Collingwood remembered
by Collingwood people!

In those days is the story of an Industrial suburb, on the fringe of a city of Melbourne, told by people who have lived there most of their lives.Nearly all were born before the Great War, many are in their seventies and eighties.

Their recollections, transcribed from taped interviews, are of the ordinary fabric of life in Collingwood, memories of work and play, of shopping and family life, of local faces and places, as well as of the wars and the Depression.

It tells of an Australian city over the last seventy years as people who lived there remember what it was like

In those days.

 Early 19th Century collingwood boys ready to rumble, ready to play!

Its Still The Same Old Story

To Fight for Love And Glory

As Time Goes By!

Yarns and Tales From Collingwood people
From The Book 'In Those Days' Collingwood Remembered.

For a bath you'd have to heat the water in copper and carry it in to your bath, if the copper wasn't where your bath was. More or less the bathroom and the wash-house were all in one in those days, not enamelled baths like they've got today. People had a bath once a week in those days, usually on a saturday.

We had kerosene lamps and wood burning fires, and a one-fire stove too. We didn't have water in the kitchen. We had it in the bathroom which adjoined the the kitchen. The chores the children shared were washing the dishes, doing the messages and polishing the floors.The boys had to chop wood, that was something the girls didn't have to do.We used to buy bars of ' witch ' soap which was cut and put into the copper of water with the clothes and boiled. The coppers had fires of wood burning underneath.The clothes line was one long line of rope with a clothes prop in the centre to hold it to catch the high wind, a clothes prop was a long thin tree with a natural fork at the top, they were bought at the wood yard..

In winter we used to burn coke in the dining or lounge room in a grate. When we wanted coke i would pull my trolley up to the gasworks, take a chaff bag of coke all for the price of a shilling. The coke made lovely heat once you got it going. We had our firewood delivered. You could buy a hundedweight or half a hundredweight. But a lot of the time we used to go down to the park and hunt for bark for the fires. Some of us used to get leather. we used to go up to the leather factory and get pieces and we always used to call that ' collingwood coke ', Everybody burned scrap boot leather in their washing coppers- collingwood coke they called it.

When i was young there was a nurse Lovell and she was a visiting midwife and she always wore grey- a grey coat with a cape and pillbox hat with tails down the back, You'd go around and tell her it was time and she'd come round, She was a trained sister and she was very nice.

Pneumonia was a very dreaded disease  in our household because our fathers family was chesty and some of his aunts had died off like flies with TB so there was always a great concern if we had colds. My brother actually did have pneumonia ' a spot on the lung '  That was when we bought the car and ' aired ' him weekly at Eltham. I dont think we were pollution conscious then but we went to Eltham for fresh air, which i suppose meant we  were breathing non fresh air the other days of the week.

The Trueform Boot Factory ( 1924-36 ) Clifton Hill

We were that poor i didn't know where the next shilling was comming from. I was that hard up i walked into town and walked home. I had 3d.- that's how hard up i was. It was terrible. I've seen my son cry- he couldn't get a job. No money. You couldn't get money in those days.

The depression, That's when i first learned to drink tea without milk. My husband lost his job and he was very upset about it. He had to do something with less experience and it hurt his pride when he had to sing out ' Bottle-o'.

Kids at the soup kitchen during the great depression years!

We used to get up of a morning and go around looking for empty beer bottles. If we found two or three empty bottles we'd get a ha' penny for them. You'd think it was quids!

Rather than be idle, unemployed bootmakers in Collingwood have been mending school children's boots and shoes gratis, with leather supplied by the state relief committee.

The chimneys were smoking like billio. All the factories had chimneys. Collingwood was dominated by smoking chimneys like you see in the films of English midlands. And of course there were diseases for which you were offered no protection. All that was offered when i was growing up was the smallpox vaccination and you didn't even have to have that. You were exposed to diptheria, which was a real killer, scarlet fever, which was quite serious, TB and sores which were associated with dirt. So mothers like mine tended to be absolutely fanatical about cleanliness for fear that we would get a disease that might be fatal.

I was out of work for 18 months and my husband out of work for two years. It was terrible. You'd go to the council and they'd give you coupons for groceries and different things. There was no work. You walked everywhere. You couldn't afford a tram ride. A lot of people suffered, especially people with young children and especially if the father drank because they always got the money for beer. You could see a lot of that down at Collingwood.

I'd go around to all my neighbors and see what they could give me in the way of food and clothing and all that sort of thing, and on to my own relations. One of the other Councillor's wives would ring me up to tell me how badly off the people were. Coming into her bakery she would know, and we went around to the different people she gave us addresses to. It was so pitiful to see. In the places there were rats running everywhere and the rain coming in everywhere. No, I dont want to remember the depression.

