The Russian Far East: Russia’s Far Flung Territory in North-East Asia 1

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Inter-ethnic relations, Politics, Regional History, Social History

Vladivostok, the principal city and port of Far Eastern Russia, is nearly 4,000 miles from the Russian Federation’s capital, Moscow, yet it is only some 830 miles from China’s capital, Beijing. That stark fact of geography goes a good way to explaining the Russian Far East’s destiny. The inhospitable remoteness of the wild East from the capital of Russia, be it under empire, union or federation, has in its history never been until very recently❉ in the forefront of the minds of the country’s political leaders.

RFE today: the demographics
Russian: Дальний Восток России/ Dal’niy Vostok Rossi (trslit. Russian), literally “The distant East of Russia”.

Where exactly is it? The Russian Far East is a vast region within the world’s largest single-state political entity; roughly RFE extends from Eastern Siberia and Lake Baikal through to the Pacific coastline.
Area: 6,952,000 kms (comprising 40.6% of all the Russia territory)
Population according to the 2010 Census: 6.3 million (constituting a population scarcity of less than one person per square kilometre).
Composition: the majority are ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, with traditional indigenous and other ethnic minorities – including Mongols and Buryats, Aleuts and Inuits, Chukotko-Kamchatkan peoples, Koryats, Turkic peoples, Korean people (Koryo Saram).
Political division: RFE comprises four oblasts, three krais, an autonomous okrug (Chukotia) and the Sakha Republic⚛️.

Historical background
The Russian Empire, emerging out of its tentative, early Moscovy origins, was not quick to explore (and eventually conquer) the regions to the east of the Russian heartland. Exploration of the area got its impetus and propulsion under the rule of Ivan the Terrible (Tsar Ivan IV) in the late 16th century. Cossack Hetman Ermak’s 1581 victory over the Khanate of Sibir led to other eastern expeditions by other Russian atamans and ultimately to the defeat of the other khanates (the Golden Horde) and the incorporation of their lands under the Russian imperial banner. Aside from empire-building, the Russians were motivated by the mystique that had attached itself to the Asian hinterlands to the east, the reported vast quantities of wealth thought to be on the other side of the Kamen (a traditional name for the Urals)[‘Meeting of Frontiers: Siberia, Alaska and the American West’, (Library of Congress project), www.frontiers.loc.gov].

The image many hold of Sibir

Once the explorers and the conquerors had established the territory in the name of the tsar, the trappers, traders and merchants followed in their footsteps, populating the enormous reaches of Siberia. The promyshelenniki typified these pioneers, the frontiersmen who harvested and distributed the lucrative fur trade, much sought after by the European market. Finally, in 1639, the Russians reached the Pacific at the Sea of Okhotsk with Ivan Moskvitin’s expedition [ibid.].

Yakutsk (capital of Yakutia)

Yakutia, a land with a grim past to match its climate
Yakutia in RFE’s north, today the Sakha Republic (Coordinates: 66°24’N 129°10’E), (not to be confused with the Sakhalin Oblast comprising the Sakhalin and Kuril Islands) achieved legendary notoriety during the Soviet era. Described as “a prison without bars”, Yakutia was the location of somewhere in the region of 105 to 165 of Stalin’s Gulags. Between 1930 and 1950 the Soviets operated brutal forced-labour camps where many victims of Stalin’s autocracy were tasked with building the USSR’s infrastructure in conditions that were intolerable harsh and unbearable cold (arctic permafrost, frozen tundra, etc)⊙.

Contemporary Yakutia typifies the dilemma of RFE. The present government’s commitment to developing RFE is viewed with cynicism by most in the Sakha Republic. The town of Mirny (37,000 inhabitants) is the unofficial diamond capital of Russia, 25% of the world’s commercially mined diamonds are found here❂. In addition the region is blessed with ample deposits of gold and coal. Another more niche commodity found below ground in the republic are the bones of prehistoric woolly mammoths – many of which find a ready home on the black market [‘Left Behind in Russia’s Far East’, (Dmitriy Frolovskiy, The Diplomat, 24-Jul-2019, www.thediplomat.com].

