Grand designs

The Terrace Detective

Suffolk St showing the house, ‘Cecil’ at the end

In this instalment of the Terrace Detective, your aspiring local historian is back focusing on the heritage of Paddington’s streets. The haphazard process of picking a street (a trade secret, but email the editor if you have any requests) has led us to select Suffolk St as the survey site for this column.

It’s a small street which means we won’t need to be worried about an entire street re-numbering, which we have seen in previous episodes. This should make the case slightly easier — a nice way to start 2023. 

Originally, this area was part of John Gurner’s Duxford Estate which I am familiar with (I live on one of the streets created out of this original land grant). Gurner died in 1882 and his landholdings were purchased by Thomas Broughton. Broughton sold the majority of Gurner’s land in the Duxford Estate sub-division of 1885.

Luckily there are a few houses on the west side of Suffolk St with a name immortalised in their façade, such as Hagley (at number 12), Knockmore (18), and then Corio, Clifton and, perhaps my favourite, Cecil (36, 38 and 40). These will provide constant reference points during the research.

In our previous columns we touched upon why some terraces had names. For those that came in late I’ll give you a quick recap. During the early days of Paddington’s development, it was often unclear how many houses were going to be built on a street. House names were therefore invaluable in working out who lived where before the street numbers were finally allocated. They can also help personalise houses that were often built in groups.  

We will once again call on the local historian’s toolkit — the trusty Sands Postal Directory (available online via the City of Sydney archives) as well as the National Library of Australia’s Trove website to see if we can learn more about Suffolk St in its earliest days.  

It is always preferable to do a visual inspection before hitting the online resources, just to get your bearings and familiarise yourself with distinct terrace groups. It is easy to spot Hagley as a standalone terrace — you can see the ‘double walls’ on either side of it which implies it was built by itself. 

I also come across a 10a and a 10 Suffolk on the west side. 10a is in a built group of five terraces (from number 2). My hunch is that this was originally intended to only be built as a group of four (hence ending their numbering at 8) but the builder decided to sneak in an extra terrace, necessitating the 10a. 

I’m now ready to hit the Sands, though I am getting some baffling results. I start in 1890 and I’m only getting hits on the west side of the street — all even numbers, and, sadly, the only house name getting represented in the Sands is Hagley (though it is nice to check that it is still number 12, confirming no street re-numbering has taken place — it also appears to be one of the first two houses on the street, appearing in the 1880s. So the ‘double walls’ I saw on the visit make sense). 

I jump ahead to 1895 and it is the same, houses on the west side but only a single hit on the east side at 1 Suffolk — the Church Home for Inebriates.  Now there’s the place for Dry July.

I continue with the Sands at five yearly increments. The church home is still there in 1900 and again only Hagley is listed as a named terrace. In 1900, the southern-most terrace on the west side is at 10 Suffolk so my premise about the group including 10a coming later looks to be correct. 

In 1905 we now have that west side built out with 14 terraces corresponding to their current addresses — and there is 10a Suffolk confirming that premise. The 1910, 1915 and 1920 Sands don’t provide me with anything noteworthy so it is time to switch to Trove and see what we can learn.

Readers, I am going to save the inebriates for now and try to find a terrace name. Thanks to an advertisement for a furniture auction in The Sydney Morning Herald of February 1896, we have our first hit — Mouramba at 24 Suffolk. 

We get our second hit with a Trove/Sands double act — another furniture auction advertisement from The Daily Telegraph in January 1896, combined with resident confirmation from the 1896 Sands, gives us Loretto at 22 Suffolk St. 

Trove also provides the etymology for Hagley via Charles Badham’s 1888 obituary — he was a native of Hagley in Hereford, England. Another interesting pick-up was that this area was referenced as Gurner’s Hill (a ‘room to let’ advertisement from 1890 puts the address as 20 Suffolk St, Gurner’s Hill, Paddington).

Now to what we have all been waiting for — the inebriates.

The site of the Church Rescue Home for Female Inebriates and Fallen Women today

I had initially thought the church may have built a type of annex to cram the drunks into. Perhaps I had been hitting the sauce too hard as I had forgotten the history of the 1885 sub-division. Duxford House (now demolished) wasn’t included in that sale but was retained by Broughton for reasons out of my grasp.

The Church of England leased this mansion and so the church home, or to use the full name, The Church Rescue Home for Female Inebriates and Fallen Women, was based in one of the original mansions of Paddington (and one of the sporting houses of Glenmore Rd Public School — Duxford is the yellow house).  

The institution itself was founded in 1885 but only moved to the Suffolk St premises in 1893. The Sydney Evening News reported in July that year that when Lady Duff (the governor of NSW’s wife) visited there were “32 inmates of the building, who are principally engaged at laundry and needle work”. Lady Duff was said to be favourably impressed by the way the institution was conducted.  

By 1897, the rescue home had really hit its stride, with the Herald reporting 65 admissions. The Reverend Dr Manning noted to the reporter that women were required to sign a promise to stay at the home — the first time for three months, the second time for six months and the third time for a year. 

While the church home tried to “give some measure of trust to the inmates” this “trust was most often abused by the younger women”. It turns out girls sometimes sought admission “solely to find their old companions and lead them away to the horrible pit and mire from which they had temporarily been freed”. 

Sadly for Duxford House, the church was only ever leasing the building and by 1899 the lease was up. The inmates were transferred to new premises in Glebe (the church had purchased the Strathmore mansion for this purpose). Eventually, the mission of the church rescue home was taken over by what is now known as Anglicare Sydney.

There wasn’t to be another significant tenant for the big house and its last rites were published in April 1903. The Herald advertised its demolition to “builders, contractors, dealers and others”. Key fixtures included 40 cedar doors, 3000ft of tallow wood, eight cedar mantlepieces, 130ft of ornamental balcony railing and 240ft of ornamental balcony frieze as well as 600 perches (an old unit of measurement equal to about 25sq m) of clean chiselled stone and flagging. 

If your house was built circa 1903 to 1904 keep an eye out for a cedar mantlepiece.

There’s more to the fallen women but I’ve reached my allocated space. Some terrace house names uncovered and some colourful history of one of Paddington’s earliest mansions. You all know what happens now? I do. Case closed.