Prohibition and Ice Cream: From Breweries to Creameries

Leisure activities, Popular Culture, Regional History

Say the word ‘Prohibition’ and people think of those years in the early 20th century when America went dry with a blanket ban on hard liquor consumption, but much less well known is its connexion to that most popular of frozen desserts, ice cream.

(Source: Flickr)

The Volstead Act in 1920 outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution invalidated the licences of brewers, distillers, vintners and sellers of alcoholic beverages✴. The anti-alcohol legislation had its roots in the formation of the Anti-Saloon League (1893) supported by et al the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, sharing its alarm at the growing prevalence of hard drinking and the development of a culture of drink. These like-minded groups coalesced into a national movement which successfully lobbied Washington for the desired reform (‘Why Prohibition?’, Temperance & Prohibition, Ohio State University, www.ose.edu)❂.

(Source: Flickr)

Nature (and business opportunism) abhors a vacuum
Into the void left by plummeting alcohol consumption (in the early 1920s consumption of beverage alcohol was around 30% of the pre-prohibition level (‘Why Prohibition?’), came ice-cream, marketed partially as a “comfort food” for those committed drinkers bereft of the booze. The advent of Prohibition was thus a boost to the ice cream business. Americans didn’t simply stop drinking beer, wine and spirits and take up iced confectioneries…over the nine years from 1916 ice cream consumption increased 55%, against a population increase of only 15% (‘Thanks, Prohibition! How the Eighteenth Amendment Furled America’s Taste For Ice Creams’, Rachel Van Bokkem, AHA Perspectives on History, 08-Aug-2016, www.historians.org).

(Image: Omaha World Herald, CooksInfo Food Encyclopedia)

Even before Prohibition the ice cream business surge started, due to improvements in technology which boosted ice cream’s popularity. Improved methods led to mass production of ice cream; improved refrigeration preserved the product better. Other recent innovations in the industry enhanced ice cream’s appeal to the public, eg, the development of single-serve products (the chocolate ice cream bar, the Popsicle, the Dixie Cup), notably the Eskimo Pie (marketed initially as the “I-Scream-Bar”) by Christian Nelson; Harry Burt’s “Good Humor Bar” which added a wooden stick to the frozen confectionery…a further advance by Burt was the introduction of a mobile service (trucks with freezers bringing the bars to the neighbourhoods) (Van Bokkem). Another factor was the spike in the number of soda fountains in American drugstores (the New York Times estimated that there were over 100,000 soda fountains in 1922, generating $1B in sales (‘Why Ice Cream Soared in Population During Prohibition’, Farrell Evans,
History, 28-Jan-2021, www.history.com).

Coors Porcelain Co (Source: coortek.com)

Breweries’ strategies responding to Prohibition
When the bans were enforced, the bulk of breweries went to the wall. Research by Maureen Ogle indicates that of the 71,300 American brewers in 1915, no more than 100 survived Prohibition (Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, 2007). The big names in US brewing stood more chance of surviving, but only by diversifying. This they did by branching into the manufacture of everything from ceramics (Coors) to dyes to farm equipment to police vans. Beer giants Anheuser-Busch and Yuengling followed the trend into ice cream production (as did Stroh Brewing), contributing to the estimated 40% growth in consumption in the 1920s (Evans). Pabst Brewing went into making cheese (“Pabst-ett” spread), which was sold to Kraft after Prohibition ended. A number of the brewers made the logical switch to soft drinks, malted milk and malt syrup. Busch also produced frozen eggs, infant formula, carbonated coffee and tea (‘How America’s Iconic Brewers Survived Prohibition’, Christopher Klein, History, 16-Jan-2019, www.history.com).

The alcohol drought prompted the big brewers to fall back on their substantial real estate property holdings to stay afloat and generate ongoing income. Miller resorted to selling off its chain of saloons when things got tight. Some enterprising ice cream parlours bought the disused equipment and facilities of liquor businesses (Van Bokkem).

Ice cream mania…a health food?
US newspapers got in on the public’s ice cream craze, ascribing purported but unspecified health benefits to be had from eating the product. Some dietitians also sought to give the frozen confectionery validity with claims that ice cream was one of the best foods for children’s physical development (Van Bokkem). The Anti-Saloon League added its endorsement to the dairy industry’s marketing campaign for its sweet frozen cream and milk treat, declaring it a “refreshing and palatable food” (Evans).