Yakutia locals see the development priorities and benefits accruing from the new emphasis on the RFE differently to that of Moscow. In their eyes the increased wealth extracted from the region goes one way only – back to the centre. This has deepened Yukutians’ sense of isolation from “the mainland” (as the locals sometimes call the rest of Russia). Notwithstanding that the Republic of Sakha is critically underpopulated (around 1M residents in an area of 3,103,200 sq km), many locals also express dissatisfaction with the federal government’s recent attempts to bolster the depleted population of RFE with new intakes of migrants, largely from the ‘Stans’ of Central Asia’ [ibid.].

Norilsk, another ‘Gulagtown’ trying to live down its past
Current day Norilsk is overshadowed by a similar back story to Yakutia’s gulag towns…a remote location in Krasnoyarsk Krai, also supra-Arctic Circle, with no roads or rail lines into the city. Norilsk-Talnakh contains the largest-known deposits of nickel-copper-palladium in the world. In the days of Stalin’s “campaign of terror” Norilsk was “a node in the network of similar camps that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (described) in the Gulag Archipelago” [‘Norilsk: The remote Russian mining town uneasy about its gulag past’, (Tom Parfitt), The Times, 06-May-2018, www.thetimes.co.uk].

Norilsk Golgotha, a monument to the city’s gulag prisoners

Repopulating RFE with Eastern Ukrainians
Ukrainians have been (forcibly) resettled in Siberia and RFE since the 17th century. In the formative years after the Russian Revolution of 1917, Ukrainians resettled in the area known as Zeleny Klyn◚ (sometimes also called Transcathay) tried to secede from the newly established Bolshevik Far Eastern Republic and create their own Eastern Russian entity, Green Ukraine. Fast-forward to 2016, President Vladimir Putin, in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, launched a Ukrainian resettlement program, voluntary this time with inducements of free land in underpopulated northern towns like Igarka for refugees from East Ukraine [‘Green Ukraine’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘Meeting of Frontiers’, loc.cit.]. The free land carrot had already been offered to Russians living in the Federation to migrate to the Far East.

The follow-up second part of my Russian Far East blog piece will deal in more detail with contemporary developments in RFE including Putin’s desire and strategy to turn the region into an economic powerhouse, and the vexing question of foreign investment in RFE, especially that of China.

_____________________________________________

❉ the current and greatly enhanced interest shown by the ultra-nationalistic Putin government in Russia’s Far East will be more thoroughly addressed in Part 2 of this blog

⚛️ oblasts, krais and okrugs are terms for administrative divisions with a fair degree of elasticity, although okrug is sometimes rendered as ‘district’ (raion)

⊙ known to get down to temperatures of -70° Celsius

❂ the ALROSA group of companies accounts for 95% of the country’s diamond production and dominates the Russian Far East’s economy

◚ literally “the green wedge”

New York’s Seminal Brill Building: 1960s America’s Pop Music Factory

Posted on by Wolfgang Childerglas
Leisure activities, Memorabilia, Music history, Performing arts, Popular Culture, Social History

(Photo: https://nypost.com)

The Brill Building at 1619 Broadway in Midtown New York City, architecturally, has few distinguishing features to set it apart from most any other homogeneous looking commercial medium high-rise building in the “Big Apple” (save for a rather dazzlingly decorative archway entrance). But for a period from the end of the Fifties to the late Sixties it was the fulcrum (if not quite the epicentre) of innovative and groundbreaking Rock and Pop music-making in the USA.

The young professionals are in the Building!
The collaborative and creative energies of the Brill Building produced a conducive environment for young professional songwriters of the period to work with music producers to create highly productively musical outcomes. So there were song-writing teams that emerged around 1960 (often they were couples) – (Carole) King and (Gerry) Goffin, (Barry) Mann and (Cynthia) Weil, (Jeff) Barry and (Ellie) Greenwich – who linked up successfully with young producers like “wonder-kid” Phil Spector※ [‘The Brill Building: Assembly-Line Pop’, (Reebee Garofalo), Encyclopaedia Britannia, www.encyclopaediabritannia.com].

⬆ Kirshner, King & Goffin

But the Brill Building’s genesis as a revolutionary force in 1960s US pop music actually started in a building across the road – at 1650 Broadway. Here in 1958 “pop entrepreneur” Don Kirshner and musician Al Nevins formed Aldon Music✳. Aldon’s reading of the popular music zeitgeist of the day was that rock and roll’s original impact had dissipated and somewhat lost its way. Kirshner’s remedy was “to take its energies and reapply the old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley❁ disciplines to the craft and professionalism of making hits for the youth market” [Inglis, Ian. “‘Some Kind of Wonderful’: The Creative Legacy of the Brill Building.” American Music, vol. 21, no. 2, 2003, pp. 214–235. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3250565]. Kirshner put together a stable of aspiring young songwriters, including Goffin and King, Mann and Weil, as well as Howard Greenfield and Neil Sedaka.

