‘Beware of the young doctor and the old barber.’
Benjamin Franklin
While the Tramway Street reunion was in full swing, Roy Lonsdale was readjusting to home life on Botany Road. The barber shop in Mascot was slotted into a space no wider than four and a half metres along a row of similar shops. Inside, two 1920s chrome and leather hydraulic-lift barber’s chairs were set in front of a long mirror. Combs, scissors and hand clippers rested in glass jars full of misty methylated spirit on a shelf below the mirror. A thick pall of tobacco smoke was ever present—any man sitting on the single wooden bench waiting for a shave and a trim at the hands of Ernest Arthur Lonsdale or his son Ernest Jnr would bide his time smoking. The elder Ernest’s wife, Annie Lonsdale, kept the nicotine flowing, perched at a high bench in the tobacconist booth tucked near the shop window. Ashtrays on silver stands stood near spittoons, surrounded by near misses of phlegm splattered on a wooden floor covered with discarded hair accumulated from the day’s cuttings. Gentlemen of the time kept their hair short and well above the ears, ensuring the profession of gents’ hairdresser remained a secure and reliable source of income.
In deference to the long tradition of barbering, affixed to the front window was a decal of a barber’s pole with its familiar red and white swirl. The origins of the barber’s pole icon hark back to the Middle Ages, when a barber doubled as a surgeon. The process of bloodletting required the patient to squeeze a long staff, encouraging veins in the arm to engorge and allow easier access to the vein for ‘letting’ with leeches and blade. Bandages used to soak up the let blood were wrapped around the staff and left out in the sun to dry. The ball on the top of the pole was originally a leech basin. Harking forward, we find that bloodletting was not available at Ernie’s, but therapy of another kind was freely offered. The barber, like the taxi driver, would always lend an ear, even when burning the excess hair out of someone else’s with a long wax taper. The taper worked just as well on nasal hair.
While the barber shop was a constant hive of activity, there was never a queue outside the shop. The line wasn’t straight—it was scrunched up as people crowded into the tiny shop, smoking and chatting. No-one cared who was next in line. The shop was a meeting place, a place to gossip, to laugh or cry. Today, filmmakers and stage managers use smoke machines to create atmosphere. In the 1940s it was a case of BYO atmosphere, courtesy of the cigarette. The mood was always set. The perpetual whorl of cigarette smoke acted like a social adhesive, enclosing all customers and hangers-on. In the 1940s a non-smoker was a social outcast. A cigarette held in casual disregard was never absent from the hand, a compulsory addiction. The tobacconist was the dealer. She had all the accoutrements: Tally Ho papers, slender black Bakelite cigarette holders, silvered matchbox cases with enamelled portraits of the King. It was hard to resist the sweet smell of fresh moist tobacco rolled between nicotine-stained fingers. The men congregated around the barber’s chairs, leaned on walls, smoking and solving the problems of the world as a stream of local women stopped by for a chat with Annie Lonsdale in her tobacconist booth. Any advice was offered free of charge, and no doubt was of great comfort during the worrying days of World War II. From dawn to dusk, the fat was chewed and spat to the rhythmical snapping of scissors in the deft hands of the two Ernie Lonsdales.*
Ernie Snr was a man of high standing in the local community, a one-time Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge, master barber, father of seven and husband of Annie, who sat behind the tall cork-topped desk and sold tobacco and lottery tickets with her daughters Evelyn and Dot helping out while half of her sons were busy with the war. Roy Lonsdale had been the first to see active service, while his younger brother Eric chomped at the bit to go. On his return, Roy must have seen in Eric a boy similar to his pre-war self, full of the lust for adventure. Whatever Roy might have said to young Eric didn’t dissuade him. Eric didn’t need his arm twisted to go to war—unlike their older brother Jack, who needed both arms twisted before he finally enlisted (as will be revealed in due course). Two more brothers, Don and Ernie Jnr, were to miss the action. Don had a child and an essential business to run. He was pumping petrol while Ernie Jnr was essentially cutting hair.
All seven siblings were brought up in the confines of 1187 Botany Road. Beyond the tiny shop was a small space, ambitiously named the dining room. Here there was a gas fire and a long table, used exclusively at Christmas—a special occasional table. There was just enough room left for a Singer treadle sewing machine that had seen more action than Pte Roy Lonsdale, and induced as many injuries. Seven over-eager children had tested the treadle to its limits. When not pedalling the sewing machine they were pedalling a pianola at the other end of the room. The only child who actually learned to play it was Evelyn, who played stride style, belting out Fats Waller tunes, much to the chagrin of her mother—young people’s music. The others contented themselves with pedalling out tunes punched into the perforated brown paper of player piano rolls: ‘Ragtime Cowboy Joe’, ‘Black Bottom’, ‘Toot Toot Tootsie’ and ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’.
