John Fitzpatrick was the Catholic Priest at St Nicholas of Myra in High Street from 1948 to 1964. He was well loved by his parishioners and a man respected in the wider Penrith community amongst people of all religions. This was no mean achievement as there was a sectarian divide in those days, not only in Penrith but country-wide, certainly more than there is now. It was mixed up with class – Catholics generally were more likely to be in the lower socio-economic strata – and issues such as government funding of religious schools, that are no longer burning issues.

A son of Ireland

Father Fitz as everyone knew him, was born in Ireland and migrated to Australian to begin his mission. His first posting was as a curate in Leichardt and when he came to Penrith in 1948 as parish priest he had previously served at Burragorang. Incidentally the Penrith parish is one of the oldest Catholic parishes in Australia.

While serving in Penrith, Father Fitz was the moving force behind the construction of the Catholic primary school which opened in Tindale Street in 1954, being heavily involved in fund raising, seeking government grants and securing banking finance to complete the work. This new school improved the educational opportunities for those who sought a religious context for the education of their children. Previously, Catholic education was conducted at St Josephs Convent in High Street.

The politico-religious schism

It was Father Fitz’s misfortune but his parish’s good luck to be in charge of the parish at the time of the great split in the 50s in the Australian Labor Party of which at that time many Catholics were members. Members of the ALP, predominantly Catholics, had split from Labor to form a new political party, others remained.  The conflict between Catholic Labor members was exacerbated by conflict within the church hierarchy itself; some priests and bishops advocated for the new party while others advised their parishioners to remain with the old. The bitterness of the political and religious schism caused rifts between friends and even within families.

Father Fitz’s gentle ways and moderating approach, and his appeals to his flock to maintain their principles while remaining tolerant of the views of others helped to stem the bitter disputes and even physical fights that took place in other communities where parish priests took more aggressive stances.

Popularity

Father Fitz’s standing and popularity in the community was seen at the large function held in February 1955 to farewell him on a nostalgic return holiday to Ireland. The function was attended not only by parishioners but by community leaders of every political and religious persuasion. Our mayor, Bill Chapman, described Father as a perfect gentleman and commended him for what he had done for the town.

Although not myself Catholic, I knew Father Fitz well because he and my father were great friends. Every morning, except Sundays or when he was on church business, Father would come down to my father’s shop and they would drink coffee, talk and laugh. He was always happy and his rosy cheeks shone and he somehow reminded me of Bing Crosby who played a priest in a film called Going My Way which was around at the time. He did not look like the crooner and to my knowledge did not sing like him but their manner and demeanour and the Irish lilt were similar, although Father’s was genuine rather than made up.

When Father Fitzpatrick died from cancer in 1964, the town mourned.

Essie May Price was a noted citizen of Penrith, one who worked tirelessly in its community and political affairs and who, when she died, was mourned by many. She was the widow of Leo Price who had, at various times, part owned the John Price and Son funeral home, and the picture show, as well as being active in the town’s affairs and in other businesses.

Mrs Price was a family friend and, to some extent, she was a substitute grandmother to the children in our family as our real grandparents lived a long way away. Mrs Price was very good to me and I remember her fondly.

John Price and Son

The Price family have a long connection with Penrith. Probably Penrith’s oldest surviving business, this undertaking firm was started by John Price. I only remember the funeral home as being on the corner of Station and Henry Streets but apparently it had different sites over the years.

It began at a site in Henry Street next to the Methodist Church and this, in future years, became the home of Leo and Essie Price. Additional premises were opened in High Street near the site of what was to become the Nepean Theatre. The land that became the Station Street site was purchased from the Priddle family and it was there that the business was conducted for many years.

After John Price died, the business was carried on by his sons, and subsequently by Leo Price, a direct descendant. In the 1920s, Leo sold the business to his cousin Nelson and, in turn, the business was sold to a Mr Smith.

Leo Price

Leo Price was a man of many experiences and many accomplishments. He went to the old Henry Street school and later to a private school in Penrith called the Penrith College. A crack shot who won prizes for marksmanship at State level, he volunteered for the Boer War at the age of 15 but his mother stopped him from going because of his young age. He was also apparently a a talented singer, cricketer and journalist, writing stories for both local and Sydney newspapers..\

At some stage, he also operated an open air picture theatre in Penrith which I am told was the forerunner of the old Nepean Theatre. 

