Penrith characters: Perce Hall and the town’s love affair with the trots

February 15, 2020 John4 Comments

Penrith has always had an association with and a love for the sport of harness racing (the trots) and this was so long before Penrith was licensed to hold regular trotting race meetings at the old showground.

The Nepean District Agricultural Horticultural and Industrial Society (better known as the Penrith Show Society) not only ran the annual Penrith Show but conducted regular gymkhanas on the old Penrith showground, the precursor of today’s Paceway.

‘Gymkhana’ is an Indian word for a sporting event and, in the Penrith context, usually involved equestrian contests like flag and saddling events, cycling sometimes, but more importantly, trotting races. Even though they are called ‘trotting’ races, they mostly involve pacing rather than trotting. The difference between the two, as I understand it, is that a trotter’s front and back legs move forward alternatively but a pacer’s front and back legs move forward on the same side. In each format, the horse carries a sulky, called a gig or a spider, in which the driver sits and directs the horse with long reins and a whip. There is no saddle as with gallopers.

The trotting races at gymkhanas carried cash prize money as well as ribbons for the placegetters in special events. There were no bookmakers because bookmakers were only allowed to take bets on licensed race or trotting courses, which Penrith was not. However, for those interested, a bet was always possible behind the grandstand where representatives of Charlie the Bookmaker, or Penrith’s larger SP bookmakers, were glad to take a punter’s hard-earned.

These gymkhanas were popular with the public and also with trotting drivers and trainers. The big-time trainers were able to give their equine charges race experience without pushing them too much as they would have to do in a proper event while the single horse trainer, of which there were many locally and from elsewhere, practiced their driving skills and assessed the merits of their charge.

Charities would also occasionally hold gymkhanas to raise money.

The Penrith Show – a digression

The Penrith Show was then held on a Friday and Saturday in either February or March, always before the Easter Show in Sydney. I have a recollection that, for a while, the Friday was always a holiday from school or maybe we just made it an unofficial one.

It was always good fun because, even if we were not at an age where our parents allowed us to go to the big Show in Sydney on our own, the local showground was seen as safe territory and we could venture there without parental supervision.

show 2 — The sideshows (Penrith City Library collection)

There were of course no show bags or sample bags as we used to call them then. There were ring events, agricultural and industrial exhibits that were generally of no interest to us. We went for the sideshows and the rubbishy food that we could get there. You have to realise that in an era where there were no fast-food chains, the attraction of a hot dog or a Pluto Pup was a strong one.

The sideshows tended to be second grade compared to those at the Royal Easter Show but they were good enough for us.

A big attraction was always the Jimmy Sharman Boxing Troupe where a cast of broken down pugs or emerging young professional fighters either fought bouts among themselves or took on local toughs who fancied themselves in the ring. ‘Boomba, Boomba, Boomba’ went the drum; ‘you supply the fighters, we supply the fireworks’ was the challenge from the Sharman huckster with the loudspeaker.

Trotting drivers and trainers

There were professional trainer-drivers in Penrith and neighbouring areas, and plenty of amateurs. The professionals were professional in the sense that they raced not only their own horses but did so for owners who did not drive. They may or may not have other occupations or businesses.

But there were also a lot of amateurs, men with one or two horses who engaged in the sport as a pastime or in the hopes of cracking success and becoming a big-time trainer. Men like Hilton Boots who lived just up the road from us in Evan Street and who had one nag, not very successful.

They used Penrith Showground as a training track and early walkers to the railway station to commute to their jobs could see a procession of these amateurs driving their horses through the Penrith streets either on their way to or coming back from the showground. They were the mainstay of the local gymkhanas but many of them never made it to the licensed tracks in Sydney and elsewhere.

The quest for a licence

The Show Society was dead keen on getting a licence from the New South Wales government to hold proper race meetings for trotting and pacing events on the showground. The difficulty was that legislation only permitted a set number of meetings on licensed trotting tracks a year. There was a quota of metropolitan meetings and Penrith was considered to be within the metropolitan area.

The principal licensee at the time was the NSW Trotting Club which held its meetings at Harold Park in Glebe and later on at Menangle Park. That club prized its near-monopoly of trotting in the state and was not prepared to sacrifice any of its racing dates to allow an upstart town like Penrith to get into the act. The government was reluctant to legislate to allow more events because that would arouse the anti-gambling community. Wowsers had always exercised more influence in New South Wales politics than their numbers deserved. Capturetrot book 1

For as long as I could remember, the Show Society had chased this licence. It made a big push in 1945 and again in 1952 when it was actually promised a licence but the government reneged.

dr renshaw 1 — Dr Renshaw at the Showground (Penrith City Library collection)

These tireless efforts finally achieved a result and on 16 April 1964, following legislation that situated the town in a country area for the purposes of trotting meetings, the first meeting was held on the newly licensed track now called the Penrith Paceway. Over 7000 people turned out.

It didn’t hurt that the president of the Show Society at the time was Dr Maurice Renshaw whose brother Jack Renshaw was a senior minister in the New South Wales government. Dr Renshaw capably led the trotting club for many years.

Penrith’s own Perce Hall

The Hall family owned Hall’s Butchery in High Street near the corner of Woodriffe Street and Perce Hall was also a professional driver-trainer and he was very successful. Percy was a colourful character and he and other family members were often engaged in controversies and feuds over both harness racing and the ownership of cattle.

Perce and his wife Ruby built and lived in a big white and pink house in Tindale Street just down from the tennis court next to the old School of Arts. This house was the subject of much admiration or envy, depending upon whether the observer was a fan of the Halls or not.

Another Penrith sporting champion

Irrespective of whether people liked Perce or not, there can be no denial that he was a master at his chosen sport, if trotting can be so described.

James-Scott — Perce Hall on board James Scott, his champion pacer (Harnessbred)

He was the leading trainer-driver in New South Wales on many occasions, trained many champion trotters and pacers – Dixie Beau, Ribands, Van Hall and James Scott – and was successful in the Inter-Dominion Championship, the Melbourne Cup of trotting in 1962, with James Scott.

Perce was four times the leading trainer of horses in a single year in New South Wales and won the driver’s premiership five times, winning over 500 races in his career before compulsory retirement from the sport at age 65. And From time to time, he also worked in his butcher’s shop. His brother, George, also drove trotters.

Trotting itself is no longer the spectator sport that it was in earlier days. Harold Park which had trotting events every Friday night has gone and turned into apartments and cafes. Provincial meetings are less frequent and the only big-time track in New South Wales is at Menangle. Whether Penrith, now larger, more cosmopolitan and more sophisticated, remains a town passionate about trotting, I do not know.

But back in the day, it certainly was.

High Street in the 1950s (7): South side Woodriffe Street to Fletchers

February 2, 2020May 11, 2020 John1 Comment

The block between Woodriffe and Station Streets on the south side is a long block, so I will look at it in two parts.

Memory Park

The block starts with Memory Park which sat and still sits on the corner. The park was opened in 1922 after many years of public agitation for a memorial to those who had served in the Great War and was funded mainly from public subscriptions and fundraising by the Penrith Soldiers’ Memorial Committee. Mrs Price and Mrs Sandy were a two-woman fundraising force and these two ladies worked tirelessly to raise funds for the Park.

The dentists

There was a dental surgery here too. The original dentist was a surgeon called Don Hattersley who practised in Penrith from 1920 to 1946 and took a prominent part in the community life of the town – Council, Hospital Board, Show Society and various sporting clubs.I understand that he was a prime mover in establishing the Glenmore Golf Club now the much more pretentiously named Glenmore Heritage Valley.

glenmore — Glenmore c 1920 (Penrith City Library collection)

The property occupied by the club was originally a farm and then became a school for young ladies before it was sold for a golf course and country club in 1927.

