Ma and Pa Kettle on the Farm Again: Hillbilly Stereotypes in Film and Television

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Cinema, Media & Communications, Social History

Hillbilly (noun) informal, chiefly derogatory: an unsophisticated country person [Oxford Dictionary of English]. Etymology: unknown, however the explanation favoured by Anthony Harkins is persuasive if not definitive – coming from the melding of “hill-fort” with “billie” (friend or companion) by Scottish highlanders [‘Hillbillies’, Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture,www.encyclopediaofarkansashistoryandculture.net✱]

☋☊☋☊☋☊ ☋☊☋☊☋☊

The title of this blog references a popular 1950s movie series which neatly encapsulates the essence of the negative  stereotypes of the ‘hillbilly’ conveyed through cinema and television that the jaundiced eye of Hollywood has delighted in perpetuating over the decades – in the name of humour. “Ma and Pa Kettle” are two impoverished and uneducated but headstrong back-country bumpkins on a dilapidated wreck of a farm with 16 mostly out-of-control children (“Hen-pecked” ‘Pa’ is slow-thinking and pathologically indolent, singularly dedicated to the pursuit of the avoidance of any work; ‘Ma’ is a large and loudly haranguing woman and only one cog brighter than her not-intellectually-overburdened husband!). The characters made their visual debut in a 1949 movie The Egg and I (based on a novel by Betty McDonald) in supporting parts but proved so popular that Universal Studios elevated them to leads which segued into nine more films with titles like Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town, Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair and Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki ⌑
.

In popular currency the notion of the hillbilly has an overwhelmingly pejorative connotation anywhere within the reach of American culture (ie, everywhere!), especially as a topic of discussion or comment outside the American South. The stereotype is deeply embedded in and has been perpetuated through the agency of American popular culture – in literature, there have been long-running hillbilly comic strips ridiculing country folk as basically “dumber than dumb”, especially seen in ‘Li’l Abner’ and ‘Snuffy Smith’ (at left). But the idea of hillbillies as backward, ornery and all the other negative connotations associated with them, has been nowhere more pervasive than on the celluloid screen, both big and small.

The Southern Appalachians ⬇️ ️️
The perception given by popular cinema and television comedy is that hillbillies can be found in a loosely defined geographical region somewhere in the American South. If need arises in a storyline to pinpoint their location more precisely, screenwriters will tend to locate them in mountainous areas, and if named it will usually be in one of two southern physiographic regions, either the Ozarks (extending over parts of Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Kansas) or the massive Appalachians (several systems of mountains but usually “Appalachian hillbillies” are depicted as coming from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, and (parts of) Ohio)✥.
The Ozarks (“Hillibilly haven”) ⬆️

The hillbilly trope
Hollywood, from the pioneering days of the film industry, has been happy to resort to negative stereotypes of the hillbilly. The early film emphasis was on showing the hillbilly as an agent of violence and social menace, as degenerates and outcasts, only after WWII do we start to see hillbillies as a screen vehicle for innocuous farce and comic effect with the advent of Ma and Pa Kettle and the TV comedies that followed in the Sixties [A Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon, (2005)]. The motion pictures’ use of a hillbilly trope can be seen in films as far back as the 1904 silent The Moonshiner…in fact the story of the hillbilly clandestinely making ‘moonshine’ in the backwaters while evading the law has been a much-used trope in movies, recurring for example recently in the Prohibition-era ‘bootlegging’ flick Lawless (2012) [‘Portraying Appalachia: How the Movies Can Get it Wrong’, (Tom Porter), Bowdoin News Archive, 09-Jun-2017, www.community.bowdoin.edu

The South is “a different country”: More audience fodder for Hollywood
In the television age Hollywood’s “go-to” take on hillbillies typically utilises the persona for pure comic intent, mercilessly exposing and ridiculing the (usually) working class hillbilly for his or her wilful ignorance, lack of education and sophistication, depicting him or her as “pre-modern and ignorant hillbillies” (in Anthony Harkins’ words) to create, “one of the more lasting and pervasive images in American popular iconography” [Harkins, op.cit.]. Given that areas like Appalachia with its coal-dependent economy are cyclically prone to recurrent “booms and busts”, poverty is a familiar reality for very many of those residing in such places, accordingly Hollywood has traditionally seen hillbillies as soft targets, comfortable in showing up their unworldliness and illiteracy for a laugh…the Beverly Hillbillies of that popular American TV comedy of the same name are “dirt-poor” until Jed makes a fortuitous discovery on their ‘worthless’ land which transforms the ‘Hicksville’ family into “oil-rich tycoons”.

