Terminus

by Shirley Fitzgerald

  Thousands of immigrants arrived at Pyrmont 13. The SS Orcades at dock.

  Maritime Services Board, State Records NSW, 9856_a017_A017000073.

  Australia’s place as the greatest wool-producing nation in the world was underpinned by the demands of the Korean War (1950–3) as well as the demand at home following wartime austerity. A lot of this wool went through the woolstores and wharves of Pyrmont, and on wool sale days, the crowds at the pubs swelled. Trucks regularly queued up along the middle of Harris and John Streets waiting to get onto the wharves. Drivers occasionally ducked into one of the two pubs on the corner for a cleansing ale while they waited. The Terminus and the Royal Pacific (known to everyone as ‘Barkers’), were still perfectly placed on one of the busiest corners in town.

  This aerial view reveals how Pyrmont was an industrial landscape in 1943. The Terminus is circled in white.

  NLA http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/19609650

  The Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR) was still known as the sugar company, but in addition to its sugar, treacle and rum, the company had diversified into building material production during the 1940s. These materials were now in high demand for domestic expansion after years of wartime austerity. Canite, a cheap cladding product made from the compressed waste of sugarcane became a household name, as did a later plaster product, Gyprock. The new Canite factory built on the foreshore next to the Glebe Island Bridge in 1939 was just part of this industrial expansion, and was deemed worthy of a visit by the US Vice President Richard Nixon in 1953. Nixon was interested in industrial relations more than in Canite. At the height of anti-Communist sentiment across the western world, he was on a fact-finding mission to study how local industrialists handled trade unionism.163 By 1957 the company owned 31 acres (12.5 hectares) of Pyrmont and had bought up around 70 houses. The CSR end of the peninsula was virtually a company town.

  In addition to the seamen, wharf, woolstore and sugar workers, the Terminus also attracted workers from the electricity powerhouse in Pyrmont Street, where a second plant was built in 1955, and those from the bulk handling firms at the Darling Harbour goods yards, including the long-established meat-processing and cold-storage firm of F. J. Walker. Shipping personnel and teachers from the John Street Public School next to the pub, which was now operating as a training college for the Postmaster General’s Department (PMG), provided a smattering of white-collar workers in an otherwise heavy industrial area.

  VERA DEMPSEY’S LAST DAYS

  During the war years waterside hotels, including the Terminus, had traded better than many others, but the hotel had literally been falling to pieces. Now things were in order and Vera Dempsey had no trouble getting the license renewed in 1952 with the company’s glowing assessment once again.

  I cannot write too highly on the merits of the lady as a licensee. She is doing an excellent job, is highly respected by the employees of the Sugar company and wharf labourers who are hard to manage and who are the greater part of her trade.164

  Vera was keeping up trade and she had spent a lot of money upgrading the hotel’s interiors. Now she wanted refrigeration installed as other nearby hotels already had cooling equipment and Mrs. Dempsey said she was losing customers to the Pyrmont Arms and the Duke of Edinburgh (now the Harlequin Inn). She thought they would return when the drinks could be served at a temperature to suit the new preference for colder beer. She believed that she would get some of the Tooheys trade opposite as well because the Royal Pacific only had ice boxes. Because some of her customers were businessmen, she said that she needed a saloon bar. This didn’t eventuate, but the cellar was attended to (again), and she got her refrigeration in time for summer.165 She even advertised for a cook and may have served meals although again, no-one remembers this happening.

  Vera Dempsey’s job advertisement for a cook.

  The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 November 1954.

  Vera Dempsey, regardless of how she had behaved up until now, was past worrying about nitpicking rules on Sunday trading. Community sentiment was in favour of it and the Terminus is remembered for its Sunday hospitality in Vera’s last years. In summer, some of the locals went on the harbour to follow the yacht races. On board the ferry – presumably a government one – there was a keg and a bookmaker. Pyrmont was proud of its home-grown sailors who built their own skiffs in their backyards, but according to Billy Dillon, who often joined these trips as a child, this crowd ‘went for the grog … all of our fathers were all drunks. The odds changed as the bookie took bets all the way through the races.’ Later in the day the ferry would make an unscheduled stop at Pyrmont 13 to drop everyone off. The women and kids would go home and the men would walk up John Street to the Terminus, where they got entry by ‘a certain tap with a penny’. There was a dint in the doorway made from those pennies.