Mr Hattersley sold his practice to the dentist of my nightmares Mick Griffin who in turn sold out to a Mr Fletcher. I assume that he was in some way associated with the department store Fletcher family but do not know this for certain.

Fruit shops, cafes and immigrants

There was a fruit shop run by a Mr Wainwright and which was then taken over by the Kepreotis family. The name of this family was very confusing to me. As I remember it, there were two brothers, Peter and Nick. Peter was always known as Peter Kepreotis, but Nick could be either Nick Kepreotis or Nick Aroney. They owned various businesses from time to time in Penrith – fruit and vegetable shops, milk bars and cafes.

nick asroney — One of the Aroney brothers (Max Dupain)

Maybe the name changes had something to do with the prejudices of some of the more backward members of the community. Although there was no overt racism in Penrith that I remember, some of the older and more established townspeople definitely thought that people not of Anglo-Saxon heritage had lesser qualities. The terms ‘wog’ and ‘dago’ were used commonly for immigrants of Mediterranean background, newly arrived folk from Eastern and Central Europe were all thrown in under the name ‘Balts’ presumably after the Baltic Sea and the epithet ‘Reffo’ (refugee) was commonplace. The more polite described immigrants as ‘New Australians’.

Easts Butchers

The East family was very big in the meat business in Penrith. There was a butcher shop named East Brothers here and further down the block there was another butcher shop known as White Way which was also run by an East. I don’t know the story but imagine that they were all somehow related.

EAST SLAUGHTERHOUSE — The old East’s abattoir in Kingswood (Penrith City Library collection)

I do know that there was a Harold East who may well have been the man who started the East beef dynasty. He originally had a butcher shop in Station Street, their own abattoir in Wrench Street Kingswood and a property on which they ran their own animals. There was a rivalry with another Penrith well-known butcher family who also ran their own cattle with occasional flare ups over ownership of cattle that ended up in Penrith Court.

Saunders Chemist

After East Brothers, there may have been a shoe shop known as Gardeners. Then came Saunders Chemist. My recollection is that this was on the other side of the street but people who worked there assure me that it was at 450 High Street just up from Fletchers. saunders ad

Mr Saunders started his business in about 1936 and it was still going strong in the 1960s. As well as selling patent medicines and dispensing prescriptions, Mr Saunders also stocked a large array of gifts and luxury products that he displayed in the shop windows. He also had an extensive stock of cameras and photographic supplies.

We then had another ladies’ wear shop that might have been called Chic and a fabric shop which was bought out by Fletchers when they extended their main store. I will look at Fletchers and the remaining shops in this block in a future post.

Next High Street post

North side: Woodriffe Street to the Federal Hotel

Previous High Street post

(6) North side – the lane to Woodriffe Street

Cracker Night in Penrith and other dangerous things

January 6, 2020February 16, 2020 JohnLeave a comment

We did lots of things when we were kids that were stupid, none more so than fooling around with crackers, as fireworks were familiarly known.

Empire Day

Empire Day was a day to celebrate the glories of the British Empire and our self-proclaimed privilege and joy in being part of it. As Britain gave up more and more of its colonies, the term Empire was not only unacceptable to the newly liberated former colonials but a bit foolish and so in 1958 the name was changed to Commonwealth Day. It is still commemorated by government but nobody else seems to give a proverbial. global-trade-empire-crop

Mind you, I don’t think anybody other than those Australians suffering the colonial cringe and who strangely still referred to Britain as ‘home’ cared much for Empire Day but to kids it represented a half-day off from school and crackers.

So on the 24th of May each year, we had morning assemblies at school listening to local imperialists and a few conscripted students extolling the wonders of the British Empire and Australia’s essential role in it. After this, we got the afternoon off to prepare for the real highlight of the day – Bonfire Night or Cracker Night, choose your own term.

cracker night 2 — A typical Cracker Night scene back then

Building a bonfire

There were publicly held bonfires, a big one at the Showground, and another at the Scouts Hall but the real fun was building your own bonfire with your mates in one of your back yards or on a spare paddock. When we lived in High Street, our bonfire was always in the yard at the back of our shop. When we moved to Evan Street, we built a bonfire on the paddock next to the house of George Innes.

You would start building a bonfire by throwing some easily combustible kindling on the ground and then piling on whatever was handy to create a good and lasting flame. We were lucky when we were living in High Street because the yard was at the back of Dad’s cafe which had a fuel stove so there was always plenty of wood down the back of the yard to throw on the fire. Old tyres were a favourite fuel as well but you had to get in early at one of the tyre places and plead for some tyres before they ran out of useable stock. Light the bonfire, chuck some kerosene on it to get it going and you had a bonfire.

I have to say that little heed was paid to the possibility of flames spreading from a bonfire and causing damage but that was the way it was back then.

Crackers

A few weeks before Cracker Night some of the stores in Penrith – mainly newsagents and the sports store – would start selling fireworks. They were of several kinds – the pretty ones, the explosive ones, and the safe ones, and I use the word safe here with some trepidation.

The pretty crackers

These were in different forms but essentially what they did was shoot out a shower of sparks, often of different colours but sometimes just an ordinary yellow or white shower.

Roman Candles had a cascade of several spark showers, A Catherine Wheel was a circular tube of explosive powder that you nailed to a fence post. When you lit the wick, the wheel turned round and round, letting loose a shower of sparks. The difficult bit was nailing the wheel it loosely enough to spin but not too loose. Of course, if you were not careful in your nailing and it was too loosely attached to the post, the Catherine Wheel fell off the post and ran amok across the fireworks area.

pretty crackers bw — Light the blue touch paper and run!

A particular favourite was the Mount Vesuvius which, as the name implies, offered a volcano-like explosion of sparks.

One thing that these crackers all had in common was the wick – a piece of slowly combustible paper coloured blue. They all bore the instruction: Light blue touch paper and stand back. As you can imagine, the prudent lit the blue touch paper and moved back, the foolhardy didn’t.

Explosive crackers

These were, I suppose. like mini sticks of dynamite. There was the bunger which, after the wick was ignited, exploded with a loud bang. You were supposed to get rid of the bunger quickly after lighting it but the game was to see how long you could hang onto it before it went off. This was crazy. The double bunger exploded twice. A favourite pastime was to put bungers into a letterbox and watch the result. This was done outside the view of parents and, let’s face it, was pure vandalism.

Then there were Jumping Jacks which were a set of small explosives tied together and after being lit, jumped around in a series of tiny explosions. Ideal for younger kids wanting a thrill or the timid. Tom Thumbs were a gentler version of the Jumping Jack.

Safe crackers

I include here the Sparkler which you still see occasional in restaurants which use them instead of candles on cakes when a customer is celebrating a birthday or some other occasion. A sparkler is a metallic stick with a non-flammable metal handle. Upon being lit, the flammable section burns slowly throwing out a shower of sparkles. These were often given to the littler children to hold and wave around so that they could participate but safely.

The problem with sparklers is obvious. The metal once ignited gets scalding hot and takes quite a while to cool down. If carelessly picked up, as it often was after being discarded, it could give a nasty burn. I don’t know what percentage of burns sparklers were responsible for in our day but I read recently that they are today responsible for nearly 20 per cent of firework burns in the USA. Seeing and hearing a small child suffering from a sparkler burn was not pretty.

The other so-called safe firework was the skyrocket which you placed in a container such as a bottle or metal tube, lit it and away it went into the sky, emitting a cascade of sparks. Very pretty. Some of the bigger and rougher boys had a little trick of putting a skyrocket in a metal watering can or some similar device, lighting the rocket and aiming it at another bonfire. I don’t know anybody who was actually injured by one of these but the danger was always there.

The unexpected climax

Smart people kept their unexploded fireworks safely in the house or some other protected place until they were needed and individually brought out into the yard. It was common however for the fireworks to be placed in a box or paper bag and left in the yard. And if there were visitors they generally bought their bag or box of fireworks and left them lying around.