One step down from the dining room under a rusted corrugated-tin roof with a leaking skylight was the kitchen, home to a round wooden table, an Early Kooka stove, a leadlight cabinet and one tiny basin. Between the shop and the dining room a steep set of stairs led up to the sleeping quarters. One room for the parents, and the rest of the crew were jammed into another room with a closed-in verandah. Out the back was a laundry, with industrial-size deep concrete tubs to wash both clothes and children. In a far corner sat an iron-footed freestanding bathtub. There was no shower and no hot water—just a cold tub under bare charcoal-black brick walls. The toilet was an architectural afterthought, a dark hut that you wouldn’t want to spend too much time in. The newspapers jammed onto a wire coathanger weren’t for reading, they were for wiping your arse. The backyard was a narrow strip of bald dirt. Grass didn’t have much chance after years beneath the feet of seven children, but here and there a few brave sprouts poked through, like a nervous digger sticking his head out of his doover. At the far end of the dirt was a tin shed, at one time home to Ernie Snr’s pride and joy, a black Model T Ford. Eventually the costs of bringing up a family had meant a choice had to be made, and reluctantly the Model T had to go.
I know a fair bit about the Lonsdales’ place. I grew up there too.
The little barber shop was much like its patriarch. Ernie Snr was a slight man, not wealthy by any measure, yet immaculately dressed at all times in a three-piece pinstripe navy-blue suit, braces, silver spring-metal armbands, a shiny silver fob watch in his vest pocket and tortoiseshell horn-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. During the years of the Great Depression, wearing that same suit Ernest took Ernie Jnr in hand and wandered the beaches of Botany Bay offering free haircuts to the hundreds of men forced to sleep out on the sands while they searched for a home and a job.
One day, around about the time little Stanley Livingston was ferrying buckets of beer to his mother in Zetland, there was a knock at the door of the barber shop after closing time. Annie Lonsdale was busy checking the lottery sheets and counting the day’s takings, while Ernie Snr was sharpening a cutthroat razor on a leather strop. A silhouette of a male, smaller even in stature than the small-statured Ernie Snr, could be seen through the frosted-glass door. Annie asked no questions and invited the man in: a head in need of a haircut was never turned away. As the well-dressed gent entered the shop, Annie failed to notice the blood drain from the face of Ernie Snr, who tightened his grip on the cutthroat razor. Their visitor also knew a thing or two about cutthroat razors, but that was about all the men had in common. Annie offered the man a seat in the barber’s chair. Word of the highly respected barber’s generous nature had spread beyond the borders of Mascot, and the man quietly but firmly explained that he wasn’t after a trim, he was in urgent need of a short-term loan. Ernie Snr said nothing. Annie chastised him, ‘Ern, Ern! The gentleman is talking to you.’ Ernie Snr had frozen to the spot. Annie went straight to the cash drawer and sorted out the loan, then bid the man good day. She closed the door and resumed berating her husband for his uncharacteristic rudeness, until he interrupted her.
‘Do you know who that was?’ he said softly.
‘Never saw him before in my life,’ spat Annie.
Squizzy Taylor was the man’s name. And as the blood returned to Ernie’s face it retreated just as swiftly from Annie’s. The loan was never repaid. Taylor was shot dead on 27 October 1927. Both the Livingstons and the Lonsdales were touched by the notorious Squizzy Taylor, but Ernie Lonsdale was touched for a week’s wages.
Reassured that Lilly Livingston was in good spirits, Gordon was off to his family home in Wollongong. Meanwhile, Pte Stanley Livingston dropped in to the Tennyson Hotel to meet Roy and grab some courage before heading across the road for a trim and a shave, but more importantly to see Evelyn Lonsdale. The pair had exchanged letters throughout Stanley’s time in the Middle East, but seeing her now made him nervous—he’d had plenty of time to think about this girl, still in her teens when he left, and to sort out his list of priorities. Evelyn was high on that list. As Evelyn assisted her mother trading tobacco that day, she found it impossible to avoid the gaze of Pte Stanley Livingston, now seated in the chair, his chin lathered in foam awaiting a much-needed shave. It did not go unnoticed by Ernie Snr that the young private had his eyes set upon his daughter, a quiet, intelligent girl with flowing brown locks. Ernie Snr grasped the leather razor strop and vigorously sharpened his cutthroat razor before holding the blade within inches of Stanley’s neck. The young private soon turned his eyes right.
