Category / Alcohol

by Eddie

Drinking in the men’s room

Women listening as men discuss manly things

Women listening as men discuss manly things, like hair-dos

Is it acceptable for women to down a schooner in a public bar? Or should the fair sex be confined to the lounge bar? In Brisbane fifty years ago, activists Rosalie Bogner and Merle Thornton had to chain themselves to a foot rail just to get served.

We were a bit more progressive that that in the 1950s and ’60s. Unlike Brisbane, it was not illegal for a woman to have a beer in a saloon. But most publicans did not approve. Men needed their own space, somewhere men could be men.

In 1953 the Sunday Times asked if lasses should enter such a testosterone-rich environment. The journalist noted that most women did not want to prop up a bar, even though drinks were more expensive in the lounge. (When did this practice of different pricing stop?)

In the summer, one Cottesloe hotel usually had representatives of the fair sex drinking in the saloon bar. But this was the exception, rather than the rule for most hotels. Unless you lived in Armadale. Nobody had the nerve to tell Armadale women where they should drink.

For most Perth hotels, though, publicans said they would object if a lady invaded the men’s space, and she would be directed to the special place set aside for women to drink in.

We’d like to see some landlord try that one with Mrs Dodgy Perth.

by Eddie

There’s trouble brewing at the coffee stand

coffee1

You’d be forgiven for not recognising the above building. Its face has completely changed, losing all of the detailing, into the boring blank canvas now called Grand Central Hotel on Wellington Street.

Built in 1903, the Grand Central Coffee Palace was a magnificent hotel, but a hotel without an alcohol license. Didn’t stop a succession of owners selling beer under the counter. Usually to undercover police officers. With predictable results.

Today, it is a grungy backpackers. The sort of backpackers that gets reviews like this on TripAdvisor:

This place is full of junkies. The beds and rooms, bathrooms, kitchen and common area are truly disgusting. We’ve never stayed in a place like it. Booked for a week but could only stand one night in this hovel.

A century ago, reviews would have also been negative. But back then it was not the owners’ fault.

It was only shortly after opening that the Palace was in trouble. Just like our TripAdvisor guests, visitors would book in for a week but depart in a filthy mood after only one night.

To cater for Perth’s late-night crowd, the council had allowed a café-de-kerb (coffee stand to you and me) to operate directly opposite the Palace on the other side of Wellington Street.

The council, in its wisdom, had also installed a public urinal on the site too. Which attracted even more of the inebriated class.

As soon as the pubs closed, all the drunks in town—of both sexes—would flock to the coffee stall to get some caffeine and a hot pie.

Bedlam then ensued, as brawls broke out every night, and ‘disgusting language’ was shouted until two or three in the morning.

Those guests in the front rooms of the Palace would simply pack up for a quieter hotel somewhere else.

The council said they would try to find somewhere else for the café-de-kerb. This was beyond their capabilities, though, since no new site was apparently available anywhere in Perth.

So, next time you’ve had a night out in the CBD, and feeling a bit tipsy, grab a coffee and a pie, head for Wellington Street and relive the good old days.

by Eddie

Bacchus and the pony girls

bacchus

Probably hunkier than the hero of our story, but we love this picture

You know what it’s like. Getting back from the pub on a Friday night, you turn on SBS for one of their sexy shows like ‘Sydney Lesbian Strippers’ or ‘Ladyboys’ or ‘Inside the Dungeon’.

But what did Western Suburbs residents do before SBS gave us such intelligent programming? Turns out they used to gather outside the windows of orgies and settle in for a night’s entertainment.

In 1936 the neighbours would wait until a supply of bottles arrived. These would be followed by a number of professional young women. Then the evening of free entertainment would start.

In the middle of this Western Suburbs’ lounge room stood a well-known society gentleman dressed as Bacchus. In his hand was a bottle of wine. Round him circled half a dozen girls, each of them also armed with a bottle of wine, and each in various state of undress. As they passed, each girl sprinkled him with wine and he graciously sprinkles them in return.

Sometimes Bacchus would play leapfrog with the girls. Or have them lie side by side on the floor while he athletically leapt over them again and again.

But the best nights were when all of them were completely nude. Then Bacchus could be seen armed with a toy whip, driving his team of girls round and round the room. The fair sex on all fours, doing their best attempts to impersonate the chariot horses of ancient Rome.

