Penrith characters: Aunty Priddle, Mrs Sandy and George the Cocky

JohnLeave a comment

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.john price

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.

 

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Taken in High Street just down from Mrs Priddle’s lolly shop. Castlereagh Street and the John Cram building are in the background to the right.  (Thanks to Penny Fitzgerald for supplying this wonderful old photograph)

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.

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George, a vicious and vindictive bird.

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.

 

 

10 June 1946: Victory Day in Penrith

JohnLeave a comment

It is not easy to remember things that happened when you were a young child but one of my first memories is of the excitement in Penrith on the day that World War II ended – 15 August 1945.  There are several things that I recall about that day but my account of those events mostly comes from what my parents and other adults told me and what I have subsequently read.

What I remember

I do recall standing at the window of my father’s shop and watching one of the women who worked for him decorating the window and writing messages on the window with a mixture of flour and water. And I do recall standing at the front of the shop watching cars blowing their horns, and people running and dancing and singing on the footpath and on the road.

And hearing the bells from the churches in High Street ringing throughout the day.

Of course, being only five years old, I had no idea what the war was and why people seemed so happy but they were. And I do remember later that day walking with my mother who was wheeling my younger brother in a stroller down High Street. Music was playing from shops and people were still singing and dancing and there were a lot of people in the area around the railway station.

How the townspeople celebrated

As I understand it, the police soon closed off High Street to cars between Castlereagh Street and Station Street to allow people to gather in the street and celebrate. There was singing and dancing in the various streets until late in the night and a dance band played more or less non-stop outside Handley’s Electrical Shop in High Street. The music was relayed to adjoining streets through amplifiers and there were marches by various service men and women who happened to be around. Police estimated that at one time there were over 2000 people in the streets which is a lot for a town that size at that time.

High Street and Station Street were illuminated by fairy lights and apparently there was a mock Surrender Ceremony at the Railway Station where Fred Hinch, the manager of the Moran and Cato grocery shop and a very colourful and brash Penrith character, dressed up as the Japanese Emperor and signed a ‘surrender’ that he handed to Carl Claeson, another Penrith character, who was dressed as a soldier. I vaguely remember seeing this and a lot of people cheering and yelling.

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Mr Fred Hinch

There were several church services during the day and a big thanksgiving service held in the picture show at which there were said to be 800 people.

Amongst the unbridled joy that people felt, there must have been quite a few people who were not celebrating: those who had already lost family members in the war and those who had family members captured as prisoners of war and who were wondering if they were still alive. They must have had mixed feelings – joy that the war had ended but sadness about those whom they had lost.

Australian never suffered the damage that people in other war countries suffered. We were spared bombings, other than in Darwin and a couple of other northern towns, and invasion. It must still have been hard on the people – rationing, military and civil conscription, shortages and the constant worry for loved ones who were in peril.

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Ration book (Australian War Memorial)

No wonder the end of the war brought such a spontaneous expression of relief and of joy.

Victory Day 1946

I remember a lot more about Victory Day, 10 June 1946, the official celebration of the ending of the war. I don’t know why the official celebration was delayed for ten months. Perhaps it was to give those troops who had been serving overseas and returning ex-prisoners of war and their families the chance of taking part.

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Our float

The procession

I remember it particularly well because my father had a float in the procession that went down High Street. He had migrated to Australia from Greek Cyprus and with other Greek businessmen in the town sponsored a float that commemorated the Australians and the Greeks who had fought the Germans together in Greece and in Crete during the early days of the war.

I helped decorate the float but I suspect that my presence at the preparation of the float was nominal only and I was probably more of a hindrance than a real helper. I was just an indulged six year old. I wanted to ride on the float but Mum wouldn’t let me, even though there were other children on it.

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Our float another view

The float, however, ran second in the most original float competition, the winner being the Wallacia Progress Association which had a House on Wheels to represent a housing scheme for Wallacia. My father had the second prize pennant hanging in his shop for many years.

The overall prize-winning float was a Wedding Float entered by Engle-Elle, the dress shop owned by Dorothy Elliott.

The parade began at the public school at the top of High Street and progressed to the showground.

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Watching the parade. I think the spectators may be watching from the old paddock that was next to the Australian Arms. (Penrith City Library collection)

There were over forty floats and the parade took forty minutes or so to pass. It was watched by over 2000 people according to police estimates.

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Another float. The top end of High Street, or maybe Station Street?

There were decorated floats, trucks, cars, bikes and horses as well as several bands and comic acts. The Nepean Times reported that the procession was led by a float with a local girl ‘dressed’ as Lady Godiva riding a white horse. Of course, this was the Forties and she was not really naked nor did she pretend to be and wore a white satin swimsuit. What Lady Godiva, a 10th-century mythical noblewoman, had to do with the ending of the war escapes me.

Most of the floats were prepared and entered by local businesses so there was probably a lot of advertising as well.float 4

There were also prizes for best-decorated bikes and horses, most comical characters (Poddy Hewitt, a rotund man, was dressed as a baby) and fancy dress competitions for both adults and kid. The Gibbons children scooped the prize pool here. Thank goodness my mother avoided the temptation to enter me. There were lots of fancy dress opportunities for children in Penrith back then and my mother had a penchant for entering me in them as a ‘Pearly King’.

The most comical character adult prize was won by Mr Pratt for ‘Boong’. Let’s not go there.

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The prize-winning float (Penrith City Library collection)

At night, High Street and Station Street were closed to cars and the whole area lit up by lights. There were two bands playing popular music and dancing and singing in the streets. The day finished with the assembled people joining in to sing the national anthem which at that time would have been God Save the King.

I wasn’t allowed to go to the festivities at night but watched them from the balcony of our apartment above my father’s shop in High Street.

The generation that saw it all

As I was writing this story, I started to think about the generation before mine and all the wonders that they had lived through and all the trials that they suffered. Mt father was born in 1904 and died in 1986, my mother was born in 1910 and died in 1994.

Just think what this generation went through. They went through two world wars and the losses and privations that accompanied them and they went through the Great Depression, a time of misery, deprivation and lost hopes that we can only imagine.

When that generation were children, there were no antibiotics and few vaccines. Many of them suffered and many died from childhood diseases that are no longer around like polio, TB, scarlet fever, and diptheria, or have become curable and preventable, or occasional or minor ailments rather than fatal ones.

It is no wonder that those who survived were as tough as old boots.

But that generation also would have seen and experienced amazing things. They would have experienced the transition from transport by horse to cars, and the introduction of radio and then television as the normal method of entertainment. They would have experienced the wonder of seeing a motion picture for the first time and its progress to widescreen, surround-sound format. They would have read about the first plane to fly and then themselves years later have travelled in jetliners flying across the world at 900 kilometres an hour. They would have watched men land on the Moon.

They would have seen the beginnings of the telephone and the start of the communications revolution. They would never have realised when they made that first telephone call on the telephone set hanging on the wall with its rotary dial that one day twelve-year-old children would be retrieving information for school projects on a device that they could carry in their pockets.

So many other changes that they must have seen – the icebox to the modern refrigerator, the fuel stove to electric ranges and microwave ovens, the copper and washboard to washing and drying machines, outside toilets to multi-bathroom houses. The list goes on.

Technological change in the past thirty years has been amazing but that earlier generation experienced, I think, far greater change and, unlike us, much greater hardships. They probably were, as the American journalist Tom Brokaw described them in 1992, the ‘Greatest Generation’.

 

 

Penrith High School in the 50s (10): sports, clubs and other things

John3 Comments

Next year, 2020, is the 70th anniversary of the founding of Penrith High School on its present site and I wonder how much it has changed in that time – physical changes, cultural changes and structural changes.

Co-educational high schools

The school, as everyone who has ever been a student knows, has always been co-educational. What may not be known is that when it opened, country high schools were usually co-educational but Sydney metropolitan schools were not. This was the case throughout most of the country.

Penrith was in a unique position. It was seen as a country town but was so close to Sydney that it was almost suburban. Consequently, educationists saw Penrith High as experimental in a way – whether co-educational secondary schools was the way to go. There were many visits to the school from interested groups, not only from Sydney. but from interstate and from overseas to see whether it was working. It must have because now co-educational high schools are the norm.

As for me, I am glad that the co-educational model was chosen for our school. I think an all-boys school would have been awful.