Three weeks into March of 1943, Operation Liddington leave was almost up for the men of the 2/17th. With her Stan around the house, and Gordon never far away, Lilly’s condition had improved, but the thought of losing them again distressed her, and Stanley and Gordon were reluctant to leave. Roy Lonsdale was enjoying married life, albeit in the cramped upstairs quarters of the barber shop, and over a quiet beer the three of them decided to turn their leave into a stay. When the battalion returned to duty at Narellan camp at 0645 hours on 23 March, privates Stanley Livingston, Gordon Oxman and Roy Lonsdale were reported absent without leave.
H.D. Wells was also loath to return to camp. He reports that a large number of troops, like himself, extended their leave for a few days. He was fined two pounds and given a severe reprimand. Pte Peter J. Jones too found the three-week leave ended far too swiftly and the prospect of a return to duties away from those of family hard to swallow. Still, Jones and many others straggled into camp, either of their own volition or under military escort after being rounded up. Roy Lonsdale was rounded up by the military police and returned to his unit on the twenty-ninth. He was fined five pounds. The two other absconders managed to elude capture and were not present for the ceremonial parade that attracted thousands in Sydney before the battalion moved to far northern Queensland on 17 April to commence intensive training in the Atherton Tablelands in preparation for active service in the south-west Pacific theatre.
The troops were immediately subject to lectures on the tactical problems of such warfare, with emphasis on encouraging the fighting spirit. Point 30 of a training memorandum issued by Lt Col N.W. Simpson states the importance of maintaining morale, and that if the troops were well led ‘their morale will be high and with all that they are more than a match for the enemy, without, they lay themselves open to defeat by uncivilised natives armed with spears and bush knives’. After studying the memorandum, the men were issued fresh supplies of tomahawks, picks and bush knives.
Major John Broadbent wrote of the training that it was initially directed to ‘familiarising troops with the different types of jungle country . . . learning bush craft as it applied to such including the many personal problems of how to evade or remove leeches, know the stinging tree, sharpen and use a machete, cook the new style rations. Scrub typhus first raised its ugly head here and soldiers learned the application of mite repellent and most soldiers were extra serious about it.’
Scrub typhus and leeches were far from the minds of the two absentees. With Lilly in the safe hands of Gordon, Stanley was spending far too much time hovering around the barber shop on Botany Road. How many haircuts can one man endure in a week? Ernie Snr knew what was going on. Years behind the chair had given him a unique perspective on male vanity. Without exception, when a man was in the chair, he looked steadfastly at himself. Once in the chair, it was polite to stare. It was imperative, in fact; with scissors snapping at near light speed in and around the ear area, one false move and a man could lose a lobe. The head was to be handled by the barber only, a tilt to the left or right, but at all times the eyes of the customer were never to leave the eyes in the mirror. During a haircut, a client’s eyes act as a pivot point. A barber works around the centrifugal stare of the client. The barber’s chair allowed time for a man to indulge in narcissism without criticism. The fixed stare, the music of the scissors snapping and the gentle massage of the comb quiets the man-beast, and then it’s all over too quickly. Especially if your last trim was the previous day. Stanley Livingston was breaking the golden rule: he was not looking at himself. His eyes kept drifting to the left to study the profile of Evelyn as she sold cigarettes and chatted with too many other young men for Stanley’s liking—many of them dressed to impress in uniforms that had never left Australian shores.
Evelyn’s sister Dot had not initially approved of her older sister fraternising with Stanley. He had apparently been going out with a girl called Madge who worked in the cake shop on Botany Road when he spotted Evelyn. And she had her eye on him too. ‘Evelyn used to watch your father,’ Dot told me. ‘He always had white cricket pants on, you know, he was always immaculately dressed and Evelyn was always impressed because our boys were rough and ready.’ Dot couldn’t work out what Evelyn saw in him. ‘Evelyn always thought what a nice fellow he was, and I said, “Oh, he’s a bit too queeny for me,”’ the elusive charm of Stanley Livingston remaining a mystery to her to this day. The two girls were also familiar with Stanley’s father, who after gurning his way along the pubs on Botany Road often dropped in for a haircut. Dot clearly remembers the enthusiasm Ernie Livingston demonstrated as he gurned just that little bit too close to their ungurned faces for comfort.