The danger always was that a stray spark or a deranged Catherine Wheel or Jumping Jack would fall onto the stored fireworks and accidentally set them off. When this happened, and it was not a rare event, the result was one brief glorious moment of fireworks exploding and then everybody had an early night.

The other dangers

As with today, fireworks were hell for cats and dogs. We all loved our pets but somehow, in the excitement of the night, we forgot the terror that the crackers caused our animals.

Apart from the dangers generally of handling fireworks, and each year the papers on the following days would have stories of kids injured by fireworks, it was common for the younger children to attend Cracker Night dressed in their pajamas and dressing gowns. And in those days, fire-resistant sleepwear was not common. The risk of a bad accident was always there.

The end of Cracker Night

My recollection is a bit hazy here but I believe that after Empire Day became Commonwealth Day, fireworks celebrations gradually changed to the Queens Birthday weekend.

There was always pressure on the government to do something about Bonfire Night because of the risk of fires getting out of control and injury to children from mishandling fireworks. Fireworks, other than at specially controlled events, were finally banned in New South Wales in 1986. Most other States have similar bans. So how come I can still hear bungers explode and see skyrockets light the air from the beach just down the road from my home every Queens Birthday Weekend and New Years Eve. They can’t be all left over from Cracker Nights in Penrith.

Other dangerous pastimes

There were plenty of other things that we did back then that were, looking back, on the dangerous side, such as playing with shanghais or catapults, the names were interchangeable. You got a small piece of forked wood, attached a think elastic band or rubber cord and used it to shoot projectiles – tightly wrapped pieces of paper or even stones, at targets. Some kids used them to hunt rabbits – I was not one of these – and the more irresponsible fired them at other kids. If a ‘bullet’ hit you, it certainly hurt and the big danger was that it could take out an eye.

The same with bb guns or air rifles. As I never owned one, I don’t really know the difference, but some boys had them and used them to fire projectiles like small ball bearings. These could cause serious injury and no doubt sometimes did.

Mucking around on bikes and on the family car was also risky. Most cars in those days had running boards on their sides and it was great fun to stand on the running board while one’s father was backing the car out or driving it into the yard or garage, or even to sit on the bonnet.

And there were cars with what we called a rumble seats and which was were known elsewhere as a dicky seat. This was an upholstered seat at the rear of the car that folded into the body of the car. My father, and some of my friends’ fathers, had at one stage a car with one of these seats. I think ours was on a Ford. My brother and I would sometime squeeze into the rumble seat and enjoy a fresh air motor passenger experience but how insane was this? One rear-end collision and that’s all, folks.

Parental supervision

All this raises the question of why did our parents allow us exposure to these risks? I have no answer to this question. I would certainly not have let my children light crackers, play with catapults or driven a car with them in a rumble seat and my children, in turn, are even more obsessive when it comes to to their children and the risk of harm.

I have no doubts that my parents, and other parents, loved their children dearly and would have taken a bullet for them but yet they must have been aware of the risks of these activities and did nothing. Perhaps it was a generational thing, perhaps it was because that generation had lived through two world wars and a Depression and saw risk differently.

I just don’t know how the vast majority of us survived these risks, the harsh physical discipline that most of us had rendered to us, and the many childhood diseases that are now but a memory, without any lasting effects, physical or mental.

But we did.

Penrith parties and the church youth club caper

December 20, 2019 John1 Comment

As it is the festive season, my mind has turned to parties in Penrith. We may have been naive and emotionally immature as youngsters in Penrith in the fifties but we still knew how to party. Tamer than today perhaps but still, for those days, quite daring.

The youth club

There was a church in Penrith which, for reasons apparent in this story, should remain nameless.

This church had a youth club, formed with all good intentions, to provide a meeting place and social outlet for clean-living Christian young people. A management committee of members of the club ran it and for years it functioned as it was intended.

Towards the end of the fifties, the committee of the youth club fell into the hands of some young people who did not really measure up to the ideals and aspirations of the church.

The committee started holding regular Saturday night social occasions under the auspices of the church. These nights became very popular because of the tolerant attitude of those running it to such non-religious activities as drinking alcohol and dancing to rock music. Rock and roll had caught on with a vengeance and the liberation of the sixties was just around the corner.

The functions were held under such innocuous titles as Beach Night, Roman night and the like and the attendees dressed accordingly. There were party games and dancing to records. As the evening wore on, the lights in the church hall were dimmed by whichever committee member was running it that night. Attendees would pair off to do whatever young people did in those days.

One night, the minister in charge of the church, a gentle and polite man, wandered into the church hall and twigged what was going on. He gave a couple of polite coughs to alert people to his presence and to give them enough time to get themselves together. He asked people to leave and in the following days disbanded the committee. Heaven only knows what he reported to the elders of the church.

The club had a healthy bank account from membership fees and the proceeds of its various fun nights. The bank account was still under the control of the sacked committee which decided to splurge the money on one glorious night out for members of the troublesome club and any hangers-on they wanted to bring along.

They chose as a venue the Capri Nightclub that had recently opened in Kingswood just down from the hotel. The bill for food and drinks was covered from the money in the bank account.

A good time was had by all. I understand that the club was subsequently reformed and reverted to more traditional activities.

Penrith’s longest party

The same players were more or less involved in Penrith’s longest ever party. We have all seen Hollywood movies where the parents go away and leave the house in the care of the errant teenager who then proceeds to hold a party that gets out of hand. Well, this one was Hollywood teen party on steroids.

In the same year as the church youth club fiasco, one of the participants’ parents went on holidays for two weeks in the Christmas-New Year period, foolishly leaving at home in Kingswood their son who had a part-time job and who they thought was responsible enough to be left at home. As you would expect, they were no sooner gone, than it was party time.

Unlike the Hollywood cliche where the party lasts a night only to end with the unexpected return of the parents or the expected arrival of police, this particular party went on for some time – a little over two weeks (the memory is fuzzy). It was a continuous party, going on day and night with a changing cast of attendees. Those party-goers who worked would leave the party to attend to their employment (often straight to their job or, if they worked out of town, straight to the railway station), returning at night. Daytime partying at the house was left to those who did not work.

At any given time, there would have been between 10 and 40 revellers in the house. The sharing of costs – drink and food – was fairly equitable except for the occasional freeloader. I suppose the ages of the attendees varied between about 16 and 21.

There was a lot of alcohol drunk but in those more conservative days there were no drugs involved, other than cigarettes. The party was not riotous and never got out of hand, although one girl attempting a handstand in the lounge room accidentally went through the glass front door, requiring stitching up at the Nepean Hospital, thankfully within walking distance of the party house.

I have to say that the party holders’ parents when they returned home and saw the state of the house were somewhat disappointed in their son.

Penrith’s biggest party

The Kingswood Festival was not, however, Penrith’s biggest party. This took place one Regatta Day at a girl’s home in Jipp Street. I don’t know if the parents were home for this one because I never managed to actually get inside the house, although I was a close friend of the party girl.

I realised that there was a debacle in the making as, leaving home in Evan Street at around 7 o’clock to go to the party, I noticed a heavy stream of teenage traffic walking south up the hill. Heavy pedestrian traffic on Evan Street walking away from the town on a Saturday evening was unusual, to say the least. tiffanys

I heard a young girl walking in front of me asking her companions where they were going. Her companion replied that they were going to a party being held by a girl named June who he didn’t know at a house that he didn’t know but and to just follow the other people. Apparently, news of the party had spread like wildfire at the Regatta and the assumption was that everybody was invited. I suspect that this was untrue.

