GPS Regatta Day: the private schools invade the town

February 17, 2019July 26, 2019 JohnLeave a comment

GPS schools held their annual regatta in April every year on the Nepean River. Following the British tradition, GPS stands for Great Public Schools although they were all, with the exception of Sydney Boys High, private schools charging big fees. As Penrith High School was a state school, it was not included in this category although we all thought that it was pretty great.

Remarkably, very few Penrith children went to a private school. Parents at every income level either sent their child to a state-run school or to a school in the Catholic education system.

The GPS boys and their families would flock to the river to see which school won the rowing eights and became the Head of the River as the championship was called. As High Street was then part of the Great Western Highway, they had to drive through town in their buses and private cars with their school colour ribbons attached to their vehicles, giving the old school cries. We were accustomed to our own conservative school uniforms, so straw boater hats and military uniforms on schoolkids seemed a bit odd to us.

Most of the town gathered along the road to watch the passing traffic. There was still a sectarian divide in Penrith in those days so a few of the believers, even though they may not have had a son in a GPS school (then all male) would get over-enthusiastic. The Catholics in that category would cheer one of the Catholic private schools – Joeys or Riverview – and the Protestants barracked for Protestant schools like Shore or Scots, even adopting the colours of that particular school. The rest of us didn’t give a damn and just jeered and hooted.

The procession of vehicles generally took a couple of hours and for most residents that was the end of it. Spectacle over! However, some of the wealthier families who lived in Nepean Avenue which fronted the river held house parties and watched the boat races over cucumber sandwiches and a glass of champagne, or so I imagined. As probably did the poorer plebs who lived across the river in Emu Plains, but with a Sargent’s Pie and a Toohey’s New instead.

H J F Neale regatta Nepean River — Spectators watching Regatta 1932 (Penrith City Library collection)

The more aggressive youths in our community carried on the day by going down to the spectator stands along the river and trying to start a fight with some private school boys, while the bolder girls paraded along the stands hoping to attract the attention of a boy with nobler blood than the locals. These endeavours were mostly unsuccessful.

They still hold the Head of the River each year in Penrith but I suspect that the locals now have more things to interest them than to stand on the footpath watching cars carrying people they don’t know to an event that few of them care about.

Still, in those days, anything happening outside the ordinary was a big event for us.

Penrith Infants’ School: the magpies and the spoiled milk

February 14, 2019October 20, 2020 JohnLeave a comment

Penrith Infants’ School was for many years situated on the corner of Evan Street and Henry Street, a site now occupied by commercial premises. It was separate then from Penrith Primary School.

The school comprised kindergarten, first class and second class, or grades as they would now be called. Students in years 3 to 6 moved up to Penrith Primary School on the corner of High and Doonmore Streets, where it still is.

The long time kindergarten teacher was Mrs Curroll, a sweet lady loved by every child she ever taught. Year 1 was taught by Miss Anderson, who wielded the feather duster, the chosen instrument of corporal punishment, ferociously. Her target of choice was the back of the legs. In those days, corporal punishment was considered unobjectionable by parents and community. Today, most of our teachers (and probably our parents) would be doing time.

Students in year 2 were taught by Mrs Dunn, who lived with her family on a huge property out beyond Jamison Road, The farm extended almost to Smith Street and, if you were a Mrs Dunn favourite, you could go out there on a weekend and ride their horses. Mr Dunn owned a racehorse named Taunter which was always going to win a race but never did. Taunter at one stage had the distinction of being the oldest maiden (a horse that was yet to win a race) in Australia.

Mrs Dunn was also very handy with the feather duster but she was a great teacher and is fondly remembered.

Charity and learning to save

We were taught at school the benefits of thrift and the need to show charity in a very unusual way. Somebody would bring around a device consisting of the face of a black man with a little hand. A child would place a coin in the hand and by pulling the lever the coin would be transported into the man’s mouth and proceed down the throat. In the racially insensitive spirit of these times, the device was called ‘The Nigger’. Those were indeed different times but surely this should have been unacceptable even then. nigger 2

A favourite charity for school collections was Stewart House, a home providing a safe haven for children in need.

We were also encouraged to open a savings account with the Commonwealth Savings Bank. A representative of the bank would call regularly at the school to collect savings and enter them in a passbook. Many children had a Commonwealth Bank money box at home to store up their savings.

piggy bank 4 — The famous Commonwealth Bank money box

Good business for the bank and many a person has been surprised in later years when they recollected their Commonwealth Bank history and found a tidy little sum available.

The maggies in swooping season

There were lots of big trees in the play yard in the school that were nested by magpies.

It is well known that August to October is magpie swooping time, the breeding season when magpies are prone to defend their brood by attacking any unsuspecting person who comes within their territorial area, favouring the victim’s head, face and neck. They bite savagely and stitches are often needed after a swoop. magpie

As a result, the back half of the schoolyard was off-limits during swooping season and woe betide any kid brave or foolish enough to wander into enemy territory.

Alfred Hitchcock probably got his inspiration for his horror film The Birds from the backyard of the Penrith Infants’School.

A Hitchcock horror scene or possibly Penrith Infants at play time.

Free but often spoiled milk

At some stage, the government decided that Australian children were undernourished and not getting enough calcium. They brought in a well-meaning scheme to provide free milk to every child at school.

Great idea, but the problem was that the milk was to be consumed at recess (play time as we then knew it) and it was delivered by the milkman at 9 o’clock in the morning or earlier and left in the yard. The milk was in either small glass bottles with a foil top or cardboard containers.

They didn’t take into account the ferocious Penrith summer, and by recess at 11 o’clock, the milk had well and truly curdled with a big scummy layer on top. Nevertheless, you had to drink it. Some kids tried to covertly pour the milk out but if you were caught, it was the feather duster for you. Of course, in the winter, the milk would often be frozen.

The free milk program was still going on in the 1970s. I reckon a lot of us were put off milk for life as a result.

The big needle

And then there were the vaccinations when we had to line up to get inoculated against Diptheria and other diseases. The injecting doctor or a nurse would stick a bloody great needle the size of a pneumatic drill in you, after swabbing the spot to be punctured with some form of medical disinfectant.

Little regard was paid to the purity of the process and there was no such thing as disposable syringes. One kid would be jabbed and then a lighted match applied to the needle to ‘disinfect’ it before the next kid was inoculated.

Anyhow, we all seemed to survive this process. Maybe we were tougher in those days or perhaps the rancid milk built up our immunity.

Penrith characters: Old Tom, the Count and the one-armed man

February 12, 2019November 17, 2020 John5 Comments

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

Old Tom

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

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

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

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

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

Count O’Meagher

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

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

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

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

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

The Count and his car. The man sitting next to him may be George Howell (Penrith City Library collection)

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

The one-armed man

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

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

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

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