Terminus

by Shirley Fitzgerald

  A deal over a new license was eventually hammered out at the end of 1968, but soon after Bourne announced that he intended to dispose of it at the beginning of the following year. Perhaps he and his new wife had better plans. Perhaps he just wasn’t cut out to be a publican. Whatever was going on, Tooths had experienced several years of difficult relations at the Terminus, and were looking around for a steadier pair of hands.

  Robert Collins should have been the answer. He was a Tooths’ man through and through with 20 years’ experience running seven hotels. His first ‘report card’ was glowing: ‘He is a man of experience and one on whom it is a pleasure to call … ’ The hotel was in good shape, except for that ever damp cellar, and the hot pies he sold at lunchtime were a welcome addition. He installed the much-needed cold room. He had resuscitated Vera Dempsey’s idea of a club bar where he could segregate his white-collar clientele, but was advised against it, as ‘in this area I think such a move would be a mistake and I think Mr. Collins feels the same way now. He is loyal to the Company, an excellent tenant.’209

  The hotel that Collins managed had moved with the times since the days of kapok mattresses. An inventory of what he purchased from Bourne included fixed wall heaters in the bar and parlour. Wall-to-wall carpets had replaced lino in most of the bedrooms and in the dining room set up as an office. There was a Hoover Keymatic washing machine, vacuum cleaners and a television in the private lounge, although not in the bar.210

  But just over one year into the job, Collins on-sold the license. The company found no fault in him and acknowledged that he had made a rational choice because ‘he realised business was declining.’ Trade statistics for the Terminus show that he was right. There was a steady falling off in actual takings in the first half of the 1970s. Although total trade returned to over $70,000 by the end of the decade, this translated into a real fall. With annual inflation running at 10.4 per cent averaged over the decade, the real equivalent trade figure for 1980 would have been around $200,000. As trade declined, all the outgoings such as wages, rates, repairs and insurance steadily rose.

  OPERATING UNDER A SEVERE HANDICAP

  John Combes, like his predecessor Collins, was an experienced publican, and like Collins, he did not stay long. He and his wife, Margaret, were in residence for less than two years, from mid-1970 until early 1972. They tried to make a go of it. He had previously held the license for the Fitzroy Hotel in East Sydney and the couple knew the inner city well.

  Combes invested in creating the saloon bar that Collins had been dissuaded from creating. The parlour, which had progressively shrunk from seating for 32 ladies down to 12 people in order to accommodate billiard tables and a juke box, was now finally crossed out in the records. Instead there was a saloon bar, and for the first time a beer garden, allegedly with seating for 50 people. More creature comforts and higher liquor charges in the saloon bar was intended to attract a better clientele of white-collar workers although it is difficult to know where they would be coming from. ‘I may be wrong’ intoned the Tooths’ man, ‘but I don’t think that these alterations will help because they drastically reduce the size of his public bar, which, in this hotel, over the years, has been the main source of revenue.211

  The takings continued to go down. Tooths’ reports acknowledged that the hotel was well run and that there were genuine external reasons for declining trade, including prolonged industrial unrest on the waterfront. The company also acknowledged that the Combesera Terminus’s sales of bottled beer, wine and spirits were way down on those of his predecessor because Bob Collins had been keeping up this trade by supplying unlicensed clubs. However there were also problems, as the company viewed things, due to the similar time when Combes arrived in Pyrmont, he had suffered a terrible accident that had left him physically incapacitated. Combes’s face was disfigured and his jaws were badly mutilated. He wore a heavy beard to cover the worst of it, but because he suffered a permanent speech impediment he was unable to physically run the pub. He took on Collins’s former cellar man as his manager. According to the company reports this proved unsatisfactory as ‘Pyrmont is an area where customers look for and expect a close contact with the Licensee himself’ and ‘while the “cellarman-manager” is doing a good job it is not good enough and as a result trade has dropped still further.’