‘Monstrous mountaineers’ and other ‘psychopaths’
The comedic hillbilly has proved a rich source of material for movies and television, but as a variant from time to time Hollywood has also presented a very different, menacing on-screen hillbilly persona – the classic cinematic example of this is perhaps the 1972 Deliverance movie. Deliverance portrays hillbillies as sadistic, lawless types bereft of any semblance of moral compass, ‘inbred’✪ nefarious individuals who commit acts which are both morally and sexually depraved⍍. In hillbilly movies of this type, in place of the benign and fun-loving “Good Ol’ Boys”, are more brooding and sinister Southerners, sometimes isolated loners, psychotic serial-killers and even corrupt sheriffs. Meredith McCarroll, in a study focusing on the Appalachians [Unwhite: Appalachia, Race and Film, (2018)], has identified several distinct tropes of hillbilly movies. McCarroll’s typology includes Monstrous Mountaineer [Deliverance, Wrong Turn (2003), Timber Halls (2007)]; Heroic Highlander [Next of Kin (1982)], Killing Season (2013); Lazy Hillbilly [Our Hospitality (1923), Kentucky Moonshine (1938)]✜.

Where are the “black hillbillies?” “Honorary non-whites?”
McCarroll in her just published book focussed on the fact that the hillbillies portrayed in Hollywood movies and television are phenotypically white…the towns of Hillbilly films and TV comedies typically, are uniformly devoid of black people, eg, The Andy Griffith Show/Mayberry, R.F.D. (despite the reality, a concentration of large numbers of African-Americans in the South!?!). Leaving aside the anomalous element of that scenario for a moment, in Unwhite McCarroll argues that the depiction of white hillbillies on the screen – characteristically disparaging – signifies that the TV and film-makers are applying the same kind of negative trope traditionally employed by Hollywood to vilify non-white minority groups (native Americans, Black and Hispanic peoples), as part of the ‘other’ in society [McCarroll, cited in ‘McCarroll’s book debunks myths about Appalachia’, (Lucas Weitzenberg), Bowdoin Orient, 28-Sep-2018, www.bowdoinorient.com].

The 2018 independent documentary Hillbilly (Sarah Rubin and Ashley York) offers a similar critique on the vilification of specifically Appalachian, but of Southern culture generally. Decrying the screen prevalence of negative hillbilly stereotypes (represented as promiscuous, “buffoonish alcoholics” and “trailer trash”), at the same time York and Rubin make a link between those stereotypes and the corporate exploitation of the Appalachian Mountains’ natural resources [‘”Hillbilly” Reclaims Appalachia’s Identity Against Lasting Insidious Stereotypes’, Pop Matters, (Argun Ulgen), 21-Nov-2018, www.popmatters.com; ‘”Hillbilly” explores stereotypes of Appalachia’, Times-Tribune, (Brad Hall), 19-Sep-2018, www.thetimestribune.com].

Escaping to an imagined and idealised South
Hollywood’s hillbilly stereotypes extend to a romanticisation of the hillbilly, often their lives are romanticised as simple and uncomplicated (much as native and Black Americans and Mexicans are!). The hillbilly is shown as backward and quaintly pre-industrial, embodied in the famous river bank scene in Deliverance of hillbillies lazing about with nothing better to do than mindlessly pluck banjos [McCarroll, op.cit.]. Allied to this perception, Hollywood’s hillbilly tropes are a component of “using the South as a foil for modern life”…for Americans living in the Sixties and Seventies it was a confrontational time, full of harsh realities and worrying big issues such as the conflict over the Vietnam War, race riots, poverty and the Cold War. Feeding the viewing public a diet of idyllic and irenic images of Southern harmony, a distorted sense of life not being too serious, provided a palatable form of escapism for Americans in the big cities. So we got shows like The Andy Griffith Show, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres and The Dukes of Hazzard, presenting fictional Southern ‘Hicksville’ towns with names like ‘Mayberry’ and ‘Hooterville’, peopled by harmless hayseed sheriffs and shopkeepers [‘The Weird History of Hillbilly TV’, (Gabe Bullard), www.bittersoutherner.com].

‘Hicksploitation’ reality obsession
In the age of reality TV saturating our screens, the subject matter of hillbillies has far from abated. The trope has perpetuated itself within this sub-genre of television with a string of titles pitched fairly and squarely at the LCD in society…Swamp People, Moonshiners, Bayou Billionaires, Hillbilly Handfishin’, American Hoggers, and even Lady Hoggers, as well primus inter pares, the much-hyped docu-drama Duck Dynasty. Reality hillbilly shows keep faith with the standard formula, peopled with folk who are not exactly what you’d call cerebral, rather they are raucous, profane, intolerant, “anything goes” ‘rednecks’…so lots of guns around, wild animals of various kinds, ‘Down-South” stills producing copious amounts of “sly grog”, “hunting-and-a-fishing”, excessive facial hair, Confederate flags, lack of respect for authority, etc. Despite the often appalling and sometimes degrading behaviour exhibited in “redneck reality TV”, viewers continue to subscribe in meaningful numbers to this brand of “televisional fare”. Testimony perhaps to the fact that “people will (always) tune in to see themselves on screen or the extremes of another culture” [“‘Redneck’ reality TV is one big ‘Party'”, (Patrick Ryan), USA Today, 09-Dec-2014, www.usatoday.com].

