Glebe’s Colourful Characters A-Z

Boys on wall. Studenten Gavotte continues.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the stories of just a few of postcode 2037’s colourful characters. You have been listening to Studenten Gavotte.

Composed by Hugo Alpen, conductor, singing teacher and Director of Music for the Education Department for over 30 years.

Hugo Alpen lived in Derwent Street and Arundel Terrace.

A is also for Glebe’s biggest bigwig, the colony’s first locally trained solicitor George Allen, here with his wife Jane, mother of 14.

At the 1828 auction of church land young George bought 95 acres and built Toxteth Park. A staunch teetotal Methodist, he still loved to entertain. Guests smuggled in their own champagne. His assigned servants got drunk.

This is some of the rest of Allen’s land. Over the hill is Harold Park.

George’s eldest son, slum landlord and moneylender, Sir George Wigram Allen, was Mayor of Glebe for 18 consecutive terms. He’s here with wife, Marian, mother of 11.

The Toxteth Park library in 1890. Most of the books were religious or edifying English literature.

Maybanke Anderson lived in Apricot Cottage in Arundel Terrace.

Maybanke Anderson established the Playgrounds Association and the Kindergarten Union, providing free pre-school care for poor families within walking distance of their homes. One of the first KU kindergartens was at Wentworth Park.

Maybanke was a member of the Womanhood Suffrage League and the International Women's Union, and published Woman's Voice, a fortnightly journal covering social issues.

What was rock band Australian Crawl doing in a derelict house in Glebe in 1979? Where are we? Beautiful People [YouTube FOOTAGE]. LYN: The answer? B is for Bellevue.

B is for William ‘Boss’ Bardsley who lived on Bridge Road and became Forest Lodge’s long-serving headmaster, from 1883 until 1922. He’s at the back behind the horse on school pet day – not a dog in sight! Bardsley was mad on cricket.

William Bardsley's son Warren (a non-smoking vegetarian teetotaller and a Forest Lodge classmate of fast bowler Tibbie Cotter) was a top scoring batsman who toured England four times. Warren and Tibbie played with the Glebe Cricket Club …

... as did other Test players Bert Oldfield and Charlie Kelleway.

Colonial architect James Barnet lived where Officeworks now stands on the corner of Ross Street and Parramatta Road …

... with his wife Amy and their family.

In his garden Barnet kept some of the carvings from the GPO (which he designed) after it was struck by lightning. The family’s pets included a magpie and a kangaroo.

Among Barnet’s early work was designing and colouring the carvings on the cedar ceiling of Sydney University’s Great Hall.

Edmund Barton first prime minister was born in The Glebe. But where? Some say Hereford House, others Ferry Road.

Barton’s best friend at school was Richard O’Connor …

… who lived at Maryville on Glebe Point Road, one of the houses sketched in the 1860s by …

... Edith Blacket, photographed here with her architect father Edmund during the building of Sydney University’s Great Hall.

Bidura, the Blackets’ home in Glebe. The separate ballroom at the right was built …

… by the wealthy Fitz Stubbs family.

When the 1890s Depression hit, Maud Fitz Stubbs, “The Australian Strauss”, …

… made a living by publishing sheet music.

B is for Bohrsmann, a German name. Born in Australia and a medical officer at Duntroon, Rudolph (on the right) had his surgery next door to Glebe Public whose pupils he treated for nothing, but like …

... Darghan Street milkman Fred Kurtz he was vilified as a “Hun” during the First World War. German bakeries were boycotted.

During the Second World War, Glebe greengrocers the Galluzzos and the Arenas were suspected of aiding the enemy.

[FOOTAGE Tony Arena with Frank Galluzzo.]

This is the Wireless House in Foley Park where Tony and Frank listened to their favourite radio serials “The Search for the Golden Boomerang”, “Dad and Dave” and “The Shadow”.

Where did this Jubilee Park institution get its name?

It opened in 1965.

And was named after the mother of City Council alderman Des Booler.

Hilda Booler lived for over 40 years at 12 Ferry Road. Mother of six, she was asked by a neighbour to look after a toddler “for a few days”. The boy finally moved out at age 15.

I guess Annie Jeanne Byrnes’ mother at 4 Marlborough Street was paid something for this promotion in 1914 ~ maybe a tin of biscuits?

C is for the Chaser team who brought their camera to Glebe more than once. [FOOTAGE fruit fights]

C is for entrepreneur Harry Clay, proprietor of Clay’s North Sydney Coliseum (it became the Independent Theatre) and …

… Clay’s Bridge Theatre at Newtown (now The Hub). The home of vaudeville.