Many other things were seen by the neighbours, but Dodgy Perth is a family publication. So if you weren’t there, you’ll just have to use your imagination.

by Eddie

Once upon a midnight orgy

001186d

Tell me again, Granny, how kids today don’t have any standards

Once Crawley had all the nude parties and wild orgies by the river. Then Scarborough took up the challenge of being the leading place for such antics. But by 1936 Como Beach is where you needed to be for fun disgusting midnight parties.

One Sunday, decent members of society were shocked by what they encountered on a late-night stroll south of the jetty. Four drunken louts were chasing half a dozen tipsy girls along the beach. When they caught them, they dragged them back to a pile of stubbies.

And then—Dodgy Perth does not know if we can go on—they began tearing off their clothes like the wild beasts they were. God alone knows in what state of undress the girls must have arrived home the next day.

This degrading spectacle should not be allowed to happen on a decent beach like Como. Upright members of society need to be protected from having to see young people enjoying themselves. And the disgusting degenerates themselves should be locked up.

What makes it worse, as regular readers will have guessed, is these were not even working class louts. They came from some of Perth’s most respected families.

Four men, six girls. There’s a movie title there somewhere. Not the kind of movie Dodgy Perth would watch. Obviously.

by Eddie

What a mess!

Black Boy Hill, 1916

Black Boy Hill, 1916

Basic training for World War I took place at Blackboy Hill, a couple of kilometres east of Midland town centre. The YMCA won the contract to provide the canteen at the camp.

Trouble is, none of the enlisted men liked the way The Y ran the place. Instead of providing a service at a reasonable price, the canteen was basically run to raise money for the YMCA. The manager of the canteen was vastly overpaid, and they even had the nerve to charge rent to anyone on site wanting to use the canteen for a meeting. The building had been built by the Army!

All in all, the men serving their nation felt completely ripped off.

The officers weren’t happy about this situation, so on Monday 28 September 1914, a rival ‘wet’ canteen was opened in a tent at Blackboy Hill.

This would be good for morale, said the officers. It will keep the men on site and away from the local pubs. In any case, it would let the officers know how much the men were drinking, and restrict them to beer rather than spirits.

A welcome improvement to the training camp. No one could possibly object to this.

Welcome to Western Australia.

Naturally some pasty-faced wowser, the Mike Daube of his day, took to the letters page to rail against this threat to civilisation. Having a beer would turn soldiers to cowards, he screamed. They would become tired, be unable to shoot. Every military virtue would be wiped out as soon as a glass was poured.

In any case, drink leads to horrible, horrible war crimes. Apparently.

Perhaps it had not been wise for the officers to have seized one of the YMCA’s tents for the new canteen.

The Y retaliated to this insult (and to the end to their monopoly) by requesting that the camp commandant ban the consumption of beer at Blackboy Hill. He rightly told them to get stuffed.

But the YMCA were not to be put off. They drafted an urgent telegram to the federal Minister for Defence, explaining that the “young soldiers of this State” needed protection from the awful officers at the camp. And their “social work” was becoming more difficult, since no one wanted to eat at the old canteen anymore.

At 2 o’clock in the afternoon, on Sunday 4 October, orders came in from high command. The wet canteen was to be closed.

It had survived less than a week.

Wowsers 1. Anzacs 0.

This is an edited re-post of an earlier article. But we like it, so are sharing it again with our new followers.

by Eddie

Getting into hot water

013150dThe office at Dodgy Perth HQ is a fairly relaxed place. Not much makes us angry.

But today, we read of how Dalkeith residents were forced to listen to people having fun on the foreshore.

You can imagine how that made our blood boil.

Pictured above is the notorious Hot Pool at Dalkeith, which for decades was a popular place to relax.

One of the best things to do was get to the pool around midnight, strip off and hold a nude swimming party. However, the installation of floodlights and regular patrols by the police made this a more difficult activity to get away with.

So most people just turned up with a picnic and a few beers to have a good time. Right up to the 1950s.

Enter the Dalkeith residents. They had not spent all that money on housing to have to listen to people having a good time. No sir.

They pressurised the Nedlands Road Board who passed a by law forbidding barbecues on the foreshore. And for good measure they outlawed alcohol too.

Police started nightly visits looking for evil doers who wanted to barbeque a steak.

Unbelievable as it might seem, the police once found a group of young people who had some beer and who thought it would be acceptable to get together within earshot of Dalkeith. That was quickly put to an end.

So now Dalkeith is exactly as it should be. Big houses and no nudity. And certainly no fun on the foreshore.

by Eddie

Drunk in the spirit

CockmanWe’ve all been there. Had a few too many at the Sunday Session and then barged into a church and made a complete tit of ourselves in front of the whole congregation.