PostScript: “Warring Hillbillies” folklore
One of the well-trawled narrative sources for hillbilly films and TV programs has been the historical feud between the Hatfield and the McCoy clans (1860s-1890s). The protracted conflict between the two neighbouring mountaineering families, stretching from West Virginia to Kentucky, a part of Appalachian folklore, caught the imagination of Hollywood, providing it with ample material for screen productions over the years. This has included both comedies and dramas, ranging from Abbott and Costello’s farcical Comin’ Round the Mountain to the more recent (2012) Hatfields and McCoy miniseries.[see also the following article – ‘The Much Mooted ‘Hillbilly Wars’ of Appalachia : The McCoy v. Hatfield Feud’]

∇ Ma minus Pa – the Kettles’ swan song ≣≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≣
✱ the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture points out that the word ‘hillbilly’ is often used interchangeably with several other derogatory epithets – eg, ‘redneck’, ‘white trash’ and ‘cracker’
⌑ despite being depicted as quintessential ‘hillbillies’ (as defined by popular culture), Ma and Pa Kettle, both in the original book and in the films live in a rural locale somewhere in Washington state…not Appalachia or the Ozarks or anywhere in the South (although one of the series entries is The Kettles in the Ozarks). Not confining itself to the negative profiling of hillbillies, the Kettle movies delve even deeper into stereotypes with a thorough “hatchet job” on the series’ two dim American ‘Indian’ characters – ‘Crowbar’ and ‘Geoduck’
✥ although people labelled as ‘hillbillies’ don’t necessarily have to live in the mountains per se to be thus categorised
✪ remember, Elvis made a ‘hillbilly’ movie called Kissin’ Cousins
⍍ we see through Hollywood’s lens suggestions of promiscuity, of inbreeding, bestiality, all manner of sexual deviance, attributed to the on-screen hillbilly [Hall, loc.cit]. To balance the negative slant slightly, as Tom Porter notes, on rarer occasions screen depictions do exist which present mountaineers more positively – as rugged and even heroic folk living outside societal norms living independently on their wits (somewhat akin to filmic representations of the “Wild West” prior to the 1970s), Porter, loc.cit.]
✜ McCarroll also nominates an infinitely smaller list of “hillbilly movies” which manage, to greater or lesser degree, to avoid the standard stereotypes [eg, Winter’s Bone (2010), Norma Rae (1979), Matewan (1987)]

The World’s First Animated Pop Icon Cat…but Whose ‘Baby’ was Felix?

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Cinema, Leisure activities, Media & Communications, Memorabilia, Popular Culture

Felix the cat,
The wonderful, wonderful cat!
(Popular theme song lyrics)

↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝

❛ I made the cat and the cat made me! ❜
~ Pat Sullivan

↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝

The model for a certain cartoon mouse …

The best part of a decade before Mickey Mouse made his first appearance on a celluloid screen and then went on to establish himself as the international popular culture phenomenon par excellence, there was Felix the Cat. The parentage of Mickey Mouse is not a topic that has generated the same level of controversy as that of Felix, which over the last forty years has been a matter for much impassioned cross-Pacific conjecture.

BF – before Felix…
Felix, the anthropomorphic black cat with the massive white eyes and the broadest of broad grins, was not the first animated cat to grace the screens of movie theatres. That honour went to a mouser called Krazy Kat, the conception of cartoonist George Herriman…first appearing as a comic strip character in the New York Evening Journal, Krazy Kat debuted on movie screens in 1916 in a silent short featuring the eponymous cat and his brick-throwing ‘frenemy’ Ignatz Mouse.

Master Tom, prototype
Not long after, Felix had his beginnings in the prototype form of Thomas Cat. In 1917 Australian cartoonist Pat Sullivan produced a short, animated silent film about a black cat, The Tail of Thomas Cat, through his own New York studio. By 1919 ‘Thomas Cat’ had morphed into ‘Master Tom’ in the short Feline Follies. After a follow-up entry (The Musical Mews) again starring Master Tom, Sullivan’s third short of 1919 (Adventures of Felix the Cat) changed the name of the ‘Tom’ character to the name he would henceforth be universally known as – Felix. Despite the seemingly clear lineage between Thomas Cat and Felix, some American animation historians discredit the connexion, citing Thomas Cat’s non-anthropomorphised nature, the uncertainty of his fur colour, the fact that he loses his tail fighting a rooster without ever being able to recover it (cf. the difference with Felix who can magically transform his tail into other forms) [‘Felix the Cat – McGill CS’, www.cs.mcgill.ca].

The chief animator of Sullivan’s film studio was Otto Messmer, but because of Sullivan’s proprietorial role in the process of animation production it was Sullivan’s name alone that appeared on the credits of films (this was a common business practice in animation at the time), despite Messmer as principal artist conceivably doing a weighty share of the studio’s artwork. After Sullivan’s premature death in 1933 his relatives in Australia took ownership of Felix. It wasn’t until 44 years later, that Messmer in an interview with animation historian John Canemaker belatedly made his claim to have been the originator of the famous feline.

