Birkenhead Point Back Story

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Local history, Retailing history

Origin of place name: Birkenhead Point on the southeast corner of Drummoyne (Sydney) derives its name indirectly from a northern English town via the Birkenhead Estate in Drummoyne … Birkenhead is or was a village near Liverpool-on-Mersey in the UK.

Birkenhead Point, former site of Dunlop-Perdriau Rubber Co, Roseby Street, Drummoyne

Birkenhead Point Factory Outlet Centre (BPFOC), on the western side of Sydney’s Port Jackson, is a bit of a sleeper as far as shopping centres and malls go. Recently, it ‘celebrated’ (sic) it’s forty-year anniversary (opened 26 July 1979), but it was an anniversary bereft of any fanfare whatsoever! The centre has 170 stores or services including two anchor tenants but can’t attract a major department store chain. In recent times it has tried to lure more paying punters by introducing a “shopper hopper” ferry service from Circular Quay or Darling Harbour. Thursday night shopping is virtually a non-event with most of the vendors not bothering to stay open. The only shoppers you are likely to see at night are those grocery shopping at Coles and Aldi✾.

The reasons for BPFOC’s low-key status among the large retail outlets and malls of Sydney are manifold. It’s relatively small size and its distance away from the Sydney rail network are contributing factors. Likewise the proximity of Burwood Westfield (a few kilometres away) and the Broadway Centre to name two, gives these shopping complexes a comparative advantage.

Birkenhead Point before it was a shoppers’ haven

The area around the point was originally part of a land grant made to John Harris, the colony’s first surgeon (circa 1800). By the late 1830s Harris’ land on the point, having shifted ownership several times, was a brick-making operation. This business didn’t apparently succeed as the owner, a Mr Dutton, went bankrupt in the early 1840s. At this time Birkenhead Point went under the name of Duttons Point, then part of Five Dock Farm.

(source: Dictionary of Sydney)

“Abercrombie’s Point”

Charles Abercrombie, the next man of capital to acquire Birkenhead Point, turned it into a race track (Abercrombie’s Racecourse). The first Australian steeplechase was held here on 19 September 1844. The horse racing caper failed to produce a worthwhile dividend for Abercrombie, prompting him to transform the site into a “salting and boiling down works” in the mid 1840s. This business as well was apparently not sufficiently profitable and Abercrombie resold the land.

New industry, rubber works

In the following years the land on the point again changed hands several times. In 1885 the property was bought by the Perdriau brothers (Henry and George) who started a business to make rubber engine packing for their ferry service (With a single work shed at Birkenhead Point). In 1899 under the leadership of Henry Perdriau, the brothers established the Perdriau Rubber Company (PRC) and began manufacturing rubber products in 1904. Coinciding with the rise of the automobile, the company launched itself into the manufacture of rubber tyres, sufficiently successfully that PRC took over the whole 7.7 hectare site (by 1928 it was producing somewhere between 500,000 and 780,000 tyres annually)⍟.

Dunlop Rubber plant

In 1929✩ the Perdriau Company merged with the English firm Dunlop (forming Dunlop-Perdriau Rubber Co) and the new enterprise at Drummoyne became the Dunlop Rubber Company (DRC)❂. By the 1960s Dunlop’s Birkenhead Point factory employed 1,600 workers. By the 1970s the complex comprised eight brick buildings⌺ and a number of auxiliary structures (sawtooth roofed sheds). The brick buildings were substantial, being between two and four storey high.Perdriau‘s rubber hose line

From industrial to commercial

In 1977 the Birkenhead Point tyre plant closed its operation with the site being acquired by major Australian retailer/department store chain David Jones for $21M. DJs converted the brick and rust-red tyre factory into a waterfront shopping centre, retaining 40% of the original factory buildings. The shops were eventually replaced by designer brand clothing outlets (including a David Jones factory outlet and a Fletcher Jones factory outlet). In the 1990s apartments were added to the site. A long glass ceiling was installed on the top floor in 2010 and the decade saw the centre undergo a number of extensions and renovations.

Over the last thirty-plus years the Birkenhead Head complex has undergone several changes of ownership. Most prominently in 2004 it was bought by Singapore tycoon Denis Jen for $111M (later unloaded). Currently, Birkenhead Point Outlet Centre is owned and managed by the Mirvac Group.

