The Ballad of Beryl

In memory of Beryl Whatson (nee Pittard)

 1933 - 2022

In 1930s Auburn

Pittard’s Produce Store

sold coal and groceries

and offered

homemade scones

in the afternoons

to perk up the working man

My great aunt Armandine

was serving at the counter

when a larrikin sign writer

named Aubrey Paul

dropped by

and seduced her

over the strawberry jam

Armandine and her parents

grew flowers and veggies

on the double block

surrounding their Victorian house

and kept a pony and trap

for deliveries.

Aubrey and Armandine

lied to Maud and Fred

that they were wed.

Aubrey and his elegant sideboard

moved in 

The Pittards gathered

and gave them a nuptial party

and all was bliss

until a woman knocked on the door

one day

insisting her husband come home.

Maud threw Aubrey

and his sideboard out.

A few months later

on the coldest Sydney morning ever

Beryl was born

and given Maud as her middle name

in appreciation

Maud senior set herself as gate keeper

to keep both Armandine and Beryl

safe from the pernicious adulterer

who didn’t dare darken their doorstep again

As she grew Beryl

gleaned a few scant facts

about her father

by eavesdropping

on family exchanges

it seemed she had his height and thick wavy hair

During the week

to be near her work

in Sydney’s rag trade

Armandine boarded out

leaving Beryl to Maud’s offices

Maud kept her close

chiding her for exuberance,

and more than once

resorting to the strap

Fred indulged her though

and Beryl adored him

treasuring and keeping

his drawings even

his plan

for a chicken brooder

all her life.

Beryl wondered later

if the neighbours knew and judged

her origins 

like her nasty Auntie Joyce

who dubbed her ‘Illegitimate Beryl’

as if it were

a latinate name.

She was a lonely child

her nearest namesake friend

went off to a different school

and Beryl made four chimneys

she could see from her window

into fantasy playmates

she called Semy, Commy, Kivey and Co 

When she was thirteen

her uncle Clarrie bought her a bicycle

and her world expanded

She was allowed to

catch the train to town 

to meet her mother

after work to see a show

Once walking from the station

she didn’t recognise Armandine

and pondered who this woman was

sporting a perm and set

whose dress fabric seemed familiar

talking to a tall man with wavy hair.

Living in Narrabeen

with Fred and Maud

city schools were deemed too far away

and Beryl was sent to Manly Domestic High

her academic gifts sequestered

for now

She left at fifteen

to bring a few pounds to the family coffers

working at a belt and buckle factory

which she hated.

Later she became a machinist

making children’s clothes

for fashionable Marjory Daw

‘before all children’s clothes were made in Asia’

as she once said  in an email to me

By age eighteen Beryl had lost

Fred and Maud and Armandine

and lived with feckless bicycle buyer

Uncle Clarrie

but he had married Josephine

his second of four brides

who used green Estapol

on the Pittard heirloom clock

and made Beryl feel unwelcome

so she took a room in a city boarding house,

forming friendships and sharing interests

with fellow boarders.

On a bushwalk she met and liked

George and Alan Whatson

especially George

They married in 1957

at St Thomas’s, Enfield

Funds were short and kind neighbours

furnished the cake and wedding breakfast.

George and Beryl moved to Glenbrook

in the Mountains

Beryl had to quit work

to adopt their three kids

so turned her sewing skills

to outfitting her girls and boy

and her energies to

being an attentive parent.

Taking her eldest

to a youth camp in the 70s

she heard the name ‘Pittard’

and got to know my Mum

her cousin’s wife

as it turned out.

Beryl applied

her brain and tenacity

to family research

and discovered

Swiss forebears

with engineering prowess

a damp and dingy

Lambeth address

measles aboard an immigrant ship

more single motherhood

and seamstress skills

a forger in the ranks

and acquired gentility

that denied

much of the above.

When our paths crossed

in 2015

seeking grandfather Fred’s

first drowned love

and adding more flesh

to Aubrey Paul’s bones

became our holy grails.

Beryl had photographs

of a woman in white

resting her hand on Fred’s shoulder

and of the sailing boat

he purportedly sold

after her death.

We traded reports

of Aubrey’s early

criminal capers

and surmised

who the mystery fiancée

might have been.

We stitched together

Aubrey Paul’s story,

mugshot and all,

but Fred’s first love

eluded our grasp.

Our last meeting was

in a nursing home

in Cooranbong

in COVID days

I shared my latest find

a transcript of another errant ancestor's

sympathy-seeking confession

Beryl showed mild interest

but her mind was on the indignities

of respite care

and the fate of her papers

of great significance to her

but of little to her adopted children

she thought.

Her funeral was last month.

The sun shone on neat lawns

and shiny cars

and her heavily pregnant granddaughter

read Mary Frye’s

Do not stand at my grave and weep

though we did.

I was and am the vessel

of your blood

and memories,

Beryl

Your eighty nine years and

four generations

leave their traces

in your papers,

in my computer files

and on this page.