He married Essie May Ritchie of Forbes on 26 August 1908 at St Stephens Church of England. The church was packed to capacity with an overflow crowd standing outside. The Prices had three children but Leo’s premature death left Essie a widow. 

Essie Price’s wonderful old house

Mrs Price lived in a great old house at what was then 244 Henry Street Penrith. There were two separate buildings on the site. The front building was occupied by a white weatherboard cottage with lots of small and interesting rooms, filled with curios and antiques. A wooden walkway connected this cottage to a separate building that contained the kitchen, laundry and rooms for storage.

It was an original wattle and daub building. For those of you who are not familiar with this term, it describes an early form of construction in this country in which wooden planks called ‘wattle’ were plastered and held together by some wet composite material that could include soil, sand, clay and/or straw. And it is a pity that Mrs Price’s house was demolished and not kept as a heritage building, but such has happened to so many of the town’s historic buildings.

The property had a really big back yard bordered by cork trees and contained an old stage coach which was the perfect setting for kids like us to play Cowboys and Indians. Amongst Mrs Price’s collection of curios were muskets and old .303 rifles which, together with indigenous and New Guinea war weapons, added to the realism of the game.

The contents of the house were amazing. Mrs Price had a collection of infinite variety – antiques, native war tools, pictures, photos and odds and ends. I always understood that the family must have been in the antique business in past years but this was apparently not so. I have read that Leo Price was at one stage an auctioneer and valuer of real estate and furniture and I can only assume that these things came into the possession of the Price family through that business.

My particular favourite was a telescope inscribed to Phillip Gidley King who sailed to Botany Bay with Captain Arthur Phillip as a first lieutenant in 1788, was put in charge of the convict settlement at Norfolk Island, and later the third governor of the colony of New South Wales.

Mrs Price always told me that I was to have this telescope after she died but I somehow missed out on this. All that I have as a memento of her and her collection are a couple of indigenous war weapons from I know not where.                                          

Community activist

Essie Price was a force in the community, not just through her participation in civic affairs, but also through her activism and agitation for causes in which she believed. An inveterate correspondent, there were few issues of the Nepean Times that did not contain a letter penned by Essie on some issue or another.

She served for many years as a councillor on Penrith Council, as a member of the board of the Nepean Hospital being the first woman to be appointed to the board, and on many other community organisations. Mrs Price was a long time president of the Penrith Mothers’ Club, the P and C like group attached to the Penrith Infants School. In association with Mrs Sandy, she raised funds for improvements to Memory Park, and these two ladies tramped the streets every Thursday for many years, raising funds for charities.

She was also the first woman to be appointed a Justice of the Peace in the district. A JP was more than a document witness in those days and could be called upon to preside in an emergency as a temporary magistrate for the purpose of bail and adjournments of proceedings in the Magistrate’s Court.

Essie Price was a dedicated smoker and it was rare to see her without a Craven A cigarette. She also liked a social drink and enjoyed parties. She was very fond of the films, having the privilege of life time free admission to the Nepean Theatre. Her favourite time at the pictures was Saturday afternoon because she really enjoyed the serials and B class movies that were a feature of that session. She would sit in the front stalls in her regular seat on the right hand side, surrounded by young kids whose parents were happy to let them go there unattended because they were confident Mrs Price would both look after them and control any childish over-exuberance.

Essie Price was not only a Penrith character. She also exemplified the character of the town in those days – community service, friendliness, and the affinity and cooperative nature of the residents with each other.

The back section of the house (Arthur Street Collection, Penrith Library)

Mrs Sandy lived at 395 High Street, a site now occupied by a real estate agency, in a big old white house. The house had a large expanse of verandah, smothered in blue wisteria, and it fronted the street. Mrs Sandy, crippled with arthritis, would sit each day in her chair on the verandah and watch the town pass by.

Next door to the house was a small wooden building that served the town firstly as a lolly shop and then as a dressmaker’s shop. I believe that both the house and the shop were part of the same property.