The layout – as I remember it

I recollect that when you walked in the western gate, you walked up a driveway and came to the bike shelter with the change rooms behind. You turned to the left and came into the quadrangle or main yard. On the High Street or northern side of the quadrangle was the administrative block with classrooms, and staircases going upstairs. On the western side were the amenities block and bubblers and the Assembly Hall. Then the Tuck Shop. The manual arts block was behind the Tuck Shop and the Home Science Building across the yard.

Upstairs were the library, classrooms, and another staff room. The Science rooms were above the Home Science block and could be accessed from the yard by separate outside stairs.

If you went past the quadrangle, you came to some portables and the sports area. There was a set of parallel bars just near the bikesheds.

Is this how it looks now?

The Houses

Students were put in Houses to promote sporting, cultural and educational competition. The Houses were named Blaxland, Lawson, Lennox and Wentworth.

Lawson (House colour red) and Lennox (House colour light blue) were the most competitive houses and seemed to win most things. Blaxland (House colour yellow) scraped the occasional success and my house, Wentworth (House colour green), sucked at just about everything.  No incoming student really wanted to get put into Wentworth.

The champion house of the year (the house that won the most points for academic, sporting and cultural achievements) was awarded the Lamrock Shield and had its name engraved on it.

I believe that there is still a House system in operation and that the house names are retained today with the exception of Lennox which has been discarded and replaced with Mitchell. I assume there was a reason for this.

School uniform

The uniform for girls was a brown tunic and a white blouse (long sleeves in winter and short in summer).  The shoes were brown with white socks but brown stockings could be worn in winter. Make-up and jewelry were on the forbidden list and infringements would incur the wrath of Miss Butt, the supervisor of girls.

Boys wore grey shorts or trousers and a white shirt. Grey jumper, grey socks and black shoes completed this colourful uniform. Two pairs of socks was always a good idea in winter as frosts were plentiful and probably still are.

Grey for the boys was adopted after some dispute amongst the committee of mothers who recommended the colour of the uniforms to the P and C Associaation which made the final choice of the colours. The first suggestion was for a brown uniform but some mothers felt that brown would not be popular among the boys and that brown material was hard to get. Grey was a popular colour for boys’ uniforms generally and would be easier to get. Why then it was okay for the girls’ uniforms to be brown is beyond me.

Turning thirteen for boys was a rite of passage because you went to F J Palmer’s in High Street (not to be confused with H G Palmer’s in High Street, an electrical store)  to buy your first pair of long grey trousers. Not a school rule, just a custom. For some boys, this was delayed either because their parents could not afford it or thought that their son should remain in short pants a little longer. These boys suffered quite a lot of ridicule until they made the change.

I cannot remember the sports uniforms but  I have been told that the girls wore a brown cotton tunic, shorter than the normal school tunic,  with a gold or yellow corded belt.

The school tie for both girls and boys was brown and gold striped but it did not need to be worn in summer. Boys and girls could also wear a blazer with the PHS emblem.  The school motto then was altiora peto, which I understood meant ‘I seek higher things’. Inspiring and in Latin to add gravity.altiora peto 2

Prefects generally wore blazers and more girls blazered up than boys.  The only other boys who wore it were those who were concerned with looking neat and complete or who were angling for high office.

There was a regulation hat but very few students ever wore them., Nobody knew then about the skin dangers of sun exposure and those who did know didn’t care all that much.

Report Cards

I don’t know about you but I have much difficulty in translating the student reports that issue today. I recently looked at my grandchildren’s half-yearly reports and while I am sure that they contain much relevant information, I remained puzzled at their progress. Apparently, they are ‘decoding’ well, are ‘tracking their thinking’ and are doing okay with their ‘behavior matrix’. I think that these are good things but am not sure.

I do know that they get lots of certificates at assemblies but some of these appear to just be for showing up. At Penrith High in the old days, you had to actually do something worthwhile to get presented with san award.

Our reports were nowhere near as detailed and contained the usual cliches – ‘working well’, ‘talks too much in class’ etc – but at least they were simple cliches and easy to understand.

Inkedreport card_2
A typical report card from 1960

Prefects

Prefects were mainly Fifth Year students but there were two male and two female prefects from Fourth Year. They were elected by the students but I suspect that there may have been a headmasterly veto in there somewhere because highly popular boys occasionally did not make the cut. The fact that these particular boys had had disciplinary difficulties may have been a coincidence but maybe not. If there was a black ball system in use, then it may have been a good thing because these boys would probably not have made good prefects.

The prefects did playground duty and exercised a supervisory role. Prefects were resented by some students who were averse to taking orders from kids with whom they had grown up with and who might be living next to them or across the road. These situations must have put the prefects in difficult positions too.

Sports

Wednesday afternoon was Sports Day. Participation in sport was compulsory, although there were a couple of boys who never participated. They claimed that if you didn’t turn up on the first Wednesday of the year, you did not get entered on a sports roll and thus became a non-person and were never missed.  I think it was more likely that they just got a note from their mother, but it might have been a true story.

The boys played rugby (league or union, it changed a couple of times), soccer and I think softball in winter. In summer they played cricket, swimming and softball. The girls played basketball and hockey in winter and vigoro (a particularly strange form of cricket designed for girls) in summer. Tennis was for both sexes and played all year round.

There was also swimming for boys and girls but they had to travel because the school did not have a pool. The swimming groups either went to the river if conditions allowed it or travelled to Granville until  Council finally decided to build a public pool in Station Street after pressure from the public and the local swimming club. It was opened in March 1962. The money for the construction of the pool came from donations and fundraising by the community with Council making up the shortfall.

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The new public pool nears completion January 1962

Tunnel ball, a most peculiar game, was an unofficial sport for girls. Brandings was an unofficial sport for boys but, as it was banned, could only be indulged in when there were no teachers around. For anyone who does not know the rules of Brandings, whichever boy was ‘it’ tried to hurl a tennis ball as hard as he could at other players who did their best to avoid the missile. Upon being hit, the victim became ‘it’ and the game continued until a teacher intervened or someone got hurt badly enough to need attention.

Apart from the oval at the back of the school, the school had no real sports facilities and had to borrow grounds and courts.

The school participated in CHS (Combined High Schools) inter-school events and in regional and State-organised competitions and did fairly well as I remember.

ATC

The school also had a para-military organisation known as the Air Training Corps (ATC) where boys would be taught drill and given rudimentary military knowledge. They wore dark blue uniforms and boots and did a lot of marching around the school. They loved processions.

Cadets attended two one-week camps a year at RAAF bases. All ATC equipment and uniforms were subsidised by the RAAF and there was a preferred pathway for cadets into the Air Force if they chose to make it a career or if they were called up for national service. There was compulsory national service in Australia from 1951 onwards for 18-year-olds, but it was limited in 1957 to a birthday ballot before being ended completely in 1959. It started up again in 1964 in a ballot system as our government decided that it would soon be time for us to meddle in the Vietnam War.

There were ranks in the ATC and the boys could progress towards Leading Air Cadet and Flight Lieutenant. They were supervised by a few of the teachers who the usual mockers said had read too many Biggles books. The more likely explanation is that these teachers had seen service in the air force during the war. Good on them.

There were no girls in the ATC.

School song

Was there a school song? I don’t remember but there certainly was an unofficial chant sounded out when the school was engaged in sporting contests with other schools. Like so many aspects of life then, it was unthinking of other cultures and historical events. I don’t remember the full chant, but it went something like this. There were other verses, forgotten now but probably just as stirring.

Zis bombah, zis bombah

Penrith High School rah rah rah

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, yah yah yah

Penrith High School rah rah rah

P-E-N-R-I-T-H!

You had to be there!

Insensitive yes, but you have to remember that the Pacific War had only ended a few years ago.

Clubs

The school had various clubs that catered to students’ particular interests, I do not recollect whether these could be attended during school times (probably not) or whether they were extra-curricular. These clubs were encouraged by teachers who had interests in these areas.

There were clubs for Chess (overseen by ‘Joe’ Allison), Public Issues (Mr Torode and then ‘Boof’ Graham after Mr Torode left), Drama (Mr Edwards and ‘Bob’Stockton‘), Lifesaving (Mr Murray) and the Stamp Collecting Club.

