Terminus

by Shirley Fitzgerald

  There was a war on, and everyone knew men and women who were away at the front. Eventually the rationing of food, alcohol, building materials and petrol impacted them all. But in Pyrmont the war meant much more. Troop movements went through there, and so did enemy internees, who were offloaded at Pyrmont 13 to be taken to prison camps. Army vehicles rolled through the streets, factories that had previously produced unremarkable things were commandeered to work on things labelled top secret. Air raid shelters were built, including one that could hold 700 people in the railway tunnel beneath John Street.142 Shipments of war provisions kept the wharves busy. When the unions defied the government and refused to load pig iron on the SS Dalfram for shipment to Japan, everyone knew about it in Pyrmont and many cheered.

  ANGELS IN PYRMONT

  One thing that really did need urgent repair was the World War I memorial in Union Square. The memorial includes a large plinth on which stands an angel of peace. On a blisteringly hot Saturday in 1938, hurricane force winds tore down power lines, tossed small boats onto shore and toppled the angel off the Pyrmont memorial. A local urban myth said that when the statue fell, a nearby upper floor window was thrown open and a woman of a certain repute stuck her head out, and allegedly called out, ‘Now there’s two fallen angels in Union Square!’

  The memorial’s fallen angel at a Council depot, waiting to be repaired.

  City of Sydney Archivepix 538/056.

  And everyone knew about it on Sunday 24 November 1940 when a two-hour mock air raid took place over Pyrmont. Warnings had been given a few days before, so Sydneysiders knew it was not the real thing when waves of planes flew across the sky, dropping a shower of smoke bombs on the post office, the John Street Public School behind the Terminus, the power station and on some houses. Anti-aircraft guns were stationed at the intersection of Harris and Union Streets, and heaps of sand was blown up to heighten the effect.143

  These images depict anti-aircraft men determining factors for the gun crews and firemen applying first aid to two ‘victims’ lying on the footpath in a mock air attack over Pyrmont.

  NLA http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/167148784.

  When the war turned to the Pacific in 1941, things were humming. Tooths had a contract to supply the troops with beer and cordial as well as a wharf in Pyrmont to ship these goods from. Trade in draught beer at the Terminus hit 880 barrels for the year, the largest trade the hotel had ever done since the records were kept in 1921. The old John Street Public School was converted into a hostel that offered bed and breakfast to enlisted men from rural areas. Although advertisements stressed the hostel’s proximity to the Pyrmont Baths and neglected to mention the pubs on the corner, no doubt the soldiers soon found them.144 Prime Minister Curtin broadcast to the nation:

  There can be no distinction between soldiers and civilians. Everyone has a battle station … There is much money in circulation … The only justification for possessing it is that it should be saved and lent to the nation for the nation’s need … Only by an austere way of life can we muster our national strength to the pitch required for victory …’145

  But it seemed no-one was prepared to give up their beer money. With local consumption reaching it highest levels ever, the federal government attempted to keep the lid on things by increasing excise duties, which in turn made beer more expensive. This did not stop local consumption from rising.146 Quotas were placed on the supply of beer to hotels, but the Terminus sometimes exceeded its quota. A pub on the waterfront that was busy with troop movements was in a privileged position, and efforts were made to keep up the supply. Dempsey was out of debt and paying his way even though the cost of the lease kept increasing in response to the buoyant economy. After years of poor trading, the Dempseys were on their way to making the profits all publicans hoped for. Then he blew it.

  ALL OVER A BOTTLE OF WHISKY

  In late 1939 Scotland suspended the distilling of whisky and by 1941 there was virtually no Scotch in the country. Eventually all imported spirits were banned, officially to free up shipping space for the war effort.147 The following table shows what happened to the supply of bottled beer in 1943.

  Tooth’s ‘yellow card’ for 1940–9 showing the Terminus’s tally of alcohol purchased from the company in the war years. The top line indicates the number of barrels and the lower line indicates the number of bottles in dozens. Sales of bottled beer dried up almost completely in 1944–6.

  Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Tooth & Co. papers, N60 - YC -700.

  With bottles in short supply, any bottle of anything would do and the black market in bootlegging and sly grog was on the rise. Ray (Blizzard) Blissett, who ended his career as Chief of the Criminal Investigations Branch of the NSW Police in the 1960s, was stationed in Glebe during the war. He remembered policing the illegal trade around the waterfront and ‘the human conveyor belt … as men walked onto the ships, only to reappear with their “CSR suitcases” [a sugar bag] filled with beer and other restricted goods.’148

  Following official complaints from the US government that their servicemen were being fleeced because they didn’t know the local value of things, a federal tribunal was set up to deal with war profiteering. Official prices were set for liquor and meals. Many hotels, restaurants and cafes were given stiff sentences, like Charles Waterhouse of the Imperial Hotel at Milsons Point who got nine months for selling wine officially valued at £80 for £120. Bill Parkinson across the street at the Royal Pacific was disqualified from holding a license for three years after he was caught trading after hours.149 Wentworth Park had been transformed into a camp for US troops and, because they were all over Pyrmont, the place was targeted by the US Provosts working with the local vice squad.

  Lionel Dempsey was found guilty of overcharging after he sold a bottle of whisky for £2 10s when the fixed price is 12s 9d and he was sentenced to one month imprisonment in November 1943. All the newspapers carried the story. Two American soldiers Nelms and Wilson had visited the Terminus and, according to Dempsey, he had given them a drink on the house and sold them the bottle of whiskey for the official price. According to Nelms, he had been given five £1 notes by a Customs Officer and that when the price was discussed, Dempsey had said ‘I usually charge 50 bob’ (£2 10s). Nelms paid up with marked banknotes; just like those boxes of whisky from the Argyle Bond Stores had been numbered years before. Dempsey had the marked notes in his till, but he claimed that they were notes that he had changed into smaller denominations for the provost.150

  Dempsey said that he had been set up and that he would take the matter to the High Court if necessary, before he would give in.151 The appeal was set down for 22 February 1944, but Lionel Dempsey did not have his day in court, having died ten days earlier. After years of scrabbling during the depression, his estate was in order. When the amounts owed to Tooth & Co. for the remainder of his licence were deducted, a small sum, just shy of £2000 was left to his wife.152 Not enough to retire on, but not as bad as things had been.

  MRS. DEMPSEY TAKES ON THE TERMINUS

  Vera Dempsey had probably been heavily involved in the running of the Terminus all along and, after her husband’s death, she took over the license. Her own mother had been the licensee at the Kauri Hotel on Pyrmont Bridge Road and she had company in Margaret Singleton, who ran the Royal Pacific across the street for a decade until 1938. When she couldn’t find staff several of her sisters helped out. Jennice Kersh, who grew up in the Ways Terrace flats, has a strong memory of Mrs. Dempsey in later decades, toward the end of her tenure at the Terminus as a strong but fair woman; the type of woman who is often caricatured as the matriarchal publican who kept the men under control.

  She had big boobs. Dressed smartly, conservative with white blouses and suits. She had a touch of red in her hair – not brassy, just a touch. She had presence. If she ever barred you, it was thought of as a great ‘shame’. She was a great feminist without knowing it.153

  The contents of the hotel, listed in detail in Lionel Dempsey’s will,
provide a picture of the pub she was running in 1944. There was not much happening in the dining room, which had table settings for six but only five chairs. The two parlours each had a table and six chairs and nothing else. There were a few worn carpet runners, and a lot of worn lino and the bedsteads were old iron ones. Ten rooms were made up for use, and one remained empty of furniture. If Vera had made any improvements to the rooms, perhaps it was the marble-topped washstands in each room. The all-important bar indicated the drinking habits of her clients, with eight dozen each of schooners and middies, but a mere 12 wine glasses and 15 whisky glasses. There were two rum kegs, a good variety of cordials and mixers and a clock on the wall. The store room held more soft drinks and a meagre stash of spirits – eight bottles of whiskey, 15 bottles of brandy and three and a half gallons of bulk gin. In confirmation of what the records also showed, there were no bottles of beer listed. Whenever she got any bottles she soon sold out.

