Darcy Hassett, who ran the Terminus from 1964 to 1966, remembered Joe Potter as their ‘house detective’ who dispensed beer on Sundays to ‘the blokes living in the pub.’ It was stored in a refrigerator at the end of the corridor, but ‘they’d be in the pub drinking it.’ On reflection, considering their status as boarders, Darcy added ‘I think it might have even been legal.’181
AT HOME AT THE TERMINUS
Apart from the publican’s family, there were always boarders. There was little call for short-term accommodation as there was in the case of up-market city hotels, and some of the people who stayed in the Terminus made it their home for long periods, even years. Darcy Hassett recalled Joe Potter and Bunker Thompson living there in the sixties. Ron O’Brien remembered Tibby Watson, a retired wharfie as ‘a lovely old bloke. He just pottered around. Mum and Dad just gave him a room … can’t remember them charging him a cent.’ He said there were others as well, mostly old men.182
Usually a double and a single room were used by the publican’s family; more rooms were used if there were children. The family shared the ‘private’ bathrooms with guests. Sometimes a room would be designated as an office. Publican John Browne even allocated one room for his staff to use as a change room in 1967. Allowing for this kind of variation, there were usually eight or nine rooms available for rent, sometimes all of them single rooms, but more usually with one double room on offer. According to the official records, these rooms were usually always let and meals were provided ‘on request’. This may just have been recorded to satisfy a legal requirement that meals were theoretically available to residents even if they weren’t actually provided. Or they were provided, but not recorded, as a tax dodge. The Maxwell Royal Commission into the Liquor Trade looked into this question of providing meals and Tom Cartwright, the Pyrmont Arms publican just down the road from the Terminus, was quizzed about it. He said that he charged 6s for a room, 3s for breakfast, 3s 6d for lunch and 4s for dinner, but that the boarders never wanted meals. The judge began by assuming that single blokes living in a pub would appreciate having at least breakfast served in the dining room, and suggested sarcastically that ‘we seem to have developed a race of people who never want breakfast.’ Eventually, however, he accepted Cartwright’s claims that meals weren’t served, except for a couple of girls living there temporarily, who got tea and toast.183 Ron O’Brien does not recall that his mother provided any meals to residents at the Terminus while the records claim that they were available. Darcy Hassett said the same of the later years in the sixties. Everyone agreed that there were plenty of local shops and cafes that were cheap and convivial places where everyone knew everyone.
The presence of these ‘girls’ who took tea and toast at the Pyrmont Arms raises a whole other can of worms. Any male-dominated waterside district anywhere in the world supports prostitution, and any hotel in the area could have been part of this, but possibly not to any great extent. Pyrmont was no red-light district. Women often worked on the streets. There were plenty of vacant areas, secluded laneways and, as time went by, cars that offered privacy without incurring the expense of a bed.
It is easy to forget how basic home comforts were 60 years ago. The fuel copper in the laundry was replaced by a new gas one in 1956 but to have hot water piped into the hotel, someone had to go outside and get the coke-fired donkey engine going each morning. Vera Dempsey complained of this in the early fifties, saying that the fumes made it impossible to keep the laundry clean. In 2017, 84-year-old Marie Hassett, who was at the Terminus from 1964 to 1966, recalled it as ‘the worst thing about the place, having to get the donkey going in the yard.’184 Another complaint, which she shared with just about every housewife in Pyrmont, was the fallout from CSR when it was boiling molasses, and black muck flecked the washing. The coal-fired powerhouse down the road didn’t help much either. All the same, Tooths usually reported that the Terminus was well kept and clean. Everything is relative.
Furniture was passed on when leases were transferred, and any improvements or new acquisitions went into the assessment of its value the next time around. The Terminus rooms and furnishings were usually scored as ‘adequate’ or ‘fair’ by Tooths. By the sixties, most of the beds in the bedrooms were wooden, but there were still some old-fashioned iron ones. While some of the mattresses had inner springs, a few were still stuffed with kapok. The floors had mats over the lino, which was well polished according to the hotel’s annual report sheet for 1958. There were carpet runners in hallways and a carpet square in the lounge. This was more than could be said for the public bar, where the floors were just wooden boards until Mrs. O’Brien put her foot down and had it covered with vinyl tiles.