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Mr Edwards

There was also a debating club overseen by ‘Jack’ Curry and ‘Spike’ Jones that performed creditably in competitive debates, and a school choir. The choir was under the aegis of the music teacher at school. Students with a penchant for song could join the choir which sang at school functions and also outside the school. Religion was catered for by the Inter-School Christian Fellowship Group.

I looked recently at the Penrith High School site and was impressed by the number and variety of sports and outside activities, and range of clubs and societies that students can now join. I was even more impressed with the altruistic nature and intellectual content of some of the clubs. I wish that they had been around when I was there.

 

Next Penrith High School post

Corky Duncan and the chemistry lab

Previous Penrith High School post

Mr Jones and Billy Bunter

 

Mrs Tipping’s mulberry tree

John2 Comments

In Penrith, when I was growing up, most of my friends lived in houses with big back yards and trees to climb. Not many people had landscaped lawns and gardens but most of them had vegetable gardens and some kept chickens.

Yards were to use rather than admire. Wire fences, cackling chooks, galvanised iron roofs over coops, and an outside toilet left over from the days when the town was unsewered did not create the right ambiance for that perfect green lawn. And nobody had dedicated barbecue areas or adventure playgrounds. At best, there might be a swing, or a cubby house thrown together out of old materials.

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Penrith back yards  (Penrith City Library collection)

The yards were not cluttered up with rotary clotheslines either. The typical clothesline was a cord stretched between two wooden posts. Hanging clothes were easy pickings for the a bored family dog seeking attention.

And even if you didnt keep a vegetable garden, you had chokos growing. Everybody had a choko vine or two in their yard and after the family got tired of eating chokos – boiled, baked, stuffed and in stews – we tried to foist them on friends and neighbours. Of course, these same friends and neighbours had their own choko surplus. If they saw you walking towards their house with an armful of chokos, they might well draw the blinds and pretend that they were out.

The only solution was choko jam or choko pickles or choko chutney.

Playing outside

As kids, we played outside most of the time, certainly much more than the children of today. I like to think that we did this because we chose a healthier and more open-air lifestyle but I think the real reason is that we didn’t really have much else to do after school, on weekends and on school holidays. And it was safer then. Our parents had less to fear for their children.

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Just a small tree for small children

We didn’t have television, we didn’t have computers or games consoles or tablets and we didn’t have the range of toys and gadgets that are around today. Our only form of indoor entertainment was the radio, which we called the wireless, with just a few AM stations, cards and a limited range of board games. But we did conversations because families generally ate together at the dinner table but these conversations could become heated at times.

There were not too a lot of organised activities. There were scouts and guides, church clubs, ballet (but then generally only for girls) and whatever sports that we chose to play – cricket, tennis, soccer and rugby league were the main ones for boys. The range of activities today that have parents carting their kids to somewhere different each day and on weekends simply did not exist. And even then, we mostly found our own way there because not a lot of families had a car, let alone several.

Our yard

For the first few years of my childhood, I lived with my family above our shop in High Street, as did many other children of shopkeepers in the town. The backyards of those properties were much deeper than they are now because there were no council car parks at the back of High Street on either side.

Our backyard was immense and at its rear and the rear of the neighbouring shop on the western side (Miller’s Mens Wear) were trees, scrub and bamboo that made an ideal place to play whatever games of imagination we could come up with. The useful area of our yard decreased after Mum got the flower bug and planted large beds of dahlias, taking up valuable play space.

We also had a big wood-pile down the back of the yard to fuel the stove in Dad’s cafe and Mum’s copper. Very handy for Bonfire Night.

Mrs Tipping’s

On the eastern side of our property was a shop with a dwelling above owned by Mrs Tipping. In her yard were lots of trees, including a mulberry tree and a fig tree, not common then and probably rarer today. The mulberry tree was about seven metres high and the other was a fig tree that was almost as tall.

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In the backyard. One of Mrs Tipping’s trees is in the background.

Mrs Tipping let us climb her trees and this was good fun at all times because the branches were strong and many. It was even better fun when the fruit was in season.

As I understand it a mulberry tree is really a shrub but if left unpruned it grows like a tree. Mulberry trees are deciduous and much easier to climb in the winter when the leaves are few.  Clearly, Mrs Tipping never pruned this tree because it was so tall. The mulberries came out in Spring but you had to be quick to get them because birds were also fond of them, as were the grubs.

There was nothing better than perching on a fork in that tree, chatting to friends, and gorging yourself on mulberries until you started to feel sick. We were forbidden to wear anything but old clothes when we attacked the mulberry tree because the berries stain clothes easily.

My younger brother preferred the fig tree because he had a passion for them that lives to this day but which I never shared. Like the mulberry, figs ripen in the early spring and again, it was a contest to get to the fruit before the birds and the insects.

I cannot count the number of times my younger brother got sick from eating too many figs.

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The Tippings yard c 1987. What a tree!

Silkworms and mulberry leaves

Fads came and went when we were kids, particularly when we were in primary school and earlier. One year it was yoyos, another year it was French Knitting and when that craze faded away, it was collecting cigarette packets – empty of course, but still filthy. Another one was string games – tying pieces of string on your hands and weaving and knotting them to make patterns like Cat’s Cradle, Jacob’s Ladder and so on.cats cradle 1

Just because a craze finished didn’t mean that it would not reappear a few years later. Marbles was not a fad – they never went out of fashion.

Mrs Tipping’s mulberry tree also came in handy whenever the silkworm craze hit and it became the thing to keep silkworms with the ultimate aim of producing silk. This process may have worked in China but, as a child cottage industry in Penrith based on silk production – not so much. Kids get bored easily and move on to the next big thing.

The plan was to get some silkworms, put them in a cardboard box (shoe boxes were ideal), perforate some holes in the lid for air and feed them on mulberry leaves. My access to an abundant source of mulberry leaves made me very popular while the craze lasted.

In the silk production process, the silkworms create raw silk to make a cocoon into which they will move and then emerge as some sort of moth. I think that in serious silk production the cocoon is boiled while the silkworm is inside to avoid damage to the silk which is then harvested.

Of course, it never came to this. After the initial weeks of eagerness and checking how the silkworms were going, boredom set in and interest was transferred elsewhere. The boxes were not regularly cleaned and began to smell and either the silkworms died or one’s mother got rid of the container because the smell got too bad.

I have no recollection of any child in Penrith ever successfully producing silk.

Do kids still collect silkworms? I know that there are more exotic and interesting creatures to collect these days. My grandchildren were into stick insects at one stage and I went with them and their parents to a shop to buy some. The shop stocked all kinds of weird creatures to keep – snakes, spiders, lizards and who knows what else they might have had in the back room.

There were even redback spiders for sale at $30 each. In our day, there were always plenty of redbacks in the outside toilets. They would have been a nice little earner.

 

The Great Flood and other Penrith folk lore

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I don’t know how many times as a child I was told about the Great Penrith Flood, even by people who were far too young to have experienced it. The given dates for The Flood varied from the mid-1880s to the early 1900s; nobody seemed too sure. But there was always one consistent claim. It came up High Street as far as the Post Office.

This story always intrigued me but even as a child, I found it hard to swallow.  The Post Office was between Castlereagh Street East (now Lawson Street) and Woodriffe Street, the Nepean River was at least two kilometres away, and there were uphill slopes, one quite steep, in between. It  just didn’t seem physically possible. It must have been one of the local Uncle Remus stories, the myths that surrounded my Penrith childhood.

Myths and legends

And there were quite a few of these stories. The local businessman who was supposed to have pushed his wife off a cliff to her death; the 100 year old hermit who lived in the scrub at the back of Jamison Road; the ruins of the house at Emu Plains where Mr Street, our teacher at Penrith Primary School took us on several occasions and which were supposed to be haunted by a woman who had been murdered there.. This did not come from Mr Street who was a local historian and dealt in facts rather than children’s stories but from those ‘in the know’. And there was an old house in Lemongrove and one in Regentville with similar reputations.

We never came across any ghosts but to be on the safe side we did not visit any of these places at night.

On the subject of old houses, Mr Street also took us to one that had once been owned by the Reverend and infamous Samuel Marsden. I don’t remember where it was but recollect that there were shackles in one of the rooms. I don’t know if this one was haunted but surely any poor soul who had been conscripted to work for that psalm-singing old flogger would have had good reason to hang around and wail.