Collingwood was isolated from the eastern suburbs because there was no direct public transport route to Kew. The cable trams stopped at Johnston St Bridge and if you wanted to go to kew you had to go on a rather small erratic privately owned bus which took you to Kew junction. But on the other hand Collingwood was lucky in having such easy access to the Zoo because the train going through Collingwood and Victoria Park station, went to Royal Park and Zoo station. It closed down before the war.

I always went home for lunch like most other children. I never ever took lunch to school. But during the Depression years they used to go to and get soup at Foy and Gibsons and bring it down for the children whose fathers were not working and couldn't afford dinner. The children used to have a cup of soup at school. Two of the big boys would go and get the pots. I can always remember when it was a wet day and the headmaster came and told all those that had got boots on to take them off and carry them home as not to get your shoes wet. You wanted them to wear and you didn't have another pair, those that had shoes.

The famous Foy and Gibson store Smith St Collingwood was a Collingwood institution
Collingwood people on a friday night 'pay day' would head to Foys.

In those days there was generally one vacant block of land in the street and mostly that was the gathering place for all the kids. You played with whoever you went to school with. We wern't allowed to go far on our own. You;d only go a street or two. I dont think we were alllowed to go out at night till we were about 16.

1851 The beginning of the rush to Victoria's Goldfields. Collingwood boomed in both population and buildings as the gold immigrants who had flooded into the economy started to return to Melbourne from the diggings.
1854 Census showed population in the area as 8,738
1855 East Collingwood proclaimed a muncpality.
1863 The Borough of East Collingwood had a population of approximately19.000 crowding into its increasingly subdivided land.
1873 Proclaimed the town of Collingwood.
1875 Population of 21.000
1876 Renamed the City of Collingwood.
The population increased rapidly through the boom years of the 1880s to reach 35.000 in 1891
From the 1850s to 1870s Collingwood's population was the largest of Melbourne's suburban muncipalities.
This increasing population provided a vast source of cheap labour for the development of local industries which include brewing, tanning, boot and textile manufacturing.

Collingwood citizens band had a fine reputation. They used to practise every Sunday morning at Collingwood Football ground. We could hear them quite clearly.They had tremendous volume.They sometimes used to march.

Dr Mannix was the priest up at the cathredal in East melbourne and he used to walk from Raheen at the top of Studley Park and come across and walk up Langridge St about half past 8 every morning with his big, long, black frock coat and a great big top hat about twice as high as any other hat i remember. Always a walking stick or an umbrella whatever the weather was. He'd walk all the way up to St Patrick's cathedral.

A friend of ours had a weekend shack in Mentone. He used to harness up his horse and jinker and we'd go from Collingwood to Mentone. We'd get to the bottom of Punt Road somehwre near the St Kilda Town Hall. From there there'd be two bits of steel in the ground like a tram rail and it went all the way down to Mordialloc. Once you set the horses in between these two tracks you could go to sleep and the horse would lead you all the way. The market gardeners used the tracks to bring up all the green groceries from their farms.

We used to play football in the street with a paper football. That was the main hobby in all the areas around Collingwood. It was a piece of newspaper with a piece of string around it. You never had a proper football not unless you were a toff from the other side of the river.

But to me Collingwood wasn't just football-it was home.It was places like the boot factories where my mum worked for two quid a week to keep the family going when Dad couldn't get a job.

It was Friday night shopping in Smith St, and watching some of our star footballers parading up and down putting themselves on show.

And ragged bare-footed kids slipping in and out of Coles and Woolies, nicking Violet Crumbles, bullseyes and humbugs of the lolly counter.

Cable Trams ran in Johnston and Smith Sts and it was a favourite game to stick a long string through an empty jam tin and let the cable tram drag it along Johnston St.

And i reckon every kid in Collingwood got a whack on the fingers from the connie's ticket book while trying to whip behind the tram, We were no angels us Kids in Collingwood,When the Sustenance Workers on the dole were building the boulevard at Studley Park we used to heave bricks at them and chant ' your on the susso now'.

In all my life i'd hardly been outside Collingwood- a trip across the Yarra was a big event back then, We loved Collingwood it was everything to us.