  These architectural plans were drawn up for Terminus publican Robert Collins in 1969, but they were not built. The next Terminus publican John Combes used these unaltered plans to build in 1971. The partition across the bar and the plywood wall panelling installed at this time were interventions that could easily be reversed. Tooths and Combes paid equal shares of the cost of $1924.

  Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Tooth & Co. papers N60/7436.

  An early assessment that Combes was ‘a good tenant under a severe handicap’ gave way to less charitable comments such as ‘Combes has been out of his depth. We had doubts when he went in.’212 This was said to justify arguing that things would improve under the next man – and hence rents could be calculated against some imagined improvement in trade. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The most likely explanation for Combes relinquishing the license in early 1972 was that the Schute, Bell, Badgery and Lumby woolstore across the road from the hotel closed its doors just before Christmas 1971.

  Combes had paid $58,000 for the lease. Stephens paid $54,000. The pub was on the skids and not all the saints’ names in the world could help Anthony Peter Stephens do much to turn trade around. He had previously run the Royal Oak in Balmain, and took on the Terminus with financial assistance from his sister Marcia. The housekeeping was undertaken by his wife, Camille. Tooths were hopeful. ‘Stephens is an experienced licensee and is buying with his eyes open.’ After expenses he expected to make about $3600 ($35,600 in 2016). He didn’t make this amount and, when takings continued to fall, the company claimed that it had not known about the woolstore closure. Then there was the worry that ‘shipping has been quiet for the last six months.’ Then, grasping at straws by arguing that it was a temporary setback, Tooths said that the problem might be that Tony was Greek, and ‘may not be acceptable to wharf personnel.’213 Stephens said that he had a good relationship with his customers.

  Around this time, Abe Kersh was kicked out of home and came to live in the Terminus for a few years. Everyone called him Abe the Jew, as Darcy Hassett recalled. Abe’s daughter Jennice says that it was mostly said in friendship although he could sometimes be referred to less charitably as ‘Abe the bastard Jew … My dad was colourful. A colourful bastard … a master of witty one-liners and a compulsive gambler who drank 17 schooners a day.’ She said she couldn’t really believe anyone could drink this amount, but others confirmed it. This translated into a hard time for his wife and children, but he was a great raconteur and a popular man on the wharves where he worked as a foreman. Back in June 1967 when the Six-Day War between Israel and Palestine ended, a bunch of wharfies turned up at the Terminus to celebrate. They put Abe the Jew on their shoulders and carried him round he bar, ‘as if he’d won the war himself, single-handedly’.214

  Stephens stuck it out for over three years. The rent went down over time and the pub got rougher around the edges. When he moved out in 1975, the two-tap saloon bar that had cost $2000 in 1970 contained a cash register valued at $300, a stock of glasses ($60) and two tables, four stools and four chairs, collectively valued at $34. The ‘beer garden’, which had contained four tables, ten chairs and a wooden bench in 1974, was recorded the following year simply as a ‘yard’ containing a hose worth $1 and a quantity of old furniture, valued at zero dollars. The furniture, household equipment and accessories in the bars such as refrigerators and glass washers were probably the same as the ones valued five years before at $6100 in total. Now it was valued at $5700 [$39,000].

  Thomas Menday and his wife, Margaret, ran the Terminus for the next two years until 1977. Tooths’ records don’t tell us much about these years except that the volume of trade remained about t
he same as it had when he took it over from Tony Stephens. We do know that he put a television in the bar. No doubt he regretted doing this when he was sprung for not having the $10 license required for televisions or radios that were used in public places. For this he was fined $400 and $375 court costs. This occurred just before he left. He had come from a hotel in rural Menindee and he was probably very glad to get out of Pyrmont.