And there was a supposed cave down near the river where a bushranger had hidden out from the colonial troopers for many months with the assistance of local Aborigines. The bushranger in question was variously Bold Jack Donoghue, Captain Midnight, Captain Thunderbolt and Mad Dog Morgan (he did hail from Appin) although Ben Hall and Ned Kelly never got a guernsey. Take your pick.

Despite many expeditions as kids, we never did locate this cave.

The Great Flood of 1867

I recently remembered those stories and started to do some research. To my surprise, I discovered that there really was a Great Flood. It was in 1867 and although it did not come up as far as the Post Office, it did reach Woodriffe Street. Close enough to make the story true. Pretty impressive.

The flooding was immense. Newspapers at the time reported that the Nepean River was nine miles wide at the peak, that all Emu Plains was flooded and the waters lapped the base of Lapstone Hill.

People made homeless by the flood took refuge in churches and the courthouse and in private homes. Crops were destroyed and property lost. People were drowned including a family of 12 near Windsor.

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Depiction of rescue from 1867 flood (State Library)

Another flood in 1874 was almost as bad coming to within two feet of the levels reached in the 1867 flood. In a further flood in 1927, floodwaters came up as far as Station Street, flooding the approaches to the railway station.

I don’t remember any major flooding of the Nepean at Penrith when I was growing up although there were some disastrous floods in the Windsor and Richmond area.

Victoria Bridge

The Victoria Bridge survived the 1867 inundation. A bridge across the Nepean River had been built in 1855 but had been damaged by floods in 1857 and again in 1860. Construction of the present bridge to replace what was there before began in the early 1860s and it was completed in 1867.

victoria bridge
Construction of the bridge (source unknown)

The waters of the 1867 flood almost reached the road surface of the bridge but it survived the flood although there was damage to the approaches.

victoria bridge 1939 museums victoria
The bridge in 1930 (Victoria Museums)

So the Great Flood story has turned out to be true after all, although I still doubt that all of the people who recounted it to me were actually around when it happened. Some of them probably remembered later floods.

The water did come up to the Post Office – almost.

The bushranger myth

Even the bushranger story may have some truth. There is a Bushranger’s Creek out Silverdale way that runs into Bent’s Basin. Maybe that’s where the cave was.

And The Daily Telegraph, noting in 1937 the death of an elderly woman named Harriet Heyward, reported that she had been a nurse and had once found a bushranger named Marsden lying injured by the side of the road. She took him to a hut somewhere in Penrith and nursed him back to health. As she was 99 when she died, this event probably took place around about the 1860s, so the timing sounds right.

hospital first
The first hospital

The newspaper report also said that Mrs Heyward treated others at the hut as well and this was the forerunner of Penrith Hospital. This doesn’t sound right to me because the first hospital was proposed in 1855 and was built in Henry Street in about 1857. If Mrs Heywood was 99 years old as the Telegraph reported, she would have been born in 1838 and would have been only 19 when the hospital was built, This seems too young an age for her to have played any major part in the beginnings of the hospital.

One piece of folk lore that wasn’t around when I was growing up was the existence of the Blue Mountains Panther. This is a modern legend. This mystic animal is also known as the Lithgow Panther and the Grose Vale Panther so it certainly gets around.

Anyhow, there really was a Great Flood and there were certainly bushrangers in the Penrith area. Maybe all those other stories that old-timers recounted to me back then were true too,

 

Penrith High School in the 50s (9): Mr Jones and Billy Bunter

John3 Comments

Mr Jones taught Latin at Penrith High School. He was appropriately known as Spike, named after an American bandleader who satirised popular songs in a melee of discordance and chaos, which pretty much summed up our Latin classes.  It would have been even better if Spike’s hair was spikey but he wore it shortish and flat, probably trying to emulate the style of his hero, the Emperor Augustus.

spike jones
Mr Jones (‘Spike’)

Spike was a learned man and a gentle man and was not prepared to impose harsh discipline on his students. Consequently, they took advantage of him, at least some of the boys,  every chance that they had and totally disrespected him and the subject he was teaching.

Latin was compulsory for students in the A classes for the first year of high school and optional after that. Those students who aspired to go to University took the Latin option as it was thought that a knowledge of it would be useful in the professions.

Spike must have had classes other than Latin because a couple of classes each week for the A Classes could not possibly have made up a full teaching program. He was in the departments of Classics. English and Modern Languages so he was certainly well qualified to teach elsewhere.

Billy Bunter

Billy Bunter was a character in English books and comics about boarding schools. Bunter was a fat and obnoxious schoolboy and was totally dedicated to food gluttony. Mr Jones loved literature of this kind and was particularly fond of the Billy Bunter stories.

He would from time to time relieve the boredom, probably as much to him as to his classes, of declining Latin nouns (villa, villae, villarum etc) or conjugating its verbs (amo, amas, amat and so on) by bringing in one of his Billy Bunter books and reading a story from it.

bunter comic 2
Billy Bunter (Alamy)

Of course, the class scalawags got right on to this and were always likely to disrupt a Latin class by pleading with Spike to read another Bunter story – ‘please, Mr Jones, can we have another Billy Bunter story, can we Sir, please, please?’. The ever good-natured and quite naive Mr Jones would generally go along with this to the concern of the keener students in the class, generally female, who were smart enough to discern that this was not actually advancing their knowledge of Latin.

The inevitable result is that when the end of second-year exams were held, a lot of the boys found that they had failed the subject. The boys who had wasted their time and class time mucking around found that their prospects of passing Latin in the Intermediate were grim. The exam questions were more likely to focus on translating a passage from Caesar than on Bunter’s appetite for pies.

Miss Lennox

Help was at hand. Miss Lennox was the fixer for failing Latin students. Miss Lennox lived in a big old house down High Street between Worth Street and Mulgoa Road. She had, with her sister, previously conducted a primary school for young ladies at St Stephen’s Church. The school was moved to her High Street home in 1932.

church school
The St Stephen’s church school run by Miss Lennox sometime in the 1920s (Penrith City Library collection)

 

Although she had closed the girls’ school and retired, she was still available for private tuition as a remedial Latin teacher for wayward boys. Help was available for a tuition fee and at the cost of two hours solid work on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school.

Her house was huge and dark and Gothic and full of wonderful old furniture and both it and Miss Lennox, who had some connection to the Price family, would not have been out of place in an Emily Bronte novel.

She tutored her pupils at an oak dining room table set beside a large open fireplace. A fire burned steadily in winter, thank goodness, because the house was very cold and dark as the curtains were always drawn. A good spot to work on something like Caesar’s Gallic Wars. 

Miss Lennox generally came good and those boys who actually did the extra work with her managed to scrape at least a pass in their Intermediate Latin exam.

Latin helped us

In retrospect, I don’t think we took school and learning as seriously then as students do today. If so, that may have been because career prospects were easier. Jobs were freely available even to those who did not have good marks and having got a job a worker would often stay in that job for the rest of their working life. And the marks were not as important in going on to further education. If you matriculated and your parents could afford it, you went to university and did a course of your choosing. If your parents couldn’t afford it, you didnt unless you got a scholarship.

Latin was once compulsory in all private schools and most of the public schools. I don’t think it is offered in any but a handful of schools now and that is a pity because it was a good subject, despite the chaos and tomfoolery. And when we chose to pay attention, Mr Jones taught us well because he was an erudite man and a good communicator of his knowledge. It would be good if Latin returned as a language option in schools but the difficulty would be finding teachers who knew enough of the language to teach it.

Latin helped me develop an understanding of English grammar and the origin of many of the words that form the complex language of English. Most former students of Spike Jones would, I believe, be able to write and speak English correctly as a result of their time with him.

I would, however, hazard a guess that none of us ever cared to read or listen to a Billy Bunter story again.

Previous Penrith High School post

Penrith High School in the 50s (8): the teachers

 

 

 

High Street in the 1950s (4): north side – Lawson Street to the lane

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The shops and businesses mentioned in this story may not have all been there at the exact same time, as businesses closed and new ones opened over the years.

Corner of High and Lawson Streets

The Melrose Building

The Melrose building was at 357 High Street on the corner of what is now named Lawson Street. It contained the Melrose Apartments which had an entry from Lawson Street. I did not know anyone who lived in the apartments or who had even been inside them.