Ernie Lonsdale Snr was a stickler for the law and did not approve of the boys going AWL, but under instruction from Annie, the only person who held sway over him, he conceded to hold his tongue and welcome them into his home. He even relented so far as to offer Stanley a roof over his head at 1187 after Stanley gave up his couch to Gordon. The two men had shared too many doovers together in the desert to split a couch on Tramway Street.
Ernie and Annie Lonsdale were born late in the nineteenth century. Ernie Snr managed to avoid the conflicts of World War I: he was married, had his own business and was raring to breed. Annie lost a brother, Donald, at Gallipoli. Some years before this she had almost lost her own life. Annie grew up in the slum suburb of Paddington in Sydney. Her mother, Jessica, had a habit of leaning over the upstairs balcony to abuse any debt collectors or beggars knocking on the door below. One day in 1899, after hearing a knock at the door, five-year-old Annie Macleay tried to emulate her mother and leaned over the balcony to rebuke a visitor. She fell and was impaled on the ironspiked fence below. It missed most vital organs but had that spike pierced a few centimetres further north most of the stories presented here would have been nipped in the bud. Annie Lonsdale had no qualms about flaunting that scar on her upper thigh in later life. It was pretty gruesome. No child can resist gruesome. My father had a claw and my grannie had been impaled on a fence—it didn’t get any better than that. Apart from Uncle Eric’s missing index finger. He’d point the stump in my face and say, ‘Whatever you do, son, don’t bite your nails.’ I immediately started biting my nails.
Ernest Arthur Lonsdale spent half of the twentieth century keeping men’s hair at bay in the shop on Botany Road while Mascot transformed around him, world wars came and went, children grew and married, then had more children who grew and married. Hair also continued to grow from men’s heads, and up until the mid-sixties it was to be removed with military precision. When he was born, in 1892, Mascot hadn’t even been a name on a map. The young Ernie Snr grew up in Hill End, a goldmining town in the central west of New South Wales, his parents rushing for gold like thousands of others. The tiny wattle-and-daub cottage the family lived in would in the coming century be overrun by artists. In the 1940s Donald Friend moved in, followed by Russell Drysdale, and these two boys soon struck gold without even digging a hole.
In the nineteenth century the Port of Botany was largely sand, swamp and market gardens, acres of lantana, buddleia, mulberry, flax and pines. The entire population of Sydney relied on the gardens for their potatoes. With the onset of the gold rush many gardeners left to hit it rich up north, but those who hung around had the last laugh as the price of spuds rose to twenty pounds per ton. Apart from the gardens there soon developed a mill, a candle factory, a piggery, Barney Dougherty’s boiling-down works, a tannery and a slaughterhouse. There was a glue factory and a blacksmith named Joe Bogis who was also renowned for his rhubarb-growing prowess. It seems that you could buy a pig, have it slaughtered, make candles out of its fat and a saddle from its hide, then have the rest boiled down and made into glue while you enjoyed a bowl of Sydney’s best stewed rhubarb with Joe, all without leaving the suburb. But back then the one thing you couldn’t get was a decent haircut anywhere along Mudbank Road. Convicts had built the road, which rolled from the district of Mudbank through to George Street in the city. To get in there you had to either walk or take a market cart. By the end of the nineteenth century you could take a bus for a shilling each way, or a double-decked steam tram from the loop at Tramway Street.
Come the new century, the unused marshy land and mangrove swamps would become the Ascot Racecourse, the track soon to be absorbed into an embryonic aerodrome where the likes of Charles Kingsford Smith, Bert Hinkler, Amy Johnson, Jean Batten and Charles Ulm would practise their skills in biplanes high over Mudbank. Charlie Kingsford Smith and Charlie Ulm were regulars in Ernie’s barber shop in the 1920s, dropping by for a trim before setting off on another solo adventure. I always look closely at photos of Smithy, knowing my grandad cut that hair, most likely using the same pair of scissors that later trimmed my own. A good pair of scissors was a prized tool of the trade and would last a lifetime. Kingsford Smith once had his photo taken in the barber’s chair for a local news story. From then on the old iron seat was always referred to as ‘Smithy’s chair’.
By the time Stanley Livingston was born, horse-drawn jinkers carried the biplanes into the paddock that passed for an aerodrome. The only thing required for anyone wanting an aerodrome licence in those days was ‘a surface smooth enough to allow a T-model Ford to be driven at 20 mph with the driver still comfortably seated’. Local racehorse trainers were warned against using the former racecourse, now landing strip, as a training track. Dogs and horses were also banned from crossing the strip, but the authorities had less success in halting gangs of youths who used the aerodrome as a shooting ground.