Harry’s only child was a performer from the age of seven. Billed as ‘Little Essie Clay’ and ‘The Child Wonder’ her repertoire included ‘The Boers have got my daddy’, ‘My Mother was a Lady’ and ‘Mr Conductor, please don’t put me off the train’. The Clay family home in Glebe was 29 Wigram Road.

C is for CROOK. Private investigator Cliff Hardy, the creation of crime novelist Peter Corris, lived in a Glebe terrace close to the dog track “a convenient meeting place for some transactions in my trade and, as they say, Glebe is one of those places where if you can’t see a pub by looking both ways down the street, then you must be standing outside one”.

Cliff Hardy dealt with unsavoury fictitious characters in 52 books. We had plenty of the real thing. Here are a few:

John Scowen lived in Brisbane Street (now disappeared) behind Broadway. Like six of his siblings, he was a lawbreaker. In 1880 he was sentenced to death for aiding and abetting the murder of the publican of Glebe’s Burton Hotel. At his trial, already gaoled for indecent behaviour and assault and battery of his father, Scowen smirked and played to the gallery. The sentence was commuted and Scowen went on to be an habitual petty criminal.

“... there was only one thing I wanted out of life. I wanted to be a crook. Not just any crook, but the crook, the BIGGEST – the man with money, power, influence. Working for a living never entered my head.” Answer: George Freeman, Glebe Public School expelled old boy.

George Freeman at the left with other Sydney ‘identities’ Darcy Dugan and Lennie McPherson. Darcy Dugan was a serial prison escapee nicknamed Houdini.

On the run in 1950 after holding up an Ultimo bank, Dugan abandoned the getaway car in Eglinton Road and hid in Jubilee Park before being picked up by Lennie McPherson.

In old age Dugan was back in Glebe, in a half-way house – from where he often disappeared.

In 1921 brothers Richard and Patrick Roache were acquitted of stealing cloth worth £1,000 from the David Jones warehouse in Christie Street.

Paddy was soon back. By 1933 he had been declared an habitual criminal.

In January 1939 standover gunman Chow Hayes threw hot coffee over a Glebe hamburger shop owner who refused to serve him. The next month he was found drunk in Talfourd Street with a bullet wound in his chest. Hayes was taken from Glebe Police Station to RPA Hospital where he named his attacker as Father Christmas. Prepared for surgery and wearing only a hospital gown, he was momentarily left unattended. He climbed out of a window, rang a mate from a public ‘phone box, and was picked up …

… and taken to Sydney George’s surgery at 100 Glebe Point Road where the bullet was removed.

In 2007 Glebe’s St James Church overflowed for the funeral of Michael Hurley, a cocaine importer fictionalised in Underbelly.

A fireplace, stolen from Hurley’s Toxteth Road house during renovations, was returned within 24 hours when it became known that its owner wanted it back.

From CROOKS to CRICKET. Test player Albert Cotter’s family home was Monteith 266 Glebe Point Road, now classified by the National Trust.

Albert was nicknamed Tibbie because he was small, and “Terror Cotter” because he was an intimidating fast bowler. His image was used on World War 1 recruiting posters. Tibbie was killed in Palestine three weeks after his brother John at Ypres.

D is for Pauline Deane who lived at 19 Avenue Road and ran Pauline’s Song Shop in the city.

She was the daughter of Jacques Albert, founder of Albert & Son, music publishers …

… and makers of the Boomerang mouth organ.

The father of Glebe satirist John Dengate played the mouth organ. John busked with guitar and tin whistle. [SHORT FOOTAGE]

Another of John’s original compositions was HMAS Melbourne. The Australian Navy acquired aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne. Its record at sea proved to be remarkable – for the wrong reasons.

HMAS Melbourne image.

The Melbourne was the only Commonwealth naval vessel to sink two friendly warships in peacetime collisions. One was the Voyager.

Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens (here at the right), the tenth and youngest child of the famous writer, was nicknamed Plorn. He sailed to Australia as an unaccompanied 16 year old, became a stock and station agent, and was briefly in politics as the Member for Wilcannia. His constant tormenter was William Willis, the Member for Bourke. In parliament Plorn rose to his feet: My honoured father once wrote “Barkus is willin’. If he had been here tonight he would have said “Willis is barkin’”.

Plorn Dickens died of TB aged 50, debt ridden and childless. He stayed for a short period at Toxteth Park when it operated as a lodging house.