Conflicting stories of Felix’s origin
Sullivan maintained all along that he was the creator – on a visit back to Australia in 1925 he told the Melbourne Argus newspaper that the idea for Felix had come to him when his wife brought a stray cat into Sullivan’s studio one day (as was her wont). On other occasions he said that the inspiration came from a Rudyard Kipling story, ‘The Cat that Walked by Himself’. For the name of his cartoon creation Sullivan explained that he had drawn on his native Antipodes… Australia Felix was a term in use from the 19th century to describe the western districts of the state of Victoria (also later the name of an Australian novel by Henry Handel Richardson). Another source for the cat’s name came from a contemporary fellow cartoonist – appearing in print in 1936 the cartoonist affirmed that Sullivan told him that he derived the name from a black West Indian-born boxer living and fighting in Australia called Peter Felix whom Sullivan was acquainted with (the animator being a big enthusiast of boxing) [Pat Sullivan – I made the cat and the cat made me’, www.vixenmagazine.com].

Messmer by contrast had a wholly different story of Felix’s ‘birth’ and evolution. He recounted to Canemaker for the latter’s 1977 documentary film that because Sullivan’s studio was busy at the time, he (Messmer) went away and by himself at home drew the figure that was to become Felix. He perceived of the mischievous black cat as a kind of animated Charlie Chaplin. Messmer explained that the name “Felix” was thought up by a Paramount Magazine journalist from the Latin words felis (cat) and felix (happy). Canemaker and other contemporary American animation historians have been undisguisedly dismissive of Sullivan’s creative contribution, backing Messmer’s claim, subscribing to the view that Messmer ‘ghosted’ Felix for Sullivan who was preoccupied with his entrepreneurial role (inexhaustibly promoting and marketing Felix to the world)✱.

Contesting Felix
Not surprisingly the strongest argument for endorsing Sullivan as Felix’s true creator comes from Australia, the animator-cum-entrepreneur’s homeland. Australian cartoonists, including some who knew Sullivan, have drawn attention to a comment during an interview when he visited Sydney in 1925 (quoted in the local papers): Sullivan stated that his practice was to ‘do the “key drawings” and leave the rest to a staff’ [Vixen Magazine, op.cit.]. Moreover, the Australian Cartoonist Association have argued that the distinctive lettering style of Sullivan can be detected on the Felix artwork, eg, in Feline Follies (Felix’s first incarnation), the lettering used matches examples of Sullivan’s handwriting. Additionally, certain speech bubbles in the short uses expressions and terms which have distinctive Australian usage, especially ” ‘Lo Mum! “. Australian animators, argue that had Otto Messmer conceived and created the prototype Felix film, as he claimed in 1977, he would have used the traditional American form of shorthand for mother, ‘mom’ (not ‘mum’) and he would not have dropped the ‘h’ in ‘hello’ which is more characteristically Australian or British◰. [‘Reclaiming Felix the Cat in the Picture Gallery’, (Judy Nelson, Exhibition, 1-May to 7-Aug 2005, State Library of NSW, Sydney), www.pandora.nla.gov.au]

Animator Ub Iwerks drawing animated rodent extraordinaire, M Mouse ▶

Sublime collaborations
Whether it was Messmer or Sullivan who was the true creator of Felix we may never know for sure, given that the episode occurred around 100 years ago and both claimants have been long dead. For a very long time the reflected glory for the creation of the animal superstar even more famous than Felix, Mickey Mouse, was almost exclusively falling on Walt Disney. Only in a relatively recent period, historically speaking, has the role of animator Ub Iwerks been properly acknowledged. Today even the Disney Corporation (metonymically known as the Mouse House), more or less unequivocally recognises Iwerks as the real creator of the mouse. But this doesn’t diminish Walt’s integral role from the origin point in developing Mickey’s personality and traits (not to mention the story lines). Similarly with Sullivan and Messmer, the fairest course may be to attribute causation, Felix’s genesis and transformation to the screen, to what was quintessentially a collaborative effort between two creative individuals.

PostScript A: Felix, a template worth copying
One green-eyed embryonic animator in the US in the mid-Twenties very much aware of Felix’s ascending star was Walt Disney. Disney’s earliest innovation in the field was his Alice Comedies where he inserted a human figure “Alice of Wonderland” into an animated landscape. As foil to Alice, the main animated figure in these shorts was Julius, a cat with a particularly strong resemblance to Felix…basically a clone of Felix [‘Felix the Cat’, (Ian Gordon), St James Encyclopaedia of Popular Culture (2002)]. Disney’s later followed up Julius with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (a product he ultimately lost creative control of) and then lucked in again, hitting the jackpot with Mickey Mouse…Oswald and Mickey were both different animals to Felix but again the physical similarities to the (original) Felix are there – albeit with reshaped faces and ears.