When I arrived at the house, there were so many people gathered in the front yard of the home and on the footpath that it was not possible to actually enter the house and acknowledge the hostess. Shortly after I got there, a fight broke out between two groups of boys, locals and visitors. One visiting GPS lad was knocked off the patio into the rose bushes by one of the locals but the police arrived and broke up the party before things turned too ugly. They sent everyone home so not only was it the town’s biggest party, it was also the shortest.

Today, so many of my generation cluck and grimace at what they see as the looser behaviour of young people with the implication that it was not like that in our day. Certainly, drugs were not an issue back then, but had they been, I suspect that many would have tried them, at the least. We were just as capable as today’s youth of behaving badly but the opportunities were much more limited. And parents and community figures and police were less tolerant, more respected and more feared.

When I hear people of my generation decrying the behaviour of young people today, I think back about what we did and wonder at their short memories.

Penrith High School in the 50s (13): English and language teachers

December 2, 2019March 10, 2020 JohnLeave a comment

There were many teachers of course who I never had teach me, and maybe some of them inspired the students they taught. This story and one that will follow are just pen pictures of some of the teachers whom I experienced at Penrith High. Other ex-students may have other memories.

The English Department

The English Department also included social studies subjects like History and Geography.

The first English teacher that I had was Mr Torode but he was only there for the first year and was replaced by Mr Graham.

Boof Graham had a slightly oriental appearance and was inclined to cuff disrupting male students about the ear. In the summer months, he wore the traditional male teacher’s outfit of short-sleeved shirt, tie, shorts, long socks and highly polished shoes. His tailored shorts were the briefest I believe I have ever seen on a man of his age.

Mr Brown was the English master and he was known as Les Brown. First, because it was his name, and second because there was an American bandleader of the same name – Les Brown and his Band of Renown. Mr Brown was always immaculately dressed in a well-cut suit and spoke in refined tones, reminding us of Bob Menzies, the then Australian Prime Minister. His teaching style was didactic and his mellifluous tones could easily cause one to drop off to sleep on a hot afternoon. Not a bad teacher but he excited little interest in the subject. He left in 1957 to study in England which seemed appropriate to his English-like appearance.

We had Mr Edwards in fourth and fifth years. He was known as Bodgie to his students. I have no idea why, because he looked less like a bodgie than almost any other teacher in the school. For those of you who don’t know what a bodgie was, just think John Travolta in Grease.

Mr Edwards was a great teacher who instilled in his students a love of English and a love of literature which, in my case, has continued down the years. An outstanding teacher and a cultured man.

One of the good things about English was that we were expected to be able to spell, use the correct grammar and know how to punctuate properly, an art that seems to be becoming obsolete in a world of Facebook, Twitter and text messaging.

The bad thing about the English syllabus was that the novels and plays that we were given to study were, with the exception of Shakespeare who is timeless, just so lacking in contemporary interest. Jane Austen was good but tomes like the essays of Dean Inge, an English cleric who wrote in the 1920s, and the non-science fiction novels of H G Wells with their focus on industrial and social conditions in England at the turn of the century had no real relevance to our lives. Spend half a year with The History of Mr Polly and you will know what I mean.

The focus was always on English authors. Australian and American authors never got a mention although the Irish occasionally got a guernsey and we did dabble with We of the Never Never for a term in first year. This was typical of the way our institutions were so focussed on Britain in those days.

Poetry was all right but it was a relief to move away from the Romantics who we studied in the earlier years of our schooling to more modern poets like Eliot, Auden and Yeats.

My History teacher was Bob Stockton of whom I have already written. The only other teacher in this department who I ever had anything to do with was Miss Harris who sometimes filled in at the library if Miss Fardell was away. Miss Harris was not well-liked and was cruelly called Miss Wobblebum by some of the less sensitive boys with whom she had clashed. She later became the librarian when Miss Fardell took up a position at another school.

Languages

The only two language teachers whom I encountered were Miss Butt who taught French, and Spike Jones, my Latin teacher and I have written separately of them. Mr Curry (‘Jack’) was also a language teacher as well as a teacher of English but he never taught me so I have no observations to make about him. He seemed amiable enough.

In 1957, Miss Glenn, a new French teacher arrived and some of the boys in my class romantically daydreamed about her but I don’t think that she stayed at the school very long.

French and Latin were really the only two languages taught, and German occasionally. There was no interest at the curriculum level in secondary education for Asian languages as our engagement with Asia had not started and many of them were still colonies of European countries.

French was taught because it was supposedly the language of international diplomacy, and Latin because a basic understanding of it was required in some University courses. I have no idea why German was on the menu.

Excursions

Unlike today’s more privileged language students, there were no school-arranged overseas trips to become better acquainted with the language and cultures that we were studying. And no exchange students either.

The best one could hope for as a French language student was a non-school-authorised visit to the Savoy Cinema in Sydney to see a French-language movie that would never pass muster at the Nepean Theatre because it was too raunchy, at least by 1950s standards.

savoy theatre cinema treasures — The Savoy Theatre in Bligh Street in the days before it got into foreign-language films that corrupted the morals of teen-age Penrith boys

The Savoy had a fairly flexible approach to regulations that required its customers to be of a certain age to watch these films. I recollect that Brigitte Bardot movies were a particularly favoured medium to improve one’s understanding of French language and culture.

Students today have wider and probably more relevant choices of other languages to learn and those with other ethnic backgrounds can often study the language of their parents. Good.

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Maths and Science teachers and the rest

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Letting in the public

High Street in the 1950s: north side – the lane to Woodriffe Street

November 21, 2019 JohnLeave a comment

This is the shopping block that I knew the best because I lived on it for the first 12 years of my life and my family owned property here until recently.

Tipping’s mixed business

The property at 389 High Street was owned by Mrs Barbara Tipping who ran a mixed business in the shop downstairs and lived upstairs. The business was a milk bar, a newspaper sub-agency and she sold a limited range of grocery items.

My father bought the property and business from Mrs Tipping around about 1950 and ran it the same way, although for some years he added fruit and vegetables to the range. Mrs Tipping continued to live upstairs for several years after she sold out.

My recollection of the shop is that as you walked in there was a glass showcase on the left where mixed lollies were sold by weight. Licorice all sorts and jubes were the most popular. On the lower part of the showcase were stored what we called penny lollies, the most popular with children. There were rainbow balls, gob-stoppers, licorice sticks, sherbet suckers and the vile looking and equally vile tasting musk sticks. Kids generally either bought these separately or in bags of mixed lollies for threepence or sixpence.

There was also chewing gum – the old type with the hard sugary covering rather than the supposedly healthier chewing gum sold today. Bubble gum was available but it never achieved the popularity in Australia that it seems to have in America.

On top of and behind the counter were the larger items of confectionery – chocolate bars, crumble bars, cherry ripe, vanilla nougat, scorched peanut bars and the like – and boxes of chocolates like Winning Post and Old Gold, generally bought by men or older boys to impress a date. scorched peanuts

Like all shops then, there was no air conditioning and, on hot days, chocolates had to be removed from the showcase to a cooler spot to avoid the hot sun streaming in through the windows and the front entrance.

The general milk bar counter was further along on the left. Here were served fruit juices, bottled drinks, and milkshakes. The milkshakes were prepared in the old way – a scoop of milk into the old style metal container, the selected flavoring – vanilla, chocolate, caramel, and strawberry were the favourites – malt dispensed from a Horlicks Malt dispenser. and a single scoop of ice cream. The ingredients were then mixed together in an electric milkshake mixer. The secret to a good milkshake was in how long you mixed it. horlicks 2

Most customers drank their shake from the container with a straw although a minority wanted a glass. There were no takeaway cardboard or laminated containers. milk shaker 3

Ice creams were also for sale – a single scoop cost threepence and a double scoop sixpence. Ice cream buckets, eaten with a wooden spoon, were popular with people who did not want to risk ice cream running down their clothes on a hot Penrith day. Ice blocks were not as popular as ice cream and, as with ice cream, there was nowhere near the variety that we have today.