BP Marina

The prime location of the factory outlet centre fronts on to a marina which caters for over 300 mostly pleasure watercrafts (as well NSW Marine Rescue and Divers maintain operational vessels at the marina). There are also Marine Rescue and maritime industry association offices below the shopping centre at wharf level. The Birkenhead Point complex originally planned to include a series of museums in the site (car, fishing and maritime) but these ventures have never apparently gotten off the drawing board.

Publications and websites consulted:

‘Dunlop Factory Buildings At Birkenhead Point (Former)’, www.environment.nsw.gov.au

‘Five Dock racecourse’, Dictionary of Sydney, www.dictionaryofsydney.org

Graham Spindler, Uncovering Sydney: Walks into Sydney’s Unexpected and Endangered Places (1991)

Brian & Barbara Kennedy, Sydney and Suburbs: A History and Descriptions, (1982)

‘The Names of Sydney: Suburbs D to G’, Pocket Oz Sydney, www.visitsydneyaustralia.com.au

‘Roaming Roy Goes Shopping For History – Birkenhead Point’, The Tingle Factor Box, 24-Feb-2013, www.tinglefactor.typepad.com

Josephine Tovey, ‘Resurrected shopping centre up for sale’, Sydney Morning Herald, 06-Mar-2010

▄▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▄

✾ late night shopping at Birkenhead Point in any case would be a misnomer as the centre’s closing time on Thursday is 7:30pm

✩ a couple of sources give the date as 1928

⍟ shoes were the other mainstay of Perdriau Bros’ production business…in 1928 just prior to the merger they were still producing 50,000 shoes per week

❂ although some of the company’s advertising in the day referred to the business as the “Dunlin Rubber Co”

⌺ architect Peter Hickey’s design of the commercial project allowed the extant brick buildings to retain their former industrial character whilst integrating the centre into the maritime setting of the waterfront…the original buildings are listed by Heritage NSW as being of Federation warehouse design

Chaoyang Jie, Art, Culture and History: A Street Worth Seeing in Shenhe District, Shenyang

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Heritage & Conservation, Travel

Chaoyang Street in the Imperial Palace district of Shenyang, overshadowed by the proximity of the city’s most illustrious tourist drawcard, the Gu Gong Palace itself, doesn’t get the interest it perhaps deserves. Visitors to Shenyang tend to be drawn to Gu Gong and with equal magnetic force to the “shoppers’ paradise” of the Middle Street Pedestrian Mall . But if you divert some of that time to exploring Chaoyang Street, you might happily discover some less known little treats it has to offer.

Fengtian office of Southern Manchurian Railways (131 Chaoyang Street)

It’s hard to credit that this rundown building with its faded facade and peeling paintwork, and the roof vegetation, was once the Fengtian※ office of the powerful Japanese Southern Manchurian Railway organisation, known as Mantetsu. Japanese’s control of the railways network in China’s Northeast came about after Japan defeated Russia in the 1904-05 war. The railway line, running from Harbin in the north to Port Arthur (Lüshan) in the south, was acquired by the Japanese in 1906. The premises on Chaoyang Street were clearly still occupied and padlocked from the outside (apparently currently a training centre for a children’s library system). However, the organic outgrowth of the roof resembling someone’s unkempt backyard, suggested that the property was not a candidate for the local tourist circuit.

Shenyang Huangchengli Cultural Industrial Park (129 Chaoyang Street)

Shenyang and Chaoyang Jie’s penchant for turning the ordinary and mundane into something fresh and different is ably illustrated by the makeover given this old industrial complex. Situated like the ex-Manchurian Railways depot in the 皇城社区 (Huangcheng neighbourhood), a narrow entrance lane from the street leads to a small square. A new project, still presently in the process of completion, is to transform what was a drab old industrial site into a visually more appealing urban landscape. An attractive and classy new arch adorns the entrance to the square and historically and culturally relevant murals and other artworks including elegant carved relief panels decorate the walls. A subject figuring prominently in the industrial park’s paintings is local celebrity and 1930s Dongbei martial strongman Marshal Zhang (“the younger”). The artistic facelift of the old industrial complex on Chaoyang Street is a refreshing innovation in Shenyang, but one for which the city has precedents, eg, Shenyang’s 1905 Cultural and Creative Park taps into that same artistic and aesthetic potential for transforming a depressed industrial wasteland.