1619 + 1650 = the Brill Building style
The term “Brill Building” in the musical context doesn’t confine itself exclusively just to that one building…Brill Building as a descriptor for the achievements in NYC pop and rock creativity of the day is an omnibus reference for what was happening at both addresses, 1619 and 1650 Broadway, New York.

The pioneers of the new professionalism that was to become labelled as “Brill Building” were probably the song-writing team of Leiber and Stoller (Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller) who had earlier written for Elvis Presley, started to write hits for the Drifters from the late 50s that mark the starting-off point for Brill [Garofalo, loc.cit.]. A new wave of songwriters began to etch out pop songs from within the walls of 1650 Broadway and 1619 Broadway (the Brill Building adopted Aldon’s ‘hothouse’ style of songwriting from youthful collaborators with a creative overlap between the two addresses)✥ [Inglis, op.cit.].

Distinguishing features of Brill Building music and music-makers
Kirshner’s writing staff at 1650 Broadway were not only dedicated professionals, they were remarkably youthful…the eighteen songwriters Kirshner had in his employ in 1961 (roughly equally male and female) were aged between 19 and 26, a clear departure from the status quo ante of “middle-age men churning out novelty songs” [ibid.]. This contemporary generation of songwriters, not much older than their target audience, grasped the idiom of teenagers and wrote exclusively for the youth of the 1960s [Garofalo, loc.cit.]♕.

Other composer/lyricist teams to thrive in the environment of the Brill Building included Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart (who later worked with Kirshner and the Monkees) and the extraordinarily prolific hit-making duo of Burt Bacharach and Hal David.

The gender equality between songwriters achieved at Brill, brought female pop and rock songwriters like King, Weil and Greenwich to the fore, correlating with the rise of the girl groups of the early 60s… these female writers wrote hits for the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Chiffons, the Ronettes and the like [Inglis, op.cit.]✪.

⬇ The Ronettes: “Big hair” sound!

‘Brill’ place, ‘Brill’ music?
Recollections of the songwriters’ working conditions at the Brill Building doesn’t suggest an ideal environment to inspire the creation of Top 40 hits: writers were assigned their “respective cubby holes” (Carole King), “a tiny cubicle the size of a closet”…”no window or anything” …(an upright) “piano and a chair” …”we’d go in and write songs all day” (Barry Mann, ibid.). The creators of pop and rock worked in an assembly line fashion in something akin to a standard nine-to-five office job [Garofalo, loc.cit.]. Kirshner would play one young writing team off against another to enhance their productivity [Sociology of Rock, Simon Frith (1978)].

The hit factory
And yet despite these strictures it somehow worked! The songwriting team did come up with “teenage drivel” from time to time, but collectively, the youthful penners of contemporary Sixties song generated a steady series of musical hits for a Pop-crazy world! Fusing the urgency of R & B with “the brightness of mainstream pop” melodies, Goffin and King, Greenfield and Sedaka and the other B.B. star writing teams came up with perennial pop classics like “Will you Love me Tomorrow?”, “Calendar Girl”, “Leader of the Pack” and the much revered “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” [ibid.].

A vertical integration of the pop music biz on a micro-scale
The “B.B. factory” was good at matching artists to appropriate material. By 1962 the Brill Building contained 165 separate music businesses. This meant a B.B. musician “could find a publisher and printer, cut a demo, promote the record and cut a deal with radio promoters, all within this one building”, Garofalo, loc.cit.; ‘The Brill Building’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World Volume 8: Genres: North, (Edited by John Shepherd, David Horn), 2013, www.books.google.com.au]

Time call on the Brill Building
By the mid to late 1960s the B.B. music line was losing its energy. A new creative force was rapidly filling its void – the rise of the singer-songwriter, heralding a new era of artists who wrote their own material. The new wave led by the phenomenal global success of the Beatles (the unsurpassed potency of the Lennon/McCartney songwriting duo) and the guru-like acclaim afforded Bob Dylan, fairly swiftly relegated the Brill Building writers to the edges of pop music relevance [Garofalo, loc.cit.].