The building also contained the Melrose Fish Shop fronting High Street. The business was originally started by two men called Sutton and McCall and later run by Bill Turnbull.

Abstention from meat on Fridays was then mandatory for Catholics, which meant that Fridays were particularly busy for fish shops. The queues outside the Melrose Fish Shop on a Friday evening stretched into the street.

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Looking down High Street 1906. What would become the Melrose Building appears to be Railway House (on the right). (Penrith City Library collection)

There were fewer choices of fish available then and fish shop menus did not have many non-fish options. The Chiko Roll did not appear until the early Fifties. Chips of course went with fish and were wrapped in newspaper until the dangers of lead poisoning became known.

Is there anything better than freshly bought hot chips eaten from the package on a cold and wintry afternoon?

At one stage there was also a fruit and vegetable shop next to the fish shop known as the Melrose Fruit Market. It may have also have been run by the Turnbull family. I also recall an electrical appliances shop in this immediate area run by a Mr Morrison. Penrith seemed to have quite a few electrical shops which is surprising considering television was not available until 1956 and the range of available electrical appliances was not great.

The corner to 367 High Street

Grocery shop

I believe that at one time there was a grocery store in this block owned by a chain called SR Buttle Ltd, as distinct from Bussell Bros which owned a big general store in the next block. I also recollect that at 361 High Street, the Earp Brothers also sold groceries as well as hardware and gardening supplies. It makes no sense that there were two grocery shops close together so the explanation may well be that the Earps who had had a grocery shop further down in High Street bought Buttles out and transferred their business to 361 High Street.

I don’t remember the other Earp brother but Reg Earp lived in Castlereagh (Lawson) Street next to Mr Arthur Street who taught at Penrith Primary School. Reg was related to Harold Earp who later taught at Penrith High School.

Grocery shopping was very different then, there were no supermarkets. They were more like today’s health food shops – a counter, a till, and a lot of provisions in bulk. There were no frozen foods and few refrigerated products until the fifties. Before then we relied upon ice boxes, and fridges were a novelty.

Packaged foods were few. You told the grocer what you wanted and how much you wanted and he got it from the container and put it in a brown bag for you or a bottle or container that you brought with you. When you had collected all your groceries, you put them all in your own bag – string bags were popular. The shops did not provide trolleys and customers had to carry their purchases.

Many things sold in supermarkets today were not available from the grocer. People bought their meat from the butcher, fish from the fish shop, fruit and vegetables from the greengrocer, medical and cosmetic supplies from the chemist, newspapers and magazines from the newsagent, and stationery from a stationer. Milk and dairy products were delivered to your home and you bought your bread from a baker or the baker delivered.

There were no plastic cards either. The grocer, like other businesses, was paid by cash or cheque, or the customer ran a weekly or monthly account.

I particularly remember biscuits which were kept in tins and the quantity requested were weighed in a set of scales and put in a bag. You could buy just the one type or get a quantity of mixed biscuits – plain, savoury or both. Any biscuits that became broken in the handling process were thrown together and sold cheaply as broken biscuits.arnotts 2

I think the only biscuit maker then was Arnotts until Westons came along to provide competition sometime in the fifties. There was a lot less variety than there is now.

After Earps, there was a bootmaker’s shop and at 359 High Street, there was a shop originally occupied by a company called Bon Marche. I don’t remember what they sold.

The hamburger shop 

Then there was a hamburger next door to a one-ended lane that also housed Charlie the Bookie. At one stage, there was also a bicycle repair shop in the lane – Stevens Bikes. The hamburger shop was owned by Eddie Messer. I didn’t know the Messer family well but the Messer kids were always playing in the lane.

tricycle
Riding my bike in High Street,  probably in 1943 or 1944. As the Cram Building can just be seen on the right this is possibly outside or near the hamburger shop. The roof and awning of the Australian Arms are just visible on the corner.

Eddie Messer later sold the shop to George Shakas. George made great hamburgers but it was a wonder that his food preparation practices ever escaped the wrath of the local health inspectors.

Then came a couple of other shops, one of which was occupied by National Furniture.

375 High Street to the lane (Judges Lane)

Edwards Bakery

You then came to the bakery run by the Edwards family. There was old Mrs Edwards whose hair was as white as her flour, and her sons George and Arthur both of whom were excellent tennis players. George Wilmington, also a fine tennis player, was a brother in law.

The shop was at the front and the bakery out the back. The smell of freshly baked bread in the morning as one walked to school was wonderful and there was nothing more delightful than chewing down on warm freshly baked white doughy bread brownly crisped on the outside bought from Mrs Edwards. Sliced bread did not exist. Bread was in loaves and sliced with a bread knife.

At the back of the premises was the Edwards’ clay tennis court,  open to the public for a fee and for tournaments.

MacArthur’s

Next to the bakery was a stationery shop owned and run by Len McArthur, known locally as Mac and to the kids as Mr Mac. I don’t remember much about the shop except that it was quite dark inside.

macathhur
Mr Mac

Mr Mac also operated a lending library. The idea behind a private lending library as distinct from a public library is that the borrower paid a fee to borrow a book, either a one-off fee per book a yearly subscription. They were very popular in the days before Councils invested heavily in public libraries and they served a good public purpose.  The shop also stocked records, toys and gifts.

Mr Mac had two children a boy and a girl. Heather was the girl’s name but I cannot recall the boy’s name. He was older than us. Mr Mac was also very big in Rotary and other civic organisations. The shop closed in 1955.

Smith’s Pharmacy

You then came to Smith’s Pharmacy. Stan Smith owned this business. Behind and above the back counter Mr Smith had two big glass flasks to indicate that this was a compounding chemist shop, that is prescriptions were put together by the pharmacist. One flask was filled with pink liquid and one with blue.

smith chemist 1
Smith’s Pharmacy (Penrith City Library collection)

Unlike today when most regular medications come pre-prepared in pill, capsule or liquid form from the drug manufacturer, chemists made up the prescription in the shop. The doctor would write out a prescription and unless the medicine was one of the few pre-mixed ones, the chemist would make it up from chemical compounds kept in the pharmacy, meaning a much longer wait for the prescription. Filling time could be hours or even not be ready until the next day.

Medicare did not exist and people bore their own medical costs unless they were members of a medical fund run by a union or friendly society. This meant that doctor’s visits were less frequent and people relied more on the chemist for advice or consulted a ‘doctor’s’ book. This was a book most people kept at home to help them identify an illness from the symptoms. Goodness knows how many misdiagnoses were made by non-medically trained parents.

Parents had standby cures for minor complaints – Reckitt’s Blue for stings and burns, mercurochrome and Elastoplast (before Band-Aids) for cuts and bruises and of course castor oil in the mistaken belief that many childhood maladies were caused by constipation or as they euphemistically termed it – the child was feeling bilious.

Castor oil is one of the foulest tasting substances ever made. A parent administered it to a squirming child by holding the child’s nose and then slamming a tablespoon of oil into the mouth. An orange was usually supplied to take away the foul taste. Some of us still associate the taste of an orange with castor oil. And if the castor oil did not do the trick, there was always Comstocks ‘Dead Shot’ Worm Pellets.

And on the subject of home remedies, let us never forget the prevailing cure for sunburn – a hot shower and/or rubbing the skin with a tomato. What?

People also resorted to one of the many patent medicines, some of which worked but others didn’t. Popular were Dr Morse’s Indian Root Pills, Liveroide, Euro ointment, Warn’s Wonder Wool which apparently relieved against everything from headaches to rheumatism, and Bonington’s Irish Moss containing the mysterious and exotic-sounding ‘Pectoral oxymel of Carrageen’. If you sipped, sipped, sipped Bonington’s as their marketing suggested, you would be relieved from ‘coughs, colds, influenza, soreness and tightness of chest, asthma, bronchitis, croup, whooping cough, difficulty of breathing and other lung complaints tending to consumption’. Wow!

Bonington’s had a competitor called Buckley’s Canadiol Mixture whatever that was. They both advertised heavily on the wireless or radio as we now call it. The Buckley’s ads seemed to focus on Canadian Mounties and people walking about in blizzards.

