Woolloomooloo: A Biography

By Louis Nowra

It was no wonder I was glad to be down in Woolloomooloo. The Old Fitzroy reminded me of how Kings Cross used to be. Told in his vivid and entertaining style, Louis Nowra writes Woolloomooloo's biography, drink in hand, from the vantage point of the Old Fitzroy Hotel, the cosy, eccentric and wonderful pub on Dowling Street, Woolloomooloo. It's a world of sex, sin, sly grog, sailors, razor gangs, larrikins, workers, artisans, murderers, fishermen, activists, drinkers, fashion designers, tradies, artists and the downright dangerous. It's also a story of courage, resilience, tolerance, compassion. And though the pub has a real theatre, it's the cast of real-life characters that are the stars of this show. Woolloomooloo's past wraps around its present. Louis – often accompanied by Coco the Chihuahua and other two-legged locals, often walks the streets, uncovering history – some official, some never revealed. He stumbles across pockets of beauty and charm, and the derelict and abandoned. Unforgettable – and unspellable – Woolloomooloo in this book is a place as fascinating as its name.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Apr 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781742242699

Louis Nowra

Louis Nowra is a critically acclaimed playwright and author. He was born in Melbourne and lives in Sydney with his wife, also a writer.

Book preview

reasons.

THE OLD FITZROY

ONE DAY INSTEAD OF TURNING LEFT, I WENT RIGHT. I was with Coco, my Chihuahua, who was so sure of herself on the streets that I didn’t need to use a leash. For her afternoon walks we had always gone left and headed up William Street into Kings Cross. This time, for some reason, she went the opposite way after leaving the front door. I followed her as she walked the twenty metres to the corner, where she turned right into McElhone Street. We headed down the street to a small strip of public land called Daffodil Park, but instead of exploring it, Coco continued on, past the kindergarten with its green steel railings wreathed in passionfruit vines, and at the next corner turned left, heading down narrow Reid Street into Woolloomooloo.

I paused at the top of the short street to see where she was headed. At the end of Reid Street was the Old Fitzroy Hotel on the corner of Dowling and Cathedral streets. I had been there a couple of times, but at night, and several years before, and I could barely remember it. It was a pub that wasn’t on a main street, so you either had to seek it out or find it by accident.

Coco trotted down towards it with a certainty of purpose as if she had an appointment there. As we neared the pub it struck me just how odd it looked. It was three storeys high, with a recessed balcony and two Victorian-style bay windows on the first floor, and a further two bay windows on the second floor. It had a red brick façade with two blank scrolls where the date the hotel was built could be inscribed. Metre-wide stripes of white concrete demarcated the three storeys, as if band-aids were keeping it together. The window and door frames were painted a dark blue. It seemed ancient and decrepit, yet there was something eccentric about it, as if it had been designed by an author of Victorian fairytales with a sense of humour. Outside, a couple of dozen drinkers were milling about enjoying the sunshine.

Without waiting for me, Coco made for the front door and trotted inside as if she had been going there all her life. I followed her in. The bar was dimly lit by three small plastic chandeliers hanging from a ceiling painted a congealed-blood red. Two overhead fans turned lethargically. There was a fireplace with a diagonal black flue leading up through the ceiling. The whole room was cluttered with a delirious and incongruous mix of objects fixed to the exposed-brick walls and arranged around the top of the bar. On the back wall of the bar a stuffed hairy goat’s head with glass eyes and twisted antlers peered down on the staff. The bar counter was an L shape and built on top of bricks so old they had convict markings. The grey carpet was shiny with wear. The far corner window featured a metre-high neon sign of the red outline of a coffee cup, with steam indicated by four wavy yellow lines. What was immediately apparent, and so different from most hotels, was that there were no televisions. I ordered a gin and tonic from the barman while a blissful Coco rubbed her belly across the threadbare carpet. As I waited for my drink I saw a small blackboard near the fireplace; written on it in chalk was the message: Dear Alcohol, I thought we had a deal. You were going to make me smarter, funnier, dance better. You and I need to talk. There was something immediately cosy and friendly about it, as if I had exited from the city through the wormhole of the front door and suddenly found myself in a country pub.

I went outside, sat down and sipped my drink. Most of the customers, judging by their overalls, lumberjack shirts and plaster-covered boots, were tradies, labourers and sparkies. With my black suit, white shirt and Chihuahua on my lap, I looked effete and out of place. Coco was captivated by all the people and, as gregarious as ever, leapt off me and jumped on the lap of a tradie sitting nearby. Soon she was upright in a begging position, looking like a bug-eyed meerkat, tapping him on the chest, wanting a scratch. The man was amazed at her agility and remarked, as most people did on seeing Coco perform, that he had only seen snappy, yapping Chihuahuas before, but this one was different.