MOVING WITH THE TIMES
Television came to Sydney in 1956, hard on the heels of the introduction of 10 pm closing. Suburban hotels recreated themselves with modern furnishings and upgraded facilities in an effort to become convivial meeting places where both men and women could linger to socialise into the evening. This was partly to do with moving with the times as living standards rose. Even in Pyrmont, where plenty of people still enjoyed few of the creature comforts, there was pressure to rub some of the rough edges from the Terminus.
Toward the end of 1956, Tooths sent their architect to discuss upgrading the bathroom and toilet blocks with the O’Briens. The architect’s report provided to the company said that Mrs. O’Brien also wanted the dividing wall between the two parlours removed and a garage for their car. Structural alterations were Tooths’ responsibility, and nothing was done for a number of years. Finally in July 1960 the district licensing inspector lodged an application with the Licensing Court for upgrading the bathrooms in the upstairs residential area, and for new bathrooms and toilets in the public area. These toilets gave direct access into the public bar and ladies’ lounge. The O’Briens must have again argued for their garage and removal of the parlour wall because when the tender was let, the court-ordered work was extended by Tooths to include these changes as well.185 There was already a storage room where the garage was to be built on John Street behind the bar, so it was also necessary to convert a bedroom to a storeroom.
In the pub lingo of the time there were public bars, which really meant bars for male patrons, and there were parlours for the ladies. In the Terminus, there was a window opening from the ladies’ lounge next to the public bar and drinks were sold through this hatch at bar prices. So the division between the two drinking areas had always been fairly porous. Combining the parlours into one room in 1961 initially provided even more space for the pub’s predominantly male customers. The 32 seats that were provided were reduced to 20 once the partition was gone, and a pool table was installed. Then space had to be cleared for a dart board and a juke box. By the late 1960s, there would be two pool tables and seating for only twelve patrons.
By now the local women who came often drank with the men, just as they did back in the nineteenth century when Jessie Finch told the coroner that nobody used the parlour for drinking. Ron O’Brien remembers that on Saturday afternoons there would be a sociable gathering of 20 or 30 people and ‘quite often Mum would have an afternoon tea for them.’ The official story of women gaining access to the public bars is usually located in the 1970s and, in particular, to an incident when women chained themselves to the public bar of the Manly Hotel in 1973. Gender segregation had broken down well before this in other places, including at the Terminus.
The upgrade work that had been done in 1961 had created a lot of disruption. As O’Brien’s license was soon to be up for renewal, he wrote to Tooths telling them that his trade was down. Tooths ignored this and suggested that because the hotel was now in better nick, his rent should go up by 10 per cent in the new lease. The publican’s next salvo was to ignore the effect of the renovations on his takings, and to provide a long list of woes that he said were affecting Pyrmont. He said there was a drop in the wool trade, the technical college next door was closing down, there had been retrenchments at the sugar work
s, and the new shipping terminal at Circular Quay was taking work away from Pyrmont. And on top of all this, the Duke of Edinburgh was ‘serving both Tooths and Tooheys and serves elaborate counter lunches. We are now commencing counter lunches, but we fear some loss on the cost of food.’186
O’Brien’s sales, measured in the quantity of draught beer traded, did track downwards from 1012 barrels in 1959 to 688 in 1962, but Tooths did not budge on the lease terms and O’Brien reluctantly agreed to pay the new rental for the newly improved Terminus. But he was looking around for somewhere else.
A PICKLED PUBLICAN
At the beginning of 1963, Jack and Ruby O’Brien moved on to the Iron Duke in Alexandria, and the Terminus got Nelson Austin. Or maybe he was known by his middle name of Richard. Or Dick. No-one remembers him as this must have been one of the shortest tenancies in the history of pubs. He had been a bookmaker since way back in 1928, and he only got the job after promising Tooths that he would hand in his bookmaker’s license and get a legal divorce from his wife from whom he had been separated for 16 years. He said that Mrs. Scown, who had experience of running a boarding house in Brisbane, would be the Terminus’s new housekeeper. When he got the job, he had no idea of how to run a pub and after five months he was gone. He was old, and both he and ‘Mrs. Austin’ (presumably Mrs. Scown) were both unwell.187 Austin hardly merits a mention except that the instability he had created continued when he on-sold the license to John Cleary.