Some patent cures were actually harmful, like APC powders, a mixture of aspirin, phenacetin and caffeine, marketed under the brand names Bex and Vincent’s. They were available from chemists and other stores in powder form and contained in paper sachets. They were commonly taken by a generation or two of Australians, particularly women. It was subsequently found that frequent and long-term could lead to kidney and other diseases.bex

Mr Smith, like the other chemists in town, had his own mixtures including Smith’s Corn Cure, Smith’s Cough Mixture, Smiths Teething Powder and Smith’s Bronchitis Balsam. I don’t know if Mr Smith’s cough mixture was as universally effective as Bonington’s.

He had two children that I remember – Gay, known to us as Googie for some reason lost to history and her older brother Tony who later opened up a real estate agency in High Street just up from the pharmacy, I think in the old MacArthur’s shop. When Mr Smith died suddenly in 1958, the business was carried on by Mr Hill.

The Kodak film sign from its chemist says remains on the building today.

Wood’s Butchery

Wood’s Butcher shop was at 387 High Street. There had been a butcher’s shop on this site since 1900 when it was started by the Millen Brothers. Walter Wood bought them out in 1931 and later brought two of his sons – Lloyd and Ray – into the business. Lloyd was the son most often seen in the shop. Another brother Ken had a car dealership.

MILLENS
The original Millen Brothers shop later Walter Wood and Sons (Penrith City Library collection).

Lloyd Wood was a jolly man, stocky, bald and, like all butchers, affable. The butchers in the shop always wore white shirts with a red bow tie and the usual striped apron. The centre-piece of the window display was almost always a pig’s upper body and head with an apple in its mouth.

There were a lot of butcher shops in Penrith for a town of its size, indicative of Australian eating habits at the time where meat and vegetables formed the majority of meals. The population of Penrith in 1956 was only 19,000.

At the back of the shop in the lane, Mr Wood had a big old sharpening wheel where the butchers would sit and sharpen their knives while rotating the wheel with a foot pedal. Pedestrians using the lane would often stop to watch this process and chat with the butchers.

Lloyd Wood had two sons, Geoffrey and Tony. Geoff became an accountant in Penrith and Tony went into the meat business with his father, helping to extend the business to a chain of shops spread over the western suburbs  and a meat wholesaling business. Tony later bought the Wine Barrel Bistro in Woodriffe Street originally started by Billy Lomas.

The lane

This lane ran between High Street and Henry Street initially. Council then resumed strips of land off all High Street properties to construct car parks. After the acquisitions and the building of the car parks, the lane ran from High Street to Edwards Place.

The lane never really had a name although adjoining landholders tended to confiscate the name for themselves – hence Wood’s Lane, Tipping’s Lane etc. In reality, the lane was owned by Judges Estate which had been wound up many years before. Council subsequently sold it for unpaid rates and it became part of the redevelopment of 389 High Street into the present shopping arcade.

It should properly have been known as Judges’ Lane.

Next High Street Post

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

Previous High Street Post

High Street in the 1950s (3): the north side, Evan Street to Lawson Street

 

 

Penrith characters: Roley Price, the barber

John5 Comments

Roley Price cut hair in Penrith for nearly fifty years.

There were several men’s barbers in High Street. Some people went to Jim Connell or Cyril Upton but our family barber was Roley Price Most of my friends had their hair cut by Roley.

Going with your father to Roley for your first professional hair-cut was a rite of passage.

Roley, who was also a champion rower, had the usual revolving striped pole outside his shop and was a very versatile cutter of men’s hair. He would give you any cut that you wanted as long as it was short back and sides, although he did deign to do a crew cut when they became popular. No tricky coiffures with Roley.

Roley also did shaves and several Penrith businessmen who liked to keep up appearances would call in for a daily shave. A shave was always good too after a heavy drinking night when the hands were unsteady and a hot towel placed by Roley on the face helped to ease the effects of over-indulgence.

For small kids who did not come up to the height necessary for Roley not to bend over, he would place a hard wooden board across the arms of the barber’s chair that the kid would perch upon. Roley would warn the kid about wriggling and would meet the first wriggle or a squirm with a pinch on the ear. Neither the seat perching nor the ear pinching would go over well today.

Roley did not make appointments – too much paperwork – and there was always a queue. Roley had a selection of comics and magazines to help you pass the time. He had multiple copies of Man, Australia’s fairly tame version of the soon-to-appear Playboy. There was also a smaller and less risque version of Man called Man Junior which featured a really entertaining comic strip called Devil Doone. As boys grew older, they tended to gravitate away from Devil Doone to the pictures in Man Magazine.man junior 2

devil doone
Devil Doone

Other popular men’s magazines in Roley’s shop were Pix and the Australasian Post. The Post famously introduced the Ettamogah Pub while Pix infamously hosted cartoons and comic strips by Eric Joliffe.

Joliffe’s drawings featured stereotypes of half-naked Aboriginal men and women wearing only loincloths and portrayed them as simple stone-age people, causing the Federal Anti-Discrimination Board to accuse Joliffe of being racist. His defenders argued that his drawings were sympathetic to indigenous people and highlighted the difficulties that they had in dealing with European customs and mores. Check out some of Joliffe’s stuff online if you find it hard to believe that this type of material was thought acceptable even in those less culturally-sensitive days and make your own judgment.

Back to Roley. Roley was laconic, to say the least, and his lay-back approach ideally suited the types of haircut that he gave – well only one type really.

Roley opened all day Saturday but closed on Wednesday afternoons. He often cut hair after normal retail closing hours and did good business with pub drinkers after they left the pub in the days of six o’clock closing.

Roley’s shop was at 378 High Street, on the southern side of High Street down from the Nepean Theatre and before you got to Memory Park. Roley began business before the outbreak of World War II and suspended trading to join up. When he returned from the war, he began cutting hair again.

roley ad
Reads more like a legal notice than a back in business announcement

He was going strong many years later at a new address – he had a room at the back of 389 High Steet in what was then a lane, running from High Street to the service building for the Post-Master General’s Department (PMG) fronting Henry Street. The PMG provided general postal services and telephone lines in the pre-Australia Post and pre-Telstra days. You could duck through this lane directly to Henry Street properties.

After the Council compulsorily acquired strips of land from various High Street properties to build a car park, the lane fed directly into Edwards Place Carpark.

roley 2
Roley having a chat while waiting for a customer

As men began to get their hair cut at hairdressing salons and they no longer got barbers’ shaves, traditional barber shops faded away. Roley however still did a roaring trade at the new premises, catering for men who felt uncomfortable in getting shorn in a lady’s salon or who still wanted the traditional cut. When he wasn’t busy, Roley would position himself in the lane or in High Street for a chat with the many passing shoppers whom he knew.

Thursday was Pensioner Day at the new shop with discounted prices for the senior citizens. Always plenty of customers. With longtime customers who were not able to make the trip into town, Roley would visit their homes to cut their hair.

Somehow, along the way, Roley had misplaced the revolving barber pole but he still had his barber’s chair from the old days. He also brought along with him from his old premises a dated radio that should have been in an antique store, some pre-war calendars and posters and a couple of old photographs of Penrith. His sink and benches dated back to the 1920s.

After Roley moved, he refused to cut children’s hair any more, claiming that he no longer had the patience. Those of us who had been cropped by Roley when we were kids were startled to learn that he ever did.

 

 

Penrith High School in the 50s (8): the teachers

JohnLeave a comment

Most of the teachers at Penrith High School, although of uneven teaching quality, were a decent and dedicated bunch of people. Some were memorable, others not so much.

I found a photograph of the teachers at Penrith High School when I was looking through some old documents. Why I had a photo of the teachers but none of my own class photos is beyond me.

The photograph would be of the 1954 or 1955 staff. I know this because Mr Graham is in the photo and he didn’t come to the school until 1954 and Miss Fardell is also in the photo and she left at the end of 1955.