Aunty Priddle’s lolly shop

May Sandy was the niece (or possibly the adopted daughter) of Louisa Priddle who was known universally to Penrith residents as Aunty Priddle. I don’t recall Aunty Priddle but Mrs Sandy and others used to tell me stories about her. Aunty Priddle was born in Picton but lived in Penrith for most of her adult life. Her husband, John, owned a livery stable on the corner of Henry and Station Streets and opened a lolly shop next door for Mrs Priddle to run.  She also sold cakes, drinks and tobacco products.

When John Priddle died suddenly, Aunty Priddle continued to run both businesses for a while but in 1908 sold out to Nelson Price, who was the nephew of John Price, the founder of John Price and Son, funeral directors. Nelson continued to work the livery stable until he bought the funeral business from John Price’s widow and eventually moved the funeral parlour to the Priddle site from its original site in High Street opposite the Post Office just down from the picture show.

After she sold to Nelson Price, Mrs Priddle bought the property in High Street from John Doyle, the licensee of the Federal Hotel, and opened another lolly shop where she was helped by May. She and the Sandys lived in the house next to the lolly shop.

Aunty Priddle died in 1943, a well known and well-loved citizen of Penrith. She had the lolly shop on the High Street site for over 30 years so it must have been a landmark. Mrs Priddle was 81 when she died and the town gave her a huge funeral.

A sporting side note

Mrs Priddle’ brother in law and sister were Richard and Nell Benaud who had been Penrith residents before moving to Coraki. They were the grandparents of Richie Benaud, the great Australian cricketer and even more renowned cricket commentator. The Benauds moved back to Penrith to help out and look after Mrs Sandy and we knew them as Uncle Dick and Aunty Nell. Dick Benaud, in his earlier stint in Penrith, had been the first president of the Penrith Show Society.

Now Richie Benaud was born in Penrith and was captain of the Australian cricket team from 1958 to 1964. The great rugby league player, Ken Kearney, was also born in Penrith and was captain of the Australian Rugby League team in 1956-1957.

Although their captaincies did not quite coincide, it was close enough. Penrith boys were captains of two of our premier national sporting teams. Not bad for a small country town.

The mystery of Mrs Sandy’s name

I was always confused about what Mrs Sandy’s name actually was. We knew her as Mrs Sandy but others called her or referred to her variously as May (fair enough, that was her given name), Sandy, Mrs Boston or Sandy Boston. And her son was Jack Sandy.

The story was that she was born May Rowe, married a Mr  Ern Sandy (actually Dagmar-Sandy) who died at an early age and she then remarried a man called George Boston who also died after a few years of marriage. She had no luck with her husbands.

Anyhow, Mrs Sandy, which is what I will call her, ran the lolly shop for a while until the arthritis in her fingers got too bad and the lolly shop was taken over by her daughter in law Freda Sandy,. Freda was a first-class seamstress and she made dresses to order and mended garments in what had been the lolly shop.

Mrs Sandy had been very active in community affairs before the arthritis got her. She and Essie Price, the sister in law of Nelson Price (Penrith was a small community) headed a community drive to raise money to pay for improvements to Memory Park. These two ladies worked tirelessly for charities and walked the town from Mrs Sandy’s house to Emu Plains every second Thursday for over a year knocking on doors to collect money to fund an operating theatre at the hospital.

After she became crippled with arthritis, Mrs Sandy would sit each day on her verandah, talking to the many people she knew who were passing by and doing her needlework with her dog at her feet and George the Cocky in his cage beside her. It was amazing to see her old twisted hands fly across the needlework. I often used to visit Mrs Sandy and listen to her stories about Penrith in earlier days.

Some of the less polite youths in the town would taunt her as they walked past and refer to her as a witch. Many of those same youths would today be old men with joint pains and I bet that their minds sometimes stray back to those days and they regret that they found Mrs Sandy’s plight so funny.

George the Cocky

Mrs Sandy owned a ratty little dog called Monty and a cocky named George. George was a Corella Cockatoo and was the most vicious and evil creature that ever walked this earth. I know whereof I speak because Mrs Sandy eventually gave George to our family and he lived with us for many years.

I would like to think that there was some excuse for George’s evil ways because he had spent his entire life locked up in a cage, but I think that he was just mean by nature. Mrs Sandy had bought George from a man who worked in a carnival and had had him for many years before she passed him on to us. We had him for over twenty years so he must have been a ripe old age when he died.