After a couple of drinks we left for home, but the next day Coco turned right again and we ended up at the Old Fitzroy Hotel. This was the beginning of my almost daily attendance, which has continued for more than eight years. Coco’s discovery of it had come at the right time. Kings Cross, where I lived, was changing permanently. Once a place celebrated for its diversity and tolerance, it was becoming an exclusive suburb only the affluent could afford.

Cheap restaurants for the poor, pensioners and students in the Cross were being transformed into five-star restaurants, and a dozen hotels had become apartments. The Bourbon and Beefsteak pub, once famous for its louche mixture of criminals, cops, locals, sailors and tourists, had been sold and turned into an upmarket venue for the social set. I’d occasionally drink there because it was a convenient place to catch up with friends, but the staff were bored, many of them backpackers impatient to be travelling north, and the gleaming, vacuous interior didn’t have the warmth of the original hotel with its inclusive mixture of people and clutter of objects so diverse that it resembled an opportunity shop. Other pubs along Darlinghurst Road had been converted into beer barns where locals were barely tolerated.

Unlike previous generations who came to Kings Cross to be transformed by its values and attitudes and to escape from suburbia, the new arrivals wanted to change the Cross in their own image. They may have been titillated by living in a oncenotorious address, but they didn’t want its sex shops, strip clubs, beggars or the homeless. There was an influx of new mothers who, naturally enough, wanted a suburban sense of safety for their children. They had demanded a huge new playground in Fitzroy Gardens. I argued against the proposal in a Town Hall meeting presided over by Lord Mayor Clover Moore, who had stacked the hall with mums, babies, prams and testy househusbands. My suggestion was that the playground would be better situated across the road in an empty park where it could be much larger, but the mums wanted to be near the restaurants and cafés. My other point was that the noise of children playing would annoy residents in adjacent apartments. As I was about to address the meeting my microphone was mysteriously switched off and I was howled down. Nevertheless, I was proved right. A couple of years later eggs were thrown at the playground and, after a tyre used for a swing was torched, an article on page 3 of the Sydney Morning Herald mentioned my name several times as an opponent of the playground. The inference seemed obvious. For weeks afterwards I had locals coming up to me asking if I had done the damage. It was no wonder I was glad to be down in Woolloomooloo. The Old Fitzroy reminded me of how Kings Cross used to be.

After a day spent by myself with imaginary people in my work as a writer, I needed a place to relax with people who had nothing to do with the arts. It was such a relief to mix with people who were different in their behaviour, values and ambitions from those middle-class dwellers up on the ridge who were pushing the gentrification of the Cross.

If anyone is the creator of the special ambiance of the Old Fitzroy, it’s the publican, Garry Pasfield. He has owned the pub since the beginning of the millennium. He had once run a country hotel in Kyogle and one day, while visiting Woolloomooloo, he accidentally wandered into the Old Fitzroy and, immediately smitten with it, made the owner an offer too good to refuse. Garry is in his fifties, with broad shoulders and a firm, stocky build that hints at his strength, honed by years of surfing. He presides over his pub with the affability of a born host. Unlike the hotels in Kings Cross, there are no bouncers on the doors, and Garry has an uncanny ability to employ staff, mostly young, who become friends with the regulars and even, once or twice, lovers and permanent partners.

The pub is more than its main bar. It has a permanently humid basement with a low ceiling where the kegs are kept and which doubles as Garry’s office, its desk facing a bank of CCTV cameras, which sometimes don’t work. On the lower ground floor is a claustrophobically small theatre that seats about sixty people. Beyond the main bar is a cramped kitchen. A few steps from it, and up a couple of stairs, is a mezzanine overlooking Cathedral Street with its jacarandas and casuarinas, where customers eat and, until the law changed, smoked.

The first floor is an enormous space, which is available for hire, with couches, a pool table and a balcony (drunks have been known to deliberately drop glasses and cigarettes onto the infuriated patrons sitting below). The second floor had once been rooms for guests and staff but is now in a state of apathetic neglect, its ceilings and cornices browned with water damage, its rooms filled with abandoned spider webs dotted with the carcasses of dead flies, dusty old furniture and boxes with forgotten contents. It is reputed to be haunted.