Jock McHale commanded such respect that it was years before we dared call him anything but Mr McHale. Yet he was just an ordinary guy, a foreman at the brewery. Jock had four great loves in his life-the Labour Party, the Brewery, his family and the Collingwood Football Club, though not necessarily in that order. I'll ways remember one day when Jock was making his half time address and we were down four or five goals. The then Laboor Prime Minister John Curtain had slipped into the rooms and Jock spotted him. Quick as a flash he yelled, "if we want to win this match, we've got to be like the Labor Party and stick together!". Lately there had been a lot of nasty stuff said about John Wren - but i bet no old Collingwood player will hear a word gainst him. Mr Wren was a familiar sight at Collingwood with his bow legs, grey felt hat and black overcoat with the velvet collar. He helped many a Magpie out of financial difficulties in those hard times-especially forwards who kicked a bagful of goals.

I remember once when i kicked seven goals against North Melbourne. I walked past Mr Wren seven times on my way to showers before he slipped me a tenner. Big nights out were watching General Died at Dawn with Gary Cooper and Madeline Carroll at the Austral- better known as the flea house. You were big time if you sat in the lounge at 2/7d.

The big go on Saturday nights was Freeman's dance at Collingwood Town Hall- where i won my Edna, The trick was to slap some rub down oil on yourself so all the charlies would know you were a Collingwood footballer. But of course the big entertainment in Collingwood came on Saturday Arvo when the Pies burst out of that race, That was Collingwood, many times socially down and out, often laughed at but on Saturday afternoons on many ocassions the Collingwood Pauper would stand like like a Collingwood King.

Oh , So you come from Collingwood-that sort of thing.The other places looked down on it, like Kew and the likes of them.I suppose because the money wasn't as free.The people were't very comfortable.The people had a hard time those in the heart of Collingwood.I think the marvellous thing about the people of Collingwood was that with all their hardships and low wages and rented accomodation they got out of Collingwood.It was Collingwood people really who populated Fairfield, Alphington and Ivanhoe Heidleberg and then later on, Eltham. They were sort of pioneers of the northern suburbs..

I went to the Gold St school as a little girl. And they had a great big ground, a whopper, and as little girls we loved swinging round showing our undies.When i was 14 i went to school in the morning and my mother was going to have a new arrival and I went to help and i never went back to school anymore, I satyed home and helped my mother.

The Rev.Mr Eunson at the Tabernacle was a Collingwood Tradition. The people turned to him for counselling, they turned to him for comfort, and he was always marrying pregnant girls in his sitting room.He was really an institution.

Mr Eunson was a fine man. He helped anyone at all, it didn't matter who they were. And there used to be Father May up in Clifton Hill at St Johns.He's another one done alot.Yeah, he worked hard too.When all the men were digging the road in the Parade one hot day he came out and threw them money,Here go up and have a drink, and they all went up to the pub.

I miss the shops-Treadways and Foys. A few weeks ago i went to Smith St and saw a wonderful change.It's all foreign shops now.Hoddle St has changed terrific.You'd get lost now in Collingwood. Anyone who'd been away and came back after a few years wouldn't know Collingwood. because of Hoddle St being gone. It vwas the main St in Collingwood. Well Collingwood's not as friendly as it was.To my way of thinking it used to be very friendly.If anyone said anything against Collingwood I'd down them. I wouldn't let anyone say anything against Collingwood.Collingwood has made a lot of changes in my time for the better-filling in tips, providing parks and gardens around Merri creek, widening Hoddle St and cleaning up the slums

Mr Petheric presented the statistics he had collected showing that in 1860 the Muncipality contained:

3.142 dwellings
33 Hotels
362 shops
30 Shanties
9 Foundries
1 Flour Mill ( Dights )

Collingwood according to their construction material :

Wood 2.560
Brick 686
Stone 310
Iron 54.

Literature out of the depressions

First hand experience of both the 1890s and the 1930s depression inspired many people to write, either at the time or in retrospect of what they witnessed or how they felt.

Edward Dyson was born in 1865 on the Ballarat Goldfields, and began work in the mines at an early age. He eventually became a journalist  in Melbourne, and many of his ballads and short stories were published in the Bulletin. His subject was often that of his own work in the mines, or of the working class in the city, and he wrote of the depression of the 1890's

Out of work and out of money, out of friends that means, you bet
Out of firewood, togs and tucker, out of everything but debt
And i loathe the barren pavements, and the crowds a fellow meets,
And the maddening repetition of the suffering streets....
With their stink my soul is tainted, and the song is on my tongue
Of that sour smoky suburb and the push we're thrown among,
And i sicken at the corners polished free of paint and mirk
By the shoulders of the men who're always hanging round for work.
Home - Good Lord! a three roomed hovel twixt a puddle and a drain
In harmonious connection on the left of liver lane.
Where a crippled man is dying, and a horde of children fight.
And a woman in the horrors howls remorsefully at night.
It has stables close behind it, and an ash-heap for a lawn,
And is furnished with the tickets of the things we have in pawn:
And all day the place is haunted by a melancholy crowd,
Who beg everything or borrow, and to steal are not too proud.
Through the day come weary women, too, with famine haunted eyes,
Hawking things that are not wanted- things that no one ever buys,
And I hate the prying neighbours, in their animal content.
And the devilish persistence of the man who wants the rent.