  Billy Dillon and his mate John Kersh would slip into the pub with the men and put on a concert. Now in his seventies, Billy recalls it clearly: ‘I Belong to Glasgow, When Irish Eyes are Smiling … the blokes loved the old songs’. He was the one with the good voice – still has it, he says – and John was the showman who collected the pennies. Billy said he enjoyed the singing so much that it wasn’t until later years that he got to wonder whether John ever divvied up the coins fairly. In winter, when there was no sailing, the Sunday drinking at the Terminus started earlier, and Billy and John would go up to the pub after they had officiated as altar boys at mass at St Bede’s Church.166

  As far as anyone remembers, Mrs. Dempsey’s Sunday hospitality was never an issue with the law. ‘Around here nobody coppered anybody. That was No. 1 of the Ten Commandments: you never dobbed anyone in to the coppers’.167 With all that singing going on, the police must have been taking a very different attitude from on previous occasions.

  But Mrs. Dempsey was getting old and things were starting to slip. In October 1953 a man from Tooths paid a visit to a clerk at his P&O office on Wharf 20 to discuss claims that the clerk had been sold six bottles of bogus Tooths Sheaf Stout from the Terminus. The bottles had no labels, plain seals and the contents were cloudy with sediment. A laboratory analysis proved it was draught beer. Mrs. Dempsey claimed to have no knowledge of any illegal bottling, and suspicion fell on the cellar-barman whom she immediately sacked. Tooths decided this was the right line of action because the man did not even ask why he had been dismissed. Some of the drinkers in the pub said that they knew it was going on and that the barman had been pocketing the money.

  This incident and other complaints around this time upset Vera, not least because they suggested that she was losing her grip on things. In the winter of 1954 a Mr. Wyatt who probably worked at the hotel rang to let Tooths know that she had ‘had a breakdown and was unable to sign cheques for a few days’.168 The staff and some of Vera’s relations stepped into the breach. Then she applied for six months’ leave and Tooths found a temporary manager. She renewed the license one more time in 1955, but Vera never came back to work. She had bought a nice house in Seaforth and the thought of going back to live in the hotel, as the company required, was probably beyond her. She died in the winter of 1956, leaving a respectable inheritance to her brother and three sisters.169 It was the end of an era for the Terminus where the Dempseys had ruled the roost for over 30 years.

  MODERN TIMES

  Mr. Oldum did not have experience on his side and the brewery had to send someone down to instruct him on how to draw beer correctly. However, he took to running the pub with enthusiasm. By the end of October he claimed that in ten weeks he had increased weekly takings from £400 to over £700, and was asking for an increased allocation of bottles of Resch’s beer so that he could compete with the Royal Pacific across the road where the supply seemed to be ‘inexhaustible’.170

  The company’s report card on the Terminus for 1955 recorded that everything was satisfactory. The beer plant was clean and it was operating under good pressure. The beer was served at an acceptable 42 degrees and it had an excellent flavour. The advertising mirro
rs were in good condition, the parlours had been recently renovated, as had the laundry. The dining room was open to the public, which served about 40 meals a day in addition to counter lunches – all cooked on the premises. The furniture was in good condition and the rooms were fully let.

  Things weren’t perfect. They never were. The lino on the bar top needed replacing, the storeroom in the yard was in a bad state and some of the hotel’s floor joists and bearers needed attention yet again. The frequency with which the floor needed repairs hints at the intensity of wear and tear in a small area that was heavily trampled by a crush of drinkers who swilled, spilled and worse. It was also possibly related to the ongoing issues with dampness in the cellar beneath the bar. But overall, the pub was in far better shape than it had been in its earlier years. According to a note appended to this report, ‘in the absence of Mrs. Dempsey due to illness the hotel is being managed by a Mr. Odlum who has greatly improved the general standard of the hotel both as regards to services and cleanliness’.171

  Tooth & Co. recorded that Odlum was a ‘very suitable publican’ who was ‘progressive’ in his ideas. When Vera Dempsey renewed her license for a further three years in mid-1955, it was sold immediately – not to the good Mr. Odlum, but to John O’Brien.