A threepenny bit was the equivalent of today’s five-cent piece but it had more buying power. It was nicknamed a ‘trey’. A sixpence was a ‘zac’, a shilling (10 pennies) was a ‘deener’ or a ‘bob’ and a two-shilling piece was ‘two bob’. For a while there was a half penny piece but, as the value of money deteriorated, it was taken out of circulation. coins 2

At the end of the shop was a large counter with newspapers and a range of magazines and next to it a big cabinet with bottles of drink inside. The majority of these drinks were made by Penrith Cordials, a local business. The big American drinks like Coke and Pepsi were yet to come.

The money was paid into one of those old type tills. You pressed the total key, a bell rang and the money drawer shot out. The till did not total the order for you – you had to work this out, and the change, in your head. I often despair when I go into a shop these days and find that the assistant cannot add two simple sums together without resorting to either the register to do it, or pen and paper.

penrith cordials — The Penrith Cordials factory in Station Street (Duval Studios from Penrith City Library collection)

There were three of four tables along the right-hand side for people to sit but they were not used all that much. Alongside this was the fruit and vegetable section with a big set of old fashioned scales.

The property together with the adjoining lane was redeveloped in 1989 into an arcade and is now occupied by Aussie Home Loans.

We also owned the Nepean Cafe, a restaurant and milk bar, next door at 391 High Street until 1965. We lived above the Nepean Cafe until 1951.

Miller’s Men’s’ Wear

Frank Miller owned a men’s’ wear shop next door at 393 High Street. The Miller family, like us, lived above the shop, and we knew them well. Mrs Miller was a very kind and cheerful lady and I liked her a lot. My brothers and I were good friends with the two Miller girls, Wendy and Dianne.

Mr Miller was a jovial and friendly man and, despite his non-sporting appearance was a talented sportsman in both his younger and his more mature days. He was a champion lawn bowler and a low-handicap golfer. He could often be found in his backyard practicing his golf strokes by hitting balls at a rug draped over the clothesline.

He had been a talented cricketer and in 1931 represented Tumut District in a cricket match at Tumut against a visiting team of first-class cricketers which included the great Don Bradman. In the previous year, Bradman had scored 974 runs in the Test series against England and is considered to be the greatest batsman who ever played the game. In the Tumut match, Frank Miller bowled out the Don first ball for a duck. Not many cricketers achieved this feat at any level of cricket.

Mr Miller was active in community affairs and a great supporter of Penrith sporting teams. He was, along with my father and Dave Fitzgerald, one of the trustees of the original Penrith Leagues Club.

If Mr Miller was away, the shop was looked after by Bob Ausburn, the smoothest salesmen in Penrith and everybody’s idea of what a gentlemen’s tailor should be. After Mr Miller died in 1974, Mrs Miller kept the shop going for a couple of years but eventually sold the business to Lowes. Bob Ausburn went to work for Neales up the road.

The building occupied by Mr Miller and the adjoining property 391 High Street were built around about 1935 and still stand.

Mrs Sandy’s house was next door at 395 High Street. Then came Engle-Elle, a frock shop owned by the Elliott sisters, Miss Dorothy Elliott and Mrs Daisy England. The Eliott sisters were two of five daughters of Joe Elliott who was a noted equestrian rider and horse breeder and lived in Regentville. They were related by marriage to the Hall family, more about whom later.

Then came Jay’s Shoe Shop and O’Farrells bakery and pastry shop. The O’Farrells had been a baking family for many years, having previously had shops that became Bamford’s bakery and Cameron’s bakery at opposite ends of High Street.

The Post Office

The Post Office was the focal point of community life in Penrith. It operated as a mail delivery centre, telephone exchange, and a medium to allow townspeople without checking accounts to pay bills.

The Post Office deserves a story on its own.

Bussell Brothers

Bussell Brothers operated from a large building known as Cumberland House and was the biggest grocer in town as well as selling hardware, crockery, drapery, manchester, clothes and agricultural supplies. It also sold liquor but, because of the restrictive licensing laws, purchases had to be in bulk.

bussels inside — Inside Bussell Brothers (Penrith City Library collection)

The footpath outside the store was the scene of a legendary brawl between two feuding families – the Halls and the Tanners. Arising from allegations and counter-allegations over the ownership of some cattle, the fight involved several men, the police and a crowd of interested bystanders. Two men were taken to hospital and the whole affair ended up in Penrith Court in a trial of the participants that entertained the whole town for several weeks.

bussells max dupain — Cumberland House with Bussell Brothers and Hall’s Butchery (Max Dupain 1949). More bikes than cars on High Street!

As can be seen on the sign on the building in the photo above, Penrith was still then thought of as a country town, or at least a semi-rural one. There were still many dairy farmers, orchardists and market gardens on the outskirts of the residential and business areas.

Hall’s Butchery

The Hall family conducted a butcher’s business in Penrith for many years, firstly on the other side of High Street and then on the northern side.

hall butcher — Halls Butcher shop in the 1930s. It didn’t change much over the years. (Penrith City Library collection).

This was one of the busiest butcheries in Penrith and at this time was run by Percy Hall. Mr Hall was well known in the town, not only as a colourful identity but as a champion trainer and driver of trotting horses. He was the leading trainer and driver in the harness game for many years.

Jim Connell, the barber

Jim Connell ran a barber shop here for many years, one of the numerous men’s’ hairdressers in Penrith. Jim was a popular Penrith man, being heavily involved in Penrith Lions and the Bowling Club.

The Connell family lived in High Street near Parker Street and in 1959 opened on adjoining land Penrith’s first squash courts. This was a novelty for Penrith and its opening was well received.

The came Judges’ Pharmacy – one more chemist shop. The business was owned in my time by Bob Wylie. Now, according to my parents and other adults that I knew, Mr Wylie had a mysterious past but they never added any details to the story.

urens — Judges’ Pharmacy and the frock shop (Penrith City Library collection)

The frock shop

The last business in this block was a ladies and children’s wear shop that had various names at different times. The one that I most remember was Anna Q Nilsson which was named after a Swedish opera singer who made it big in silent movies. I don’t know what the connection between a Swedish soprano and a Penrith frock shop was.

At one stage, the owner of this business was Mrs Nicolson who also had had a cafe further down the street.

Just to be sure that I had the name of the shop right, I checked the archives of the Nepean Times and yes, it did exist. anna q

The building was owned by Len Uren, the dentist. I think that his dental surgery may well have been on the floor above the frock shop. Mr Uren owned a lot of commercial property in Penrith.

Living above the shop

As can be seen from the photos in this story, most shops had residences above them and this was the case in most of High Street. These residences were mainly occupied by the shopkeepers and their families and, where they weren’t because the shopkeepers had bought houses elsewhere, they were tenanted by shop employees or rented out. Occasionally, a professional practice was carried on upstairs but few were used as offices.

This was an interesting block of shops that is now filled mainly with food houses and estate agencies.

Penrith High School in the 50s (12): letting in the public

November 7, 2019July 25, 2020 John2 Comments

Life at Penrith High School was not all about learning and playing the fool. At various times during the school year, we gathered together, sometimes with our parents and the community, to celebrate special occasions or to mark certain events. There were assemblies, community events, and special events.

Speech Days and Nights

Speech Day (later Night), held annually, was an occasion for important people to give inspirational speeches and for students who had excelled in particular fields to receive well-deserved prizes. The first Speech Day was held at the Nepean Theatre. I think that later on they were held in the school hall.

The very name Speech Day does not conjure up images of joy and excitement. There was no compulsion to attend and no real enthusiasm to go either unless you were receiving a prize or were forced by your parents to go to see one of your siblings receive a prize. In a word, boring.