George was an incredible mimic and had alternate voices – you could hear the carnival man in him sometimes when he swore, or the voice of Mrs Sandy, or even my mother. His sweet ingratiating Mrs Sandy -voice when he murmured ‘scratch cocky’ or ‘give  George a kiss’ or ‘shake hands with cocky’ tempted many a trusting person to get too close to the cage in order to shake George’s proffered claw.  As soon as the trusting soul made contact George would pull in his claw and savage the imprisoned hand quickly and truly with his vicious beak, claiming another victim. If he had been a dog, I am sure that the police would have put him down years before.

All members of my family and several of our friends carry marks of George’s bites because my mother, who had an abiding kindness towards lesser creatures, would sometimes allow George out of his cage to roam around the house freely for exercise. Needless to say, he repaid her kindnesses with an occasional bite. He did have a bit of a limp from an injured leg where my father once had to defend himself from a George attack with a responsive kick.

George also perfected his imitation of a  wolf whistle. He would often, while his cage was in the yard – at Mrs Sandy’s or at our place – shriek out his whistle. If this happened, as occasionally it did, when a young lady happened to be walking past, the result was a baleful glare at any unfortunate man who happened to be in the vicinity.

George also had a bad habit of crying out in alarm if I or one of my brothers were trying to sneak into our house late at night without waking the parents. Thanks for that, George.

George died in 1980, mourned only by my mother.

Mrs Sandy leaves Penrith

For reasons that have remained unknown to me, her family persuaded Mrs Sandy to sell her property in 1958 and move away from Penrith. She told me at her farewell party that she did not want to leave Penrith and without the town and her friends she would die.

She was right. Mrs Sandy died less than three months after leaving Penrith.

Mick Griffin had his dental surgery in High Street near Memory Park. There were other dentists in town but Mick was the one everybody who I knew went to.

Nowadays, dentists are referred to as ‘Doctor’ and there is nothing wrong with that – they are very skilled specialists in dental surgery. But nobody ever referred to Mick as Dr Griffin. They may have called him Mr Griffin to his face but in the third person, it was always Mick.

Our visits to the dentist were frequent. Our teeth needed continual fillings, and extractions were always on the cards.  There was no fluoride in the water then, we ate a lot of starchy and sugary foods and parents were not as conscious as they are today of the need for good oral hygiene. And we chewed a lot of gum, the old type with the hard sugared casing. Not only pleasant but good for your breath and digestion, they said. They should have had a dental health warning.

And Fantales and Minties could shake loose a filling in a flash.No wonder we all had holes in our teeth, and gaps.

Mick would surely have been skilled at his work otherwise he would not have lasted so long in a small town where reputations could easily be lost by bad practices. The problem was that dental techniques were not as good as they are now and the equipment and aids that we are today accustomed to did not exist, at least in Mick’s surgery.

I don’t recall there being a mouth rinse to gurgle around and spit out, only water. The dentist did not usually wear a face mask and there were no dark glasses to protect the eyes against the glare of the dentist’s big light. There was certainly no television set fixed to the ceiling for you to look at when the dentist tilted your head upwards to work on your teeth. And you did not get a free toothbrush or sample tube of toothpaste from the receptionist on your way out.

The drills were frightening. They didn’t have the high pitched quick drill that now makes drilling so quick and painless. There were only the slow and heavy ones that were more like the drills that they use when fixing roads than dental work. Okay, that is an exaggeration but they were big and slow and noisy. And whatever they used in a filling, if not concrete, surely felt like it.

Anesthetic by injection was available but the needles were big in diameter and painful.  Mick sometimes used a sweet sickly-smelling gas if you were having a tooth out. I was told that this was chloroform.

I suppose that this was to knock the patient out completely to stop them leaping from the chair when Mick reached for the pliers.

A face mask containing several cloths soaked with liquid would be placed over your nose and mouth and you would be told to count up to 100. The next thing you knew you were in Disneyland and having strange dreams. When you woke up, you would not only be sore, you would be nauseous.

We all dreaded going to the dentist and for people of my generation, at least from Penrith, we dread going to the dentist now. Yes, things have changed, and we look with awe at how our grandchildren can march happily into a dental surgery for a filling without the apprehension that we had and have still. Half the time, they don’t even ask for or need anesthetic. Still, they never had the Mick Griffin Experience.

And we really hate needles. Trypanophobia, they call it.