PostScript B: Felix, the image de jour to launch a new medium
Felix with his funny, all-too-fallible anthropomorphic ways (fond of a drink or two in ‘speakeasies’, given to making whoopee and his general hijinks and manic spurts in surrealistic situations)✪ suited the “Jazz Age” to a tee! [Michael Cart, ‘The Cat with the Killer Personality’, New York Times, 31-Mar-1991, www.nytimes.com]. Capitalising on Felix’s success on the big screen (upward of 150 animated shorts made in the 1920s), Sullivan introduced a comic strip version of Felix in 1923 (syndicated by King Features 1923-1967). Everyone wanted a piece of the famous celluloid feline, the US Navy’s Bombing Squadron adopted Felix as its insignia, his countenance was used as the logo for car dealerships, he was the mascot for the New York Yankees at one time and for many high schools [‘Felix the Cat’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The universal appeal of Felix made him the prime candidate to introduce television to Americans…in 1928 broadcaster RCA choose a papier-mâché doll of Felix as THE image for testing the new technology [‘The First Star of Television’, MZTV Museum, www.mztv.com].

PostScript C: A marketing bonanza
Felix as a commodity had an electrifying impact on the world of celebrity merchandising in the 1920s – the iconic image of the black cat popped up on toys, dolls, ceramics, postcards, cigarette cards, jigsaw puzzles, clothing, pencils, sheet music and so on (earning Sullivan an estimated $100,000 a year) [Dictionary of Sydney staff writer, Felix the cat, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/felix-the-cat, viewed 6th Oct 2018]

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
✱ the generally accepted view of Sullivan’s character and behaviour, which was very far from exemplary, seems to have jaundiced the opinion held by some commentators (particularly Canemaker) as to the merits of the Australian animator’s achievements
◰ as Nelson et al have argued, these discrepancies in the case for Messmer have not been accounted for satisfactorily by American animation historians including Canemaker
✪ this said, Felix could also be contemplative at times, deep in thought, working things out, solving problems…a cat for all seasons!

Remembrances of a Juvenile Bookworm: Old Street Directories I have had the Pleasure of … (Part 3)

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Built Environment, Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Local history, Media & Communications, Memorabilia, Social History

The further I delved into my “war-ravaged” copy of Wilson’s 1922 Authentic Director of Sydney and Suburbs, the more snippets of hitherto unearthed information, little gems of Sydney’s yesterday, I stumbled upon.

Among the minutiae of miscellaneous info contained in the directory’s index, one item that got my attention was a list of the consuls and overseas government agents in Sydney in 1922. Interesting to see that at that time there were consulate offices established in Sydney for tiny international entities like Latvia, Nicaragua, Columbia, Ecuador, Honduras, Serbia and the Czechoslovak Republic, but being not yet four years after the cessation of the hostilities of WWI, no consulates for the countries deemed by the victors to be the “guilty parties”, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Turkey. So much for moving on!!!…and we all know where that path catastrophically led!

Another curio I discovered was that among the State and Commonwealth government departments listed in the index, there were several with city addresses in Richmond Tce, The Domain. The questionably named Aborigines (spelt ‘Aborogines’) Protection Board, the Pharmacy Board of NSW, the Dental Board of NSW, the Medical Board of NSW, the Metropolitan Meat Industry Board and the Inspector-General of the Insane(sic) were all located in this east side of the city street…interesting in that this street, Richmond Terrace no longer exists!

Ad for the Orient Line

A total of forty-six shipping line companies were recorded as having offices in Sydney’s CBD. These included British-India SN Co, China-Australia Mail SS Line, Nippon Yusen Kaisha, the Adelaide Steamship Company, New Guinea, New Britain and the Solomon Islands (Line), the White Star Line✲ and the more contemporarily familiar P & O Line. Only one of the 46 placed a (full-paged and quite detailed) ad in the directory, the Australia to Britain Orient Line.

Royal Autos in ‘Wilson’s’

City clubs and buildings of interest
In a section of the index Wilson’s lists the various clubs, chambers, banks and arcades that formed part of the cityscape in 1922. The more ‘highbrow’ of the clubs, predominately “Gentlemen’s” establishments, tended to congregate ‘uptown’ (the end closer to Circular Quay) considered to be the smarter and more affluent part of the city. The clubs included the Australian Club (corner of Bent and Macquarie Sts)[¹], the Automobile Club of Australia (132 Phillip St)[²], the Country Club (17 Castlereagh St), the Catholic Club (107 Castlereagh St ), Masonic Club (216 Pitt St)[³], the N.S.W. Club (Bligh St)[⁴], the Soldiers’ Club (426 George St), the Union Club (2 Bligh St)[⁵], the Warrigal Club (145 Macquarie St). Also in the city were clubs associated with the sport (and business) of horse racing – these three used to be situated in the CBD, the Australian Jockey Club (now the Australian Turf Club) (8 Bligh St), the Canterbury Park Race Club (15 Castlereagh St) and the Rosehill Racing Club (32 Elizabeth St). Another city club intricately linked to horse racing is Tattersall’s Club (202-204 Pitt St). Traditionally the haunt of old style bookmakers, “City Tatts” as it is better known, still stands and operates on its original land, 123 years after its foundation.