Play Nights

Play Night was an opportunity for students who were interested in drama or in acting to perform before their peers, the teaching staff and interested parents and conscripted siblings and other relatives. It was also a producing and directing opportunity for teachers who thought that they had been cruelly robbed of a career on Broadway or in Hollywood.

The programs generally consisted of one-act plays or abridged versions of plays, comedy sketches, a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, some dancing, music recitals, and a gymnastic exhibition. The 1954 playbill consisted of a playlet based on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperors’s New Clothes, several short plays nobody has ever heard of since, a junior gymnastic display, some country dancing and a spot by the school choir.

I have written before that I did not believe that there was any active racism or bigotry at Penrith High when I was there. There were students at the school of European, Asian and Indigenous descent and I recall no incident of overt discrimination against them by teachers or students. One indigenous boy was an outstanding athlete and was a popular sporting hero to students: a boy of Chinese descent captained a football team; and there were several central and southern European names amongst the student leaders, both elected and appointed.

That said, there is no doubt that there was an Anglo-Australian attitude that other cultures were inferior and this, I believe, induced an ignorance and a lack of sensitivity that was likely to cause both offence and hurt. This is certainly illustrated in one Play Night item in 1954 – ‘Nigger Minstrels’. Yes, that is what it was billed as. I don’t really know what more I can say.

Empire Day

Empire Day was celebrated each year on 24 May. This date was better known and loved as Cracker Night.

Being British to the bootstraps as Bob Menzies used to say, we celebrated the glory of the British Empire at the school with stirring addresses at a morning school assembly from the headmaster, a representative from the RSL, and other local imperialists.

Usually, a senior student would also give a stirring address along the lines of The New Elizabethan Age or Our Place in the Empire or some claptrap like that. The headmaster would read out a message from the Governor-General, and one of the school’s budding sopranos or baritones would burst into Land of Hope and Glory or Rule Brittannia. The Union Jack was always prominent with the Australian flag as a minor player.

There was one assembly for the junior students and one for the senior students. My memory is that the latter was longer than the former, the students giving speeches being likely to be more assured than their younger colleagues and thus more likely to speak longer. It could have been worse. At least May was in Autumn and we were spared long listening in the extremes of summer and winter.

For example, in 1954, as well as the orations from the headmaster and other guests, there were speeches by students on The Meaning of Empire and Commonwealth today and The Fundamental Freedoms enjoyed by Commonwealth Countries which I always took as the freedom to supply Britain with cheap primary products and to supply soldiers for Britain’s wars, but maybe I was just too cynical.

There were the usual musical items, some kindly remarks by a recent immigrant on how welcoming we all were to new arrivals, and the national anthem to round it off. That would have been ‘God Save the Queen’.

Meanwhile, most of us were just wishing for it all to wind up so that we could get about building our bonfires. It was only a half-day of school and we had the afternoon off.

School fetes

The school fete was usually held in November to raise money for the school to augment the miserable sums allocated to it by the Education Department. Stalls and exhibits were staffed by students, staff, parents and local business people and were both outside and inside the assembly hall.

The stalls were what you would expect in those days – small goods, fruit and vegetables, craft and preserves – and the same with the fun stalls – knockems, hoopla, darts, lucky dips. Students’ work was on display in the classrooms. The program in 1954 included a school boxing championship, talent quest and dancing.

I think that if they had had one of those stalls where you throw a ball at a teacher and try to make him fall into water, it would have been a big money raiser.

Parents’ meetings

I don’t believe that there were regular parent and teacher meetings to review a child’s progress as there are now other than the ones where a parent (usually the mother) was asked to visit the school to talk to the Headmaster or his Deputy about their child’s transgressions.

The school did, however, have bonding opportunities for students, parents and teachers. – annual Mother and Daughter Afternoons and Fathers’ Nights. You see, this was because fathers had jobs and mothers didn’t, or so they believed at the time. I don’t know about the girls bonding sessions with their mums and the teachers but I suspect women’s liberation was probably not on the discussion menu.

The Fathers’ Nights were excruciating. You got to take your father around the various classrooms to see examples of students’ work and where you hung out while you were at school. Then you went to the assembly hall for a welcome address from the headmaster and the school captains, and presentation of various prizes and trophies.

Then they showed a promotional film. In 1954 it was Back of Beyond which was a documentary on the Australian outback, somehow linking the Shell Oil Company, an Anglo-Dutch-American multinational oil company, with the spirit of Australia which was a big stretch. All in all, in common with most of my fellow students, I would rather have been at the pictures or at home listening to the wireless. Or anywhere else, really.

The evening ended with a half-hour musical recital by the school orchestra and finally, to the relief of all present, a vote of thanks to whoever thought up this painful experience, and then refreshments. I don’t recall what these refreshments were but they certainly would not have included alcohol. Probably tea and scones, or syrupy fruit drinks.

And all the men wore their best (or only) suits. They probably had hats too but again I don’t remember.

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English and language teachers

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Corky Duncan and the chemistry lab

The Doonmore Street marble patch

October 25, 2019 JohnLeave a comment

Fads came and went when I was a kid in Penrith but the one thing that remained constant was marbles.

You could play marbles anywhere and at any time. All you needed was a playing surface and a friend and at least two marbles. Heck, you could even play marbles with just yourself.

You fired a marble by putting it between your thumb and first finger and flicking it forward with your thumb. You had to have one knuckle on the ground when you fired and if you looked like transgressing this rule, someone would be sure to call out ‘knuckle down, screw tight’

The playing field

Even though you could play marbles anywhere, not all surfaces were equal. On concrete or asphalt, the marbles ran too fast and the hard surface could chip a valuable marble.

To digress and speaking of asphalt, I well remember those really hot days in Penrith when the asphalt in the roads started to melt and you could lose a shoe when you walked on it. Walking barefoot across a Penrith road in the height of summer was madness.

Anyway, back to marble playing surfaces. Grass was okay but unless it was bowling green consistency, the grass slowed the marbles down. Plus, kneeling down on a bindi could put you off your game. Indoor carpet play was okay too but furniture kept getting in the way.

The ideal marble playing surface was grassless soil that had a good proportion of clay in it and that was level, smooth and free of stones and ruts. Clay tennis courts were great. We often played on the Edwards tennis court behind their bakery in High Street but we were always at risk of getting turfed out by inconsiderate and thoughtless tennis players who thought that their needs were greater than ours.

However, there was a big patch of soil on the footpath in Doonmore Street near the school that was just the right surface and mix of dirt and clay and which had plenty of room to play marbles. And we used it a lot.

Marble categories

Each of us had a marble bag containing a collection of marbles passed down through the family, bought, or won from other kids in marble games. The marbles were either for firing (taws or tors) or target marbles (dibs).

The most prized taws were agates, made out of a silicon rock and which were hard and strong. The best agate marble to have was a connie agate. Another type of taw was a steelie which was just a ball bearing and came in different sizes. It was generally banned from competitive play both because of its strength and its destructive effect on target marbles.

Dibs were mainly glass marbles and they varied in cost, colour, and quality. An interesting marble was the glassie which was a glass stopper originally used in old glass bottles. They were rare.

Marble games

The game that we mostly played was Big Ringy. A circle was scratched into the ground and each player put one or more dibs into the ring, depending on the number of players and how many they agreed were to be up for grabs.

A straight line was then drawn across the face of the circle and another line a distance away. We then fired our taws from the second line and the player whose taw was closest to the target line got first shot. The second closest got the second shot and so on. This process in itself was always likely to trigger a dispute as to who got the closest. If a shooter before you got one close to the line, the trick was to knock that player’s taw into the ring which meant that they had to retrieve it and shoot again. If your shot went past the line and into the ring, you had to shoot again.