Hidden from most customers is a lower ground floor room that can be surreptitiously entered via a side door on Cathedral Street. This is the pokies room, its dim interior illuminated by eight garish poker machines with flashing yellow, blue, red and green lights, images of cartoon Mexican bandits, Egyptian pharaohs and Thai princesses and a moodily lit bouquet of plastic flowers in a glass cabinet. Unless the players come up to the bar to collect their winnings, you don’t see these Morlocks down in their garish netherworld, where they concentrate on the hypnotically whirring images and numbers, their every jab of the buttons eating up their welfare cheques.

It didn’t take me long to realise the contrasting streams of customers the hotel attracts. There are the theatregoers, who generally arrive with a puzzled expression, unable to believe that the geriatric hotel holds a theatre. The audiences stand out for their youth, their uniform of black clothes, hipster beards and parties of tipsy women all talking at once. Opening nights are enlivened by the effusive greetings and air kisses of fellow actors. It’s easy to identify them as they arrive because they’re all staring at their mobile phones, which project glowing white lights onto their faces as if they’re carrying their own personal spotlights.

The first floor has held ukulele rehearsals, drawing classes and parties. At the bucks’ parties the men dress as clowns (because, apparently, the grooms hate clowns), sailors or cricketers; the groom may be forced to wear a frock, diapers, rabbit costume or come as a prisoner with a ball and chain. Most are noisy affairs, but the worst racket, a combination of ear-splitting disco music, yelling and laughing, was a party of about thirty deaf men, many of them wearing hearing aids with wires attached to their skulls. They had two strippers perform for them. It’s impossible to know what happened up there but straight after their act the strippers, now dressed normally, fled the hotel, wheeling their luggage of scanty clothes and sex toys behind them. They were so shell-shocked by their experience that they openly sniffed cocaine in the front seat of their car before driving off to their next gig.

At one buck’s party the groom wore convict-striped overalls, and a dwarf in a black suit, a truncheon in one hand and a schooner of beer in the other, pretended to be his prison guard. Two topless waitresses, one wearing a tiny tartan skirt that showed off her bare behind, the other a silver lamé miniskirt, came downstairs not long after the party began to rescue the dwarf, who had fainted in an alcoholic stupor next to the ATM, and carry him back upstairs. The men who organise bucks’ parties must find dwarves funny because this one was a familiar figure at these events. The problem was that he always got thoroughly smashed and one time as I was ordering a wine I saw him rolling noisily down the staircase and onto the floor, where he lay still for a time before staggering to his feet and returning upstairs for more free beer, ridicule and a lap dance with one of the waitresses.

When you sit outside, the tables are arranged against the wall of the hotel. To the right are half a dozen terrace houses that stop at a high concrete fence and a dense clump of casuarinas, eucalypts and bushes that hide the railway viaduct that cuts Dowling Street in two. Opposite the terraces is the local kindergarten, unique in Woolloomooloo for its Spanish Mission–style design.

To the left are houses that make up part of the large housing commission estate in Woolloomooloo. For most of the year these houses are hidden behind the luxuriant foliage of the enormous plane trees lining the footpaths. In winter, however, the bare trees reveal the dowdy exteriors. In the warmer months the plane trees give the street the erroneous impression of genteel normality.

The pub regulars in my time have been a mixture of caretakers, house painters, teachers, gays, straights, transvestites, lawyers, tradies, debt collectors, ex-crims, drug takers, meth chemists, mechanics, labourers, madmen (bipolar and depressives a speciality), fixers and a con-man. The weird thing for a newcomer is that this idiosyncratic mix of people happily co-exists.

What becomes apparent when you sit outside the Old Fitzroy is that Reid Street, which comes straight down from McElhone Street, is a conduit from Kings Cross to Woolloomooloo and the scene of some unnerving, even bizarre sights. It funnels stoned skateboarders who race down it unconcerned about cars, ice addicts jabbering to themselves, the hollow-eyed homeless, those hurrying to the Matthew Talbot hostel to get to dinner in time, the coke dealer whose comings and goings is as regular as clockwork, police cars with sirens screaming as they rush to a crime scene, the woman dealer pushing a pram with her child sitting on a pillow filled with drugs, the alcoholic transsexual and the former heroin addict who accidentally fell on her pet rat and tried to resuscitate it by injecting it with her methadone. There is a constant stream of dishevelled, painfully thin addicts and crazies, some of them clutching a bottle of beer or a cask of wine, making for Tom Uren Square to find shelter under the railway viaduct on the corner of Forbes Street. One afternoon we cheered a lone cop puffing and panting as he ran down the street chasing a bearded drug dealer who, not knowing the area, turned right and found himself in the cul-de-sac created by the concrete fence of the railway and, realising escape was hopeless, abruptly sat down in the gutter and held up his hands.