The teachers who I remember are listed under the photo. The others I have either forgotten or never came into contact with.TEACHERS MASTER

Front row, left to right

x, Miss Butt, x, Mr Cameron, Mr Eason, Mr McGregor, Mr Harrison, Mr Brown, x, Miss McEwen

Second row, left to right

x, Miss Gould, x, x, Miss Fardell, x, Mrs Reynolds, x, x, x, Miss Baldwin peeping out

Third row, left to right

x, x, Mr Mullane, x, x, Mr Coughlan?, Mr Horton, Mr Sharp?, Mr Jones, Mr Curry

Fourth row, left to right

Mr Dooley, Mr Sheridan?, Mr Allison, Mr Edwards, x, x, x, Mr Duncan, Mr Stockton

Fifth row, left to right

Mr Graham, Mr Ewens, Mr Baguley, Mr Crockart, Mr Penman, Mr Eyles, Mr Murray, x, x, x

I may have some of these wrong. If any reader can correct me, or fill in the missing names, that would be good.

Teaching aids

These teachers did it hard. The only teaching aids that they had were a blackboard, white and coloured chalk, and a blackboard eraser. No electronic whiteboards, no overhead transparency projectors or computerised slideshows, and until the sixties, no television sets that could allow a teacher to get some breathing space by having students watch something on the screen.

And of course, there were no computers, tablets or mobiles. If teachers needed to make a phone call, they had to get the okay from the headmaster to use the office phone or find a public phone. There was one across the road.

There were no photocopiers or laser printers. The only way to duplicate anything was to use carbon paper which would produce at most three legible copies. There were Gestetner machines, A Gestetner was an archaic printing machine that involved mixing chemicals to enable printing. It had a handle to run off copies. The process was very messy and required the user to put on a dust coat or risk ruining their clothes. The process was more trouble than it was worth but that is all that they had.

gestetner 2
A Gestetner duplicating machine

And teachers had very limited resources for research. Google and Wikipedia were decades into the future and it was either the encyclopedias at Penrith Library or a request for help to Miss Fardell in the school library.

Administration communicated with the students by means of an antiquated public address system that worked most of the time. Otherwise, you learned what was going on at Assembly.

From what the teachers said, the Education Department was not much help.

Teaching styles

The teaching style was simple – the teacher spoke and the students listened. There were few innovative teaching techniques.  After the students finished writing down what the teacher had said or had written on the blackboard, they generally worked on their own. There were no teams or groups, apart from in science, and little demand or opportunity for independent research.

There was a lot of work written on the blackboard for students to write down. The keener teachers would write on the board before class or during recess or lunch. The others would write on the board during the class with their backs turned, allowing students to copy it or clown around. Too much noise and the teacher was likely to whirl around and admonish the offenders or hurl a piece of chalk or anything else within range. It is surprising that no one lost an eye.

It was amazing how some teachers could sense, without seeing, who the offenders were, or perhaps it was just a case of rounding on the usual suspects.

Chalkboards were filthy things and every now and then a student would be asked to go outside and clean the blackboard erasers. This was done by clapping two erasers together, sending up a cloud of chalk dust which could not have been good for the lungs.

And much of the learning was rote learning – repeating things until they stuck in the memory. I know that this has gone out of style but it was an effective if a tedious way of learning, although it did not lead to a great understanding of complex material. It worked best with matter that one needed for reference such as the periodic table in chemistry and formulas.

Departments and teachers

The teaching staff was divided into departments, although some teachers had a foot in several camps. Mr Curry, for one, was in both the Department of English and the Department of Classics. Mr Jones was multi-departmental, being in the English, Classics and Modern Languages departments. He was also an expert in English schoolboy comics and books but that’s another story.

Each department had a head teacher whose duties were never clear to me. The teaching departments were:

English

Languages (Modern and Classics)

Mathematics

Science

Commercial

Technical

Home Science

Art and Music were also departments but they only had one teacher each in those years. I suppose those teachers qualified as departmental heads but wonder if they got the extra money that departmental heads were paid.

The Physical Education department consisted of a sports master and a sports mistress. I don’t know who was the boss there. Maybe they took it in turns.

Administration

The headmaster and deputy headmaster ran the school and each had their own office in the main building. I don’t remember if they had any administrative staff working for them but, if they did, it was very limited.  I do know that the girls in 4C, the class for budding typists and secretaries, were always being asked to do typing for the heads and teachers.

It would have been dressed up as good typing practice for the girls but it was necessary because of the lack of resources.

Teacher respect

With a few exceptions, teachers were respected by the students and any backchat was cheeky rather than offensive or menacing. I can recollect only one incident where a student struck a teacher and that student was one of the very few bad kids at the school.

This did not prevent the student body from being unruly or mocking the teachers, and nicknaming teachers was the order of the day. At least by the boys.

That said, students were fairly docile and well behaved and, apart from the occasional fight in front of the bike racks, there was little violent behaviour. Misconduct was soft-core.

Many teachers also lived locally and in a small town knew and were known by many of our parents. The possibility of parents learning of their child’s misbehavior through social contact with teachers discouraged bad behaviour. It could be awkward to attend a social function with your family and bump into one of your teachers. Awkward for them too, I would imagine. And walking past a house and seeing your teacher mowing the lawn in shorts or carrying out the garbage bins just didn’t seem right.

Nicknames

Many of the teachers had nicknames and those who didn’t were referred to by their shortened first name (Mick Coughlan, Ernie Penman).

There was no system in the conferring of nicknames. Some were derived from bandleaders or musicians (Spike Jones, Les Brown), some from physical attributes or the lack of them (Muscles Mullane, Fatty Horton, though he wasn’t really fat), some because of the way they dressed or the opposite (Bodgie Edwards) and some defied explanation; they just were (Corky Duncan). There were very few women teachers with nicknames. I dont know why.

I don’t think that there was any malice behind any of the nicknames, even the seeming cruel ones like Miss Wobblebum. They were just students’ ways of dealing with a situation where they were exposed to these authority figures for concentrated periods of time over several years.

Students never addressed teachers in person by these names. It was always Mr Cameron or Miss McEwen, or Sir or Miss, the latter irrespective of marital status. And in the unlikely event of one of us bumping into a former teacher today, that is how we would address them, irrespective of the situation.

That was symptomatic of that age. Younger people called their elders Mr, Mrs or Miss unless they were related to them. The rules today are much less formal, but I am always surprised when someone from a call centre, whom I have never met or dealt with before, addresses me by my first name. It doesn’t matter but I suppose that the etiquette of my youth is ingrained into me.

It is probably a generational thing because my nieces and nephews refer to me as Uncle but their children call me by my first name.

Most boys were also given nicknames by their mates in proper Australian tradition – names like Bluey, Wiggy, Drippy, Sqizzy, Mozza, Tiny, Butch and Diesel. If they did not have nicknames, they were generally called by a shortened or lengthened version of their last name – Bowdo, Browny, Woodsy, Maido and so on. Boys rarely gave nicknames to girls but girls may have had names for other girls. We would not have known.

Naming the students

Teachers too used names as a strategy. If we had all been consistently addressed by our last name, as they did in some private schools, or by our first name, there would be no issue. Teachers would, however, indicate their irritation or anger at a student, or the degree of their like or dislike of them, in the way they addressed them.

If a teacher consistently addressed one student by their first name and another by their last name, you would know that the first student was favoured but the second student was not liked or respected.

And if the teacher used the first and last names together, an admonishment or a sarcastic remark was surely coming.

We tend to remember our teachers, the very good ones and the bad ones. It is the ones in between who are likely to fade most from the memory.

Previous Penrith High School post

Penrith High School in the 50s (7): school dances

 

 

 

 

High Street in the 1950s (3): the north side, Evan Street to Lawson Street

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This walk back through time will begin at Evan Street and will take us along the northern side of High Street from Evan Street to Lawson Street. Thanks to Robert Neale for refreshing my memory on some of the locations.

Geographical note

Lawson Street was formerly called Castlereagh Street but it was not directly opposite the other Castlereagh Street lower down on the southern side of High Street. As Penrith grew, this seemed to present a  problem that Penrith Council thought needed a remedy. I don’t know why – we all seemed to be able to find our way around. Maybe visitors to Penrith were not as smart as we were.

The Council could have done something like other towns and cities have done and called them  Upper Castlereagh Steet and Lower Castlereagh Street or Castlereagh Street East and West. Instead, it decided to rename Castlereagh Street as it ran between the northern side of High Street and Henry Street as Lawson Street.

The Evan Street corner

On the corner was Alex Leitch who supplied steel and heavy machinery like hoists and forklifts. There was a common saying among locals when a more bulky friend lost their footing and fell – stay there mate and we’ll send for Alec Leitch to get you up again.

