Recorded 11 June 2018
Girls Friendly Society (GFS) – but will they be friendly?
GM: We are continuing our recordings with Trenna Mahney. Today is Monday, the 11th of June 2018. Tren, we’ve talked a lot about Craig House. Eventually you moved out to Girls’ Friendly Society. I think you were 15, it was 1973. Tell me about that era.
THM: Well I turned 15 in September 1972, and that was the final year of Craig House. I spent the following Christmas with the Andersons, and a little bit longer. Because ordinarily we would go back to Craig House at the start of the high school year. Which was usually around the start of February.
But I didn’t do that. I moved to Girls Friendly Society.
I think it was at the beginning of March because that’s when the Key Personnel Business School started up for the year. I remember Mr Anderson taking me to Girls’ Friendly Society.
I’m sure there were others there because I’m sure Sue Anderson would have wanted to come and have a look at the place.
Margaret had already been married, but Margaret lived for a while at 222 Adelaide Terrace in the city and GFS was not far from there on the same side of the street.
GFS was an old, red, double storey lodging house really. So it had a bit of history behind it.
So I was looking so forward to finally heading off to go and live with my family
It had been set up by the Anglican Church for perhaps, mothers, young girls who’d been a bit wayward, got pregnant – by themselves no doubt – and had to go and live somewhere.
Eventually it became a lodging house for girls who had lived in the country and were coming down to learn how to be nurses, dental nurses, secretaries, typists and all the types of jobs that were available to 15 year old girls. I guess hairdressers and shop attendants.
Initially I had absolutely dreaded going there because I was the only one from Craig House going, and it was not what I wanted.
When I left Craig House it had been discussed about me continuing on at school. I just wanted to stay with my friends from Craig House, or go and stay with my family, like they all did.
[GM: This is also mentioned in the recordings done by the City of South Perth. See “Dead at 27 and Never to Marry”.]
When Nancy first moved out of Craig House Colin came and lived with her, and then Barb went and lived with her. They all had great times together. I know because I used to go and stay with them.
So I was looking so forward to finally heading off to go and live with my family.
But I knew things had changed because by this stage I had been told about Rebecca. Barb’s daughter Rebecca had been born in April 1971, so all of Barb’s life was about bringing up Rebecca. Although, Colin shared a house with her.
They initially lived in Leederville, in a house there. That’s when Nancy lived there, Colin lived there, Barb lived there. And that’s where I had rocked up for my birthday in September and was told in 1971 that I had a baby niece. There was a baby in the house.
I think I had to be told by then because Nancy was going to get married and I guess I would find out about Rebecca then. [so they thought they better tell me.]
So Rebecca was very new in my life and I adored her, but there was no room for me in any of their homes, or I just assumed that because no one offered for me to go and live with them.
GFS Building Described
So I went to Girls’ Friendly Society. My bedroom was a bit exciting because it was quite adult. It wasn’t like a Home, it was like a boarding house. The people who came here weren’t people who had sadness and death in their life.
There may have been the odd couple of people who had parents who have died, but most of them were just country girls coming to learn a career.
We had double [share] rooms mostly. I think one of the rooms may have been a single. We slept on the second story of the main building, and underneath the main building where you went into the main entry it became a front foyer. There was a desk which was a bit like a bank teller’s room, because it was all wooden and glassed in.
The Matron, I’m pretty sure there was a Matron, or the person in charge stood behind the glassed in area and so did other paid employees who probably looked after the girls’ income and their board for the week. We got a key for our room but only for the period that we were going to be in.
There was an ”in and out book” that we had to sign and we were on lockdown at 10 o’clock at night. We had to be home by then, no excuses. Some girls would start work very early in the morning, particularly the nursing girls.
So you would enter into this main entrance area, and I guess that’s where the people who came to visit would wait for you whilst someone went to fetch you.
To the left of this area there was a door which opened up into a reading room, and that was in the front as well, which was right on Adelaide Terrace [in the CBD of Perth]. So although a reading room, with big windows it was quite noisy.
To the right was the main entrance to the rest of the lodging house. The main room there was a large room which at one end had a television and to the side, a record player.
There was a large dining table but it wasn’t used for dining. There were magazines and newspapers scattered all over that table and you were allowed to just grab a magazine and sit down and read. But in that room you were expected to be quiet so that people could listen to the television or the radio or whatever.
From there you walked out to a concrete undercroft of the top upstairs building, and you walked along to the right and there were stairs that were covered. They went upstairs to the girls’ bedrooms.
In a little corner nook, just before those stairs was a telephone on the wall. I’m not sure if that was registered [rostered] on when you could use it, you did have to pay to use it, but I think you were allowed to use it at any time. But you had to be polite, and if people were waiting you had to cut your phone calls short.
As far as I know, except for emergencies, which could be taken at the main office, that was the only phone in the lodging house.
A new double story of flats had been built one quadrangle backwards from the main house. It ran parallel to the main lodging house and it was a very 1960s, basic, small block of flats.