In her guidebook Great Australian Pubs (2012), Lee Mylne wrote that the Old Fitzroy had a ‘shabby-chic charm’. In Vagrer, a comic novel about the pub by a former barman Nathan Roche, the Old Fitzroy (or, as he calls it, with tongue firmly in cheek, the Ritz) is described as a ‘place that could be seen more or less as a mental institution with alcohol being provided’. This may be a comic exaggeration, but sometimes it was close to the truth.

Because of the hotel I have got to know many locals and I’ve spent much time wandering Woolloomooloo’s streets, gradually learning about a milieu that is totally ignored by outsiders except as a byword for the poor, dysfunctional, homeless, hopeless and desperate who live there.

This is a zone that was allowed to wither away until the 1970s. It was no wonder that George Farwell’s affectionate 1971 book was called Requiem for Woolloomooloo. But it recovered through the stubbornness of its remaining inhabitants, and the persistence of urban dreamers, unionists and a priest. Woolloomooloo was, in a way, the triumph of the forgotten and the powerless, and they make it the intriguing place it is today.

Over the years I’ve sought out Woolloomooloo’s past in its streets and alleys and how it’s imprinted itself on the present. In other words, I have been a flâneur. Baudelaire once defined the flâneur as someone whose domain is the crowd:

… as air is that of a bird, as water is that of a fish. His passion and his profession is to marry the crowd. For the flâneur, for the passionate observer, it is an immense pleasure to make a home in the multitude, in the flux, in the motion, in the fleeting and infinite.

This does not mean the flâneur is an objective reporter; in fact he glories in his attraction to the temporary, the ephemeral, the subjects not considered important by the historian. For him, the past is a spectral but persistent presence.

It is only when you walk its sixty-three streets that you see things that a cyclist, jogger or driver does not. To these transients Woolloomooloo may seem bland, a miscellaneous cacophony of buildings and streets, but a flâneur discovers, generally by accident, pockets of beauty and charm and small enclaves redolent of the past unnoticed by others.

But how to tell the story of Woolloomooloo? It cannot be a normal history because I haven’t experienced it in that way. As a flâneur (or ‘deep walker’, which is my preferred term) I have a street-level understanding of the area and, as a drinker at the Old Fitzroy, I’ve become familiar with many members of the community. Through my time at the pub, I’ve also set out to discover the history of the ’Loo, which is seldom written about except in a disparaging and condescending way.

I’ve approached Woolloomooloo through four strands: memoir, history, its major streets and the themes that define it. This approach has come about because of the way I have learned about the area. Originally I had no intention of writing about it, but through a process of accretion have accumulated information for what could also be called ‘A Field Guide to the Neighbourhood’.

The catalyst was the Old Fitzroy and those regulars I mix with. From my interest in the hotel itself, its history and the locals I met there, my fascination with Woolloomooloo grew. Just what was its history? There were only a couple of books written about the area nearly half a century ago. Why is the very word Woolloomooloo still a stigma, a shorthand for notoriety, social despair and criminality?

It has become clear to me that the Old Fitzroy, with its history dating back to when the area was transformed from a farm into a crowded residential district, is a living portal into Woolloomooloo’s past and present.

THE NAME EXCITES RIDICULE AND ODIUM

ALL THE LONG-TIME RESIDENTS I’VE INTERVIEWED agree that once people heard they were from Woolloomooloo they were considered ‘scum’ and ‘low-lifes’. In order to get a job they pretended to be from Potts Point or Darlinghurst.

The name’s unsavoury reputation has been longstanding, so much so that in 1905 a Woolloomooloo Renaming Committee was formed. As far as its members were concerned, the name ‘excites ridicule and sometimes even odium’. Patrick Lynch, the secretary of the group, thought it was a ‘long ugly word with eight vowels’. It had such nasty connotations that St Kilda private hospital had difficulty filling its beds and so changed its entrance from Woolloomooloo Street to Palmer Street in order to avoid the stigma.

A petition calling for the district to be renamed was signed by 1145 people but, as Lynch said, ‘11,000 signatures could have been obtained if necessary’. The petition was strongly backed by the Sydney Morning Herald, which believed that:

The old name, with its multitudinous vowels, has become synonymous with evil repute, and the modern resident craves for the final effacement of both with one pass on the sponge across the slate.