The 1922 city’s chambers are a predictable lot with numerous entities bearing largely homogenous Anglo-(Saxon)Celtic names scattered around Phillip Street, the traditional law hub of the city. That equally upstanding and status quo affirming pillar of society in that day, the banks, are spread over a wide radius of the CBD. The only point of note about them is discovering that in the 1920s Australia financial climate, with regulation of the sector very tight, two foreign banks had Sydney branches and were allowed to trade here at that time… the French National d’Escompté de Paris, a forerunner of Banque National de Paris? (24 Hunter St) and even more surprisingly, the Japanese Bank (Falmouth Chambers, 117 Pitt St).

The original (1907) Challis House

One of the city buildings identified in Wilson’s Director with a busy and interesting history is Challis House, N⍛ 4-10 Martin Place. Eponymously named after merchant and University of Sydney benefactor John Henry Challis, the House has a long association with the University as well as many financial tenants over the decades. During WWI it was used as the recruiting campaign headquarters for New South Wales. The office building at the time of Wilson’s publication was in its original Victorian architectural state…in the Thirties it received a new (Art Deco) facade and later in 1993 it underwent major renovations [‘Challis House’, Sydney Architecture, www.sydneyarchitecture.com]

Blue Mountains – a “Tourist’s Guide”
Although it’s a street directory whose ambit is Sydney and suburbs, the Wilson’s directory ends with an extensive section (73pp) on the Blue Mountains. The entry even encompasses the town of Lithgow (also called ‘Eskbank’ in 1922) which is 15 miles west of the Blue Mountains. The book has lots of detailed information on the BM suburbs, each suburb has an entry on accommodation and the scenic natural highlights of the Mountains with select maps indicating points of interest.

The “Half-way House” of Blue Mts

The directory gives a picture of Springwood, the largest of the Lower Mountains towns✥, that suggests a warm place in an otherwise cold region – “sheltered by its westerly walls from the cooler air of the higher altitudes…pleasant sunshine all year round…in winter the climate is so equable that many families make Springwood a permanent residence”. An opinion echoed by Springwood house and land agent R.F. Harvey’s ad extolling “The Best Winter Climate in the World”. For day visitors to Springwood, the Hotel ‘Oriental’ awaits their patronage (ad, right).

Katoomba, the “largest of the mountain tourist resorts” with its “wide choice of charming and picturesque views”. Despite being 68 miles from Sydney, “horses and vehicles are always obtainable” – as this advertisement (left) on page 706 offering trips to the famous Jenolan Caves in luxury Buicks testifies.

Nearby Leura is “celebrated for the beauty of its great showpiece – the Leura Falls…in themselves alone worth the trip to the mountains”. With unfettered enthusiasm the writer goes on to laud the town in extravagant terms: “the place has been so well laid out as a tourist resort that it offers a perfect kaleidoscope of the views”. The object of Wilson’s Director is clearly to sell the Mountains to visitors from Sydney which synergises nicely with the numerous accommodation ads (funny that!) that appear such as this one (right) for Leura’s Hotel Alexandria (still in business in 2018).

The spa town of Medlow Bath, is “a pretty little village, rising rapidly in tourist favour”. The tiny Upper Mountains town is famous for its Hydro-Majestic hotel resort where in the day the better-off citizens of Sydney would periodically retreat to benefit from its therapeutic mineral waters and clean mountain air. Built by retailer Mark Foy (Jr) as a hydropathic sanatorium, the “Hydro-Maje” in the Twenties was where the cream of Sydney’s elite flocked on the weekends to socialise.

Jenolan tourer (Blackheath)

One station further west, the mountains tourist resort of Blackheath, had the writer reaching for new superlatives! The bush trails and valleys (the “Valley of the Grose” as he calls it) lead to “world-famous Govett’s Leap (waterfall), a stream which plunges headlong over a perpendicular wall of dark-tinted rock on to a mass of boulders, some 520 feet below”. Mermaid’s Cave is “like a glimpse of a fairyland…a more picturesque scene cannot be imagined”, etc. The other attraction of Blackheath in 1922 was that “there is every probability of its having a permanent water supply in the near future”. The accommodation ad below is for Blackheath’s ‘Ivanhoe Hotel’, replaced in 1938 by the now quite old-looking ‘New Ivanhoe Hotel’.

Mt Victoria, 79 miles by paved road❂ from Sydney, the highest point of the Blue Mountains (the guide gives it at 3,424 feet above sea-level)⍍, is praised for the scenic countryside surrounding the town dotted with charmingly named spots like Fern Cave, Fairy Bower, Fern Tree Gully and Witch’s Glen, for the walker to explore.