  In less than a year after Lionel Dempsey had been found guilty of overcharging in 1943, the government relaxed the restrictions on imports of spirits following the exposure of scandals such as the arrival of a bulk consignment of spirits from Melbourne used to make 15 bottles for every 12 legitimate ones, relabelled as imported and sold on the street for prices far higher than Dempsey was accused of charging. By the end of 1945 all restrictions on spirits were removed, but quotas on beer were raised in 1946.

  This photo was taken shortly before the Pyrmont tram ceased on 27 June 1953. It shows a ‘corridor’ tram turning out of Harris Street into the John Street Terminus.

  From the Sydney Tramway Museum, Loftus collection.

  With preference given to keeping up food and supplies to the troops during the war, local shortages became widespread. Butcher shops might only have sausages to exchange for meat ration coupons, building materials were simply unavailable, and eventually pubs only opened for short hours or on specified days. On 2 October 1944 when it was announced that supplies would be available at selected pubs that would have remained closed otherwise, it was reported that the mobs that rushed these pubs were ‘more like a football scrum … they came in with their tongues hanging out.’ Tooheys delivered a load to the Royal Pacific that was the only open hotel in Pyrmont that day. Vera Dempsey had to watch on, with nothing to sell, while a crowd of about 100 gathered on the corner. Barker the publican said that they arrived about an hour before he opened, on foot because there were no trams running, and that his supplies lasted for only an hour.154

  When rationing came off beer in 1946, Vera Dempsey got enough supplies to trade full-time while other hotels in the area were still waiting. She was trading 18 barrels and 30 dozen bottles a week. She signed a new lease and agreed to provide lunches.155 Whether she ever did supply them was another thing. The law required pubs to serve meals and they all displayed signs giving prices, but no-one seemed to recall meals being served.

  DON’T LET THE RAIN COME IN

  The hotel was still in need of attention but regulations about the amount of work that was permissible remained in place until well after the war was over. In any case, there were still no building materials available for the repair work. Under national security regulations, the embossed plate glass had been removed from bar doors, windows and side lights and masonite was fixed to create a blackout. This was still in place. The roof was leaking. For years the police issued notices of repairs required under the Licensing Act and for years nothing much got done. Many of the demands were for kalsomining and painting rain-damaged walls.156 In 1946 Tooths told Vera Dempsey that she had an obligation under her lease to paint the interior walls. She told them there was no point as the rain was coming into three rooms and she wanted to know when the work would be done as the police were ‘on her tracks’. The company did accept a tender for a new roof in November of that year, but three more years passed before a permit and release of iron was obtained from the NSW Department of Labour and Industry. Applications needed to be sent to this department to grant permission to do anything other than minor work. Mrs. Dempsey managed to get the main bedroom wallpapered, but it was water-stained a fortnight later. That is how it went on. The rain came in, the pub continued to deteriorate, and the notices kept coming from the licensing police. In early 1949 Vera reported to Tooths that the parlour floor was being eaten out by white ants and that the flooring in the bar was so thin that customers would soon be falling through it.

  At the beginning of 1949 when her lease was up for renewal, it was the time to negotiate with Tooth & Co. As part of the process a confidential report was made to management concerning her suitability for the job. This was standard practice and it gave the company an opportunity to record any faults they may have thought would keep the publican on his or her toes. Under the regrettable circumstances of the deteriorating state of the Terminus, this report just about fell over itself singing the praises of both the hotel and Mrs. Dempsey. She was ‘a very charming and capable business woman … she has been so long in the district and so well known that she can compete with the keen competition around her.’ The hotel just needed a little paint. This was palpably untrue. With ceilings sagging and damp everywhere, Vera Dempsey pushed things by making an ambit claim for a modern makeover of the hotel because a separate, contradictory section of the company report claimed that although she faced very keen and friendly competition from the Royal Pacific (code for the customers are defecting across the street), ‘no alterations are required. To modernize the hotel the whole of the inside would have to be pulled to pieces’.157