Businesses supported the move because the name took up too much space on advertisements, and there were people who quite simply wanted a name that was easier to spell and pronounce. A counter petition, signed by just a handful of locals, thought the name ‘liquid and euphonious … unique and uncommon’.

There were many suggestions for renaming the area Palmerton or even St Kilda, but the most popular was Parkhurst. Woolloomooloo Bay would keep its name, but Woolloomooloo Street would restore what was thought to be its Aboriginal name, Wulla-Mulla. The Committee’s only success was to change Woolloomooloo Street to Cathedral because it led up to St Mary’s.

Over the years teachers made up ditties and rhymes to try and teach their pupils how to spell the peculiar name:

Near Sydney Town there’s a place of renown

Which is well known to you, it’s called Woolloomooloo,

It’s easy to say, I know very well

But Woolloomooloo is not easy to spell.

Double U double O double L double O M double O L double O

Now make that a feature, and I’ll be the teacher

Let everyone here have a go.

The origin of the name is obviously Aboriginal, but there has been considerable debate over the years as to how it was spelt and what it meant. One conjecture was that the local Cadigal people called it Wullamulla or Wullamooloo, which means field of blood, because tribal fights occurred there. But the consensus is that it was either Wallabahmullah, which meant a young male kangaroo or male black kangaroo, or Wallamullah, a place where plenty of fish are caught. Given that the Cadigal fished in the bay, the latter seems plausible.

The problem was that in the early nineteenth century the name underwent many permutations because no-one could agree on a uniform spelling. The quirky variations included Wulamulla, Woolamoola, Wallamoola, Wallamooloo, Wallamoula, Woolloomoola, Wolomoloo, Woolloomaloo. Finally these coalesced into the standard spelling and pronunciation of Woolloomooloo, a name that is obviously a European corruption of the Aboriginal word.

Back in 1793 it was known as Wallamooloo when Lieutenant-Governor Major Francis Grose made a grant to the Commissary-General John Palmer of ‘one hundred acres of land lying at the head of Garden Island Cove on the east side of the line laid down as a boundary for the common ground appropriated for the town of Sydney, which was to be known as Wallamooloo Farm’. These forty hectares stretched from Woolloomooloo Bay (Garden Island Cove) and were bounded by present-day Hyde Park, Forbes Street and Albion Street, Surry Hills.

John Palmer had arrived with the First Fleet as purser on HMS Sirius in 1788. He was twenty-eight years old and had entered the Navy as a captain’s servant at nine, though it appears he was well educated. He was captured by the French in 1781 during the American War of Independence and, after his release in 1783, he married the beautiful daughter of an American Royalist family that could trace its lineage back to the Mayflower.

Handsome, with a ruddy complexion and blue eyes, he was small enough to be nicknamed ‘Little Jacky’. He had vivid red hair and a quick temper that soon passed. Gregarious and considered by everyone a ‘proper gentleman’, he had many talents. His marksmanship with rifle or gun was thought remarkable, as was his dancing: ‘So light was he on his feet that he could dance a hornpipe (a lively dance popular with sailors) on the dining table, before the glasses had been removed, and none of the wine in them would be spilt.’ He took to the Sydney climate finding it ‘delicious, the airs so salubrious’. In early 1790 Governor Phillip appointed Palmer to the office of Commissary-General, where his duties involved the procurement, issue and receipt of stores, and being paymaster, treasurer and banker. He proved to be diligent and honest.

The land he was granted was swampy and regularly flooded, but it was fertile. It had a ‘crystal clear’ creek meandering through it, which began in East Sydney and flowed in a north-westerly direction, winding its way across William Street, where later a wonky bridge would become a constant trial for pedestrians, and followed the line of present-day Sir John Young Crescent, slightly interrupted by stepping stones near Cathedral Street for people to cross it (except at high tide, when the stones were covered), and down to the mudflats and mangroves of the bay near what is now Riley Street.

Palmer rid his property of the native melaleucas and casuarinas and replaced them with briar roses and golden gorse in the English fashion. He cultivated a model farm of five acres, enclosed by a stone wall, with orchards, grape vines and even, at one time, an experimental crop of tobacco. He also ran cattle, hogs, sheep, goats and horses. There was a windmill where Governor Phillip’s statue now stands in the Botanic Garden and the bakehouse was on the site of the Conservatorium of Music. It was so successful it was just known as ‘The Farm’.