 Footnote: A Brill Building ‘sound?’
The Brill Building style of songs drew inspiration from diverse strands of earlier music – R & B (rhythm and blues), Latin, jazz and African-American gospel. The result was often referred to as the “Brill Building sound” but there actually wasn’t a specific or distinctive sound at all. The only similarities between the Brill ‘products’ was in the recurring themes and components in the song lyrics (might be described as “First World problems” seen through the eyes of 60s American youth) [‘The Brill Building pioneered assembly line pop music but left a legacy of hits’, (Troy Lennon), The Daily Telegraph, 13-Sep-2017, www.dailytelegraph.com.au]; Inglis, op.cit.].

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️

※ Spector was both a collaborator with the Brill songwriters and a customer of their compositions

✳ described by Ian Inglis as “a crucial moment in the development of Brill Building’s pop sensibilities”

❁ Tin Pan Alley was a loose collection of composers, lyricists and music publishers based in NYC who dominated the industry for several decades through the first half of the 20th century (Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Sammy Cahn, Hammerstein and Rodgers and many more)

✥ although two of the mainstays of the Brill team, Goffin and King, never actually worked in the Brill Building, producing their entire creative output in the period over at Aldon Music (they did however sell some of their compositions through the Brill Building)

♕ many of the Brill writing alumni went on to be highly successful performers in their own right – top of the totem industry names like Neil Diamond, Gene Pitney, Paul Anka and Paul Simon

✪ another interesting juxtaposition emerging from the Brill Building music factory was the contrast between writer and artist – the songwriters were all white and mostly Jewish, writing largely for emerging black girl groups (Inglis)

The Rise and Decline of Cobb & Co: An American Business Venture in the Colonial Australian Outback – Part II

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Old technology, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

⇩ Cobb & Co coach at Scarborough, NSW(Photo: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney) ⇧

See also the preceding post The Rise and Decline of Cobb & Co – Part I

By the 1880s Cobb & Co’s coach lines had become so successful in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland that most of its competitors had been either relegated to the ranks of commercial obscurity, gone out of business altogether or been swallowed up by the ubiquitous, dominant transport market leader (or all three!)

Overreach and eventual decline

Cobb & Co’s foray in new areas of enterprise led it, and specifically company boss James Rutherford, into more and more diverse fields – everything from gold and copper mines to horse-breeding to newspapers. The inevitable downside of over-diversification was diminishing success…moreover the failures were often the result of bad and even disastrous investments (a Lithgow iron ore mine, a 1880s railway construction project connecting Glen Innes and Tenterfield)💮and in this the blame lay squarely with Rutherford. Rutherford as GM had some glaring shortcomings – he was often impetuous in business when he should have been measured, and made important (and increasingly unwise) decisions without consulting his partners [Kathy Riley), Australian Geographic, 18-Oct-2011, www.australian geographic.com.au].

⇩ A fully loaded six-horse Cobb & Co coach

(Photo: www.visityuleba.com.au) ⇧

Other factors contributing to Cobb & Co’s downfall

In addition to the instability of taking on too much concurrently, the company was a victim of misfortune and circumstance. The 1890s was a decade that brought drought and a depression to the colonies. The drought hit Cobb & Co like a sledgehammer – the cost of feed for their thousands of horses sky-rocketed! During just the four years from 1898-1902, the cost was £70,000, which was nearly half of Cobb & Co’s total revenue. Compounding this was further devastation arising from the drought – losses of livestock, plummeting of the values of company’s properties [ibid.].

⇧ Vic Museums (Photo credit: https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/1256058)

Eclipsed by the advance of rail transport

The introduction of commercial railways in the inland regions of Australia from the 1870s was a forewarning that the demise of coach transport was on the horizon. Cobb & Co in Victoria and NSW survived the new competition from the railroad for a time – in part because the coach line adopted the strategy of providing a complimentary service to it (joining the dots between the rail routes)✪. It also pushed its operations further westwards into NSW to service new localities and communities beyond the rail terminus [‘Coaching days in NSW’, (Cobb & Co in NSW), http://www.orange.nsw.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Cobb-Co-Resource.pdf].