Marshal Zhang Mansion (Shaoshuaifu Alley, off Chaoyang Street)

Marshal Mansion, located off Chaoyang Street, is the former residence of the “Two Zhangs”, Northeast warlords from the Chinese Republic era – father Zhang Zuolin and son Zhang Xueliang. The mansion now a museum comprises several buildings connected by courtyards. The main building, the family mansion itself, is neo-Gothic in style and is fronted by a body of large stones which have a prehistoric resemblance. The other buildings include an amalgam of different architectural styles (eg, traditional Siheyuan buildings, South China pavilions and Chinese-Western mixed styles). There’s lots of military stuff and a good collection of material and photos from the younger Zhang’s life after his fall from power and emigration to Hawaii. Other items of interest at the museum include the Zhang family carriage used to ferry the Zhang kids to school, and one of China’s very earliest motor vehicles. Admission is ¥60 adult and ¥30 concession.

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※ a former name for Shenyang

The Rise and Decline of Cobb & Co: An American Business Venture in the Colonial Australian Outback – Part II

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Old technology, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

⇩ Cobb & Co coach at Scarborough, NSW(Photo: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney) ⇧

See also the preceding post The Rise and Decline of Cobb & Co – Part I

By the 1880s Cobb & Co’s coach lines had become so successful in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland that most of its competitors had been either relegated to the ranks of commercial obscurity, gone out of business altogether or been swallowed up by the ubiquitous, dominant transport market leader (or all three!)

Overreach and eventual decline

Cobb & Co’s foray in new areas of enterprise led it, and specifically company boss James Rutherford, into more and more diverse fields – everything from gold and copper mines to horse-breeding to newspapers. The inevitable downside of over-diversification was diminishing success…moreover the failures were often the result of bad and even disastrous investments (a Lithgow iron ore mine, a 1880s railway construction project connecting Glen Innes and Tenterfield)💮and in this the blame lay squarely with Rutherford. Rutherford as GM had some glaring shortcomings – he was often impetuous in business when he should have been measured, and made important (and increasingly unwise) decisions without consulting his partners [Kathy Riley), Australian Geographic, 18-Oct-2011, www.australian geographic.com.au].

⇩ A fully loaded six-horse Cobb & Co coach

(Photo: www.visityuleba.com.au) ⇧

Other factors contributing to Cobb & Co’s downfall

In addition to the instability of taking on too much concurrently, the company was a victim of misfortune and circumstance. The 1890s was a decade that brought drought and a depression to the colonies. The drought hit Cobb & Co like a sledgehammer – the cost of feed for their thousands of horses sky-rocketed! During just the four years from 1898-1902, the cost was £70,000, which was nearly half of Cobb & Co’s total revenue. Compounding this was further devastation arising from the drought – losses of livestock, plummeting of the values of company’s properties [ibid.].

⇧ Vic Museums (Photo credit: https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/1256058)

Eclipsed by the advance of rail transport

The introduction of commercial railways in the inland regions of Australia from the 1870s was a forewarning that the demise of coach transport was on the horizon. Cobb & Co in Victoria and NSW survived the new competition from the railroad for a time – in part because the coach line adopted the strategy of providing a complimentary service to it (joining the dots between the rail routes)✪. It also pushed its operations further westwards into NSW to service new localities and communities beyond the rail terminus [‘Coaching days in NSW’, (Cobb & Co in NSW), http://www.orange.nsw.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Cobb-Co-Resource.pdf].

Ultimately though Cobb & Co was simply delaying the inevitable in the two southern colonies…Victoria ceased its company operations in 1890. The NSW operations’ decline led to its Bathurst and Bourke factories closing down not long after…all later coach-making was done through the Charleville Coach Plant in Queensland. By 1897 all the NSW lines ceased except those in the Bourke area [ibid.]. In 1902 Cobb & Co experienced a net loss of over £18,000 and owed considerably more than that to bankers and creditors [Riley, op.cit.]. Liquidation of the company soon followed. The following year the company was reformed but this wasn’t able to revive its flagging fortunes.