Upper Blue Mts map (‘Wilson’s’)

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[¹] the Australian Club (still at the same address, 165 Macquarie St), is the oldest men-only club in the country, dating from 1838
[²] the Automobile Club changed both its name to the Royal Automobile Club of Australia (RACA), and its location to Castlereagh St North, in the year of the directory’s publication (1922)
[³] the Masonic Club still exists but the premises relocated to a new building at 169-171 Castlereagh St in 1927
[⁴] the N.S.W. Club House is still in existence at 25-31 Bligh St, but the Club itself amalgamated with the Australian Club in 1969 and the building has had a series of commercial tenants since (currently occupied by the Lowy Institute for International Affairs)
[⁵] still in operation (since 1857), these days at 25 Bent St and now called the Union, University and Schools Club

✲ of Titanic fame, White Star Line merged with Cunard in 1934 as White-Cunard, before eventually becoming defunct
✥ Blaxland and Glenbrook, two other Lower BM towns, get very short shrift from Wilson’s, relegated to brief, passing mentions only
❂ the Great Western Highway, which bisects the Blue Mountains, was still called Bathurst Road in 1922
⍍ although according to markers on the spot, One Tree Hill on the south side of Mt Victoria, is the highest point in the Blue Mountains at 3,654 feet

Remembrances of a Juvenile Bookworm: Old Street Directories I have had the Pleasure of … (Part 2)

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Local history, Media & Communications, Memorabilia, Social History

I remember getting my first street directory as if it was 55 years ago – which it was! It was a Gregory’s of course, it was 1963 and UBD hadn’t quite yet entered the road map reproduction game (they brought out their first street directory the following year!) I had just starting playing soccer (the St George and Southern Sydney’s A-League – Ankle-biters League!) and my parents bought it to get me to season games in tricky-to-find and awkward-to-get-to places across Sydney.

Soccer aside, the Gregory’s spent more time in my bedroom than it did in the glovebox of my father’s VW. I loved perusing its contents, examining the colourful maps, sometimes in piecemeal fashion, other times randomly, learning about all the different parts of Sydney that in most cases I never knew existed let alone had been to! I discovered all sorts of faraway places (to a 10-y-o!) with exotic, magical-sounding names like Avalon, Burraneer, Oyster Bay, Picnic Point and Chipping Norton.

The 1960s Sydney motorist’s Vade mecum

I used to spend long hours during my childhood pouring over the maps of Sydney, preparing me for the future career as a taxi driver that I never had (phew!)…instead I learned lots of useless stuff like the fact that there were two separate bushland places called Warrimo. The name is well-known to many as the small town in the Blue Mountains, but my 1963 Gregory’s showed me that it was then also a suburb adjoining St Ives. Later it was renamed St Ives Chase but Warrimo Oval and Warrimo Avenue in the suburb are reminders of its association.

I got a lot of mileage out of that vintage 1963 Sydney street directory, and continued to do so even after I brought a new Gregory’s when I got my driver’s licence and my first car in the early seventies.

Footnote: Not sure what my father did for road directions before the 1963 Gregory’s came into our family’s life. He certainly had cars before then, at one time I recall he had a crank-start relic of an Austin! Maybe he had one of those fold-out maps that in my hands often end up in a tangled mess.

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WAD: the ante-(now)dated street directory
I got my second street directory around the same time as we got the ’63 Gregory’s, and it was a very different animal to the current edition of the Gregory’s, it was in fact the nearest thing I have had to an antiquarian book. I have recounted in a previous post (Part 1) how I got handed down a 1922 edition of Wilson’s Authentic Director: Sydney and Suburbs and shared some insights into how the WAD depicted different parts of Sydney then and some of the idiosyncratic aspects of the maps contained in the book. I want to focus here on the advertisements contained in the directory which are legion in number and tell an interesting story about life in 1922 Sydney in themselves.

Ad-bonanza
In a book 735pp long, even if I count the pages comprising the indexes and maps there were considerably more pages with ads than without! Some ads were full-page, some pages contained two or more separate ads, some firms like Rickard’s’ (below) had multiple entries of ads in the book. The directory is so ad-rich that the advertisement sales alone were a nice little earner to Wilson & Co. And with each copy retailing to the public at 4/6p, there was obviously more than enough takers to warrant the cost to the advertisers to be in it.

▲ Webber’s “One stop shop”!

Who advertised in ‘Wilson’s Authentic Director’?
Well just about anybody who traded, who had a business in Sydney at the time! Professional men, financiers, engineers, builders, bakers, butchers, chemists, builders, undertakers, stationers, carriers, ironmongers, haberdashers, drapers, milliners, mercers and tailors, retailers of Manchester, furniture suppliers, lime and cement merchants, glass manufacturers, all manner of service or product providers. Where the business being advertised related more directly to the world of motorists or to moving people from place to place, was where you got the lion’s share of ads.

▲ Strathfield: free from “Influences of the Sea Air”

Purveyors of property
The footprints of the auctioneer, the valuator and the real estate agent are visible throughout the directory, often in prominently displayed ads. Some who could afford to, placed more lavish ads which mega-hyped the virtues of certain suburbs and their homes – such as the Orton Bros ad (left) pitching homes in the “favourite suburb” of Strathfield, pushing the (alleged) “health benefits” of the area, “away from the “Influences of the Sea Air”. Presumably if Orton Bros had been selling houses in Clovelly or Coogee Beach, they would have taken a different attitude to the “harmful effects of sea air”!