Mary Duncan an orphan lived with her uncle at 189 St Johns Road. In 1914 at St John’s Church she married …

… Wilfred Dovey. Their daughter Margaret, a champion swimmer, married Gough Whitlam.

E is for Evangelist Robert Hammond, rector of St Barnabas from 1918 to 1943. He erected the RBS Hammond noticeboard in front of the church with weekly messages …

... like this one, and ‘Drink promises you heaven but gives you hell’. A friendly rivalry developed with the Broadway Hotel across the road which put up its own signs. One on Christmas Day read: ‘Closed, but bread and wine opposite’.

One of Hammond’s converts was Arthur Stace, the ‘Eternity’ man.

Ernie the Fridge Man who recycled old refrigerators and gave away 3,000 of them. Ernest Ridding’s living quarters and workshop were on the corner of Catherine and Westmoreland Streets.

F Is for Dr Horace Foley, labelled both saint and scoundrel, who practised in Glebe for 50 years from his surgery at 202 Glebe Point Road.

Alderman Foley picked up an old Council steamroller, painted it red and sold it back to Council. The Rest Park is named for him.

‘The dogs were racing at Harold Park when they told us the gladiator was dead. He had had a bet on Sweet and Lovely, which came home at ten to one. He didn’t.’ Writer Thelma Forshaw lived ‘within cooee of Harold Park’. She remembered …

‘the open-neck sport-shirts; the breath relaxingly beery; the entrance-fee sweaty within the fist’ and …

… the roar of the crowd: ‘Like the surf it thundered, with aspirates huffing and sibilants hissing through it. The vast sigh of collective ecstasy. Or the giant groan of collective dismay.’

‘And triumph roaring upward through the funnels of a thousand throats.’

Joseph Fowles lived at Lyndhurst and in a house on Glebe Point Road somewhere between Francis and Mitchell Street. He painted racehorses in the style of the English artist John Herring and was known here as “Our Colonial Herring”.

Fowles is best known as the artist and copperplate engraver of Sydney in 1848.

Bobby Hancock loose-living publican of The Lady of the Lake on the corner of Bay and Greek Streets. He kept at least four mistresses at any one time and showed them off in a horse and carriage. At Hancock’s wake his body lay in state on the tap-room table, and the pub was crowded with those who turned up for free booze and a feed. The Rookwood statue gives him a respectability he lacked in real life.

By the age of 9 Lew Hoad was given special time from Glebe Public to practise what his schoolmates labelled a sissy game. (The bullying stopped after he decked a kid in the playground.) Ranked world no. 1 in 1956, the champion’s name is commemorated by the Lew Hoad Reserve on The Crescent. The family home was 43 Wigram Road.

Hoad was coached by another tennis great, Harry Hopman who as a child lived in Minerva Terrace 15 Wigram Road.

Oliver Hogue was one of ten children of Glebe Member of Parliament Jimmy Hogue, nicknamed “Dismal” because he was always cheerful. Oliver was dux of Forest Lodge School and an expert shooter, horseman, swimmer, cricketer, cyclist and oarsman. He became a journalist and wanted a war correspondent job which went to C E W Bean. “Trooper Bluegum” survived fighting in the Sinai desert and Jordan to die in London in 1919, a victim of the influenza pandemic.

Oliver’s brother Roland made a career as a character actor in Hollywood and his sister Tien starred in several Australian silent films.

During the Depression, Samoan steel guitar player Mayo Hunter and his acrobatic dancer wife Gladys took their song and dance act around the countryside, living out of a caravan and incorporating their children into the routines. They settled in Glebe, first at 25 Arundel Street and later at 43 Glebe Point Road.

[SONG LIVE, Seamus, to tune of Night and Day]

Most of Glebe’s dunny lanes have disappeared and the dunny man has gone too. BUT we are connected to the mains! There’s a WC inside this space plus others outside to the right ~ follow the “Hold On” signs. We’ll now take a 15-minute drink and comfort stop.

I is for INTERMISSION. [INTERVAL RECORDED MUSIC] You have been listening to Maud Fitz Stubbs’ Pearl Waltz played by Patsy Short, a Glebe Society member.

Who is this entertainer – starts with J? Col Joye. And what’s his connection with Glebe?

He’s playing here in a TA Studios which he and his brothers set up at 98 Glebe Point Road in 1966 …

… as a management, publishing and recording business.

They had their own record label.

The studio closed in 1993 and the building changed use.

K is for Scottish timber merchant Alexander Kethel who built Benledi, named after a mountain in his native land and saved from demolition in 1994.