Ultimately though Cobb & Co was simply delaying the inevitable in the two southern colonies…Victoria ceased its company operations in 1890. The NSW operations’ decline led to its Bathurst and Bourke factories closing down not long after…all later coach-making was done through the Charleville Coach Plant in Queensland. By 1897 all the NSW lines ceased except those in the Bourke area [ibid.]. In 1902 Cobb & Co experienced a net loss of over £18,000 and owed considerably more than that to bankers and creditors [Riley, op.cit.]. Liquidation of the company soon followed. The following year the company was reformed but this wasn’t able to revive its flagging fortunes.

⇧ Cobb & Co Charleville coachworks (Qld) (Photo: www.qhatlas.com.au/)

Queensland, the last outpost for Cobb & Co coaches

Only “vast and untrammelled” Queensland held out against the railways’ dominance, maintaining “a solid demand for coaching” beyond Federation and into the new century, with routes in the colony peaking at more than 7000km in 1900. Queensland Cobb & Co lines lingered on, gradually losing business to the railways, their routes shrivelling up bit by bit. The advent of motor vehicles, while still at a rudimentary stage, foreshadowed that horse coaches were dinosaurs as a long-term prospect. Cobb & Co itself dabbled in automobiles and in store-keeping, but these ventures brought it no success [ibid.].

Air mail anyone?

The embryonic development of commercial air travel was another sign of the imminent end of the road for Cobb & Co. In 1922 QANTAS (Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services) launched its inaugural air mail and passenger flying service (based in central west Queensland). Cobb & Co made its final trip in 1924 on the Yuleba to Surat (Qld) route. Thus the curtain was drawn for good on what had been Australia’s first ever privately-owned public transport system [ibid; Simpson, loc.cit.].

Endnote: A television series rip-off
In the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a fictionalised TV take on the Cobb & Co story…made in Australia by ITV Britain♚. A fairly unexceptional piece of television adventure and light on historical accuracy, Whiplash was marketed in Australia and the US as “an Australianised Western”, it starred the serviceable American TV actor Peter Graves as the fictional “Chris(sic) Cobb”. Some of the episodes were written by the future creator of Star Trek Gene Roddenberry [‘Whiplash’, Classic Australian Television, www.classicaustraliantv.com].

⇧ ‘Whiplash’: Peter Graves in a scene (Photo: www.nostalgiacentral.com)

⇩ Artransa Studios, French’s Forest (Photo: www.abctvgorehill.com.au)

PostScript: The Cobb & Co Museum
Fittingly, given that Queensland was the state that maintained the Cobb & Co tradition the longest, it has a museum dedicated to the memory of the Cobb & Co pioneers. Located in country Toowoomba, the museum houses historic Cobb & Co coaches as part of an extended collection of horse-drawn vehicles – the ‘National Carriage Collection’. (Source: www.queensland.com)

⥰⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽⥰

💮 which left Cobb and Co a very sizeable £130,000 in debt

♚ filmed on location at Scone, NSW, and at Artransa Park Studios in French’s Forest, (northern Sydney) which then contained a suitably bushy backdrop

✪ this contrasted markedly with the fate of coach transport in England – where the introduction of railways, occurring from the 1830s, killed off the coaches in quick time [‘Cobb and Co coach’, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, (Margaret Simpson, Curator, Transport), 12-Jun-2013, http://maas.museum]

💠 💠 💠

The Rise and Decline of Cobb & Co: An American Business Venture in the Colonial Australian Outback – Part I

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Old technology, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History, Society & Culture

❝Such days as when the Royal Mail was run by Cobb & Co❞ ~ Henry Lawson

🌀-🌀-🌀

Cobb and Co is a name that still has much currency within Australian and New Zealand society. In New South Wales in the rural tourist industry there is the “Cobb & Co Heritage Trail” which invites travellers to take the “historical self-drive” following the outback route from Bathurst to Bourke that the celebrated erstwhile coach service once trekked. Queensland holds a Cobb & Co festival each year to honour the historic Surat to Yuleba route. There are touring bus and coach businesses operating that have also appropriated the name…in addition there are “Cobb & Co hotels” and “Cobb and Co bottle shops” scattered around regional areas of the eastern states※.

⇓ Cobb & Co Heritage Trail

All of this is testimony to the fame of the original Cobb & Company which was once a household transport name, etching for itself a place in the folklore of Australia’s outback regions. The company’s story begins in the goldfields of Victoria in the 1850s. In 1853 the American Adams & Co coach firm despatched Freeman Cobb and three American colleagues⚀ to Melbourne with the objective of establishing a local operation which would capitalise on the hordes of fortune seekers flocking to the Victorian gold rushes. As things transpired, Cobb ended up starting his own coach service together with the other Americans🔰, thus was born Cobb & Co.