⇧ Cobb & Co Charleville coachworks (Qld) (Photo: www.qhatlas.com.au/)

Queensland, the last outpost for Cobb & Co coaches

Only “vast and untrammelled” Queensland held out against the railways’ dominance, maintaining “a solid demand for coaching” beyond Federation and into the new century, with routes in the colony peaking at more than 7000km in 1900. Queensland Cobb & Co lines lingered on, gradually losing business to the railways, their routes shrivelling up bit by bit. The advent of motor vehicles, while still at a rudimentary stage, foreshadowed that horse coaches were dinosaurs as a long-term prospect. Cobb & Co itself dabbled in automobiles and in store-keeping, but these ventures brought it no success [ibid.].

Air mail anyone?

The embryonic development of commercial air travel was another sign of the imminent end of the road for Cobb & Co. In 1922 QANTAS (Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services) launched its inaugural air mail and passenger flying service (based in central west Queensland). Cobb & Co made its final trip in 1924 on the Yuleba to Surat (Qld) route. Thus the curtain was drawn for good on what had been Australia’s first ever privately-owned public transport system [ibid; Simpson, loc.cit.].

Endnote: A television series rip-off
In the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a fictionalised TV take on the Cobb & Co story…made in Australia by ITV Britain♚. A fairly unexceptional piece of television adventure and light on historical accuracy, Whiplash was marketed in Australia and the US as “an Australianised Western”, it starred the serviceable American TV actor Peter Graves as the fictional “Chris(sic) Cobb”. Some of the episodes were written by the future creator of Star Trek Gene Roddenberry [‘Whiplash’, Classic Australian Television, www.classicaustraliantv.com].

⇧ ‘Whiplash’: Peter Graves in a scene (Photo: www.nostalgiacentral.com)

⇩ Artransa Studios, French’s Forest (Photo: www.abctvgorehill.com.au)

PostScript: The Cobb & Co Museum
Fittingly, given that Queensland was the state that maintained the Cobb & Co tradition the longest, it has a museum dedicated to the memory of the Cobb & Co pioneers. Located in country Toowoomba, the museum houses historic Cobb & Co coaches as part of an extended collection of horse-drawn vehicles – the ‘National Carriage Collection’. (Source: www.queensland.com)

⥰⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽⥰

💮 which left Cobb and Co a very sizeable £130,000 in debt

♚ filmed on location at Scone, NSW, and at Artransa Park Studios in French’s Forest, (northern Sydney) which then contained a suitably bushy backdrop

✪ this contrasted markedly with the fate of coach transport in England – where the introduction of railways, occurring from the 1830s, killed off the coaches in quick time [‘Cobb and Co coach’, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, (Margaret Simpson, Curator, Transport), 12-Jun-2013, http://maas.museum]

💠 💠 💠

The Rise and Decline of Cobb & Co: An American Business Venture in the Colonial Australian Outback – Part I

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Old technology, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History, Society & Culture

❝Such days as when the Royal Mail was run by Cobb & Co❞ ~ Henry Lawson

🌀-🌀-🌀

Cobb and Co is a name that still has much currency within Australian and New Zealand society. In New South Wales in the rural tourist industry there is the “Cobb & Co Heritage Trail” which invites travellers to take the “historical self-drive” following the outback route from Bathurst to Bourke that the celebrated erstwhile coach service once trekked. Queensland holds a Cobb & Co festival each year to honour the historic Surat to Yuleba route. There are touring bus and coach businesses operating that have also appropriated the name…in addition there are “Cobb & Co hotels” and “Cobb and Co bottle shops” scattered around regional areas of the eastern states※.

⇓ Cobb & Co Heritage Trail

All of this is testimony to the fame of the original Cobb & Company which was once a household transport name, etching for itself a place in the folklore of Australia’s outback regions. The company’s story begins in the goldfields of Victoria in the 1850s. In 1853 the American Adams & Co coach firm despatched Freeman Cobb and three American colleagues⚀ to Melbourne with the objective of establishing a local operation which would capitalise on the hordes of fortune seekers flocking to the Victorian gold rushes. As things transpired, Cobb ended up starting his own coach service together with the other Americans🔰, thus was born Cobb & Co.