The traffic on Botany Road was about to get very busy. Smithy had seen action in World War I in Gallipoli, Egypt and France before enlisting in the Royal Flying Corps. In 1927, he and Charles Ulm took a boat to the United States with the dream of coming back across the Pacific in a plane. No-one had given this a go before. Smithy and Ulm purchased a Fokker Trimotor aircraft in Seattle, dubbed it the Southern Cross and, with the help of Harry Lyon navigating and James Warner operating the radio, took off for home. Eighty-three hours later, on 10 June 1928, three hundred thousand people jammed into Mascot’s tiny airfield to catch a glimpse of Charles Kingsford Smith’s Southern Cross, fresh from Oakland, California, on its pioneer crossing of the Pacific. Dot Lonsdale still remembers that day. The five-year-old couldn’t quite understand all the fuss—she’d seen plenty of planes before—but she remembers the excitement, and Annie and Ernie urging her to look to the sky as the Southern Cross came into view and landed safely in the aerodrome that would one day take Kingsford Smith’s name. He wouldn’t live to see it. Smithy and co-pilot John Thompson Pethybridge were piloting a sister aircraft, the Lady Southern Cross, when it disappeared off the coast of Burma.
Ernie and Annie’s seven children grew up playing in the paddocks surrounding the airstrip, from childhood to adulthood, biplanes to bombers. There were no fences to keep anyone out or in, much to the displeasure of the market gardeners still holding the last of their ground surrounding the airstrip. On the occasion of Smithy’s arrival, onlookers stampeded and flattened the vegetables. The predominantly Chinese gardeners brought out their tomahawks and threatened the crowds, but they were outnumbered by the hundreds of thousands of people. The gardens also made excellent soft landing areas for the less experienced pilots. These were the last days of the market gardens; Sydney would soon have to look elsewhere for its spuds.
At the aerodrome there were no restrictions—visitors were free to walk into hangars and fondle the biplanes. You could even go on a joyflight on a whim if you spoke to the right person. One of the pilots once offered Ernie Snr a free ride. Ernie Snr wasn’t one for heights, but he didn’t have the heart to refuse the offer, so he took Dot with him for support, or more likely in the hope that the pilot would refuse to take the tiny girl on board for safety reasons and he’d be off the hook. No such luck. The pair were bundled into the cockpit and were soon spinning and looping all over the city. Dot recalls the thrill of it; she also remembers the bruises on her arms from her father’s vice-like grip. ‘When I think of what they used to do up there . . .’ Evelyn said, recalling an incident involving a one-legged flyer. ‘You can imagine those little planes, and there was an alleyway beside the hotel and he told us he could turn side on and come through it and over the Tennyson Hotel. They were really daredevils. He did it. He went through the lane, turned his plane side on, and went up and over the hotel. Not a scratch. But he must have been blind drunk.’
In 1931, as the airfield shifted from drome to port, the Controller of Aviation set down a few safety rules:
• The practice of soliciting for passengers on the road leading to, or within, the aerodrome is not permitted.
• Pupils under instruction shall have their aircraft distinguished by a red streamer, and they are not to be approached closely by other aircraft.
• Persons visiting the aerodrome do so at their own risk.
Charles Ulm, in a letter to the Civil Aviation District Superintendent, showed concern:
I feel that it is quite unnecessary to bring to your attention the fact that there are very many comparatively inexperienced pilots flying from Mascot Aerodrome and if an inexperienced pilot had any engine failure just after taking off . . . it is quite possible that he would run into people playing golf on the aerodrome.
In 1938, the looming war in Europe spurred a boom in aircraft technology. Wood, wire and fabric were soon to be replaced by jet engines. Sydney Airport was about to become a military facility, and domestic aviation was put on hold. Soon the former swamp became an assembly, repair and maintenance facility for military aircraft. Four new runways were built, one of them forming a level crossing where planes competed with coal trains heading to the Bunnerong Power Station. The stage was being set for war.
*Clearly there was a glut of Ernies around at the time. For the sake of clarity from here on in, Ernest Lonsdale the elder will be known as Ernie Snr, his son as Ernie Jnr, while Stanley Livingston’s father will remain simply Ernie. To complicate matters further, there was one more Ernie. Bridget Livingston gave birth to a boy, Ernest William Livingston, on 18 September 1922. This littlest of Ernies was two months premature and died two days after his birth. As Mr Kipling wrote, ‘Lest we forget’.