The staff from Gow’s Drapery had left their counters for a
few minutes to join the crowds, and be part of history.
I heard about this excitement in Hamilton from four women
who began their working lives at Gow’s Drapery in the 1940s – early 1950s.
Within this brief window in their lives, between leaving school and getting
married, ten young women forged lifelong friendships. Over more than 60 years,
they have kept in touch, sharing life’s milestones, joys and grief. Now, just
four of them remain.
(L-R) Val Kavanagh (nee Stewart), Gwen Fuge (nee Bailey),
Phyllis Watson (nee Marks) and Joan Little (nee Watson)
The women meet each month for lunch in one another’s homes
Photograph courtesy of Aurora, Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle
Gow’s, on the corner of Beaumont and Cleary Streets, where the Chemist Warehouse now stands, was also known as Montrose House. In its hey-day in
the 1920s, it rivalled even the city stores like Winn’s and Scott’s in its
advertising and range of merchandise. One of the earliest department stores, Gow’s
Drapery closed in the early 1960s.
Gow & Co. Store, Hamilton, NSW 15 August, 1898
Photograph by Ralph Snowball, part of the Norm Barney
Photographic Collection, in Cultural Collections,
University of Newcastle, NSW
I’d already written a post about ‘Fettercairn’, (the story is here) the
stately home in Lindsay Street, Hamilton that Ramsay Gow had built in 1903 for
his wife and large family. Nine of their twelve children survived, and Ramsay himself
died in 1907.
It is said that Ramsay’s wife Frances (Fanny), daughter of a
Maitland publican, was the driving force behind the store. I wanted to know
more about the store itself – what it was like working there, what was sold,
how staff were treated. Meeting these four wonderful women was my opportunity.
By the time our four women were starting work at Gow’s, the
store owner was Mr Walter Gow, Ramsay’s son. The Manager was Mr Ray Hitchcock,
fondly known as ‘Hitch’.
For decades, Gow’s had been a reliable source of retail
employment for young school leavers, especially girls. Val lived around the
corner, in Cleary Street, and actually ‘applied’ for a job. Phyllis lived in
the same street as Mr Hitchcock. He’d known her growing up, and when she lost
her job in town because she’d contracted measles, Mr Hitchcock invited her to
join Gow’s.
Gwen’s mother shopped at Gow’s, supporting 7 children alone on
meagre government Child Endowment payments. As soon as Gwen reached the legal
school leaving age of 14 years 9 months, she left school and started work at
Gow’s to help her family. It was 1947.
‘There was no
interview’, confirms Gwen.
For Joan, migrating
from Wales as a young woman in 1952, it was her aunt who rang Gow’s and asked
for a position for her niece. That’s how things were done in those days.
Today, walking into department stores David Jones or Myers,
we are confronted with a glittering sea of cosmetic counters. I wondered what one
saw first, walking into the ground floor of Gow’s?
‘Skeins of wool’,
Phyllis replies. ‘A whole wall of wool’.
How priorities have changed.
Once the skeins were purchased, they had to be wound into
balls at home before knitting could begin – a tedious task for which children
were often enlisted to help.
On the left, the women remember, was the manchester counter
– sheets, towels, blankets, quilts; on the right, haberdashery – all the things
needed for home sewers. There was a long counter for measuring out fabric, one just
for buttons and buckles, another for ribbons.
At the back of the store was the fashion – frocks, coats,
hats, gloves, hosiery, handkerchiefs, underwear – with a girl in charge of each
counter.
Val, and later Joan, both worked as cashiers in a wooden
cubicle in the centre of the store, the cash tray in open view. Unlike the rest
of the store, which had bare boards (‘I
was shocked when I first saw this’, says Joan, fresh from Wales), the
cubicle had linoleum to prevent the pennies shipping through the spaces between
the boards.
Sales assistants did not handle cash. Instead, they wrote
out a docket in duplicate for each transaction, placing it with the customer’s
cash in a tube that whizzed on a high wire across the store to the cashier. The
cashier would then place the correct change and one copy of the docket in the
tube, sending it on its way back to the counter it had come from. For me as a
child this fascinating activity took the boredom out of shopping with my mother
in a similar store in Narrabri!
Staff worked a 48 hour week, extending until 9 pm on
Fridays, and Saturday mornings.