Miss Brown's Newtown

My paternal grandmother, Violet Victoria Brown, was born to George and Martha Brown on November 8, 1897 in Newtown, New South Wales, the youngest of four children. Within three weeks of her birth, the tragic drowning of her brother, Thomas, in the Clyde River, Granville was to leave her the youngest of three and to traumatise her parents, especially her father, irrevocably. It is family wisdom that growing up with the story of Tom’s misadventure gave her a lifelong fear of going into the water and certainly she never learnt to swim and protested at her children doing so.
 

 Violet Victoria Brown aged in her teens

I only met my Australian grandmother a handful of times. The above pieces of information came from my knowledgeable cousin Cheryl Venables and from my own research. Most of what follows is based on four pages of spidery writing in blue biro on lined notepaper I found amongst some old family photographs from the Pittard side of the family. Dating from the 1980s, they are a determined attempt by ‘Ma’ (as my father always called her) to set down her memories of life as a young woman in Sydney’s Newtown. It has been an honour and a pleasure to interpret them and to further research some of their content.

Throughout the late 1890s and early 1900s Violet and her family lived at various addresses in Newtown, principally in Australia Street, toward the Camperdown end, possibly at number 81 which shows up as the residence of her brother Victor in the 1930s. She is likely to have attended Newtown Public school until the age of about 14 when she left and found work as a shop assistant at Sweet Brothers. Sweet Brothers was an established drapery and variety goods store located at 249 King Street where the IGA now stands. As the 1912 photograph below shows, it occupied two adjacent sites as well. What remains of the original building became a series of supermarkets. The art nouveau plaster ceiling of the Sweet Brothers is still visible above the shelves of groceries at IGA.

Three views of 249 King Street, Newtown, as Sweet Bros in 1912 

and as Flemings and IGA much later in the 20thC.

Violet was paid 5/- a week for working on the women’s garments and accessories counter. There she sold hair chignons for 2 shillings and 11 pence each that were matched to a woman’s natural hair and pinned into place with hairpins. The chignons formed rolls around which the woman’s own hair was swathed enabling Newtown ladies to achieve fashionable Edwardian hairstyles. The nearby millinery and frock department had a very erect and proper lady floor walker, a kind of female captain Peacock, who swished up and down the aisles in a high necked black dress with a long train.

The shop used the vacuum tube method of sending money to the cashiers; small cylinders ran on wires overhead. The customer’s money went inside, Violet or a co-worker then pulled a cord and the tube was propelled towards the cash desk; the customer’s change was returned to the counter in the same manner.

Sweet Brothers’ merchandise was widely varied and, as the 1911 advertisement below attests, delivered free to purchasers throughout New South Wales. No wonder it was where ‘Biz hums’! My grandmother particularly recalled the tables of beautiful glassware priced at 1/- and 2/- a piece (mass machine manufacture of glass began in the 1880s) and the popular cutthroat style ‘Bengal Razors’ selling at 1 shilling and 11 pence and 2 shillings and 11 pence.

Top: Advertisement for Sweet Brothers 'Where Biz Hums', Evening News, Nov 14, 1911.

Above: A Bengal Razor of the kind Sweet Bros sold.

Violet began ‘stepping out’ with young men in her later teens (she married at 19). Newtown was a thriving shopping centre and King Street bustled. It had its own picture show, The Hub (not the one at Newtown Bridge but an earlier theatre of that name on the south side of King Street near the corner of Brown St), as well as markets and the St Georges (dance) Hall near the station. Courting couples may even have strayed into the tree filled, shady St Stephens cemetery which was not to surrender most of its grounds and many of its graves to form Camperdown Memorial Rest Park until the 1940s.

Violet describes a walk with a beau along King Street passing various buildings and businesses and sometimes calling in to buy. On the south side of King Street, on the corner of Erskineville Road was Newtown’s superb 1893 red brick Post Office which still stands, albeit beleaguered by one remodelling of its ground floor after another. A few steps along was the Presbyterian (now Uniting) Church and R.H. Gordon’s furniture store from which Violet’s brother, Vic, bought 3 rooms of furniture when he married in 1910 for just £27.00 paid off in weekly instalments of 2/6. Hire purchase being a new practice that enabled newlyweds to furnish their homes now and pay gradually.

Both Marcus Clarke and Anthony Horderns had Newtown stores in her day but it is Brennan’s Drapers on the corner of King and Wilson Streets that Violet recalled.  The façade of its once grand premises still stands though the shell now houses a gym, a pharmacy, a boutique and a video hire business, amongst other shops, at ground level, and offices in its upper two storeys.  Brennan’s still traded when I was a uni student living in Newtown in the 1980s; its underwear, scarves and giftware displayed on wooden tables and racks of blouses and overcoats draped in plastic to protect them from the dust generated by King Street traffic. Also on the south side of King Street was Tom Cousin’s Hardware Store whose eponymous proprietor became a Newtown alderman, and a small stall selling fresh fish and oysters for 1/- a dozen. Violet was partial to oysters but usually settled for the bottled variety; she would stop here as a treat.