  FAME COMES TO THE TERMINUS

  Then just when it seemed the lights were going out, Bob and Shirley McElwaine turned up in October 1977 with five of their six children. The whole family was involved in sport and one of the daughters, Kim, stayed behind in Newcastle to continue her training. Eventually she won four world titles in trampolining and was NSW champion in high-board diving several times. Bob was an ex-boxer and a health fanatic who drove all of his family to extreme levels of fitness. In 1968 the family made a splash when the parents and the three elder children, all boys, took out most of the honours in a 50-mile walkathon organised in Maitland in rural NSW. Mark, who was only nine years old, walked 38 kilometres.215 Shirley, also a marathon walker, had a spot in the Australian Women’s Weekly giving recipes for health foods and claims to have been the first person in Australia to promote carrot cake.216 With this widely read magazine covering the family’s exploits occasionally, they were well enough known to be a drawcard in Pyrmont.

  The three elder boys were all good boxers, and the family moved to Sydney so that their son Phillip could get the best training available with Johnny Lewis at the Newtown Police Boys Club before he competed in the Commonwealth Games in Edmonton, Canada, in 1978, the following year. He had already competed in the Olympic Games in Montreal in 1976, and hopes were running high. At the appointed hour a crowd of family and wellwishers gathered around the television at the Terminus to watch the match, but it was a forfeit because the other boxer had been declared unfit to fight.217 So he came home with a gold medal as champion middleweight boxer, but the whole thing had been a bit less perfect than it should have been.

  Phillip McElwaine, an Australian middle weight champion, was popular behind the bar and a bit of a hero in working class Pyrmont where boxing was a favoured sport.

  Photograph Hunter Region Sporting Hall of Fame.

  Everyone remembers Bob McElwaine for his running: ‘He used to run over the bridge every day with his dog … he used to run twenty miles a day …’ [Lyn Wallis, drummer who played many gigs at the pub]. ‘He was a mad runner. He’d run round Wentworth Park all day … used to run for fuckin’ days. Never smoked, never drank’ [John Hutton, drinker]. ‘He used to make us kids all run at Wentworth Park. He used to go and put sticks crossed down there then we had to uncross them and then he would go down and check them later’ [Kim McElwaine, daughter].

  Bob himself claimed that he was spending about four hours a day in fitness training in 1980 when he arranged with Tooths for Shirley to manage the pub for a year while he trained to become the first man to run around Australia. He intended to follow the 1955 route of the famed Redex car rally that covered 17,703 kilometres. He was 55 years old and he said that he expected to be a ‘skinny physical wreck’ by the end of it, but that he had extreme fitness on his side. He had recently fallen down the cellar steps at the Terminus flat on his back and got away with only minor bruises, whereas ‘normally, at my age, I should have landed up in hospital.’218

  In the end Bob could not raise the funds for this circumambulation and he remained in Pyrmont, but as his wife, Shirley, explained, ‘he never worked in the pub much at all then. He was too wrapped up in his training to work in the pub.’ And that was how it was. ‘He had good ideas but he was a bit of a slave driver. He would organise everything and set things up and then he would disappear.’ Family assessments of Bob McElwaine range from ‘he was a genius but way before his time’ to ‘we always thought he was mad but we couldn’t say that. We had to go along with everything that he did. There was only one boss and that was him.’ As Kim remembered it, ‘he would set things up. He was a good boss and a good organiser but Mum was the worker.’219 Her vibrant personality made her a drawcard with the customers at the Terminus, and people remember her as ‘a good sort’.

  Running the pub was a family affair and they all lived at the Terminus, except when Phil moved out for a while when he got married, and Greg lived in the old schoolteacher’s house behind the John Street School with his family. There were three or four ‘permanents’ living in the pub as well. One of them was Robert Jordan who had polio as a child. It seems he would have fitted in well at this pub full of fitness fanatics. He would leave his wheelchair on the ground floor and somehow jump up the stairs to his room. He ended up competing in the 1992 and 1998 Paralympics.