Freeman Cobb ⇑ (Photo: www.geni.com)

The first trip (January 1854) of Cobb & Co carrying passengers, goods and equipment went from Collins Street (Melbourne city) to the Forest Creek goldfields (now Castlemaine) and to Bendigo✫. Cobb & Co was a winner pretty much from the outset…by 1856 the company was worth £16,000 (in 2011 values around $2.1 million). Freeman Cobb however didn’t stick around to see the full flowering of it’s success, after three years he sold out of his eponymous company, moving on to other (less successful) ventures. Cobb & Co changed hands a couple of times, and then in 1861 it was purchased by a consortium of nine US and Canadian businessmen for £23,000 ($3.4m in 2011) [‘Cobb & Co: historical transport’, (Kathy Riley), Australian Geographic, 18-Oct-2011, www.australian geographic.com.au].

The driving force of the firm under the consortium was another American immigrant, James Rutherford. Rutherford began by organising all of the company’s lines (the different routes), making them more profitable concerns. Under his leadership Cobb & Co expanded into NSW and Queensland (the NSW operations were based at Bathurst). At the company’s peak in the 1870s, it’s coaches were covering a distance of nearly 45,000km a week with routes stretching from the very top of Queensland (the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cooktown) down to southern Victoria [ibid.; ‘In the Days of Cobb & Co’, Sydney Mail, 20-Apr-1921, www.trove.nla.gov.au]. As one one chronicler of the iconic transport company’s story observed, Cobb & Co was many things combined – “the Qantas, the Australia Post, the TNT and the Holden of its day” [Sam Everingham, Wild Ride, The Rise and Fall of Cobb and Co, (2007)].

James Rutherford ⇓

(Photo source: State Library of Queensland)

What accounted for Cobb & Co’s spectacular success in the coach transportation business?

The decisive factors were manifold but basically Cobb & Co beat it’s competitors in several logistical areas. It’s coaches were faster and more efficient…while the rivals used heavy, rigid English coaches for their runs, Cobb imported American Concord coaches (made in New Hampshire and used in the American West) which were rounded and lightweight and had supple coach bodies – far more suited to the rugged Australian landscape than the cumbersome English coaches. Consequently Cobb & Co’s coaches gave a smoother, faster ride [Riley, loc.cit.] (the Concords, though superior, apparently didn’t always deliver that smooth a ride as they were known colloquially as the “red bone-shakers”).

A replica C & C Concord coach on display at Timbertown, NSW ⇓

The Concord coaches were fitted with leather braces and straps in place of the inflexible iron ones used on other horse-drawn vehicles which had a tendency to snap too easily (leather also provided greatly superior suspension for the carriage). Concord coaches were made to last the rugged journey and so contributed to a reputation for reliability that the Cobb service was able to establish [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.].

A master stroke by Cobb was to establish a series of changing stations every 16-32km along the routes. This gave Cobb & Co journeys the big advantage of always having fresh horses, enabling the drivers to maintain high speeds over long distances.

Cobb & Co coachmen – risky adventures, pitfalls and hazards of the job

The drivers themselves employed by the company were possessed of extraordinary skills in managing their horses and vehicles. They had to be to negotiate all the difficulties and obstacles in their paths and still keep on schedule…atrocious roads made worse by inclement weather, flooding of creeks and rivers, and unpredictable encounters with dangerous bushrangers◘, were all recurring events that challenged the mettle of the coach drivers. The dangers aside, experiencing the thrills and (near) spills and the full-on ‘wildness’ of a Cobb & Co journey through “the bush”, must have been an exhilarating experience for colonial travellers in the day.

Many of the drivers, some of which Cobb and (later) Rutherford recruited from the US, were colourful characters in addition to being accomplished horse handlers…blokes such as Dick Houston, Jim Conroy, ‘Silent’ Bob Bates, H Barnes, and not least “Cabbage Tree” Ned Devine. Devine, with his team of distinctive light grey horses, was by all accounts a particularly exceptional driver (earning himself a very good wage of £17 a week)…when the first English cricket team toured Australia (HH Stephenson’s, 1862), Devine was their driver on the Victorian leg of the tour [K. A. Austin, ‘Devine, Edward (Ned) (1833–1908)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/devine-edward-ned-3405/text5169, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 31 May 2019].