At its peak during Prohibition New Yorkers were consuming 300 million gallons of ice cream a year by themselves. Among those businesses seeking to cash in, a number of confectionery and butter factories starting manufacturing ice cream as a by-product (Van Bokkem).

Cotton Club, NYC’s premier speakeasy

Speakeasies, drugstores and “Near beer”
For the aficionado or the hardened drinker there were ways, illegal and legal, to get round Prohibition’s national ban on liquor. With the ingredients still obtainable for backyard stills moonshiners and bootleggers benefitted from an upsurge in demand for the home-brewed stuff. As formerly legal saloons were closed down in 1920, the void was filled by the mushrooming of ‘speakeasies’ (unlicensed bar rooms) selling ‘hooch’. These operations were commonly run by city gangsters, organised crime ‘luminaries’ such as Al Capone and his lucrative Chicago racket.

Brewers like Pabst, Busch and Miller were able to exploit a small window of opportunity—beverages containing less than 0.5% alcohol were legal—to produce a concoction described as “near beer” (Miller’s equivalent brand was called ‘Vivo’). Busch manufactured a non-alcoholic malt cereal beverage, ‘Bevo’, which apparently tasted much like actual beer. Genuinely serious drinkers ultimately rejected “near beer”, opting for real beer which could be procured from Speakeasies and bootleggers (Klein).

(Source. vinepair.com)

Another, legal avenue for sourcing alcohol were drugstores. Licensed druggists were allowed to sell liquor for “medicinal purposes” – or to clergymen for “religious reasons”, eg, “Kosher Wine” was available to rabbis for “sacramental purposes” (‘Speakeasies Were Prohibition’s Worst-Kept Secrets’, Prohibition, www.prohibitionthemob.org).

In 1933 Prohibition was repealed and brewers and drinkers went back to doing what came naturally, although the taste for ice cream was by then “permanently engrained in US culture” (Van Bokkem). As it remains today with Americans, who per capita consume 20.8 litres of ice cream a year, second only to sweet-toothed New Zealanders.

(Photo: US Naval Institute)

End-note: The Navy jettisons liquor
The US Navy was the first arm of the government to move against the “demon drink”, banning alcohol from its ships and ports in 1914 (Secretary for the Navy Josephus Daniels was a fervent supporter of the Temperance Movement). Later on the Navy replaced it with ice cream – building two floating ice cream factories on concrete barges during WWII (‘How Ice Cream Became America’s Native Treat Because of Prohibition’, Cleveland Whiskey, 16-Jan-2019, www.clevelandwhiskey.com).

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✴ Prohibition legislation did not ban the consumption of alcohol, just its production and distribution. Nor were the ingredients for making beer prohibited
❂ there were prior American moves, initiated by Temperance activists, to outlaw alcohol at state-level, the earliest to succeed was in Maine (1846)

Sherlock Holmes’ Posthumous Copyright Case

Cinema, Creative Writing, Law and society,, Literary & Linguistics, Performing arts, Popular Culture

The image stereotype of the Sherlock Holmes character (Source: Culture Livresque)

Few characters from modern literature pop up on cinema screens and TV sets as frequently as Sherlock Holmes does. Some observers have stated it more firmly. Christopher Redmond estimates that Sherlock Holmes is the most prolific screen character in the history of cinema (A Sherlock Holmes Handbook (1994)). Just how many different Sherlock Holmes screen adaptions have been made is too large and elusive a number to pin down accurately, but screen vehicles of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous super-sleuth and Mensa-alumni certainly number in the hundreds.

(Photo: CrimeReads)

A publishing can of worms
When Arthur Conan Doyle (ACD) died in 1930 the author left his literary works in Trust to his widow (Jean Conan Doyle) and immediate family. But in excluding his daughter Mary from his first marriage, ACD opened the door to an ongoing family rift, decades of squabbles, strife and litigation by his heirs, descendants and their spouses.

As the intra-family ‘Barney’ over who controls the copyright to the Sherlock Holmes works deepened, the imbroglio entangled an investment company specifically set up to manage the windfall (aptly named “Baskervilles Investments”) and even the Royal Bank of Scotland (‘History of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Copyrights’, (2015), www.arthurconandoyle.com).