His residence, Woollamoola House, was flanked on the west by the creek, close to what is now Palmer Street, some 75 metres from William Street. Built in 1800, it was a simple but large house with Georgian windows and no verandah. Nearby were enormous stables and coach houses, and a family vault (‘a pretty tomb’) secreted on the corner of Cathedral and Forbes streets in a small grove of cypresses. Two of the Palmers’ children were buried in it (their bodies were later removed to Parramatta). The surroundings were equally impressive: ‘There were iron gates supported by stone walls and a stone palisading up to the house, within grew Norfolk Island pines and the large blossomed carrajong.’ The home was said to be spacious enough to accommodate a huge family and strong enough to withstand a siege. The Cadigal roamed the property making ‘their fires on the hillside at night, but never came by the front of the house’.

Palmer had a strong mercantile streak and owned three vessels. One called John was built in his own shipyard, nearly a third of a mile from the present rim of the bay where there was enough water to launch small ships. John and a sloop called George were used for whaling and sealing in Bass Strait, and Edwin, the runt of the vessels, traded up and down the Hawkesbury River and along the coast.

When he had established himself, he returned to England in 1796 to fetch his wife and children whom he hadn’t seen in ten years. The family arrived back in Sydney in 1800. The Palmers were soon celebrated for their elegance, grand entertainments and summer soirees, their invitations highly prized by colonial society.

John Bolger’s 1803 painting Walloomooloo, the Seat of John Palmer Esquire, Port Jackson may be the work of a gifted amateur, but it’s a delightful rendition of how Palmer’s farm was seen in its prime. Picturesque boats sail in the bay, another is being built on the foreshore, contented cattle graze on the slopes, the orchards are heavy with fruit and the house itself is at the centre of this idyllic portrait of fecundity and unostentatious wealth.

The French also noticed Palmer’s extensive property. On a map published in Paris in 1805 (by order of His Majesty Napoleon, Empereur et Roi) his spacious house appears as ‘Maison de Monsieur Palmer’. The map also shows the winding course of the stream, beginning somewhere in present East Sydney and crossing William Street, where there was a punt (the only way to cross the creek before the bridge was built).

Palmer was gregarious and kind. In 1806 when there was a scarcity of flour in the colony, he made sure his bread was sold to the needy at less than the inflated prices charged elsewhere. He treated convicts well, and one who worked for him was Margaret Catchpole, who later became known for her letters home to England. For eighteen months she cooked for Palmer and was amazed at how the family ‘mak as much of me as if I was a Lady’. While working there she was wooed by the botanist James Gordon, a frequent visitor to Woollamoola House, but she rejected him and never married.

During the mutiny against Bligh, Palmer sided with the Governor and was imprisoned by the rebels, but on Macquarie’s arrival in January 1810, he was reinstated to his office. Three months later, he was forced to travel to England as a witness for Bligh. He returned in 1814, but in his absence his position had been downgraded and Macquarie had resumed the land that held the windmill and the bakery. Palmer’s finances were a mess and the mortgage for his estate rose to an incredible £13,000. There seemed to be no way of reducing his debts except to hold a fire sale of his furniture in 1816. The advertisement in the Sydney Gazette suggests the lavishness of his former lifestyle and refined tastes. The furniture comprised:

Elegant four post bedsteads, with mosquito curtains and beautiful English chintz hangings, very tastefully made up, with window curtains to correspond, excellent beds, palisades, and hair mattresses, fashionable drawing room, parlour and dining room furniture, consisting of Brussels, Kidderminster, and Venetian carpets … two dozen handsome drawing room chairs, dressing room and parlour ditto, quite new and very fashionable register stoves, with brass mounted fire irons and fenders to correspond: elegant Europe chintz window curtains with superiorly arranged draperies and cornices, with couches en suite; a very superb mirror 5ft 6 inches by 3 feet; mahogany and cedar articles, consisting of wardrobes, chests of drawers, sets of dining, breakfast and card tables, wash hand stands, dressing tables, gentlemen’s cylindrical writing desks, two excellent piano fortes, a very good 8 day clock, a double dinner set of tureens, patent china, a truly elegant and beautiful dessert set of Worcester china, and an equally elegant tea and coffee set of the same, with trays … cut and plain glass, a very rich and fashionable side board of plated ware … A most complete and very superior assortment of every description of Kitchen furniture, comprising fly and cottage jacks, ranges, boilers, stewers, steamers, ovens. There will also be sold a very handsome Chariot, a good gig, some prime Carriage and other articles too numerous to mention.

Even this desperate ploy was of little help, and Palmer was forced to sell the property at a huge loss. In 1822 Edward Riley