A few words on crime
Akind of romance has grown up around the stories of Sydney’s crime world in the decades between the two world wars. But Pyrmont does not figure very largely in this story for obvious reasons. Jewellery shops and fashion shops were in short supply in Pyrmont. If you wanted to pickpocket on the trams, why would you choose the Harris Street line? Sometimes a Pyrmont address was named in dispatches for receiving stolen goods, but housebreaking and theft were more often associated with the well-heeled suburbs where the loot was worth stealing, not in down-and-out Pyrmont. With the real wealth concentrated mainly in the Eastern suburbs, receivers of stolen goods and their ‘fences’ were thick on the ground in nearby localities such as Darlinghurst, East Sydney and Surry Hills. Establishments associated with prostitution, illegal gambling and drugs were located there too. So did the courts at Taylor Square and the Darlinghurst Gaol. This is the criminal Sydney of the imagination, of vicious razor gangs and flamboyant madams, of cocaine busts and dramatic shoot-ups in colourful pubs.
This story does not belong to the Pyrmont peninsula, except perhaps for parts of Ultimo. Here, some of the pubs had their share of seriously criminal customers such as John (Chow) Hayes, because of proximity to Central Railway Station and to the city’s markets, which were always places for wheeling and dealing, but there were few reasons to venture further along the peninsula to Pyrmont. In the course of writing this book, several old timers expressed the view that everyone was a crook, if the crimes you were talking about were pinching goods from the wharves or buying stolen goods that turned up in every pub. The real gangsters, however, drank further down Harris Street because it was closer to the city. In the landscape of illegal Sydney, a pub like the Terminus was at the end of the road.
All the same, you can’t write about Pyrmont, and especially pubs in Pyrmont, without mentioning crime. Crime was a way of life for some, and an occasional transgression for others in the inner city where work was irregular and wages often did not stretch from one pay packet to the next. Peter Doyle, in his book Crooks Like Us, uses early twentieth-century police mug shots to confront us with the world of petty and not-so-petty crime that was inevitably part of the fabric of a poor community, the ‘housebreakers, thugs, gunmen, shoplifters, thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts, perverts, pickpockets, brawlers, derelicts, hooligans, confidence men, confidence women, confidence children …’ whose practices ranged from safe-blowing to scamming the trams to frequent offences for ‘small-scale thuggery … bashing drunks for a pound or two or stealing the occasional chook.’ However, in the opinion of the police, many of the youths who came before them would settle down to a law-abiding ‘squarehead life.’257 Looking back on a childhood where a certain local cop didn’t hesitate to give a kid a kick up the backside, one of his survivors commented that he appreciated this in later life. ‘He hunted us off the corners … he made sure we obeyed the law.’258
Too much liquor and brawling go hand in hand everywhere, and men caught up in a pub fight did not hesitate to settle their differences with their fists. On the other hand, there was probably less gun violence than some like to remember, with ‘the fist, the boot, the bottle and the garrotte the most frequent weapons of choice, even though the gun and the razor hijacked the headlines.’ A lot of guns were carried, but most shots went wild, suggesting that they were used to caution rather than to kill. In any case, according to Doyle, even though the number of hand guns and violent assaults did rise after World War I, the actual murder rate was relatively low. There were only a handful a year, with more in suburban and rural areas than in the inner city.259
In the forties, wartime shortages and restrictive legislation exacerbated the crimes of bootlegging and illegal after-hours trading in hotels, while the waterfront was always a source of things that were otherwise unaffordable until shipping moved to Port Botany in the 1970s. As far as the locals were concerned, shippers belonged to a different world, and a shipment of anything was the property of some unknown company of untold wealth. In their eyes, waterside Robin Hoods were only carrying out some much-needed redistribution of wealth. The kind of goods that were valued changed over time. In early decades of the twentieth century, goods such as tools and clothing found a ready market, anything that could free up meagre earnings for other things.