Mick Griffin did not want to frighten kids or cause them to fear the dentist, I am sure. It’s just that dental surgery techniques were nowhere near as friendly in the forties and fifties as they became and that the surgeries themselves were not designed to ease the patient’s fears.

Some years later, a new dentist came to town. John Anker. By then dental equipment was much better and dental techniques had vastly improved. We changed dentists but our fears remained.

When Mick Griffin sold his practice and left Penrith, the rumour among the kids was that he had retired and bought a butcher’s shop somewhere in the country.

I am pretty sure that this was not true and some kid had just made it up.

Other Penrith characters

Charlie the bookie in the hat

Sister Bartholomew, a real bone crusher

Old Tom, the Count and the one-armed man

St Joseph’s Convent was on the corner of Evan and High Streets and provided education to primary level for students whose parents preferred them to be taught at a Catholic school.

Sister Bartholomew was a nun at the Convent and taught music. If you wanted to learn the piano, you either went after school to the Misses Hand who also lived in High Street or you went to Sister Bartholomew who would teach you, even if you were not  Catholic. The Hand sisters taught not only the piano but the violin and guitar. Very versatile ladies.

Sister was a small elderly lady but she was a real terror. She would stand beside the student as they practiced on the piano and at the playing of a wrong note she would swoop. She had a steel-edged ruler that she would bring sharply across the knuckles of the offending fingers – CRACK!

Despite her apparent fondness for the sound of metal against bone, Sister was a good teacher of music. Her better students became accomplished pianists but the not-so-good implored their parents to let them give up the piano rather than face life with twisted fingers.

Still, away from the piano, she was kind and did good works. And she liked to laugh.

Another Penrith character was Charlie, the SP bookmaker.

If you strolled down the lane next to George’s Hamburger Shop in High Street, just down from what is now called Lawson Street, you would come to a broken down building. This was the place of business of Charlie, the SP bookmaker. The lane is no longer there but has been built over. I think there may be a nail care place there now.

Before the TAB was created in 1964, off-course betting was illegal. If you wanted to punt on a horse or dog race, you either had to go to the racecourse or find an SP bookmaker. SP stands for starting price and this was how winning bets were calculated. They were paid on the starting price – the price at which on-course bookmakers had the horse or dog at the moment that the race started.

As SP betting was illegal, both the punter and the bookmaker could be charged and fined. Police were very tolerant of bookmaking establishments and they more or less operated with impunity. This could have been because the majority of the community did not consider it as something that should attract penal punishment. Another view was that police inaction resulted from financial inducements given by the bookmakers. Who knows? Perhaps it was a mixture of both community tolerance and the financial needs of police.

Most town and suburbs had at least one SP bookie. Penrith had several well-run SP bookie joints and there were shops and pubs in town that acted as agents of these bookmakers. These bookmakers were well organised and operated like proper businesses.

Charlie was neither well organised nor business-like. He didn’t even appear to have a last name, at least one that anybody knew. On the charm and personal charisma scale, Charlie was in negative territory.

He sat at an old table, always with his hat on, with a telephone next to him and recorded bets in an invoice book with carbon paper. The top copy went to the punter, leaving Charlie with a carbonised record of the bet. The radio was always on: the race broadcasts and starting price information on station 2KY were tools of trade.

Charlie was gruff and his conversation was hardly sparkling. He did offer a couple of advantages over the bigger establishments: he gave credit to out-of-luck punters and never resorted to strong arm methods if they didn’t pay him back. He would write off the defaulting punters to experience but they never got a second chance.

At one stage, Charlie had a side kick named Barry. Barry was a mad punter himself but was very able with figures and quick at calculating bets without the assistance of pen and paper. He was less able in keeping his hands out of Charlie’s cash-box and made off with a couple of hundred quid of Charlie’s takings. So far as is known, Charlie took no punitive action against him and Barry was still seen occasionally around town without any visible signs of post-embezzlement injury.

Not long after the TAB started, Charlie closed the operation down and left town, Another small business lost to emerging technology.

Next Penrith character story: Sister Bartholomew’ a real bone-crusher.

There were many characters in Penrith when I was growing up and they all contributed to the atmosphere of the town. I will be writing short sketches of some of them.