That first player, from just outside the ring, flicked their taw into the ring and tried to knock one of the dibs outside the ring. You had to fire from where your marble landed in the shoot-off that decided the priority of play. Firing from a more advantageous spot was illegal and was called fudging.

If the initial shot successfully knocked a marble outside the ring, the player kept firing until they missed. Then it was the next player’s turn. Once every player had had their turn, if there were still dibs left in the ring, the first player fired from wherever in the ring they had stopped. If they succeeded, they got another shot. When they missed, the next player was on turn and so on. This continued until all the marbles were out of the ring.

The firing player could choose however to try and hit an opponent’s taw out of the ring instead of a dib. If the hit was succcesful, the other player’s next shot was from where they landed. If unsuccesful the attacking player missed a turn.

The decision whether to fire at a dib or an opponent’s taw required skill and judgment, depending upon the state of the game, the positioning of the marbles, and the comparative strength of the marbles of the shooter and the opponent. Might was right in this game, and the better taw often decided the contest. The bigger the taw, the more power it had to force a marble out of the ring but bigger marbles were more difficult to fire. A balance had to be struck between the firing power and the ease of use.

You got to keep whatever dibs you had knocked out of the ring and this continued until all the marbles were out or the game stopped for some other reason. marble bag 2

A variation of Ringy was Half-Moon where the marble containment area was drawn as a half-moon rather than a circle and you fired first from the straight line and not from inside the circle.

Another game was Holey where players tried to hit target marbles into a hole. We also played Follow the Leader, a game for two players, played over a pre-set distance where you each took turns in firing your taw at your opponents and moving it along the playing surface. The player who first successfully hit the opposing taw over the finish line won the game.

The prize here was predetermined before the game started but it was often the losing player’s taw. Unless you felt sure of winning here, it was best not to play with your best connie agate.

Marble rules varied and there were regional differences. There were even differences in the rules depending upon what street you lived in or which playing group you were in. This inevitably led to disputes which in most cases were settled peacefully but occasionally not.

One sure way to build or rebuild your marbles stock was to play a game against your little brother but this could often be just a temporary thing as it was likely that he would run crying to your parents and you would have to give them back.

The players

Just about every kid I knew had a bag of marbles although some were more frequent players than others. Girls occasionally joined in a game of marbles but not often in those days of sexism – they had their own games. If you did play marbles with a girl, then it was pretty much a mark of shame to lose. However, it was also bad form not to give back to the girl any marbles that you won from her.

Hopscotch was popular with girls as was skipping where two girls twirled the rope while another girl jumped it to various chants. The twirlers called ‘salt’ while the motion was slow but when they called ‘pepper’ the speed quickened.

Real boys didn’t skip.

Younger children played ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and ‘Ring a Ring a Rosy’ which usually involved falling down at some stage or collapsing mauls.

Other games that we played as younger kids included jacks, cowboys and indians, cops and robbers, chasings, and the perennial hide and seek. As we grew older, most of these games disappeared from our repertoire but marbles remained popular.

Do any kids play marbles today? Even if they wanted to take time off from their devices and play marbles, there may be obstacles. I read recently that some schools had banned marbles because they caused arguments. I thought that was the point.

High Street in the 1950s (5): south side – Castlereagh Street to Woodriffe Street

October 13, 2019 John2 Comments

This is the shortest block in the High Street main shopping area and in earlier days it was dominated by banks, the Nepean Theatre and the John Price funeral home. As Penrith developed in the forties and fifties, the banks and the theatre remained but the funeral parlour moved to the old Priddle site in Station Street and smaller shops sprang up. The Price family also owned the Nepean Theatre at that stage before it was taken over by Lyall Spence.

ol;d nepean — This may be the original theatre (from a 1930s photo supplied by Penny Fitzgerald).

The corner of High and Castlereagh Streets

The Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac) which stood on the corner had occupied several previous sites. First, on the southern side of High Street near Doonmore Street. It then moved to a site in High Street on the northern side between Evan Street and Castlereagh Street. Its present site had previously been occupied by the School of Arts before it moved to Castlereagh Street.

bk nsw better — The Bank of New South Wales building on the Castlereagh Street corner (Penrith City Library collection).

The bank was the largest non-government bank in town, the Commonwealth Bank then still owned by the Commonwealth Government. It was the preferred bank for the majority of business and professional people.

There was a shop between the bank and the theatre which was a dress shop and later an estate agency. The estate agency was opened by Bruce Spence, the owner-manager of the theatre, who saw that when television came in 1956, the long term viability of cinemas was at risk.

The Nepean Theatre came next.

There was another milk bar next door to the theatre run by Bill Gibbons. Penrith wasn’t short on milk bars and cafes.

Glory Box or was it the Vanity Box?

There was then a business that I remember as the Glory Box that sold ladies wear but others tell me that it was called the Vanity Box and was a ladies’ hairdresser. They may well be right because reports in the Nepean Times confirm that it was a beauty salon run by Miss Marion Stanton and offered a full beauty and body treatment and was well patronised. According to the Times, the shop boasted of its cleaning process and claimed that all instruments and equipment were sterilised after use. Miss Stanton asserted that stylish appearance was not a luxury but a ‘social necessity’.

Then came a flower shop, selling fresh flowers and arrangements. It was called Margot Florist and run variously by a Mrs Paskins and Mrs Anderson. The barber shop of Roley Price came next.

Commonwealth Bank and Penrith Tyres

The Commonwealth Bank, then government-owned, was the biggest bank in town, catering mainly to working rather than business and professional people. It was the main lender for house purchases and had by far the greatest number of individual savings accounts.

It had a great strategy. In co-operation with schools, it encouraged children to open their own savings accounts and would send people to schools on a weekly basis to receive deposits from students and record them in their own savings passbook. This taught children to save and had the advantage to the bank of building up customer loyalty. I suspect that I was not the only person to be happily surprised in later life to find an old Commonwealth bank book with a reasonable sum increased by compound interest.

The next business along sold new and reconditioned tyres. There were several places in the main street selling tyres, one down in the next block and George Howell in the block past Station Street. This was in addition to the various garages that also sold tyres. Considering the few cars that were around then, either tyres must not have been made with the same durability as they are today, or the road surfaces wore out tyres much more quickly.

evans electrical 1951 opp post office — Evans’ Electrical shop in the 1950s (Penrith City Library collection)

Ken Evans had an electrical store next to the tyre shop.

The fruit shop

Then came a fruit and vegetable shop with a history of significant owners. It had once been run by the Howells, a well known Penrith family, and then by Jack Corr. Jack was the brother of Harold Corr who served Penrith for many years as Town Clerk and oversaw the development of Penrith from a small town to a city.

The business was then taken over by the Cowans. Roger Cowan who had been a school teacher later became the secretary and chief executive of the Penrith Leagues Club after the sudden departure of its then secretary. Under Roger, the Club began its progress to the behemoth that it is today.

The CBS

cbs — The old CBS on the corner of Woodriffe Street (Penrith City Library collection).

The Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, a large two-storied building, stood on the corner of High and Woodriffe Streets. The CBS, as a banking entity, no longer exists. The manager for several years was Mr Don Mackay. The Mackay family were very popular in Penrith. There were three sons, Grayson, who became a doctor, Colin, and Ivan. Colin was unfortunately killed in a car accident in 1960, a sad event for the family and for the town.

The banks and theatre that once dominated this block have gone: only the Commonwealth Bank remains.

So many similar businesses

During my journey through the past along High Street, it struck me how there were so many businesses providing similar goods and services in a town of only 20, 000 or so, in some categories more outlets than there are now. According to a report in the Nepean Times 21 January 1954, Penrith Council had issued licenses for 14 barber shops (this may have included ladies’ hairdressers), 10 butcher shops, 14 fish shops, 20 ‘refreshment rooms’ and 40 groceries and small goods. This sounds a lot to me – maybe some of the licenses were dormant or were for businesses in streets outside the High Street area. There were also at least six garages, five chemist shops, six electrical goods and five bakeries in town.