Freeman Cobb ⇑ (Photo: www.geni.com)

The first trip (January 1854) of Cobb & Co carrying passengers, goods and equipment went from Collins Street (Melbourne city) to the Forest Creek goldfields (now Castlemaine) and to Bendigo✫. Cobb & Co was a winner pretty much from the outset…by 1856 the company was worth £16,000 (in 2011 values around $2.1 million). Freeman Cobb however didn’t stick around to see the full flowering of it’s success, after three years he sold out of his eponymous company, moving on to other (less successful) ventures. Cobb & Co changed hands a couple of times, and then in 1861 it was purchased by a consortium of nine US and Canadian businessmen for £23,000 ($3.4m in 2011) [‘Cobb & Co: historical transport’, (Kathy Riley), Australian Geographic, 18-Oct-2011, www.australian geographic.com.au].

The driving force of the firm under the consortium was another American immigrant, James Rutherford. Rutherford began by organising all of the company’s lines (the different routes), making them more profitable concerns. Under his leadership Cobb & Co expanded into NSW and Queensland (the NSW operations were based at Bathurst). At the company’s peak in the 1870s, it’s coaches were covering a distance of nearly 45,000km a week with routes stretching from the very top of Queensland (the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cooktown) down to southern Victoria [ibid.; ‘In the Days of Cobb & Co’, Sydney Mail, 20-Apr-1921, www.trove.nla.gov.au]. As one one chronicler of the iconic transport company’s story observed, Cobb & Co was many things combined – “the Qantas, the Australia Post, the TNT and the Holden of its day” [Sam Everingham, Wild Ride, The Rise and Fall of Cobb and Co, (2007)].

James Rutherford ⇓

(Photo source: State Library of Queensland)

What accounted for Cobb & Co’s spectacular success in the coach transportation business?

The decisive factors were manifold but basically Cobb & Co beat it’s competitors in several logistical areas. It’s coaches were faster and more efficient…while the rivals used heavy, rigid English coaches for their runs, Cobb imported American Concord coaches (made in New Hampshire and used in the American West) which were rounded and lightweight and had supple coach bodies – far more suited to the rugged Australian landscape than the cumbersome English coaches. Consequently Cobb & Co’s coaches gave a smoother, faster ride [Riley, loc.cit.] (the Concords, though superior, apparently didn’t always deliver that smooth a ride as they were known colloquially as the “red bone-shakers”).

A replica C & C Concord coach on display at Timbertown, NSW ⇓

The Concord coaches were fitted with leather braces and straps in place of the inflexible iron ones used on other horse-drawn vehicles which had a tendency to snap too easily (leather also provided greatly superior suspension for the carriage). Concord coaches were made to last the rugged journey and so contributed to a reputation for reliability that the Cobb service was able to establish [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.].

A master stroke by Cobb was to establish a series of changing stations every 16-32km along the routes. This gave Cobb & Co journeys the big advantage of always having fresh horses, enabling the drivers to maintain high speeds over long distances.

Cobb & Co coachmen – risky adventures, pitfalls and hazards of the job

The drivers themselves employed by the company were possessed of extraordinary skills in managing their horses and vehicles. They had to be to negotiate all the difficulties and obstacles in their paths and still keep on schedule…atrocious roads made worse by inclement weather, flooding of creeks and rivers, and unpredictable encounters with dangerous bushrangers◘, were all recurring events that challenged the mettle of the coach drivers. The dangers aside, experiencing the thrills and (near) spills and the full-on ‘wildness’ of a Cobb & Co journey through “the bush”, must have been an exhilarating experience for colonial travellers in the day.

Many of the drivers, some of which Cobb and (later) Rutherford recruited from the US, were colourful characters in addition to being accomplished horse handlers…blokes such as Dick Houston, Jim Conroy, ‘Silent’ Bob Bates, H Barnes, and not least “Cabbage Tree” Ned Devine. Devine, with his team of distinctive light grey horses, was by all accounts a particularly exceptional driver (earning himself a very good wage of £17 a week)…when the first English cricket team toured Australia (HH Stephenson’s, 1862), Devine was their driver on the Victorian leg of the tour [K. A. Austin, ‘Devine, Edward (Ned) (1833–1908)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/devine-edward-ned-3405/text5169, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 31 May 2019].