Cleary had run several country pubs, including the Bridge in Nowra, before coming to Pyrmont. The Terminus did not suit him, and news soon filtered through to Tooths that their new publican was on the booze. It seemed that regardless of the time of day he was officially visited, the information relayed back to headquarters was the same: ‘I found him, in my opinion, to be considerably under the influence of liquor,’ or more simply ‘he was drunk.’ A couple of months after he began at the Terminus, a company man sent in a note to Tooths’ general manager saying that he had called in to the hotel around 10.45 am, and that ‘it was obvious from the licensee’s walk and speech that he was drunk … In the course of the conversation he said he would rather be in the country.’ Another said that ‘we must keep a close watch on him’ and that this was a ‘tricky’ situation because there was a Tooheys hotel right across the road, and that already ‘a number of the better class of customers, mainly staff of the CSR Coy and some Customs Officers … have transferred their custom to the Pyrmont Arms Hotel ’.188
Cleary’s takings slowly fell away and the amount of alcohol he purchased decreased. It wasn’t catastrophic, and the company knew to allow for a variation in takings but in December 1963, when there was no spike in the number of draught line barrels purchased and no appreciable increase in the sale of bottled beer, wine or spirits, alarm bells must have been ringing. Customers were going elsewhere for their Christmas drinking.
Things came to a head in early 1964 when Cleary sent a contaminated barrel back to the brewery. It had been tampered with in a clumsy way that made it look as though he had adulterated the beer deliberately in order to get a refund on the cost. He was called in for an interview at head office, where he told Tooths’ City Manager that he chose to drink with his clients as a matter of policy. Bentley, the manager, told Cleary that ‘this was the surest way to end up financially embarrassed and broken in health.’189
From the company’s point of view, Cleary had to go. But while the Tooths’ January report sheet recorded that the publican was ‘thoroughly unsatisfactory’, it also recorded that public areas and the rooms were very clean and that there were boarders who were well cared for.190 You have to feel sorry for Madge Cleary who would have been holding it all together. Perhaps it was her efforts that persuaded Tooths to agree to keep Cleary there for another six months, but as soon as he heard the news that the license would then be terminated, he sold out and moved on.
FAMILY IN RESIDENCE
Darcy Hassett was not quite 30 years old when he and his wife, Marie, who was pregnant with their fourth child, arrived to manage the Terminus in 1964. The cost of the lease had been slowly falling since O’Brien’s day and the weekly rental of £30 had not been altered for three years, indicating a slow decline in the fortunes of the hotel. All the same, Tooths noted tentatively that ‘trade has been fairly steady under poor management so should now improve.’191 It did, and the company moved quickly to increase the rent as well.
Terminus publican Darcy Hassett standing in the hotel’s backyard with his seven-month-old daughter, Merrin, in March 1965.
Photograph courtesy of Anthony Hasset.
They came from a banana plantation, and Marie had run a shop in Sydney before, so they were used to hard work, but all the same, with three small children and another one on the way, those early morning starts were hard work. The spirits had to be lined up on the bar and ‘as soon as they hit the door they were into it. We were flat out in the mornings.’ There were two permanent girls, Marie did the till in the evening and sometimes, Darcy’s mum helped out as well.192 Marie remembers that when they first went to the hotel, she was fully occupied with the children and ‘there was no way anyone was going to get me behind the bar’. But they did and, in the end, she loved it.
Darcy Hassett’s memories of the drinking habits at the Terminus remain clear.193 There was the room off Harris Street where ship captains used to drink at lunchtime. The Royal Navy blokes who had jobs with shipping companies. The banter with Jimmy Barker from the Royal Pacific when they both gathered up the empty glasses that customers left outside on the footpath. The man who used to drink there whose brother had invented the Owen gun. The woman in the parlour – ‘I won’t mention her name. She was a terror … she’d get on the claret … she’d be polished.’ The time a man pulled out a shotgun to shoot someone in the parlour, but the barrel got knocked up into the air. The bullet damage can still be seen in the old Wunderlich ceiling. He wasn’t a local, Darcy said, and nobody ever knew who he was.