This made me wonder why this was so. The multiplicity of some businesses can be explained but others can’t.

Electrical goods

Today, particularly with small appliances, it is often cheaper to throw away a broken appliance than to have it repaired but electrical appliances were much more expensive to buy back then, and people were less able to replace broken ones.

This meant that repairs were necessary and these shops repaired appliances as well as selling them. This may be the reason that there were so many.

Service stations

There were fewer cars around then but there were more service stations, although we called them garages.. Like electrical shops, this may be because garages not only sold petrol, they all did mechanical repairs. Cars were less reliable then than they are today and so there was more need for repairs.

Garages also provided full driveway service. Perhaps, this would have slowed the progress of cars through the petrol bowsers, creating a need for more outlets. I don’t really know.

Cafes

The cafes of the fifties should not be confused with the cafes of today. They were just eating houses that served traditional Australian meals, mainly grills (red meat or fish)and salads. Chicken was not generally on the menu as poultry was much more expensive in the days before battery farming. The meals were plain – no smashed avocado or eggs poached in a strawberry jus were on the menu then.

If people wanted to eat out, their only real choice was a cafe. There were no restaurants of the kind that we know today and the small licensed clubs, even if they served meals, had a limited range as did pub dining rooms. There wasn’t even a Chinese restaurant in town until the late 50s.

These cafes were also milk bars. There were no chain food outlets like McDonald’s, KFC or Just Juice providing any competition. If you wanted a milkshake or an orange juice, you had to go to a cafe/milk bar.

Chemists

There was no universal medical scheme – Medibank was set up by the Whitlam government in 1974 – and many people could not afford routine visits to the doctor. Pharmacists became the default medical advisers in non-life threatening situations.

And a lot of products available today in supermarkets were then sold only in pharmacies – beauty products, analgesics, non-prescription medications, prophylactics.

Butcher shops, bakeries shops, greengrocers and grocers

I cannot really work out why there were so many of these. There were of course, no supermarkets as we know them stocking these products and maybe because there were few frozen foods available and people did not have freezers even when they got fridges, there was a need to buy fruit and vegetables more frequently. Sliced bread was only just coming on the market and for most people, an unsliced loaf from the baker was the only option.

Hairdressers

No man would in those days get his hair cut at a ladies’ salon but that doesn’t explain why there were as many barbers in the town as ladies’ hairdressers, if not more. Possibly it was because there were fewer two-income families or because salon prices were too high. I really don’t know.

All small businesses

What can be said about the range of businesses back then was that almost all of them were locally owned and staffed by their owners and their families. And they were small businesses. The only really large shops were Bussell Bothers and the two department stores, both locally owned, but they were not of Myers or David Jones size and no chain stores or franchised business. Woolworths, the first of the outsiders, opened in the early fifties but as it was then just a variety store and not a supermarket, it had little impact on these small retailers.

Customers personally knew the owners of these businesses and if they needed something special or they had a complaint, they could deal directly with the owner of the business and not be foisted off to a faraway head office.

But the coming invasion of supermarkets, big retailers and chain stores would certainly change the town’s shopping habits and retail ambiance.

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High Street in the 50s (4): north side – Lawson Street to the lane

Penrith High School in the 50s (11): Corky Duncan and the chemistry lab

September 29, 2019November 7, 2019 JohnLeave a comment

Arthur Duncan was a teacher in the Science Department and was known universally as Corky. Why, I don’t know.

When I watched the opening episodes of Breaking Bad, my thoughts turned to Corky Duncan and memories stirred of copper sulphate, iron filings, litmus paper and Bunsen burners.

Not that Mr Duncan was a chemistry teacher gone wrong – far from it. Few of his students would have known that Corky was a committed and well-loved member of the congregation of the Methodist Church in Penrith and that he was a gifted musician who conducted the choir in his church during his time in Penrith. When he left Penrith in 1958 to teach at North Sydney Boys High, his church gave him a testimonial dinner.

Corky was a very good teacher and was not a hard disciplinarian but for some reason, he was not liked by his students. They kept picking on him and treated him poorly and with little respect. Maybe he was too easy on them and they sensed a weakness.

Fun with experiments

The Science rooms had a large bench out the front with sinks and Bunsen burners where the teachers demonstrated chemical reactions. They were always interesting and we, in turn, got to do really cool experiments ourselves in First Year. It tended to get more theoretical in later years.

I always liked chemistry and in common with other kids had my own chemistry set.

I have to say that Corky was an entertaining teacher and it was from him that we first learned about elements and the way that they react with each other. This allowed us to do our own experiments and a favourite was to make nitrogen triiodide as a lark. I cannot remember how this was made but assume that we mixed some compounds of ammonia and nitrogen creating a chemical compound that produced an explosion when it dried and was touched.

We would make up a batch and separate it into specks and scatter it around on the playground. Because the portions were so small, the consequent explosion when touched was very light. When someone walked on it, it crackled, causing the walkers to be surprised. Some students even scattered it on the floor of the Assembly Hall for our Fifth Year Farewell function with the staff. As the teachers walked in as a group, the floor crackled beneath their feet. It seemed funny at the time.

I don’t remember wearing any protective glasses or clothing when we were doing chemistry experiments either inside or outside the classroom although Corky always wore a dust coat. We were probably lucky that nobody got hurt because of our nonsense.

Corky’s ditty

Mr Duncan had a little ditty warning of the dangers of mixing up our chemicals that he repeated at every opportunity. It went like this:

‘Oh, spare a tear for Johnny Brown for Johnny is no more.

For what he thought was H20 was H2SO4‘.

Hilarious, Corky. But it has stayed with me.

The incident of the cross

When I wrote an earlier story about discipline in the school, I had forgotten about the following incident involving Mr Duncan that illustrates another method that school administrators used to chastise students.

The science rooms were on the top floor of the building they occupied and access to them was by way of a staircase. One day, some students before school left a wooden cross at the top of the landing with the words ‘RIP Corky Duncan’ painted on it. Even by schoolboy humour standards, this was not cutting wit.

When the cross was discovered, the teaching staff went right off, and probably rightly so, because it was both offensive and a little threatening. It didn’t seem to bother Corky all that much. As a devout churchgoer, he was probably more forgiving than the headmaster.

Punishment under the sun

The headmaster called an assembly later in the morning of all students who were in Corky’s classes, excepting students in Fourth and Fifth years, reckoning correctly that the culprits would have come from the lower years.

At the assembly, which was held on the concrete near the Science block steps, the headmaster and deputy headmaster blasted the assembled students and spoke of disrespect and poor behaviour. They then dismissed the girls, reckoning, again correctly, that they would have played no part in the incident.

The headmaster, in a scene resembling one of those World War 2 prisoners of war films, told the remaining students that they would stand outside in the sun until the guilty parties owned up or they were given up. The theme from The Great Escape would have been playing over the school public address system if the movie had only been released by then and not in 1963.

Silence from the ranks. Nobody dobbed at Penrith High School. Steve McQueen would have been proud of those boys.

After about half an hour, just before schoolboys started keeling over with the heat and the bayonets came out, ‘Squizzy’ Taylor and ‘Freaky’ Godfrey put up their hands and took responsibility for the dastardly deed. They were marched off to the headmaster’s office and the remaining boys were dismissed and returned to their classes.

The other plotters, and there were several, escaped the headmasterly wrath. Honour prevented the two boys ratting out their mates. There was no reduction in sentence for this nobility or for pleading guilty and the two wrongdoers still got six on each hand.

But at least they didn’t get thirty days in the ‘cooler’ like Steve McQueen or anything like that.

Chemistry was fun, standing in the sun for long periods not so much.

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Penrith High School in the 50s (12): letting in the public