At the same time, theft between neighbours was not common. No-one stole the milk money out of the billy cans that housewives put out for the milko. John (Richard) McCullough was a paper boy for seven years for Morris Riley, the newsagent near the corner of Harris and Union Streets. The papers were dumped in bundles tied up with rope outside the shop and no-one ever stole a newspaper either. He delivered papers on the trams, on the boats and at the Bowman Street gates of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company. He didn’t do the work for pocket money. The family lived in Little Mount Street in a house with no electricity and his paper round money was important to the family budget.260
Along with petty theft from the wharves, there was more serious waterfront crime, where the point of departure for the stolen goods was the wharves, but the criminals came from anywhere and the destination of the proceeds of crime could end up anywhere. When goods started arriving in containers, the location for theft was even more dispersed. The most high-profile exception was Michael (Mikel) Hurley who grew up in Pyrmont and who was an early adopter of the new Pyrmont by moving into a fine apartment on Distillery Drive in the late 1990s. He started small with safebreaking and petty theft, and eventually he was known as ‘the king of waterfront crime’, accused of drug smuggling from marijuana to cocaine as well as armed robbery and money laundering.261 He was named in the 1997 Wood Royal Commission into the NSW Police and his latest TV ‘appearance’ is in Blue Murder: Killer Cop, 2017. The lore of Pyrmont also knows the names of some of the senior personnel inside the transport and airline industries for whom he was the front man. In his formative years he mostly drank at Barker’s (the Royal Pacific), but he was in and out of all the pubs flogging things. Hurley died in 2007 while awaiting trial over a large cocaine importation through Sydney airport. He is remembered as a popular and genial bloke who always claimed that he was just a council garbage collector who struck it lucky and won the lottery. Twice.
Today, the kinds of crime that occur in Pyrmont are more likely to be of the white-collar variety that involves different kinds of people. High-tech scams and tax evasion go with the territory. They make illegal bookies and off-course betting look very tame. Many would consider that the Star Casino, on the site of the old Pyrmont Power Station, is a place for crimes of far more sophisticated and harmful than anything that happened in a pilfering excursion to the wharves. And perhaps there are some traditional-style crimes against property as well, because at last there are residents with stuff worth stealing.
Hanging about in Pyrmont.
Detail from image held at Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Tooth & Co. papers, N60-YC-700.
Terminus timeline
1841 The first land sale of the corner block takes place following subdivision. William Allison builds the Pyrmont Hotel on the land and Charles Cameron becomes licensee of Pyrmont’s first hotel.
1845 Peter Brennan establishes the Coopers Arms at what becomes 88 Harris Street.
1853 James Pratt establishes Land’s End Hotel in the old Pyrmont Hotel building, now known as 77 John Street. The license transferred to the present site of Pyrmont Point Hotel in 1857.
1862 Peter Brennan buys the block of land, including the old Pyrmont Hotel building, and commences to build a new hotel next to it, on the corner of Harris and John Streets.
1863 Peter Brennan moves the sign of the Coopers Arms from 88 Harris Street to his new building on the corner.
1873 Peter Brennan dies, leaving the Coopers Arms to his daughter Julia Goodall Brennan, now married to James C. Pratt, son of James Pratt.
1896 The Coopers Arms loses its license.
1897 James C. Pratt builds a new wing along Harris Street, the hotel is rel
icensed and renamed Hotel Pleasanton.
1899 Pratt sells the Hotel Pleasanton to Tooth & Co. It is renamed the Terminus Hotel.
1917 Major remodelling of the hotel is undertaken by Tooth & Co.
1984 Tooth & Co. sell the Terminus to Isaac & Susan Wakil (Citilease Property Group) and the hotel is locked up.
2015 The Wakil’s sell the hotel and adjoining property to developers Auswin TWT.
2016 The Terminus is sold to David Mathlin and others, trading as Terminus Hotel Pty Ltd.
2018 The hotel is restored and has a second ‘remodelling’ to provide extended dining facilities and reopens after 33 years.
Sources and acknowledgements
THE greatest debt is owed to my partner, Tim Peach, who scoured the records and collated vast amounts of minutiae to help create this history, especially the early history of the site of the hotel and its earlier pubs. I would not have made these discoveries without his assistance. The term ‘we’ is used in these thanks because the work was a collaborative effort.