You haven’t? Just me and James Cockman then.

Above is Cockman House in Wanneroo. You don’t really need a reason to visit, but I’ll give you one anyway: to pay homage to the drunk colossus who maddened Perth Chapel.

James was born in London in 1809, and arrived in Perth just a few months after the start of the Colony.

A giant who weighed 140kg, he was renowned for his enormous strength. He worked as a labourer on some of the grandest buildings in Perth, including St George’s Cathedral, Government House and the Barracks.

James found himself in trouble with Perth’s governing classes when he was a little worse for wear and staggered into Perth Chapel one Sunday evening in April 1838. I like to imagine him singing loudly as he tripped down the aisle before abusing the preacher.

In any case, his raucous behaviour didn’t go down well, and he was forced to issue an abject apology:

I, the Undersigned, having on Sunday evening last entered the Perth Chapel in a state of intoxication and interrupted the Service, and thereby made myself liable to a very heavy penalty, hereby offer this public apology for my conduct, and likewise pledge myself never again to cause any interruption or disturbance, the Proprietors of the said Chapel having kindly consented to withdraw the proceedings they had entered into against me.

It seems unlikely that this was written by James himself since this public confession was signed with a simple ‘X’, showing he was completely illiterate. More probable is that it was written by a worshiper and James was forced to make his mark at the bottom to escape prosecution.

Although James was not the only person who had upset the congregation recently, the leading members of the colony declared he would be the very last to escape trial.

In the 1850s, he took his wife and seven children up to Lake Joondalup where he built Cockman House. When you visit, remember to have a drink at The Wanneroo Tavern in his memory.

by Eddie

Beer can chicken?

drinking chickenAs Dodgy Perth prepares to leave for Bali this afternoon, and enjoy continuous Bintangs by the pool, it seems appropriate to abandon you for a week with this cheery alcohol-related story.

In the early 1950s, a chicken by the improbable name of Georgina Thigwell Johnston was living at the Ship Hotel in Busselton.

(If you want to be accurate, it wasn’t just a chicken. It was a white leghorn. But, anyway, back to the story.)

Each night Georgina Thigwell Johnston sat on the bar counter and had a glass of draught beer. Hopefully Emu Bitter, but I cannot be sure of this.

The cook of the hotel had a £5 bet that she could raise Georgina Thigwell Johnston exclusively on a diet of beer. Which is, to be honest, my kind of diet.

If the reports are to be believed, the boozed-up chicken was demonstrating the benefits of her unusual meals and was the largest of all the hens in the hotel yard.

Mind you, Georgina Thigwell Johnston kept aloof from the other fowls and slept alone in a special box. So either she felt she was better than the other chickens. Or the other hens didn’t like the boring stories she would tell when under the influence.

by Eddie

Bacchanalian revels in flats

slwa_b3473499_2

Perhaps it’s surprising that the first flats built in Perth were extremely controversial. As far as the press could see, nothing good was going to come of this new way of living in the 1920s.

Prepare to be shocked by the discovery that unmarried males were renting apartments:

The latest thing in Perth is flats for young single men.

The flats are used not for residential purposes but for the wild parties of these young high-livers and in more than one instance the practice has become a scandal among the neighbours.

But it would be a worse scandal if some highly respectable Perth parents knew the sort of place their sons were keeping and also the type of resorts some of their daughters were frequenting.

Most of these young fellows are sons of well-to-do families and the result is that they have more to spend than the average working boy. Hence they are not content to take their enjoyment at public dances and shows as ordinary people do. And as the parties they hold are not of the kind that would be sanctioned in their own homes they have to look elsewhere.

On three or four nights a week the bright young bloods invite their girl friends down to these places. If the parties were quite alright nothing need be said. But young men don’t go to these measures for parties that are quite alright.

The truth is that they are wild affairs in the real sense and if a girl isn’t used to drinking before she goes there she finds it very hard to avoid it once inside. To put it briefly some of these well-educated sons of wealthy families are priceless young scoundrels and they don’t scruple to get decent girls along to these flats under the belief that they are coming along to an ordinary private party.

Of course there is nothing in the law to prevent people keeping such establishments if they please. At the same time it is not a practice that is any credit to the flash youths who have started it in Perth. As it is most of them have more money than morals.

So in their own interests we advise them to leave the flat habit to the older roués and enjoy themselves normally as the average healthy-minded young man does.

Private flats for young men are sure to cause trouble in the end.