1954 Holmes TV series with Ronald Howard (Photo: dvdfr.com)

The upshot of the kerfuffle was that each of the competing parties claimed to be the rightful holder of the rights to ACD’s literary estate, and then attempted to sell it notwithstanding the prevailing uncertainty over ownership. American TV producer-director Sheldon Reynolds acquired a licence from two of Arthur’s sons to make a Sherlock Holmes series in the 1950s. When, 20 years later, Reynolds tried to get a licence for a follow-up series on TV, he found that the legal landscape had changed. The rights were now held by the Royal Bank of Scotland who had acquired them after the previous owner defaulted on a loan. Eventually, with funds provided by his Pfizer heiress mother-in-law, Reynolds secured the rights to the Holmes stories.

Andréa Plunket (Source: goodreads.com)

Culture of litigation
Since 1990 the main battle for control of the copyrights has pitted Reynolds’s ex-wife, Hungarian-born heiress Andréa Milos (née Reynolds, née Plunket) versus the Conan Doyle Estate and others. Plunket has doggedly claimed to hold the rights to the name “Sherlock Holmes” and the stories, despite a lack of legal support for the claims. Lawsuits were exchanged between her and the Estate. Plunket also threatened to sue the BBC over its Sherlock television series for allegedly infringing ‘her’ trademarks (‘The Scandalous Sherlock Holmes Copyright Issue’, Mattias Boström, I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, 30-Jul-2015, www.ihearofsherlock.com).

The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Estate for its part has been particularly litigious in defence of its literary legacy. The Estate has consistently striven to maintain water-tight control over both the Sherlock Holmes stories and the characters. In 2013 it demanded author Leslie S Klinger pay a fee to license the Sherlock character for an anthology he was planning to do. Klinger’s response was to sue the Estate on the basis that most of the Sherlock material was in the public domain. In court the judge upheld Klinger’s position, while reaffirming that some late works were still covered under copyright (‘Sherlock Holmes Copyright: An overview’, Brogan Woodburn, www.redpoints.com). In 2020 it sued Netflix over its upcoming film Enola Holmes. The grounds? The film apparently depicts Holmes as having emotions and respecting women. This, the Estate contends, breaches Conan Doyle’s copyright (‘Lawsuit over ‘warmer’ Sherlock depicted in Enola Holmes dismissed’, Alison Flood, The Guardian, 22-Dec-2020, www.theguardian.com).

‘The Red-Headed League’ story (Golden Press edition, 1963)

End-note: An additional complication over the Holmes copyright issue is a demarcation between the UK and US laws. In the UK copyright lasts for 70 years after an author’s death (in Conan Doyle’s case, the copyright expired in 2000). Conversely in the USA some copyrights extend for 95 years from the date of the work’s first publication. This has proved a stumbling block for TV series and film-makers trying to adapt one of the Sherlock stories in recent years (‘Sherlock Holmes And His “Copyrighted Emotions”‘, Copyright House, 28-Sep-2020, www.copyrighthouse.org).

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including works for film, music, radio, stage, video games, there are over 25,000 products that are related to the famous detective (Woodburn)

the last of ACD’s published work expires in 2023

The Ashington Group: A North of England Men’s Shed for Artistic Miners

Local history, Visual Arts

One of the more novel art genres to emerge in the first third of last century was the “Pitman Painters” phenomenon in northern England. Known as the Ashington Group, these were a small collective of unionised mine workers in county Northumberland who approached their local Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) seeking out tuition in new areas of education. Initially the pitmen were hoping WEA could find a economics professor to tutor them in the “dismal science”. When none could be arranged, their interest switched to learning painting and drawing.

‘Coal Face’, Jimmy Floyd (1947) (Credit: Woodhorn Museum)

Artist and WEA teacher Robert Lyon took on the task of teaching the miners—mainly from the Woodhorn and Ellington collieries—all of whom had no formal art training. The workers however didn’t take to dry lectures on the Classical and Renaissance art, so Lyon adopted a more pragmatic approach of teaching the miners the basics of drawing and painting. Lyon advised the miners to simply “paint what they knew” ‘Ashington Group of Pitmen Painters’, Artist Biographies, www.artblogs.co.uk.