Above: Hatte's buildings on the south side of King Street and adjacent Brennan's store as it looks today.

  Above: An artist's rendering of Hatte's arcade on the north side of King Street.

Along the north side of King Street, close to Sweet Brothers was a Sargent’s Refreshment room, she recalls Sargent’s pies, which pioneered an Aussie tradition, as the being the best she ever tasted.  An enterprising Irishman, Charles George Hatte, owned premises on both sides of King Street; Violet particularly recalled Hatte’s Arcade which opened in 1904 and which, from a contemporary artist’s drawing, appears to have been as elegant and well-proportioned as the Strand Arcade replete with palms and cast iron balustrades. Because shopping hours were unregulated and the arcade also contained meeting rooms it was lively at all hours. Hatte, like Cousins, became an alderman and bequeathed the town an ornate drinking fountain which stood on Newtown Bridge from 1897 to 1929 when the road was widened. It was doomed any way as the council tired of replacing the little copper cups that were attached to it by chains only to be regularly detached by vandals.

 Artist's drawing of the commemorative fountain Alderman Hatte bequeathed to Newtown.

Next to the station, on the corner of Newman Street, in premises that had once housed the Sydney Omnibus Company, were the Newtown Markets which Violet recalled as selling everything ‘from a mussel to an anchor’, I don’t know if that is an actual expression or just her quaint turn of phrase, but it is evocative of the myriad goods the markets purveyed.  She remembered an old Indian man sitting at the entrance selling bunches of sarsaparilla which you boiled up and drank as a ‘blood purifier’.  Perhaps Violet’s lifelong interest in naturopathy sprang from taking that sarsaparilla infusion? All self-respecting markets sold flowers and more than one of Miss Brown’s suitors felt it apposite to buy her a bunch of violets as they wandered amongst the stalls. 

  Newtown Markets

A busker at the markets was a man named Albert Brett who had lost both his hands at the age 13 in an industrial accident at Bakewell’s Pottery, Erskineville.  She recalled him in 1905, playing ‘an organ on a stick’ and carrying a small monkey on his shoulder. Albert Brett was not a busker all his life though, he became something of a Sydney celebrity for overcoming his disability and mastering many skills including writing, sewing, cooking and marksmanship. He received accolades when, in 1914, working as a nightwatchman in Canterbury, he overpowered and arrested a trespasser and marched him at gun point to the local police station.

Just past the station stands St Georges Hall, built in 1887 as a venue ‘suitable for public meetings, gatherings and entertainments of all kinds’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 1887) and now part of the Newtown Performing Arts High School. The building has sprung floors and balls and dances there were presided over by a Miss Allen (I would love to learn more about her). My grandmother knew that white gloves were de rigeur for the gentlemen so perhaps she took a turn around the floor once or twice herself. The hall had a performance space where the Beale Musical Society regularly staged smoking concerts and operettas.

Further down towards Enmore at 455 King Street was Abels Bakery from which most households obtained their daily bread. Violet’s uncle worked there, later moving to Dibble’s Bakery, not the main premises which still stand adjacent to the Camperdown Memorial Rest Park, but a smaller outlet at 508 King St. It was from Abel’s that Violet’s wedding cake came when she married my grandfather in 1917.  Near both Abel’s and Dibbles bakeries is Camden St where Violet recalled living as a teenager, the delicious aroma of boiling fruit from the Peacock Jam factory ever present. Later Peacock’s moved to Darlington and was bought out by IXL. Its Camden street site is now occupied by an unprepossessing block of units; ironically, if the factory had stood and been converted to apartments it would have been a gold mine for investors.

An image from SIX Maps showing Peacock's Jam Factory in Camden St, Newtown, still standing in the 1940s.

The last anecdote recorded in my grandmother’s four pages of Newtown notes concerns Albert Brett’s brother, Walter. Violet’s mother was a friend of the Brett brothers’ mother but the story has nevertheless got twisted in the telling, though is no less sad or dramatic for that. In July 1901 Anthony Horderns Haymarket store was engulfed in a huge fire and her story goes that Walter Brett was stranded on the roof, jumped and missed the sheet firemen held out to catch him.  Walter Brett was indeed killed in the Horderns fire. He was an employee and was not seeking refuge on the roof but was with an engineer by the name of Dashwood in the engine room attempting to cut off fuel to the blaze. They were trapped there and their remains weren’t recovered until a few days after the fire was extinguished.

Ruins of Anthony Horderns Haymarket store 1901
 

Violet’s last sentence trails off with a reference to World War I,  the fact that Australian soldiers got paid 6/3 per day and the enigmatic statement ‘I have photos from France’.  I have only recently learnt the possible significance of this. Another cousin, Beryl Whatson, informed me that my grandfather Albert Arthur was not Violet’s first love amongst the Pittard brothers. She had been engaged to the older Frederick Charles who was away fighting (yes, in France) from 1915 to 1918 and my grandfather must have pressed his suit or, as some evidence suggests, played on her sympathies and won her during his absence.