Except they weren’t actually flats, they were just rooms. They were from coloured bricks and they were for the older girls, I think who maybe didn’t need as much supervision.
To get to them, where you had walked out of the television room, instead of following the undercover concrete overhang to the right, you would go to the left where you would pass a laundry area, and go along that to the right, and that’s where you would get into those flats.
Behind the flats was a big area of just grass where we would sit and relax. I’m not sure what was behind us because there were trees, there was a clothes washing area.
You Need a Tan
It was a good lawned area where we could sit and play games. Mostly in those days we sun baked. No matter the weather. Me?, I didn’t unless it was really warm, but a lot of the girls just wanted to get a tan because in those days the key thing to looking good was to have a tan.
There weren’t very good products around, this is now 1973, that gave you a good looking tan. But someone would always have a tranny [a transistor radio] that we would be listening to, so we would sit out the back, and listen to the tranny and drink, you know, Coke. All the groovy things!
I suppose we would eat fruit and whatever. I don’t know because my time there is not … very high on … not very high on what we ate during the time we were there.
GM: I’m looking at a photo of girls sunbaking. There is a can of Coke, and some smokes.
THM: We were allowed to smoke.
So, the night I was dropped off, my room that I got was the very first double bed room, at the top of the building on the far…. as you looked at the building, left side. It had double windows that opened out onto Adelaide Terrace and a bus stop that was right outside our window.
And someone would always say they saw a rat somewhere or other, and there was all this drama
Two buses would stop there and you would hear them every morning, so it was always very hard to have the windows open because the noise was just so loud.
There were about half a dozen bedrooms in that area. The majority, bar two I think, held two beds and a bedside table and cupboards. I think the two middle rooms had three beds and as you came up the stairs there was a room to the right of the stairs that was I think the only single bedroom.
From there you walked along a corridor and there was one bedroom there, and then you turned left into the corridor where the two, three-bed middle bedrooms were.
Along the front of the building were the two-bed rooms, and I think there were about 3 of those. If you turned then, at the end of that corridor to the right, there was one, two-bed room and at the end of that section there was the bathroom, which I think had three showers and three wash basins. But for the life of me I don’t think it had a toilet.
I think to go to the toilet you had to go downstairs next to the laundry. So, of course, the idea of going to the toilet in the middle of the night in windy winter was horrendous, because there would always be a little willy-willy wind that would be caught up in that quadrangle area.
The wind would come in and you would get sodden. We’d be walking along concrete that had been painted, which was always slippery. We would go to the toilet there and it would be frozen.
And someone would always say they saw a rat somewhere or other, and there was all this drama. So we all made sure we never had to get up during the night.
I only remember once ever doing that, and I think I was going with someone because they were too scared.
On my first arrival there I was very shy.
Meals?
I didn’t mention where the kitchen was, and I guess that’s because it played such a little role in our life. If we followed that same corridor along to where the stairs went up to the girls’ bedrooms, there was the telephone and a sharp right turn where you walked down a couple of steps, to basically, an area where you could make coffee and tea and toast .
And then there was a nook, a bit like Craig House, but you looked down into it and you could be given food.
I don’t remember ever really knowing what we ate. It’s not like Craig House where I remembered all of the food that we ate. The only thing I can remember that we ate was salad.
Maybe it was the case that we just ate cold meat and salad. I don’t know. But, there was that room, and then to the right of it was where we went into the dining room and we sat and ate our food in the dining room.
Now, I believe that happened very, very rarely. I went there for breakfast. I always got my lunch in the city, either when I was studying at Key Personnel, or when I went to work. I always had lunch out, so there was only dinner and breakfast at GFS.
Breakfast, I think I only ever had toast. I don’t think we got things like eggs and bacon offered to us, but I can’t swear to it. I know there was cereal.
The dinners, as I say, I only remember salad. I would have eaten anything and everything so I don’t know who was the cook. I’ve no image of cooks or anything like that, and I also have no image of ever doing the dishes.
So, I think that was where it was different from the places I had been before. We were paying for our upkeep so we didn’t have to do dishes. We didn’t have to prepare our meals because they were prepared for us.
First Night in the City
Anyway, on the very first night I arrived I befriended a couple of girls who were very daggy country girls, and who were very excited to go and walk into the city, and have a look around the city. I felt pretty cool that I was a city girl and I knew my way around the city.
There was a girl called Leanne I think, and Faye. I’m not 100% sure of their names but they were the two girls who had the bedroom next to me, that was on the way to the bathroom.
Leanne came from Carrnamah which I’d never heard of so she was a real country girl. She was pretty daggy and had a pretty daggy laugh.
When I first arrived there I had the room to myself. I was told another girl was coming, but she hadn’t arrived yet, so I got to sleep in a room by myself, which I thought was just so enormously cool.