Ned ‘Cabbage Tree’ Devine ⇓

(Photo source: State Library of Victoria)

Similarly, Cobb & Co’s grooms played an integral role in the highly organised operation…each groom was personally responsible for eight to ten horses and for their gear. The clockwork operation saw the drivers sound a bugle when they were one mile from the next staging post, this alerted the grooms to have the fresh team of horses primed and ready the minute the coach arrived. The pay-off for such a high level of efficiency, superior speed and dependability was that Cobb & Co scored lucrative mail contracts from the colonial governments [ibid.].

Cobb diversifies from its passenger and goods transport base

General manager Rutherford was the catalyst for Cobb & Co’s diversification into new businesses. Initially this payed dividends with its first move, appropriately enough, into coach and buggy building at Bathurst, NSW. Just four years into this activity Cobb & Co could boast that it was the largest coach-maker in Australia [ibid.].

Rutherford also acquired pastoral properties for the company, another profitably step for Cobb & Co. By 1877 they had nine sheep and cattle stations across NSW and Queensland covering an area of 11,000 square kilometres and turning a net profit of £77,500 (equivalent to $11.3M in 2011)…this was at a time that the company’s revenue from coaching – the principal business – was yielding only £11,500 ($1.7M) a year by comparison [ibid.].

By the end of the 1870s Cobb & Co had been in business for 25 years and had already established itself in the eastern mainland states as something of an institution in the “wide, brown land”. It had undergone diversification and experienced growth, but as I will show in Part II, the remarkable good fortunes of Cobb & Co was about to take a decided turn for the worse.

💫 –💫 –💫

PostScript: Exporting the Cobb & Co model

Unsurprisingly, the spectacular trajectory of Cobb & Co’s rise in fortune and fame drew imitators elsewhere. A number of coaching services, some using the same name (although totally unrelated to the original eastern Australian company), sprang up independently in South Australia, Western Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Africa. This last concern was started up by Freeman Cobb himself in 1871, hoping to cash in on the discoveries of diamonds and gold in the Kimberley and the Transvaal (unfortunately Cobb couldn’t reproduce his Australian success, dying in South Africa still in his 40s) [K. A. Austin, ‘Cobb, Freeman (1830–1878)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cobb-freeman-3237/text4883, published first in hardcopy 1969, accessed online 29 May 2019].

‘Kiwi’ Cobb & Co

The New Zealand version was begun by Charles Cole, who’d previously ran Cobb & Co’s Smyth’s Creek to Ballarat line in Australia❎. As in Victoria and NSW the impetus for the initiative in NZ was the gold rush in Otago (1861). Cole’s Otago coach proprietorship was in partnership with the Hoyts brothers (operating as Cole, Hoyt & Co., proprietors of Cobb & Co. Telegraph Line of Coaches)…later the service was extended to Christchurch and Canterbury. The legendary Ned ‘Cabbage Tree’ Devine worked at one time for the New Zealand outfit, driving the Dunedin to Palmerston and Oamaru routes [Austin, ‘Ned Devine’, loc.cit.; ‘Cobb & Co (New Zealand)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛

※ in fact there are all manner of commercial enterprises in Australasia using the “Cobb & Co” handle as a trading name – restaurants, bars, B ‘n Bs, screen printers, clockmakers, kitchen manufacturers, etc.

⚀ the others were James Swanson, Anthony Blake and John Murray Peck (who later became a successful stock and station agent in Melbourne and a vice-president of the Essendon Australian Football Club)

🔰 the average age of the four American founders was just 22 – although they did have combined experience working for Adams, Wells Fargo and other coach companies in the US

✫ Cobb charged £5 per passenger for the roughly 110 ml journey [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.]

◘ one of the best known bushranging incidents involving Cobb & Co was the 1863 holdup at Eugowra (in the NSW central west)…notorious bushranging gang led by Frank Gardiner and Ben Hall robbed a Ford & Co coach (the firm was takes over by Cobb & Co one week later) of £14,000 in gold and banknotes from the goldfields [‘Details of the Robbery’, (Welcome to Eugowra in the heart of bushranger country), www.eugowra.aus.net]

❎ Cole brought one of the custom built Concord coaches across the Tasman with him to Otago