The women tell me that Gow’s was ‘just like a big family – we were family’. Mr Gow came in every day
at 10 am, and did his rounds of the counters. While Phyllis remembers being
reported once to Mr Hitchcock by Mr Gow for ‘not smiling’, all agreed they had
good bosses. Mr Hitchcock even attended a staff member’s wedding.
Wedding of Elva
Roberts (10 November, 1951)
(L-R) Joan Pascoe,
Dot Moore, Ray Hitchcock, Elva Roberts,
Gwen Bailey (now
Fuge), Phyllis Marks (now Watson)
Photograph from the
personal collection of Phyllis Watson
When each Hamilton business was asked to nominate a staff
member to be its charity queen for the Hamilton Festival, and lead the fund
raising for their chosen charity, it was Joan who was the lucky one.
Charity queens on stage at Gregson Park
for the Hamilton Festival c.1953
Joan Watson (now Little), dark hair in the centre,
represented Gow’s Drapery
Photograph from the personal collection of Joan Little
Another important event on the girls’ social calendar was
making their debut. Usually at the age of 17, girls attended a ball with their
partners, making their first public appearance ‘in society’ as a young woman.
It was their ‘coming out’. When I saw Gwen’s photographs of her debut at the
Newcastle Town Hall, I asked whether there were any social barriers for girls
wanting to do this.
‘Not at all’, she
says. ‘We were very poor. No washing
machine, no refrigerator, no vacuum cleaner. My father died aged 44. A very
dear lady bought the material for my dress; a dressmaker made it up. We had a
lot of help from so many beautiful people’.
Gwen Bailey (now
Fuge) dressed for her debut c.1950
Photograph from the
personal collection of Gwen Fuge
As a child, Gwen remembers being told by her mother at meal
times:
‘If I sit down without
a chop on my plate, I don’t want any comment’.
When Gwen and her siblings were earning and saving, they
arranged to have a washing machine delivered to their mother at home as a
surprise. She sent the delivery driver away, declaring there was no way she
could possibly afford to buy a washing machine. Of course, it was successfully
re-delivered next day.
Easy credit for such purchases was unheard of. The first
floor of Gow’s was ‘the office’ where customers went make their fortnightly payments
against purchases ‘on lay-by’, or against their cash orders. Cash orders seem
to be a type of loan system popular in the days before the advent of credit
cards.
In time, Gow’s expanded into a building next door, which
became the domain of menswear. The window displays at Gow’s were the highlight
of Beaumont Street – Jimmy Canning, son of the family of Cannings Newsagents, was
held in high esteem for his skills as a window dresser.
The voices of friends no longer present can still be heard as
we chat in this New Lambton living room. Some of these had experienced working
in Gow’s during World War II, when reels of Silko cotton were rationed. Others
remember curtain material being used to make dresses as it was cheaper; short
skirts were worn for the same reason. When nylon stockings were scarce, young
women would colour their legs with a cream something like tanning lotion, and
then use an eyebrow pencil to expertly draw a seam down the backs of their
legs. What contortion – and excellent eye hand coordination - must have
required!
It was marriage that brought an end to this happy period of
independence for these young women, and opened the door to new life experiences.
Post war, women in public sector jobs (including teachers), and in many
businesses, had to resign from their positions once they married to make way for
the returning men. Val married in 1951.
‘There was no
sympathy’, she says. ‘I had to go
immediately. They didn’t want to pay my next week’s wage’.
It was a Lord Mayor of Newcastle – no one can remember which
one – who put his foot down. His recently married secretary was, he said, his
‘right arm’. He could not possibly do without her. So things began to change,
and women found their rightful place in the workforce.
Reunion of staff from Gow’s Drapery, Waratah, probably May 1991
Photograph from the personal collection of Joan Little
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Gwen Fuge, Phyllis Watson, Joan Little and Val
Kavanagh for sharing their stories. Also to Cinzia Saccoro for putting me in
touch with these women in the first place, and to Tracey Edstein, Editor, Aurora and Shirley McHugh, writer for Aurora.
Related posts
Fettercairn, survival of a stately home
http://hiddenhamilton.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/survival-of-stately-home.html
Knowing the Gow family of Fettercairn, Hamilton
http://hiddenhamilton.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/knowing-gow-family-of-fettercairn.html
1 comment:
Thank you for the above article about Gow’s Drapery. My grandfather, and also my dad were “cash order collectors”, where they would call on customers at their homes and collect payments on their cash orders. I remember going up to the first floor, and waiting for dad to finish off his paperwork.
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