  LICENSEES OF THE TERMINUS: 1955–66

  JULY 1955 JOHN EDWARD ROBERTS O’BRIEN

  FEBRUARY 1963 NELSON RICHARD AUSTIN

  JULY 1963 JOHN FRANCIS CLEARY

  APRIL 1964 JAMES DARCY LEROY HASSETT

  O’Brien bought the license for £16,000 and paid a weekly rent of £25 (about $530,000 and $830 inflated to 2016 prices). He put in £1600 of his own money, arranged a loan from Tooths for £2250, and committed to pay off the rest over the term of the license.172 That is how most licensees did it.

  At the time of a handover to a new licensee, all Tooths’ hotels were inspected and any repairs deemed necessary were required to be carried out at the expense of the outgoing publican. Structurally the Terminus was in good nick, but it once again needed some internal painting of surfaces that were described as ‘scored, age defaced and worn’. This kind of wear and tear was inevitable given the heavy human traffic that passed through the doors; painting was an ongoing chore.

  Jack O’Brien had worked for most of his life as a wholesale carcass butcher out at Homebush until he moved into the pub game in 1950. After five years at the Crookwell Hotel in country NSW, coming to the Terminus was his first stint in an inner-city pub. He ran it successfully for seven years with his wife Ruby and their son Ron who did the cellar work and worked as one of the barmen.

  For NSW hotels, 1955 was a big year: the infamous ‘six o’clock swill’ was replaced by more civilised opening hours. After almost half a century of heavily restricted trading hours being in place, with all the social horrors and sly grog trading that this had generated, even the temperance lobby was moving towards the idea that there had to be a better way of managing the way people drank.

  A Royal Commission, known as the Maxwell Royal Commission, was set up in 1951 to examine trading hours and the plethora of rules that had evolved in an attempt to control drinking. After several years of deliberations, more relaxed trading hours and drinking rules were introduced for clubs and restaurants and 10 pm closing for hotels was reinstated, although the ban on Sunday trading in hotels was not lifted.173 But while this reinstatement of 10 pm closing is always celebrated as a milestone in the history of drinking, these new laws were not so relevant in Pyrmont where the hotels were ‘early openers’. The ‘swill’ was at breakfast time as workers fuelled up after knocking off the night shift or before heading to the morning shift on the waterfront, factories or woolstore.

  John and Ruby O’Brien, who managed the Terminus 1955–63.

  Photograph courtesy of Ron O’Brien.

  Ten o’clock closing began on the first day of February and on the following day an application was accepted to vary the hours for the Terminus from 7.30 am to 6.30 pm. These were the hours Vera Dempsey had traded. It took O’Brien another year before he managed to secure an extra hour in the mornings, opening at 6.30 am and closing for one hour in the middle of the day after the lunch hour crowd had subsided. Eventually he managed to get this closure in the afternoon waived as well.174 It is possible that he actually opened at 6.30 am from the start, as his trade figures for 1955 were higher than they had ever been for the Terminus and higher than he managed in the following years. Trade went up and down with economic fluctuations and 1955 was a bumper year on the wharves. He couldn’t afford to miss out on that early morning crush.

  Tooth’s ‘yellow card’ for the Terminus, 1960–9. The top line indicates the number of barrels, the lower line indicates the number of bottles in dozens.