‘Coal-Face Drawers’, Oliver Kilbourn (1950) (Image: TUC150.tuc.org.uk)

In 1934 the workers formed themselves into a small society of miner-artists who met weekly to paint and discuss their work. Most of the small group were adherents of the political platform of the Independent Labour Party) (‘Ashington Group’, Wikipedia). The Ashington men even wrote their own constitution, setting out the regulations each of the members had to abide by, including a commitment to the establishment of a permanent collection of their work (” ‘An Experiment in Art Appreciation’: The WEA and the Ashington Art Group”, Marie-Therese Maybe, North East History, Vol 37 2006, www nelh.net).

‘Pithead Baths’, Oliver Kilbourn (1939) (Credit: Woodhorn Museum)

With guidance from Lyon and support from patrons, especially from celebrated collector Helen Sutherland, the group got to observe ‘professional’ art in galleries – Newcastle, London (Tate and National Galleries), etc. Absorbing the influences of professional art, the group of amateur artists increasingly focused on local subjects from their lives and their environs. They also experimented with art forms and styles…trying sculpture, dabbling in abstraction, but ultimately they stuck with social realism, painting mostly in a naive style. In the communal environment of the group hut members critically evaluated each other’s work.

L Brownrigg, ‘The Miner

The Ashington colliery was situated in what some called “the largest coal-mining village in the world”, (‘Celebrating 150 proud years of Ashington, in Northumberland – in 10 archive photos’, Chronicle Live, David Morton, 05-Oct-2017, www.chroniclelive.co.uk). The achievement collectively of the mine workers was to capture their lived experience accurately and truly on canvas, showing the severity of life in the pits. Devoid of sentimentality, the paintings depict the day-to-day reality of gruelling, dirty, backbreaking work, an experience that outsiders have no familiarity with, eg, Leslie Brownrigg’s ‘The Miner’ conveys the deprivations of the tunnel ‘hewer’, labouring away in ultra-cramped, severely restricted space, “crouching semi-naked within the tomb-like shafts” (Mayne). Painting their own lives, the pitmen “testified to a familiarity that no one else from trained art backgrounds could truly understand” (Ashington Group of Pitmen Painters).

‘X’mas Tree 1950’, Harry Wilson

Pitmen Painters did not restrict themselves to the life of mine workers below the ground. The non-professional group of artists took on all aspects of home life, ordinary social activities, the pub, football matches, dog tracks, fish-and-chip shops, pigeon ‘crees’ (sheds), etc. What comes through in many of the paintings is just how unglamorous 1930s coal-dominated Ashington was – “dreary rows (of homes) a mile long…ashpits and mines down the middle of still unmade streets” (Mayne).

The group’s first exhibition at Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in 1936, gave them new public exposure and even a critical nod from the likes of Julian Trevelyan and sculptor Henry Moore.

‘Pigeon crees’, Jimmy Floyd

After WWII interest in the Ashington Group waned but the men from the pits continued their painting. The early 1970s brought a renewal of interest in the Ashington Group due to the efforts of critic William Feaver  After meeting what remained of the group including foundation member Oliver Kilbourn, Feaver “reconstructs their history, revives their work, curates exhibitions, culminating in a China tour in  1980, the first western exhibition in China after the Cultural Revolution (‘Pitman Painters. The Ashington Group 1934-1984 by William Feaver’, Vulpes Libres,  (2009), (‘Pitman Painters. The Ashington Group 1934-1984 by William Feaver’, Vulpes Libres,  (2009) (http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com).

Norman Cornish, last of the group

Despite their late rediscovery the Ashington Group’s days were numbered. Coal mines in the Ashington area and the north were closing down in 1980s Thatcherite Britain. The trigger which brought the group to a sudden halt was a prosaic and trivial matter of 50p! In 1982 the annual ground rent on the pitmen’s hut in Ashington was increased by 50p to £14 (Mayne). This proved a straw too much for the ageing handful of members still active and the Ashington Group folded in 1983, just one year shy of its half-centenary. Today the Pitmen Painters are all gone and Ashington and like towns are bereft of traces of their coal-mining past, however the art of the pitmen (or most of it) remains as a visual reminder of that life. With Feaver and other admirers’ help, the permanent collection, a key article of the group’s constitution, exists today, housed within the Woodhorn Mining Museum.

