Some of what follows is still standing. Much of it is not. Taken together it is a record of how a farming and fishing district turned itself into a suburb, and of the businesses and institutions that carried people through two world wars and a depression.
Hargreaves jam factory
In 1882 John Hargreaves moved from Breakfast Creek to Manly Road and set up a small jam factory. It did not stay small. The factory sat on a belt of rich red loam that ran, with breaks, some twenty miles from Redland Bay through Ormiston to Manly, and it was fruit from those farms that went into the jars. Being able to preserve fruit straight from the orchard was a real advantage, and word spread.
The works expanded into canned tropical fruit, tomato sauce and confectionery, including candied peel. Hargreaves put in a tennis court and a bowling green for his employees. During the Depression the factory housed some of the families worst hit, and people flattened out the big jam tins to use as roofing shingles.
The Grotto
Guest houses and camping grounds were everywhere on the bayside in the early twentieth century, but the one people remembered was the Grotto — an old house at the bottom of Falcon Street, built before 1900.
It was not a refined establishment. It was a sailors’ retreat, rented out for weekends by men sailing off Manly. With no refrigeration, they tied string around bottle necks and lowered them into an old ship’s tank full of water. A notice above the telephone in the toilet read “if no paper ring the house”. Anyone who rang it got a mild electric shock through wires run to the seat, to the great satisfaction of everyone in the house.
Ingleston Guest House
Ingleston, built in Charlotte Street in 1915, was the opposite. A two-storey Queenslander with wraparound verandahs and views across the bay, it took holidaymakers, visiting officials and anyone needing somewhere decent to stay. It burned down in 1946.
The Reformatory for Boys
The reformatory at Lytton opened in 1871, at first aboard the water police hulk Proserpine. In 1880 it moved ashore to Signal Hill, where it stayed until the late 1890s. It had dormitories, classrooms and a tailor’s workshop.
The local histories this page draws on describe the regime as unusually humane for its time — the boys treated with kindness, and labour used to give them purpose rather than to punish them. That is a characterisation written in 1971 about a Victorian institution, and it sits somewhat awkwardly beside what the boys actually built: a defensive stockade around Signal Hill, and Fort Lytton itself.
Memorial Park
Around 1915 a large area near Peel Street in Manly was set aside as a public park, first called Russell Park. After the First World War the council renamed it Memorial Park.
Volunteers planted about forty-five trees. Beneath each they placed a wooden cross and a plaque bearing the name of a Wynnum resident who had not come home. The road running through the park from Peel Street to Pine Street was called Memorial Drive.
The park is now the grounds of Wynnum State High School, which uses it for sport. The crosses and plaques are gone. Some locals still call Peel Street “Memorial Drive”.
Moreton Bay Girls High School
Founded in 1901 in Bay Terrace, the school taught housekeeping and entertaining alongside academic subjects, as was expected of a girls’ school then. It doubled its accommodation in 1910 and soon afterwards opened a music school in a separate building — believed to be the first of its kind in Queensland, with insulated practice rooms, studios, a library and a hall for performances.
The school lent its rooms out constantly. The Moreton Masonic Lodge met in the music school until the Masonic Hall was built, the School of Arts held its first meetings in the library, and the district’s first Scouts and Brownies met in the grounds for years. The school is now in Wondall Road, Manly, and the original Bay Terrace building is gone.
Irvine’s “Commonwealth” store
When the 1893 floods destroyed Hugh Irvine’s grocery at New Farm, the family moved to the newly developing Wynnum and opened the Commonwealth store in 1897 — the first shop on Bay Terrace. They lived above it and ran it for seventy years, bringing stock out from Brisbane by horse and cart, and offering home delivery from opening day.
Trade fell away in the 1950s. A shop that seated its customers and fetched their goods had no answer to self-service. Irvine’s was sold to Hartley’s in 1966, subdivided in the early 1970s, and demolished in 1984.
The Star and the Imperial
There are no cinemas on the bayside now. There were two, and in the 1930s the Imperial regularly took three hundred bookings a day.
The Star opened in 1915 as an open-air theatre and was later built in. It was packed every Saturday night through the heyday of cinema. Then a fire that started in a neighbouring fish and chip shop spread to the theatre and destroyed it — and killed two firefighters, sub-station officer Herbert George Lees and station officer Sidney William Brown, when the projection room collapsed on them.
The Imperial met a quieter end, losing business until the takings no longer justified opening.
Manly foreshore
The boat harbour came much later. At the turn of the century the foreshore was for bathing, and crowds came out from Brisbane every weekend. Changing boxes lined the front and cost a penny to use. There was no sand — swimmers climbed down ladders set into a wooden retaining wall, which also kept the waves off people walking the footpath.
The Falcon Street wall
Falcon Street, originally Spring Street, runs down a steep pitch. Giving access to houses on both sides meant building Falcon and Wellington Streets on two levels, and the embankment between them was too high and too wide for that to work. A retaining wall would have solved it, but no council was willing to spend the money on something serving so few households.
It was built anyway. A District Works Engineer, acting on his own authority, put the job through the State Government’s relief work scheme of the late 1920s and 1930s, under which the State paid the wages and supplied the tools and materials for work given to the unemployed. The wall went up at no cost to the council, and it is still one of the most recognisable things in Manly.
J.A. Fairweather, grocer
Jack Fairweather came to Manly in the 1920s and bought a store in Stratton Terrace. The Depression hit him hard, and he restarted in a vacant Cambridge Parade shop with kerosene cases for fittings and tables for counters.
In 1939 he bought the corner of Cambridge Parade and Melville Terrace and built his grocery there. Through the war years he kept free delivery going when money was short everywhere. In 1946 he extended the store to take in a hardware department, a hairdresser and a dentist.
96 Tingal Road: home of the Herald
William Lockwood started a printing business on a verandah in Wynnum in 1914. As it grew he took a shop on the corner of Clara Street and Tingal Road, then moved in 1915 to 96 Tingal Road.
That building became the home of the Wynnum Herald. The first edition appeared on 31 January 1946 with a circulation of 3,000, which reached 5,000 within six months. Lockwood died in 1963; his sons George and Stan ran the paper until it was bought by the Courier-Mail in 1970.
The Herald stopped printing a hard copy edition in 2020.
Sources
- Armstrong, H.W. (1971) The History and Development of the Wynnum District, Brisbane
- Beitz, M.N. (1982) Mangroves to Moorings: The Past 100 Years of Manly, Queensland, Manly Centenary Committee, Brisbane
- Wynnum Herald (2003) ‘Own A Piece of History’, 16 July, p.25