radio and television in Australian households, both of how valuable pianos were and the key role they played as principal providers of home entertainment.

Accommodation and pleasure at Sandringham by the seaside
The first ad below at left is for the ‘Prince of Wales’, a popular beachfront hotel on Botany Bay, a local institution in the St George district since the 1860s drawing crowds to its lavish luncheons, parties, picnics and recreational pursuits on its pleasure grounds. Proprietor in 1922 William Langton was just one of very many publicans who had a go at running (with wildly varying success) the ‘Prince’ since 1866 (the hotel was demolished in 1961). ▼

Footnote: the LJ Hooker of his day:
Of the myriad real estate admen in the directory, the company name recurring most throughout is Stanton & Son, Ltd. Stanton’s features in six separate ads (pp.92, 155, 430, 503, 622, 644) to advertise its offices at Pitt St City, Summer Hill, Haberfield, Edgecliff, Randwick, North Sydney and Rosebery. Proprietor Richard Stanton was one of the founders of the Real Estate Institute of NSW and an advocate of the Garden City Movement (see later blogs on Early 1900s Sydney Garden Suburbs).

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✲ developer Rickard was in fact busy selling property all over Sydney and beyond…such as the Central Coast and the Blue Mountains where he talked the rail authorities into building new stations at Warrimo and Bullaburra to service his new estates there, Peter Spearritt, ‘Rickard, Sir Arthur (1868–1948)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/rickard-sir-arthur-8206/text14357, published first in hardcopy 1988, accessed online 12 July 2018.
⊡ realty men were no means the only business advertisers who played the AIF card, tradesmen et al were similarly not slow in slipping into the pitch their record of loyal service to King and Empire during the Great War