▲ The “Digger” Agents at Roseville

Another property heavyweight Arthur Rickard & Co, appearing and reappearing across the directory, specialised in sub-division and the creation of new estates, eg, selling as “the New Model Suburb” of Toongabbie✲. Rickard’s had a full-page ad offering a choice of two estates, Toongabbie Park (“a most promising estate, fertile soil and good rainfall”) – the buyer could opt for a large home or a Rickard Farmlet, 1 acre to 4½ acres from £50 10s. per acre; or the Portico Estate (“city water, proximity to consumers’ markets, building conveniences”) – “designed on the latest and most up-to-date town-planning – a wonderful scheme of beauty”. Some property agents like Hough and Barnard emphasised their WWI service credentials to help flog their homes, displaying ads (at right) which proudly announced their AIF associations⊡.

Newtown 1922: Hire-a-luxury wedding vehicle

Transport options a-plenty!
Up there with the estate agents and developers were advertisers for anything to do with the automobile. Hire car companies posted ads for vehicles available for any special purpose. Ads from proprietors of motor garages are liberally sprinkled through the directory, these business often rented out touring vehicles for people both wanting to explore the far reaches of Sydney using Wilson’s of course as their guide. The plentiful motor garage ads naturally catered for all the motorists’ touring and driving needs – ‘Bowserised’ (often Shell) fuel, Benzine oil, ‘vulcanised’ tyres, mechanical repairs, etc.

▲ Bulli Motors: cars, motorcycles, bicycles, for Bulli Pass

The reach of Wilson’s publication was not narrowly limited to the city and suburban district boundaries that encompassed Sydney in 1922… business advertisers buying space in the directory came from as far away as the Blue Mountains and from the Illawarra/South Coast, as evidenced by the ad at right from a Bulli motor garage who also specialised in automotive services for the motor(bike) cyclist.

▲ A horse-intensive removals firm!

The Removalists
Domestic carriers were also well represented in the ads in the street directory. Ads for businesses, describing themselves variously as removalists, carriers or furniture carters, filter through the book. The removal business ads signal an interesting crossover between the old and the new technologies…in 1922 motorised vehicles as a form of transport would still be numerically inferior to horse-drawn carts, the ads in Wilson’s show original horse-power still much in demand on Sydney streets, side-by-side with the new, motor-driven furniture vans and vehicles.

‘Tradie’ ads
Tradesmen were regular advertisers in Wilson’s Street Directory, keen to take advantage of Sydney’s growing numbers of home occupiers and new areas of urbanisation – carpenters, plumbers/gasfitters, electricians, tilers, slaters, painters and decorators, sign writers, metal workers, galvanised iron workers, etc. Some of the most refreshing and humorous ads were from 1920s tradies like the two in the directory reproduced here. ▼ ▶

A miscellany of ads
Most every other avenue of (legal) private endeavour that you’d expect to be plying its business in early 1920s seems to get a shout-out in the street directory. Several ads that popped up in the vicinity of the Lidcombe entry and maps were for stone and marble masons. Considering that Lidcombe was (and still is) home to Rookwood Cemetery, reputed to be the biggest cemetery in the Southern Hemisphere, it is of no surprise to find a troop of monumental masons showcasing their artisan wares here.▼

Rookwood handiwork

A trifecta of disparate WAD advertisers from north of the harbour:▼

▲ 1922: Home entertainment unit

The piano – pride of place in the living room of Sydney homes in 1922
Many of the domestic carrier ads that I have alluded to above emphasised “careful piano removal” as one of the fortes of their trade. This is a reminder that in the early twenties, before the advent of radio and television in Australian households, both of how valuable pianos were and the key role they played as principal providers of home entertainment.

Accommodation and pleasure at Sandringham by the seaside
The first ad below at left is for the ‘Prince of Wales’, a popular beachfront hotel on Botany Bay, a local institution in the St George district since the 1860s drawing crowds to its lavish luncheons, parties, picnics and recreational pursuits on its pleasure grounds. Proprietor in 1922 William Langton was just one of very many publicans who had a go at running (with wildly varying success) the ‘Prince’ since 1866 (the hotel was demolished in 1961). ▼

Footnote: the LJ Hooker of his day:
Of the myriad real estate admen in the directory, the company name recurring most throughout is Stanton & Son, Ltd. Stanton’s features in six separate ads (pp.92, 155, 430, 503, 622, 644) to advertise its offices at Pitt St City, Summer Hill, Haberfield, Edgecliff, Randwick, North Sydney and Rosebery. Proprietor Richard Stanton was one of the founders of the Real Estate Institute of NSW and an advocate of the Garden City Movement (see later blogs on Early 1900s Sydney Garden Suburbs).

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✲ developer Rickard was in fact busy selling property all over Sydney and beyond…such as the Central Coast and the Blue Mountains where he talked the rail authorities into building new stations at Warrimo and Bullaburra to service his new estates there, Peter Spearritt, ‘Rickard, Sir Arthur (1868–1948)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/rickard-sir-arthur-8206/text14357, published first in hardcopy 1988, accessed online 12 July 2018.
⊡ realty men were no means the only business advertisers who played the AIF card, tradesmen et al were similarly not slow in slipping into the pitch their record of loyal service to King and Empire during the Great War