Piecing together the story of the Terminus involved some hits and some misses. Some people and events generated many records, while for others the record is more or less silent. This can seem capricious. There are few images of marches or records of speeches during the 1917 Great Strike, although this was a huge event, because media coverage was forbidden under the War Precautions Act 1914. On the other hand, if a family ancestor never threw anything away, apparently unimportant events hold a place in the record. After weaving it all together, some moments in the pub’s history stand out clearly and others remain blurred.
It was exciting to discover the relationship between the site of the hotel and Pyrmont’s first hotel. It was totally unexpected that plans for the Hotel Pleasanton would not only exist, but would provide clear details of Brennan’s 1863 hotel as well. It was great to be given a photograph of a local Pyrmont policeman, but it would have been wonderful to have located one of Vera Dempsey, who ruled the Terminus for so many years. None of the leads we followed turned up that particular image although there is possibly one out there, somewhere. In this digital world where everything is captured on smartphones, it is easy to forget that the visual world of the past was only recorded in fragments. Several people who shared their memories and stories said that they did not own cameras back then. Even when they did, there was little reason to photograph daily events that occurred in and around the hotel.
Talking to people whose lives intersected with the Terminus was a pleasure. After more than 30 years of the hotel being closed up and after so many people had left the area, it would have been understandable if no-one remembered much. However, many people do remember and they generously shared their memories.
A special thanks to Paul Gye who, like so many people in this history, is a long-time worker in Pyrmont. His skill at ‘reading’ and interpreting historical images helped us enormously in getting to know the past landscape of the area. Several of the best images in this book are there because of his sleuthing. He is a great Pyrmont resource. Archaeologist Pamela Kottaras, who was working on the dig next to the Terminus, generously shared her knowledge of this important site.
Thanks to residents, former residents, drinkers and workers (in alphabetical order): Anne Abicht, Brian Delaney, Billy Dillon, John McCullough, John Hutton, Jennice Kersh, George Markham, Mary Mortimer, John Murray, Geoff Preston, Professor Virginia Spate, Carol Twist, Maggie Williams.
Publicans and publicans’ relations who provided interviews or information about past ancestors were: Julia Garling, descendant of Margaret O’Brien who married publican John Devereux; Ron O’Brien and Therese O’Brien, son and granddaughter of publican John O’Brien; Darcy Hassett, publican, Marie Hassett and their son Anthony Hassett; Shirley McElwaine, wife of publican Bob McElwaine and daughters Kim and Joanne McElwaine. Before his death in August 2017, Ron O’Brien kindly read relevant sections of the manuscript.
Family historians who post their research on Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com.au) are generous knowledge sharers. Through this site we located: Paul Clayton Judd, Jan Koperberg and Don Shearman, who all have family interests in the Clayton and Brennan families who dominate the earliest part of this history relating to the Coopers Arms. Leone Low is a descendant of publican Phillip Woods and great-granddaughter of William Woods. These people gave us access to their research and patiently answered questions. Because family historians interrogate many of the public records mentioned here, Ancestry.com provides far more than family history.
Don Heep, John Regan and Lyn Wallis who all worked as musicians when the McElwaines ran the pub in the 1980s took the time to dredge up some wonderful memories and Mickie Quick shared stories about squatting in the Terminus.
Photographs and images of the hotel, and of individuals and events that happened in the pub were provided by Mark Alexander, Jane Bennett, Vanessa Berry from her blog ‘Mirror Sydney’, Trish Curotto, Anthony Hassett, Robyn Hogan, Lara Horstead, Leone Low, Shirley McElwaine, Theresa O’Brien, Brett Patman of lostcollective.com, Dee Peebles, Alison Seccombe, Don Shearman, Linda Snook and Maggie Williams. Peter Kahn, of the Sydney Tramway Museum, and Noel Reed helped out with tram information.