Footnote: Mining art Japanese style
Coal miner art is not the exclusive domain of Northumberland or even Britain. It also emerged in Japan in the art of Sakubei Yamamoto. Yamamoto’s entire work life from the age of seven or eight was in coal mines in the Fukuoka Prefecture. Only at age 57 did Yamamoto start painting seriously. Over the following years he produced over 700 paintings of his work milieu, providing “a visual record of the brutality of mining life, capturing the poverty of workers and their families, the personal lives, customs and superstitions, and their struggles for a better life. Like the Pitmen Painters’ permanent collection, Yamamoto’s ouevre found a home in a former mine site, the Tagawa History and Coal Museum (‘The Pitmen Painters of England and Japan’, Diana Cooper-Richet, The Conversation, 16-Jan-2018, www.theconversation.com).

(L) O Kilbourn (Image: Bellcode Books)

Pitmen personnel: the Ashington Group’s founder members include Oliver Kilbourn (probably the best known of the Pitmen Painters), George Blessed, Jimmy Floyd, Harry Wilson, Lee Robinson, John Dobson and John F Harrison.

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the group initially met in a small hut in Longhorsley, but after WWII began, they were forced to relocate into Ashington proper, a small town in the coal-mining region of Northumberland

on the China tour group members visited the mining province of Shansi

Feaver’s book on the group inspired a 2007 play by Billy Elliot author Lee Hall

prolific in output and broad in scope (including historical subjects among his artwork), Kilbourn exhibited his own series ‘My Life as a Pitman’ in Nottingham in 1977

Woodford Academy,  Huts, Inns, Schools and Mountain Retreats: 190 Years of Varied and Continuous Building Use

Built Environment, Local history

Woodford is one of those sleepy little towns on the Great Western Highway about mid-way across the Blue Mountains range. Originally the village was called “20 Mile Hollow”, the nomenclature had a pattern to it, Bull’s Camp just on the eastern side of Woodford was known as “19 Mile Hollow” and modern day Linden, further east was originally “18 Mile Hollow”, and so on.

(Image: Blue Mountains City Council)

Woodford’s main claim to fame is the historical landmark Woodford Academy, a property with a varied multi-functional past. Traditionally the custodians of this land are Darug and Gundungurra peoples, but after William Cox’ s convict labour built the Bathurst Road over the mountains, the first known European activity dates to the late 1820s/early 1830s when a convict and illegal squatter on the Woodford site, William James, operated a sly-grog shop.

The first significant structure here started off as an inn circa 1833-1834 on 20 hectares of land granted to Irish-born emancipist Thomas Michael Pembroke (the building of weatherboard construction was called the “Woodman’s Inn”). Licensee Pembroke’s facilities included nine rooms, stables for six horses, a store and stock and sheep yards. Woodman’s Inn provided food and lodgings for traveller, including soldiers and colonial officials, between Sydney and Bathurst. Pembroke however suffered some financial setbacks and was forced to sell the inn to Michael Hogan in 1839.

‘Woodman’s Inn’ (1842) (Mitchell Lib.)

Under Hogan’s ownership the weatherboard structure was replaced by a stone building in 1843. The inn licence for the now named “The King’s Arms Hotel” changed hands over the ensuing years – James Nairn, William Barton, Josiah Workman, John Cobcroft and Thomas James were some of the resident publicans. The 1851 discovery of gold put an end to the isolation of Woodford. In 1855 Hogan sold the inn to William Buss of Cowra for £1,040 and the hotel became better known as “Buss’ Inn”. The inn flourished with plentiful trade from passing gold diggers heading for Bathurst and soldiers. But in the mid 1860s business declined and Buss’s widow in turn sold the establishment to Alfred Fairfax (described at the time as a “wholesale grocer of Sydney) in 1868 for £450. Fairfax had an incentive to buy when he did…in 1867 a western rail line was constructed from Penrith to Weatherboard (later “Wentworth Falls”). In 1869 a railway platform (“Buss’ Platform”) was established at what was now called “Woodford House”, advertised as a “gentleman’s country guest house” and “mountain retreat”. At this time the Blue Mountains was becoming a fashionable spot to be…valued for its “fresh, healthy, cool mountain air, waterfalls and broad vistas”.