  Greg McElwaine was the cellarman and Joanne McElwaine worked behind the bar when she was old enough. Earlier, she would clean after she got home from school in the city. She remembers doing the residential rooms, washing windows and the tiles in the bar, not as resented labour, but as part of the best time of her life.220 Her brother Phil worked behind the bar, at least for a few hours a day, for the PR value. In a locality where boxing was the workers’ sport of choice, the boys were respected and Phillip was something of a hero. Photographs of his boxing triumphs adorned the walls of the bar. As one of the drinkers whose own brother was a boxer explained, ‘I loved boxing. It was in our blood … boxing was the biggest thing around … I was proud to know the young kid.’221 Everyone agrees that the McElwaines ran a good pub and many people remember it with great affection.

  Memories of Bob fit the sound observation of his ex-wife that in many ways he wasn’t really a good publican because he would berate people for drinking too much or for smoking, or even for swearing. He could leap the bar without any trouble: ‘a bad word and he would be over there to shut them up.’ Don Heep, who worked as a musician at the pub for several years, remembered the same thing. If anyone got a bit antisocial ‘he wouldn’t beat ’em up. He’d just be over the bar and he’d just escort them out and he reinforced that. He’d remember and if they ever came back it would be straight out again.’ Local resident Maggie Williams remembered a different aspect of Bob McElwaine’s controlling ways. ‘Lovely people, Shirley and Bob. But Bob was a cleanliness fanatic … always running around with the bloody mop.’222

  Ironically it was this controlling attitude that kept people coming and kept them feeling safe. When the boys joined the Comanchero Motorcycle Club, some of their mates would drink at the hotel and the Harley Davidsons would be lined up along John Street, but ‘Dad would never let them take over.’ Eventually the pub was unofficially given over for their use one night a week, when bikers from several gangs would meet up. ‘Bikies drank there, but not the whole chapter. They did that stuff at outer suburban pubs’.223

  When the idea of having a dedicated night for the bikies seemed to work well, another night was set aside for gays. Kids were catered for too, with the creation of a play room away from the bar area so that locals who came on Saturdays could relax. Some of the local children had birthday parties in the backyard and there was a social club that sometimes hired a bus to take locals to various outings.

  When the McElwaines arrived at the Terminus, the opening hours were 6 am to 6 pm. They were soon extended to 10 pm, and as if that wasn’t enough, they were later extended to midnight, and sometimes the pub was ‘open all hours of the night’.224 There were very few neighbours to complain about the noise. There were still some local workers from F. J. Walkers meat works, from Fielder Gillespie’s Anchor Flour Mills, from CSR and the waterfront. Officers from the Maritime Services Board would come in their uniforms after work for a few beers before going home. They always sat in the saloon bar. But numbers of workers were constantly falling and the McElwaines were constantly coming up with schemes to keep the pub afloat.

  A Terminus Social Club bus stationed outside the Terminus. Kim McElwaine is behind the wheel.

  Photograph courtesy of Maggie Williams.

  G
reg is credited with the idea of employing topless barmaids. George Markham worked in the area and often did the early morning shift before going to the Terminus for lunch. He remembers this nonchalantly: ‘Yeah, they had topless barmaids but everyone did that.’225 In fact, the Terminus was the first pub in Sydney to do it, and it worked wonders for their lunchtime crowd. At its peak, there were seven barmaids on at lunchtime and often the doors had to be closed by 1 pm because the place was full. The McElwaine boys acted as bouncers, letting one person in when another person went out.226 People (mostly men) came across from the city, making Pyrmont a ‘culinary’ destination for the first time ever in its history.

  The Terminus in McElwaine’s era: Country & Western singer and yodeller, Paula Smith performs on the bar, scantily dressed barmaids attend to business, boxing photographs adorn the walls, and a basket of goodies to raffle is on show. In the centre, Bob McElwaine, wearing the striped shirt, keeps an eye on things.

  Photograph courtesy of McElwaine family.

  ‘Our girls are just “busting” to serve you at the Terminus Hotel, Pyrmont. Sydney’s Top Topless Tavern. We’re keeping you abreast of the times.’

  A Terminus flyer found under the floorboards during the hotel’s restoration in 2017.