Ned ‘Cabbage Tree’ Devine ⇓

(Photo source: State Library of Victoria)

Similarly, Cobb & Co’s grooms played an integral role in the highly organised operation…each groom was personally responsible for eight to ten horses and for their gear. The clockwork operation saw the drivers sound a bugle when they were one mile from the next staging post, this alerted the grooms to have the fresh team of horses primed and ready the minute the coach arrived. The pay-off for such a high level of efficiency, superior speed and dependability was that Cobb & Co scored lucrative mail contracts from the colonial governments [ibid.].

Cobb diversifies from its passenger and goods transport base

General manager Rutherford was the catalyst for Cobb & Co’s diversification into new businesses. Initially this payed dividends with its first move, appropriately enough, into coach and buggy building at Bathurst, NSW. Just four years into this activity Cobb & Co could boast that it was the largest coach-maker in Australia [ibid.].

Rutherford also acquired pastoral properties for the company, another profitably step for Cobb & Co. By 1877 they had nine sheep and cattle stations across NSW and Queensland covering an area of 11,000 square kilometres and turning a net profit of £77,500 (equivalent to $11.3M in 2011)…this was at a time that the company’s revenue from coaching – the principal business – was yielding only £11,500 ($1.7M) a year by comparison [ibid.].

By the end of the 1870s Cobb & Co had been in business for 25 years and had already established itself in the eastern mainland states as something of an institution in the “wide, brown land”. It had undergone diversification and experienced growth, but as I will show in Part II, the remarkable good fortunes of Cobb & Co was about to take a decided turn for the worse.

💫 –💫 –💫

PostScript: Exporting the Cobb & Co model

Unsurprisingly, the spectacular trajectory of Cobb & Co’s rise in fortune and fame drew imitators elsewhere. A number of coaching services, some using the same name (although totally unrelated to the original eastern Australian company), sprang up independently in South Australia, Western Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Africa. This last concern was started up by Freeman Cobb himself in 1871, hoping to cash in on the discoveries of diamonds and gold in the Kimberley and the Transvaal (unfortunately Cobb couldn’t reproduce his Australian success, dying in South Africa still in his 40s) [K. A. Austin, ‘Cobb, Freeman (1830–1878)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cobb-freeman-3237/text4883, published first in hardcopy 1969, accessed online 29 May 2019].

‘Kiwi’ Cobb & Co

The New Zealand version was begun by Charles Cole, who’d previously ran Cobb & Co’s Smyth’s Creek to Ballarat line in Australia❎. As in Victoria and NSW the impetus for the initiative in NZ was the gold rush in Otago (1861). Cole’s Otago coach proprietorship was in partnership with the Hoyts brothers (operating as Cole, Hoyt & Co., proprietors of Cobb & Co. Telegraph Line of Coaches)…later the service was extended to Christchurch and Canterbury. The legendary Ned ‘Cabbage Tree’ Devine worked at one time for the New Zealand outfit, driving the Dunedin to Palmerston and Oamaru routes [Austin, ‘Ned Devine’, loc.cit.; ‘Cobb & Co (New Zealand)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛

※ in fact there are all manner of commercial enterprises in Australasia using the “Cobb & Co” handle as a trading name – restaurants, bars, B ‘n Bs, screen printers, clockmakers, kitchen manufacturers, etc.

⚀ the others were James Swanson, Anthony Blake and John Murray Peck (who later became a successful stock and station agent in Melbourne and a vice-president of the Essendon Australian Football Club)

🔰 the average age of the four American founders was just 22 – although they did have combined experience working for Adams, Wells Fargo and other coach companies in the US

✫ Cobb charged £5 per passenger for the roughly 110 ml journey [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.]

◘ one of the best known bushranging incidents involving Cobb & Co was the 1863 holdup at Eugowra (in the NSW central west)…notorious bushranging gang led by Frank Gardiner and Ben Hall robbed a Ford & Co coach (the firm was takes over by Cobb & Co one week later) of £14,000 in gold and banknotes from the goldfields [‘Details of the Robbery’, (Welcome to Eugowra in the heart of bushranger country), www.eugowra.aus.net]

❎ Cole brought one of the custom built Concord coaches across the Tasman with him to Otago