  Once the formalities had occurred and the license was renewed, a very different report noted that the hotel was ‘sadly neglected … run down and dirty’, the advertising mirrors were collapsing, the wallpaper was peeling off, the cellar was seeping, the ceilings were stained, the furniture was poor, the walls needed painting, tiles were missing … these same litany of woes kept growing over the years. The only redeeming grace was the one part of the operations that Vera Dempsey could have some control over – the beer was clear with a good head and an excellent flavour, with no tipping or bleeding of the lines.158

  At last, in May 1949, she was told that the galvanised iron for the roof would be coming soon and, ever the optimist, she ordered new curtains and blinds. In October 1949 the roof, gutters and ridge capping were renewed but the job was not well done. Six months later she reported that the interior ceilings and walls had once again been extensively damaged by the ‘defective roof’.159 New tenders were let for the roof to be fixed properly.

  Years earlier, Tooth & Co. had promised to paint the water-stained rooms once the roof was fixed. Now that time had come and a long list was drawn up of additional work to be done ‘to place this hotel in proper order.’ Tasks were allocated according to the rules; some to the company and some to Vera Dempsey. In an uncharacteristic moment of generosity the company decided what it was liable for and what it was ‘morally liable for’ because ‘she has suffered considerably through the defective roof’.160 This may have been the only time that morality was seen to influence the business decisions of the mighty Tooth & Co.

  Now all was sweetness and light. The roof had again been fixed. The cellar walls were waterproofed. The bar received a new floor. Several bedrooms and the stairway were revamped with new Wunderlich pressed-metal ceilings. And even when there was a problem with staff watering down the beer, with Mrs. Dempsey herself reporting that she had to remove a dead tadpole from a drinker’s middy, it was decided not to take any action.161 After all these years the long war was over. Vera Dempsey had just been given six months’ leave and everyone thought that she deserved it. She went down to the wharves that had for so long provided her with customers, and boarded the P&O’s Strathmore that set sail for London at the end of June 1950. She wrote to the General Manager of Tooths from Adelaide to say ‘many thanks for your lovely gift of flowers and the drop that cheers. I did appreciate it.’ She also said she had mixed some of the whisky with hot lemon because she had caug
ht a cold.162

  6

  An industrial landscape

  You had yer Tooheys drinkers and yer Tooths drinkers. In the old days the pub had two beers – Tooths Old and Tooths New.

  RON O’BRIEN, BARMAN, C. 1955–63.

  Jojo Inlingworth – he used to live in the pub. He’d unlock the doors of a morning. There’d be a mob standing outside one door and he’d run around and open up the other door … I’d have 32 house runs lined up on the drip tray. I’d be nearly drunk from the fumes … and they’d come in and they’d say ‘house rum and a beer … house rum and a beer … ’

  DARCY HASSETT, PUBLICAN 1964–6.

  POSTWAR Sydney witnessed rapid suburban sprawl. A freestanding house with a backyard where children could play and a car in the driveway was what many people wanted. Young adults fled from Pyrmont in search of the new suburban dream and the population began to age. On the other hand, those who remained were often fiercely loyal to their neighbourhood. It had long been a place where industry trumped residential living, but it remained a place full of people, and even though more of them were workers rather than residents, this was nothing new. By the mid-1950s many believed that life was back to normal, as far as things ever get back to normal after a war. Rationing had more or less ended, the beer was flowing and the Terminus was bursting at the seams. All the pubs were.

  Some industries were beginning to favour suburban locations as well. In hindsight, the writing was on the wall for much that had underpinned Pyrmont’s economy for a century, but for now, expansion was still a reality. Industrial work could be hard, unsafe and unhealthy, but anyone who wanted work could find it, and this included the European immigrants who were streaming off the ships that docked at Pyrmont 13.