This is Kethel, a member of the Highland Society and a lover of Robert Burns. One of his party pieces was “To a haggis”: Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face/ Great chieftain o the puddin'-race!

Denis Kevans was nicknamed ‘The Poet Lorikeet’ after he moved from Glebe to the Blue Mountains whose beauty, he suggested, would be enhanced under a layer of concrete. In 1973 Denis co-wrote ‘Under Concrete and Glass’ with Seamus Gill – who’s with us tonight. [SONG LIVE]

CHORUS

The playground behind Glebe Library is named, not for a local, but …

… visiting Ballet Russes dancer Hélène Kirsova who bought land in the …

… ‘congested areas of the city’ in the 1940s to create playgrounds for children.

Tom Ley lived at different addresses including Denman Street (later part of St Johns Road), Avona Avenue and several places on Glebe Point Road.

When Tom was a lad he answered an advertisement placed by Glebe Point Road newsagent Syd Bibbs who was looking for “smart” boys to deliver papers. Tom got the job. While making his rounds he ingratiated himself with influential locals such as Judge Wilkinson at Hereford House.

Tom too went in for the Law and entered State politics, becoming Minister for Public Instruction, a snappy dresser with the gift of the gab. An advocate of prohibition, Lemonade Ley had dealings with brewers.

Minister of Justice before going into Federal politics, Ley was suspected of foul play when a political rival was found dead at the foot of a Coogee cliff. Ley took off for England with his mistress.

In 1947 Ley was found guilty of the strangling murder of a barman found in a Surrey chalk pit and was sentenced to death. Pronounced insane, he died in the Broadmoor Asylum. The case created a sensation in England and Australia.

L is for Louis’ Fruit Market, run by Carole and Michael who work long hours and are seldom Home or Away. [FOOTAGE]

Edwin Randolph Magnus established the Dental Hospital.

Magnus named his house Hartford after his birthplace in Connecticut. His nephew Everett, also a dentist, identified the famous “Pyjama Girl” from her fillings.

Antarctic explorer Douglas Mawson attended Forest Lodge School and lived at Palmerston Terrace and 28 Toxteth Road. A serious and diligent student, he gained double degrees in Engineering and Science.

The official photographer who took this shot of Mawson on the Australian Expedition to the Frozen Continent was …

... another local boy whose family home was 22 Lodge Street. Frank Hurley’s formal education ended when he ran away from Glebe Public after throwing two inkwells at a teacher. He bought a cheap Box Brownie and taught himself photography. His mother tried to talk Mawson out of giving her son the Antarctic job:

“He has never roughed it in any way during his life. He has lung trouble”.

Hurley was an official photographer in both world wars.

In the early 1960s Australia’s leading poet the late Les Murray lived on Mansfield Street next to Tranby.

Here he wrote some of his first published poems. (These are the opening lines of one of them.): This is for spring and hail, that you may remember: for a boy long ago, and a pony that could fly.

Sir Henry Parkes died six months after marrying his domestic servant Julia Lynch, his third wife, their age difference 57 years. The widowed Lady Julia lived in Allen Street and Maryville on Glebe Point Road with the five young children of his second marriage (this is Henry junior). Julia inherited a title from the statesman but also his debts.

P is for Prince. In 1881 George Wigram Allen entertained Albert and the future King George V at Toxteth Park where they planted a Port Jackson fig as a souvenir of their visit.

P is for Prince. In 1956 the Duke of Edinburgh flew over Sydney in a helicopter and visited South Sydney Police Boys Club, Victoria Park Swimming Pool, the Kent Street parking station ~ and the newly opened Glebe Public Library on Bridge Road.

R is for Ricketts and White who had a music store at 155 Glebe Point Road. Their society bands played at balls, weddings and even picnics.

S is for Indigenous boxing champion Dave Sands who trained at Tom Laming’s Golden Gloves Gym, stayed at the University Hotel and kept fit by running around Victoria Park.

A memorial plaque was erected in 1952 and in 2015 he was commemorated by a Glebe lane named in his honour.

In the 1880s George Sargent operated a bakery in Glebe Street with his wife Charlotte. George did the cooking and Charlotte fronted the counter.

By 1914 Sargents owned six cafes and 36 tea rooms in Sydney and Melbourne. George, nicknamed “The Colonel” and “The Apostle of Pie”, personally inspected all supplies for quality while Charlotte, “The Princess”, kept a close eye on female staff.