(Source: Blue Mountains Gazette)

Fairfax acquired extra acreage on the site, consolidated into a 26-hectare estate, using much of it for commercial orchard planting. He also created a network of walking tracks around the property, one of which was called the “Transit of Venus” track. Fairfax was something of an amateur astronomer, possessing a 4.75-inch Schroder telescope and had allowed Woodford House to be utilised for observing the 1874 Transit of Venus. Alas for Fairfax the orchard failed and finding himself in financial difficulties he was forced to mortgage Woodford House in 1877.

Woodford House 1889 (‘London Illustrated News’)

In the 1880s, under manager John Robert Place, the renovated and expanded Woodford House was being touted as providing “superior accommodation”, “a change of air and mountain scenery” and “a capital tennis court on the grounds”. The guest house was not a cheap stay, two weeks’ board was £4/4 (December 1890), equivalent to a fortnight’s pay for a skilled worker.

In 1897 Fairfax sold the Woodford House estate to David Flannery who increased his holdings by 90 acres. At this time the property was being described as a ‘sanatorium’ (cf. the Hydro Majestic at Medlow Bath, see the 31 April 2015 blog: Medlow Majestic in the Wilderness: Transforming a White Elephant into a White Palace?).

In 1907 Woodford House entered a new phase of utilisation when poet-cum-rector John Fraser McManamey initially leased the property from Mary Jane Waterhouse (the new owner) and converted it into Woodford Academy, a small, exclusive school for boys of all ages. In the early 20th century a trend emerged where parents who could afford to were sending their children to small private boarding schools in the Blue Mountains which like Woodford Academy were converted grand estates. The appeal was the promise of “fresh mountain air and bracing climate” thought “beneficially to both children’s constitutions and academic performance”.

Woodford Academy c.1920 (Photo: RAHS)

From 1907 to 1925 when the school closed for four years—before reopening as a day school for girls and boys—over 300 students had been educated there. Woodford Academy closed for good in 1936, but McManamey stayed on tutoring private students. When he died, killed in a car accident outside Woodford Academy in 1946, the property was subdivided, some of the land was sold to the Department of Education  and a portion of it donated to the Presbyterian Church. McManamey’s daughters took in long-term boarders, in 1979 the surviving daughter Gertrude bequeathed the house and grounds to the National Trust, continuing to live there until her death in 1988. After 1979 the National Trust undertook extensive repairs and improvements. 

Today Woodford Academy is a museum of Blue Mountains colonial life, conducting educational tours and “ghost tours”. The 1870s dining room can be hired for dinners and the Academy hosts community events like the Mid-Mountains’ annual Harvest Festival. 

Footnote: after establishing the Academy McManamey immersed himself into local community activities – Woodford Bush Fire Brigade, Woodford Progress Association, (president of) Woodford Tennis Club, as well as serving as a Blue Mountains shire councillor. 

 

 

Woodford Academy, 90-92 Great Western Highway, Woodford 2778 NSW

𓂷𓂷𓂷𓂷𓂷𓂷𓂷𓂷𓂷𓂷𓂷𓂷𓂷

a camp for convict road gangs working for magistrate and assistant engineer Captain John Bull

it was also possibly known at times as “The Sign of the Woodman”

chosen as a site for its “clear and steady atmosphere“, (Fairfax’s house was) “a most promising station”

in 1914 McManamey purchased 5.06 hectares of the Woodford estate including the house

✧   McManamey prior to Woodford was headmaster at Cooerwull Academy in Bowenfels (Lithgow area)

English, History, Mathematics, Science, Latin plus one modern language

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Bibliography

‘Woodford Academy – History’, Blue Mountains Australia (BMPH), http://infobluemountains.net.au

‘Seriously “Old School” – Woodford Academy’, National Trust, www.nationaltrust.org.au

Goodlet, Ken, ‘Woodford Academy’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2015, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/woodford_academy, viewed 20 May 2021 ‘Woodford Academy’,

A Rare Treasure’, Ken Goodlet, Blue Mountains History Journal, Issue 6, 2015, www.bluemountainsheritage.com.au

‘Woodford’s vital role in the 1874 Transit of Venus’, Robyne Ridge, Blue Mountains Gazette, 13-Jun-2018, www.bluemountainsgazette.com.au