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

  Ron O’Brien was about 22 years old when he arrived at the Terminus with his parents. In 1958 he married and moved away from Pyrmont for a few years, but he and Marie soon returned to help out with the work. Their first two children were born in 1960 and 1962, and so now there were three generations of O’Briens living in the pub. Ron recalls that it was ‘quite a nice pub … well built … beautiful workmanship’. On the other hand, Pyrmont was ‘a pretty wild area’ and the pub was pumping with energy, especially in the mornings. Around 5.30 am the male ‘useful’ would turn up to swab out the bar area that still had bare floorboards. The bus stopped right outside the hotel on Harris Street. Workers would get off the bus, press through the front door the moment it was off the lock, and ‘they’d have a beer and a scotch or a rum and a beer … and then out the side door …’ Then those knocking off would come in. ‘They came from No. 25 wharf right around to Pyrmont Bridge. A lot of wharfies did a midnight ’til dawn six o’clock shift. The pub could be absolutely chock-a-block at 7 am’.175

  Lunch time was equally frenetic. The staff consisted of two permanent barmaids and a couple of casuals, but at noon there would be ‘six of us on the bar, mum did the till and we’d all just serve.’ A woman came in to do the counter lunches, and it all had to be over by 2.30 pm for the pub to close for an hour. Ron recalled that they often did twenty-eight 18s a week (18 gallon kegs). The annual average figures recorded by Tooths was considerably under this amount, but there would have been weeks when this was so.

  WORKING AROUND THE RULES

  The Maxwell Royal Commission that established longer trading hours examined many of the rules and regulations that were bedevilling the liquor industry at the time. For example, one submission to the commission complained of ‘the terribly complex system of marking up nips and nobblers of spirits which is so incomprehensible as to encourage bar staff to revert to the practice of simpler times when the rule of thumb applied and the strength of your drink depended upon the mood of the barmaid.’176 This had probably always been the case in the busy, tough Terminus.

  When Jack O’Brien was fined £6 for failing to close the bar at 6.30 pm, his defense was that it was only 6.40 pm, and drinks were no longer being served, but ‘the area is a pretty tough one and as a rule difficulty is experienced in clearing the bar of customers at closing time.’ His mistake was that he had left the doors open.177

  Strict rules about trading hours made some sense. The same could not always be said for the rules about pricing. Publican Robert Bourne sent an aggrieved memo to Tooths in 1967, explaining that his profits were turning out to be lower than anticipated because he had not fully understood the implications of the preference among wharfies for large glasses in their short smoko and lunch breaks. The NSW Liquor Act had been amended in 1948 to standardise sizes of beer glasses at 5 oz (pony), 10 (middy), 15 (schooner) and 20 (pint) and the price at which a publican could sell each size was fixed.178 Because the profit margin was slightly lower on large sizes, Bourne calculated that his profits would be lowered from an estimated 36.9 per cent to 36.3 per cent, and he therefore requested that his weekly rent be reduced from $180 to $160. Tooths declined to oblige him.179
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  Being ‘tied’ to Tooth & Co. meant that the only draught beers that could be sold were Tooths’ beers. Tooths took over the Reschs Waverley Brewery in 1929 and continued to market Reschs beers, but for some reason the Terminus was not allowed to trade in this brand until 1966. Further restrictions were placed on ancillary products. The company onsold preferred brands of wine and spirits into its hotels, and most importantly, the mixers had to be Tooths own Blue Bow brand of aerated waters. It was not a hanging offence to buy elsewhere, but big profits could be made on the manufacture of these products. Publicans understood that it was not a good career move to bypass the brewery. Tooths sent in visitors – spies – to anonymously order drinks and to faithfully report back to headquarters if unfavoured brands appeared on the bar. Annotations such as ‘this hotel is exclusively Blue Bow’ are widely peppered throughout the brewery’s records.

  The most irksome rule was the one forbidding Sunday trading and the brewery liked it no better than their publicans did. Apparently O’Brien did not have the dispensation Vera Dempsey had enjoyed as he was charged with selling liquor on a Sunday. He told the Licensing Court that it was his wife who did it and that he knew nothing about it. She said that she had sold four bottles of KB Lager to a regular who lived nearby because he kept pestering her and she wanted to get rid of him. O’Brien was fined £11 with the Tooth records noting that the charge would not be recorded against his good record.180 This was the usual practice. All the publicans did it from time to time. Clubs were open on Sundays but there were no clubs in Pyrmont, so where was a person to get a drink? Strict adherence to the approved opening hours was often honoured in the breech, but the licensing police could be harsh so it was important to at least look as though the rules were being adhered to.