‘Wandering Poet’ William Pell Sharpley lived at 109 St Johns Road some time before Glebe Society member the late Ian Edwards bought it. Sharpley worked as a labourer building the Warragamba Dam.

In 1967 art expert Professor Bernard Smith and his wife Kate moved to 23 Avenue Road which became a meeting place for locals determined to preserve the suburb’s heritage. Bernard Smith, the Glebe Society’s first President, here leads a protest march against high rise in Ferry Road.

Test cricketer Fred Spofforth grew up in Derwent Street. Nicknamed ‘The Demon Bowler’ he was 190 centimetres tall, ‘all legs, arms and nose’ with a Mephistophelian expression. One batsman remembered passing him on the way to the crease: ‘His look went through me like a red hot poker’.

Spofforth had an armoury of different deliveries including a special one for batsmen squinting into the sun.

Ferryman William Suggate raised his children and some goats on the water’s edge at Glebe Point. He converted a double-ended iron ferry which had run aground into his own ‘Noah’s Ark’, saving on construction materials and avoiding land tax.

Who’s in this Glebe Public kindy class?

He lived at 12 Reuss Street.

He was a gifted actor, particularly in comedy – here at the right.

He became one of Australia’s best-known cartoonists, winner of two Walkleys. From the age of 5 Les Tanner drew caricatures of his family.

Budgie smuggler designer and kite maker Peter Travis lived at 8 Leichhardt Street and Arden Tower in Forsyth Street.

“Mr One-by-one”. In 1950 the attic light at 1 Westmoreland St burned late into the night but Edward Charles Windeyer wasn’t a uni student swotting for exams. He was, however, putting into practice what he’d learned from books. On engraving in the State Library. On a home-made printing press in his one-room flat Windeyer perfected the art of counterfeiting.

In 1953 City Council workmen pulled an old sock out of an air vent in Windeyer’s building. Stuffed in the sock were 185 fake £10 notes. Over three years Windeyer had circulated over £4000 worth, placing single note bets with busy bookmakers at night trots and greyhound meetings. He devised an elaborate system to evade detection, mailing notes to himself in fictitious names at different post offices. Ironically, Edward Windeyer was born into a legal dynasty. He was the grandson of Sydney’s first mayor.

Bottle-o and rabbit-o cricket barracker Yabba grew up in Glebe. During the bodyline controversy he yelled at hated English bowler Douglas Jardine who was swatting insects: “leave our flies alone”. One slogging defensive batsman was greeted with Yabba’s stentorian: "Call nurse Mitchell to get the bastard out!” LYN: (Nurse Mitchell was a noted abortionist.)

We’ve left Glebe’s favourite son until last. He grew up in 29 Talfourd Street (here on the left today) and 11 Lyndhurst Street …

... and attended two local schools: Glebe Public …

… and Forest Lodge where his infants teacher gave him a penny to buy her a pie. When he came back with it in his grubby hand she told him to eat it himself and gave him another penny to come back with a wrapped one. A lesson learnt …

In the army he was known as Slippery Sam.

He went into banking before switching to politics, and landing the top job in the State. He was a gravel-voiced pugnacious “ordinary bloke” a folksy raconteur and an affable pub companion.

His real first name was Robin but he had himself knighted as Sir Robert. He brought his vision to his childhood suburb.

Expressways map. Dale Dengate singing live 'Take Your Bulldozers Away' by John Dengate.

Dale Dengate singing live 'Take Your Bulldozers Away' – lyrics by John Dengate.

Dale Dengate singing live 'Take Your Bulldozers Away' by John Dengate.

Dale Dengate singing live 'Take Your Bulldozers Away' by John Dengate.

Dale Dengate singing live 'Take Your Bulldozers Away' by John Dengate.

Dale Dengate singing live 'Take Your Bulldozers Away' by John Dengate.

Dale Dengate singing live 'Take Your Bulldozers Away' by John Dengate.

Dale sings additional verse about Westconnex.

Dale sings additional verse about Westconnex.

Dale sings additional verse about Westconnex.

Ladies and gentlemen, before you rush out to man the barricades, we have a musical tribute to postcode 2037: Glebe Point Road Song (2010) Gypsy and the Gleebs. [YouTube FOOTAGE]

We couldn’t find a Z Glebe identity (Julia Zemiro isn’t a local) so we’ll bid you good night. Thanks for coming! And thanks to Dereck, Dale, Seamus, Allan and Phil.

And to pianist Patsy Short who’ll put a spring in your step as you make your way home. [RECORDED MUSIC ]

[No comment. Kids on swings.]