There was the time when the men who worked at Yellow Express came up to the Terminus to drink because they had had a blue with the publican of the Dunkirk. ‘I’d be sweating. There were four behind the bar. They put in twelve schooner orders. We were going like buggery … twelve schooners … I’d do the twelve, served about two other people then again it’s … twelve schooners … Christ, we were crushed.’ For a young man running his first pub, this was intoxicating stuff.
Then in the afternoons, the local women came in for a social natter while they shelled the peas for the evening meal and maybe had a drink or two. This image of women shelling peas is part of the lore of inner-city pubs, but Marie Hassett is adamant that it really was a time-honoured ritual at the Terminus, even as late as the 1960s.
Darcy, Anthony and Marie Hassett at the Terminus during restoration in July 2017.
Photograph, Shirley Fitzgerald.
THE TERMINUS RABBIT
By the time the Hassetts left the Terminus in 1966 they had four kids, a golden cocker spaniel and a rabbit. Because of the demands of running the hotel, the children had to be self-sufficient and their parents relied on the good will of the locals to keep an eye out for them. In the mornings Anthony used to go out with the garbos on the council trucks or the wool trucks from across the road. He was about four years old when he came home with the rabbit.
When he told his dad, his father recalls that ‘I just said right’o and kept on working. Then I realised that’s a real one’. It was a docile chinchilla and it stayed, living on the coal heap in the corner of the yard. It did get out of the yard one morning and headed off down to the wharves. The pannos [bosses] chased it for about twenty minutes, which [according to Darcy Hassett’s calculations] ‘would have cost about 5,000 quid.’ They never caught it, but later on that day it just came home through the side gate.
When the Hassetts left the Terminus Darcy drove a truck at CSR for a while, then they bought the Carlyle in Newtown, which they still own. They ran it for many years un
til eventually, son Anthony took over. The rabbit went too and lived a very long life.
In Darcy’s view, there was no racism although everyone was described in these terms. ‘Everyone would be having a go at everyone else, but nobody was nasty … Back then there was none of this Indigenous bullshit. You were a blackfella or a whitefella.’ Or a New Australian, which covered a multitude of differences, or a Jew. ‘Abe Kersh … he was a foreman on the wharves … he was The Jew … If you wanted to know where Abe was, you’d say, “Where’s The Jew?” You could put that in [this book]. Everybody knew him as that … not being nasty or anything …’ And then, as if he was right back behind the bar in the pub, Darcy Hassett said over the phone when being interviewed for this book, ‘that was his seat, in the corner.’
A man who could hold his drink was to be admired regardless of what else he might be. Felix, with his surname forgotten, was ex SS. That was the kind of thing a man kept to himself, and Darcy thought that although some of the ‘New Australians’ would have known the man’s background, most of his fellow drinkers would not have. He had been wounded on the Russian front. He would come off the night shift and sit in the Terminus from 7 am until 2 pm drinking pints and double Cinzanos, then he would walk out, stone cold sober. But a man who couldn’t hold his liquor had to be watched, because a good bloke sober could be ‘a dead-set mongrel drunk’. The least acceptable behaviour as far as Hassett was concerned was what is now called domestic violence, but for which, back then, more graphic terms were used. A bit of even-handed ‘biffo’ was not so bad, like ‘Davey [name deleted] and Biddy – they used to blue. He’d belt her up and she’d belt him.’ But [name deleted], ‘I’ll never forget him … he was a ‘wife basher’. He had been drinking heavily in the Terminus, and then went across to Barker’s (the Royal Pacific) to carry on drinking, then came back to the Terminus for some more. Darcy had ‘had enough of this mongrel’ and decided to throw him out, against the advice of other drinkers who thought that this would be a dangerous move. ‘He was six foot two or three or four and I’m about five foot eight; I wasn’t half his bloody size. He used to stand with his hands on the bar about four or five feet apart, that’s how big he was.’ As a first move Darcy picked up the man’s Gladstone bag and threw it out the door but it hit the doorframe and came back in.
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