Phar Lap

With the Black and White hooped sleeves
The John Wren Collingwood Colours connection

Fewer Australians attended major spectator sports during the early 1930s compared to the more prosperous 1920s. Football crowds in the big cities diminished  and more interest was shown in free sporting pastimes or thos which provided an oppertunity for gambling. People began to attend unofficial dog-racing tracks where entrance was cheap or free and gambling was uncontrolled. The urge to place a bet did not lessen in the depression, the lure of easy money  attracted thousands of punters  to race tracks  to put their money on the great Phar Lap. Although a proportion failed, some families were fed and rents paid with winnings from this wonder horse of the depression years. Phar Laps death in America  during 1932 stunned the nation and was percieved as a national tragedy.

Cnr Johnston and Hoddle probably around late 18th Century

Collectors card date unknown

Edward A Petherick described Collingwood's state of health in the 1850s and 60s...

Infant mortality was very great and the health officer's reports for years were of the prevalence of Scarlet Fever, diptheria, dysentery and other zymotic diseases due to bad drainage and lack of sewerage-diseases however, not then peculiar to Collingwood or the ' flat '.

In 1861 ten percent of all Collingwood children under 5 died. In the 1880s  Collingwood's death rate was the same for the whole metrpolitan area. However, in those boom years Melbourne's death rate from typhoid was in fact worse than London's and diptheria was almost as bad.

Dr Singleton 1808-1891 came from Dublin to Victoria only a few months before Gold was discovered, He writes of his early years in Melbourne. I resolved to commence one in the poorest and most densely populated suburb in Melbourne. The muncipality of Collingwood seemed most to answer the description. After much inquiry i found a great number of the poorer classes, artisans with large families, labourers, aged people, widows and deserted women , often with many children to provide for, with others of the same classes had gone to Collingwood, where the rentals were then very moderate, and the cost of food, vegetables etc...equally so. I found also that also, as a rule many of them were unable when ill to pay for medical attendance, there was yet at the same time no place but the Melbourne hospital  where they could get medical relief.

For many people, Collingwood has been a satisfactory place to live, Apart from the low cost housing, there was local employment. Whereas middle-class suburbs tend to be dormitories for people employed in the central business district or elsewhere, Collingwood people generally worked together....It must be remembered that Collingwood was a community, and that it always commanded a greater degree of commitment from its residents than most of other Melbourne residents did. This has been evidenced by the enormous local suuport for the Collingwood football team in the Victorian football league. Families stayed for generations, often by choice as much as neccessity. Collingwood was like this at least until World War II.

When i lived in Collingwood Abbotsford was the elite part of the area. I think Clifton Hill was the aristocratic part of Collingwood, They had better houses and they had Darling Gardens. Clifton Hill people do think they're a step higher. Years ago no one spoke of living in Collingwood or Fitzroy if you could get out of it. They'd always name a different suberb. They thought there was too much rough stuff and too much poverty. It sort of lowered their dignity to let anyone know they lived in Collingwood. The children in Collingwood were let go. They used to go round breaking street lights and as they got older of course the gangs started and gave Collingwood a bad name.

Oh Clifton Hill's gone ahead wonderfully. Now where i live in Dally St from Ramsden St to Roseneath St was one big paddock. Further down Roseneath St towards Hoddle St my father had the letting of for 1/6 a week for cows and horses. And right up from Ramsden St to Roseneath St was one big paddock with only one big house- a big stone house. And that lady had chooks on the corner where the butcher is now. And Ducks. And the lady on the paddock used to tether her cows and she used to run after us and swear at us. And she could swear. Where these factories are here now used to be one big paddock. We could walk right through from Roseneath St practically to where the Victoria Park school is. There wasn't a house of any sort. Now you've got to go up around corners and everywhere.

Well at the moment Collingwood looks dreadful with these monsterous looking flats and pulled down places and dug up streets. They've really raped Collingwood, It's dreadful. But i like Clifton Hill, I've always liked Clifton Hill and i wouldn't like to move from here because it's a friendly area and i know all the people around here and i get on fine with most people.

THE END.