Old Tom

Tom Egan, commonly known as Old Tom, even to those older than him, was a bit slow and fancied a drink or two. Despite all this, he was a hard worker and kept himself going by doing odd jobs around the town and he lived in an old shed. His conversation was limited and consisted mostly of adages that were sometimes hard to fathom.

He had sayings like ‘It ain’t the world, its the people in it’ and ‘You might as well kill a black dog as a white one’ whatever that meant. When the drink got him, which was pretty often, he would make these pronouncements over and over again, until the cops came and got him, and tossed him in the slammer for the night.

In those days of relaxed civil rights, people perceived by the police as a nuisance were often arrested without charge and just left in a cell until someone decided it was time to let them out. Some cynics thought that this was more the result of a copper augmenting his income by rolling an unfortunate miscreant than protecting the public. They may have been right.

Old Tom favoured GPS Regatta Day as a forum for his public oratory. Regatta Day was a big deal in those days for Penrith, an event that allowed us local hicks to become acquainted with our posh City betters, and more on that in a later story. Any Saturday night was also likely to see a Tom Egan performance. He liked to stand in the middle of High Street just opposite the Nepean Theatre to project his wisdom. This was a convenient spot as it was just down the road from the Australian Arms Hotel, Tom’s preferred pub, and only a short uphill walk to the old Police Station. Sometimes Tom would throw his money on the ground just to make it easier on the police.

Tom had no family that I knew of but he was still around when I left Penrith in the late 60s. I don’t know what became of him. Probably, he just got old and died.

Count O’Meagher

Lancelot C O’Meagher had silver hair and a Hercule Poirot moustache which curled up at the end. The Count, as he was naturally called, had a vintage car, a 1912 Renault, which he drove about the town and which became an integral part of any parade or procession held in the town. There seemed to be a lot of them but I don’t really remember what they all were for.

The Count worked from time to time in the library in the School of Arts building. He was not the shy and retiring type and knew full well the value of publicity. He once drove the Renault to Melbourne and back, averaging 15 miles an hour, and gathered admiring crowds and newspaper articles wherever he stopped.

The Count kept the Renault in the same immaculate condition as his moustache. I suspect he waxed them both on a daily basis. What he did or had done for a living nobody seemed to know. I used to think that he was once an adventurer in the Middle East with lots of stories to tell or a Lothario on an ocean liner, or that maybe he was just a retired grocer who inherited his vintage car from a maiden aunt. Although the truth was different, it turned out that he had led an interesting and exotic life.

The car had a history too. According to the Count, who was reputedly once a car salesman, he had sold it to a doctor somewhere in country NSW but he had subsequently bought it back for 340 pounds and it had never had anything but minor repairs. He did, however, prefer a horse to a car, saying that you had to work hard to keep a car looking good but a horse was much easier to maintain.

The Count was a man of many parts. At one stage, he ran Sunday cruises on the Nepean River leaving the Log Cabin wharf at 1030 in the morning and arriving back in the late afternoon. The cost was four shillings (kids half price) and the Count was both the manager and the ‘skipper’. I don’t know if the price included refreshments or if passengers took their own picnic lunch and ate on board or at some picturesque spot.

Looking back at the Count’s Renault, after all these years, the cars my family drove at that time would probably qualify now as vintage cars. The same comment would apply to my first car which was a 1959 VW Beetle. At the time of writing, it would be 61 years old. In say 1955, the Count’s vintage car would have been only 43 years old. Some comparison. Just think, if I still had it, I could be leading a Penrith procession.

The one-armed man

Long before the television series ‘The Fugitive‘, Penrith had its own one-armed man, or one-handed at least. His name was Jack Bowtell and he disguised his missing hand either with an artificial hand made out of leather or a hook, and he wore these interchangeably. What made him wear one of these on any particular day is a mystery although he probably had his reasons.

He had been a general and mail carrier in Penrith, carrying the mail between the railway station and the post office and operated from a horse and cart as The Pony Parcel Express. Mr Bowtell was very active in community affairs and in charity work. I understand that he sometimes organised dances and musical shows for charity where he would deliver a musical recital of Bye, Bye Blackbird, accompanied by a black rooster in a cage.

The hook was pretty scary to young children but he was a nice man and I suspect that he would have felt bad every time a kid saw the hook and ran.

Next Penrith character story: Charlie, the bookie in the hat.