This site was formerly occupied by a private hospital run by a Sister Maxwell.

Neales

The Penrith Hotel, one of Penrith’s six pubs, was next to Alec Leitch and then came Neales. This was one of the two department stores in Penrith. Fletchers, further down High Street, was bigger and had a greater variety of goods and was more like a traditional department store, a mini-Myer if you like. There was also Bussell Bros near the Post Office which sold a mixture of products, including groceries, but probably lacked the range to be called a fully-fledged department store.

Neale store 1882
Neale’s Nepean Stores 1882 (Penrith City Library collection)

Neales was a genuine family store, more customer friendly and with better personal customer service. As I understand it, HJ Neale, started a general and department store on its present site in 1882. The store was known as Nepean Stores. The business was later carried on by his two sons Reg and Harry. Reg’s son was Bruce Neale who later took it over and it became known as Neale’s.

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Mr Bruce Neale

Bruce Neale was a personable man, popular in the community and very active in civic affairs.  Mr Neale was a driving force in the Nepean Rowing Club, serving as President for 28 years, and a director of the Milk Factory (Nepean Milk Co-Op Ltd) for almost as long. He was also prominent in Rotary, the Chamber of Commerce and served on Penrith Council. There is a street near the Rowing Club in its present site named after him. His son, Robert, eventually took over the store, later moving it to a spot on the Northern Road.

Interior of Neale's store High Street, Penrith?
Neale’s in the 1950s.

The Court House

The original Court House was in this block but it was later moved to Henry Street. Adjacent was a residence occupied by the senior police officer in Penrith, first a police sergeant and later, as Penrith grew, by an Inspector.

The cases dealt with in the Court House were heard by a magistrate and could be either civil or criminal cases. From time to time, a District Court judge would use the court to hear more substantial criminal and civil cases and to hear appeals from the decisions of magistrates

In those days, magistrates were not necessarily qualified lawyers, and they became magistrates by working their way up through the Justice Department. There were some interesting magistrates to say the least and some palm tree justice (not necessarily with any justice) meted out.

One particular magistrate was sudden death on defendants convicted of driving while under the influence of intoxicating liquor. This was strange because that same magistrate could frequently be seen walking to his car after a session at Tattersall’s Hotel. Another magistrate, not very learned in the law, once refused to allow a young visiting solicitor from Sydney to speak because the solicitor insisted on quoting the law in defence of his client. Local practitioners knew better.

Then there was the magistrate whose behaviour was allegedly so erratic in court that he was suspended and sent for psychiatric examination. He received a clean bill of health and enjoyed telling colleagues that he had been declared legally sane and asking them if they could they say the same.police station 2

The police station

The old police station was in between the Court House and the police residence and set back. It was a solid but dilapidated building. It served the community well but as the population grew, the town needed a bigger and better one and it was pulled down and replaced in 1978.

In the 1940s and early 1950s when the population of the town was small, there were not many police in Penrith but those who were knew most of the residents and most of the residents knew them. They would patrol the town on foot, singly or in pairs, and when they came across kids or youths who looked like they might be up for a bit of mischief, they took the appropriate action. ‘

This was usually in the form of a friendly warning that unless they went home their parents would be informed of their hanging about the streets to no useful purpose. Back then, this was likely to work because kids were scared of what their parents would do if they found out. Sometimes this advice would be accompanied by a clip over the ear, admonitory rather than punitive.

There were some colourful cops. Sergeant Alan Charlton was a fixture in the town, having served Penrith for 29 years before retiring in 1956. John Braham was the sergeant in charge for some years and was an old-style cop. When he retired he started a real estate business in High Street near the Nepean Theatre. Then there was ‘Jack the Rat’ as he was called. A big man, when he was on his motorbike and wearing sunglasses, he looked just like the Southern sheriff commonly shown in American movies. But he was a good fellow and locally popular.

The two detectives were Detectives Killen and McKenzie, the Demons, and they were a fearsome double act. Again, they were old style and dealt out an arbitrary form of policing. They did however excite some criticism both inside and outside the Police Force.

Dr Uren

Dr Uren’s surgery was next to the police station.  Harry Uren was one of the most charismatic and popular professional men in Penrith and a good and caring doctor. Handsome and charming, he practised medicine in the town from 1936 to 1968 with a break in between when he served as a doctor in the armed forces during the war. Dr Uren was also big in the Rotary Club of Penrith.

dr uren 2
Dr Uren

Like most men in that era, Dr Uren was a smoker and would occasionally smoke during home consultations. Yes, doctors did home consultations. ‘

Smoking was more general then: most men smoked as did many women. The dangers of smoking were not known and it was an accepted social practice – non-smokers accepted it as part of life. If you find this hard to fathom in today’s society where smokers are in the minority and no doctor would smoke in front of a patient, watch a couple of episodes of Mad Men to see the dominant role of tobacco in the community.

The carnival paddock

There was a big paddock next to Dr Uren’s surgery that was owned by Penrith Council and was a popular site for holding fetes and carnivals. Carnivals were frequent, either being run for charity or for private gain.

The paddock was in effect the town common of Penrith and the heart of the community. It was a place where people came together for the common good and to be entertained.

carnival

At the charitable carnivals, you would often see local business and professional people working the various stalls and shows like the chocolate wheel, the roll-ems and guessing competitions. At one stage, they ran housie-housie which today we call bingo until this was made illegal by the state government.

The produce stalls at the carnivals were of the kind that you now see occasionally in the street run by charities – stalls selling jams and preserves, knitted products and the like.

If my memory is correct, there was also a vacant block in Henry Street between Lawson Street and Station Street opposite what was then the Drill Hall. This site was also used for carnivals and particularly circuses that came to Penrith periodically.

Then came the Australian Arms.

Diversion to Henry Street

If you turned right on Lawson Street at the Arms, and walked past the lane next to the Arms, you passed houses all the way to Henry Street. Mr Arthur Street, the deputy headmaster of Penrith Primary School and eminent local historian, lived in a weatherboard house on the right. The Earp family also lived on this block. Opposite was a big white brick house owned by the Wards. Mr Ward was the brother in law of Percy Hall, a local butcher with a shop in High Street. Percy Hall was more well known as a leading driver of trotting horses.

mr street
Arthur Street, teacher and Penrith historian

Further along in Lawson Street past the corner on the western side was a general store owned by the Smedleys and the railway crossing that took you to Lemongrove. I understand that there was a speedway in Lemongrove at some stage but it was before my time.

Turning right into Henry Street, you came across more houses

speedway
The old Speedway (Penrith City Library collection)

and the Methodist Church.  Mrs Price lived at 244 Henry Street, next to the church, in a wonderful old wattle and daub cottage now lost to history. They must have changed the house numbers when they made Henry Street the main deviation of the highway because Mrs Price definitely lived at 244 but now 244 is way down past Riley Street.

methodist church
The Methodist Church in Henry Street

The rest of this block was made up of houses and vacant land. A particularly striking house was that of Mrs Parkes just down from the Penrith Infants School, It was a white house on a large block with a big wrought iron front fence also painted white. It had a big garden with lots of big trees.

Penrith Council built a library on the vacant lot and old building on the southern corner opposite the school in 1964. The previous library was in the School of Arts building in Castlereagh Street. This library serviced the town for many years before it was relocated to its present site.

library
The Henry Street Library (Penrith City Library Collection)

J K Williams

If you then turned back up Evan Street towards High Street, there was a small yard at the back of Alex Leitch’s with an office, a truck and a bulldozer. The owner of this small concern was Jack Williams and his business grew as  Penrith grew.

As more and more farms and orchards were sold to developers for the purpose of residential subdivisions – Emu Plains was at one stage just a mass of citrus groves – somebody had to build the roads and infrastructure. Jack Williams, first as a part-timer and later in full-time mode, was contracted to do much of that work. From that small start, that business became JK Williams Pty Ltd, one of the few business ventures from that era that is still in business today.

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1958 The town is being developed

High Street now between Evan Street and Lawson Street remains dominated by the two hotels and the police station. The Carnival site has gone because land in High Street became too valuable to justify a meeting place for the people. And, sadly, it just wouldn’t work in a city as big as we have now.

More stories on High Street are coming.