Various websites that contain information about the area and the hotel were helpful. Paul Gye’s Pyrmonstrosity Pyrmontosis Facebook page provides some excellent analysis of historical images and allows for discussion. The Pyrmont History Group’s new website is at www.pyrmonthistory.net.au.
Then there are the more formal records – books, archives and newspapers. Thanks very much to the staff, librarians and archivists at the institutions where records are held.
The City of Sydney Archives holds records of public works carried out in the vicinity of the hotel, correspondence from the local community and building applications for work carried out on the hotel, including plans. The plans for the 1917 ‘remodelling’ of the building are almost illegible, but provided enough information to permit a redrawing of them. These archives’ online presence provides indexes to its archival records. Its ‘Historical Atlas of Sydney’ and ‘ArchivPix’ are the sources of many maps, plans and photographs that relate to Pyrmont. The City’s Assessment Books list Pyrmont properties every few years from 1845 until 1948. These records were created in order to strike the rates and they list owners, occupiers and details for buildings for every address at more or less regular intervals. The privately compiled Sands Directories, precursors to the telephone directories, are also available online at the City of Sydney’s website. Historical material on this site continues to grow.
The Terminus was owned by Tooth & Co. from 1899 until it was sold and closed down in 1984. Papers of Tooth & Co. are held in the Noel Butlin Archives Centre at the Australian National University, Canberra. These extraordinary records made this history possible, but they must be accessed physically as they consist of unsorted boxes of random material that are stored under the name of each hotel, roughly organised by date. They contain correspondence between the company and licensees, documents relating to licenses, quotations for architectural and repair work, observations on the physical state of hotels, and on the state of their plant, right down to details of the temperature at which their beer was served. The company also kept what are called Yellow Cards’ that contain a quick overview of licensees, terms of their leases, details of the amount of beer supplied monthly in barrels of draught and in bottles, amounts of spirits, and other sporadic costs associated with the hotels. Occasionally a card includes a photograph of the hotel. These cards are available online. Tooth & Co. Papers exist for the Terminus from 1921 until 1979.
The National Library of Australia’s online Trove website, www.trove.nla.gov.au, brings together content from libraries, museums, archives and other research organisations. It is progressively uploading the newspaper record from the earliest colonial papers published in the colony until recent times. This resource has revolutionised the way the history of very local places, such as the Terminus, can be wri
tten because it provides historical material that was simply unavailable to researchers prior to 2008. Everyone is encouraged to correct the text and contribute content to help build this enormous website. We have tagged much of our Trove research for this book as The Terminus Hotel Pyrmont.
State Records NSW hold a random collection of hotel plans, records of publicans’ licenses and the wills of various publicans. The State Library of NSW holds photographic material, and Land and Property Information (LPI, formerly Land Titles Office) hold details of the property from its first sale in 1795. The Reserve Bank of Australia’s online Inflation Calculator was used to convert trade figures, costs of licenses and property to 2016 prices, which were the most recent figures available at the time of writing. This provides a rough indication of the trading fortunes of the hotel over time.
Many secondary sources were used to build the overall social history of the area, liquor laws, and changing attitudes to alcohol and hotels. The footnotes provide a detailed record of material that was used to build this book. My starting point was, of course, Shirley Fitzgerald & Hilary Golder, Pyrmont & Ultimo: Under Siege (2nd edition, Halstead Press, Sydney, 2009). For a general history of Pyrmont there is also Michael Matthew’s self-published book Pyrmont & Ultimo, A History, (Sydney, 1982) and John Broadbent’s work, Transformations; ecology of Pyrmont peninsula 1788–2008, which is available online on the City of Sydney website. This contains a detailed timeline for Pyrmont’s history. Because this history focuses on one single place, also helpful was Graham Brooks, Historical Summary Report, 61, 65A –71 Harris Street, Pyrmont, GBA Heritage, February 2016. A good overview of the history of pubs is Dianne Kirkby, Tanja Luckins, Chris McConville, The Australian Pub (UNSW Press, Sydney, 2010). For specific issues and particular periods there are hundreds of books, but these few provide a foundation for anyone who wants to get into the history of the area.
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