Key Personnel
When I did go to Key Personnel I was lucky in that Sue Butts, and Julie Hampton, my friends from school, had chosen to leave school at 15. They were both going to Edwards Business College which was in Hay Street, more towards my end of the city.
I was going to Key Personnel which was more towards the Western end of the city. It was on Murray Street, not Hay Street, so it was more past Charles Street, and along up near a very groovy place called Tarvydas.
Key Personnel was a much smarter sort of school than was “Eddie’s”. Edwards Business College was really a school that was sort of for girls learning to type and do basic stuff. Mine [Key Personnel] was a business school where I was going to learn to be able to do a bit more higher stuff.
I know the girls that went to Eddie’s didn’t learn some of the stuff that I learnt to do.
Anyway, we arranged to meet at the Hay Street end of Plaza Arcade every morning, Sue, Julie and me, because Sue and Julie would have to catch the bus into the city and that would stop further up at the bus station.
They would then have to walk down to Eddie’s, and I would walk up to Key Personnel. Each day we would talk and chat about what was going on, and it was handy because we were opposite London Court so we always knew how much time we had before we had to get on our way.
So we would always meet before class, and then go to class where I met up with a group of [new] friends. They had a canteen which was very posh. It wasn’t anything like something I had come across anywhere else.
The stuff at this canteen was flash food. You got real food, and it tasted really nice. I was allowed some money, and it was a bit, it was something like $5 a week. I’m not really sure where that came from.
If it was from Legacy, or if it was from Child Welfare, but it did seem to be enough money for me to buy my lunch every day. Maybe that was part of the board and lodgings, that I got money to buy my lunch?
They were always cooked meals, and maybe that explains why I don’t ever remember my night time meals at Girls Friendly Society, because they were pretty dull.
I remember, … if I do remember, they were never as good as at Craig House. I know we ate a lot of chips and cheezels and twisties. Twisties have been around for years but cheezels were modern and we would pick those up and just live on bags of those. So we got a fair quantity of salt.
The Fruitarium
We also made friends with the people at the Fruitarium. That was a strange place. It was run by some Greek guys. I think they thought we were a bit of alright. We always got things a bit cheaper.
You could stop there and have an apricot nectar and something to eat, and we would sit and eat whatever they served up. There was always leftover fruit and probably it was from their own properties.
Little did they know the mischief I would get them into later
We never inquired. It just got sold. Some people bought it. Some people didn’t. It was really just a lunch bar. You wouldn’t go so far as to say it was a cafe.
The Fruitarium was up towards where Edwards Business College was, so they probably got a bit of trade from there. And then it was open in the evenings, and we always wandered the streets in the evenings. Even that first night when we went out.
Actually, I think Leanne’s parents were down, and they came. They were a bit scared that we were out [in the city] so late, but seemed to think that I was a trustworthy and nice girl. Little did they know the mischief I would get them into later.
But we got to have a look around the city and very quickly I realised the degree of freedom I had. Apart from having to get back in and sign in by 10 pm, because if you didn’t make it the door would be locked, it was really quite grown up.
It felt like I was living in a flat, I just didn’t have to do any of the work!
Typing, Bookkeeping, Switchboard and Secret Codes
I went to Key Personnel. Initially I didn’t know anybody from Key Personnel but I befriended people, not long-term friends as it turned out.
I was there for a 3-month period but we did have classes that were pretty strict still in those days. There was still a telephone switchboard system that you had to plug in various cords to make the connections which we thought was hilarious, but really, really good fun.
I was super good at it. You had separate cords and you had to put them into the right number of the person you wanted to get through to. I was very polite on the phone and I think I still had quite a bit of Matron’s English well pronounced voice.
Whereas the other girls mostly had country voices so their voices never sounded all that fancy, but I was considered a proper lady. I was good at doing that.
I was also the fastest at typing. I could type 45 words a minute which was exceptionally high because we used old manual typewriters. We had quite a stern typewriting teacher, and you learnt stupid things to type.
There was never a proper letter. It was quite odd the things we were made to type. I think what they wanted to see was whether you knew how to spell, that you could learn proper punctuation, and that you could do it very quickly. Good God! I wish I could have done a million other jobs that used those skills because I would have been well suited to being a private secretary or a legal secretary.
I could have even done stuff in courts, but you may have needed degrees for that and that was something right out of my realm of knowledge.
I was good at balancing ledgers. I don’t think there was anything I wasn’t good at.
In particular, shorthand was far and away my favourite subject. It was so cool, and I felt so like someone who could decipher codes, and that I could make these dark lines under the line, or light lines under the line with a dot at one end or a dot at the other end, with a tiny little hook, or a big hook, which would mean complete sentences.
I could do that very quickly. So I loved it.
And the Clothes
I also loved being able to be in the city and go and look for clothes and buy clothes.
I know Aunty Jan had made me a wraparound cream skirt with a bow at the back which wasn’t bad. It wasn’t really groovy, but it was more groovy than some of the clothes I had.
I got $50 from Child Welfare to go and buy some clothes to not only wear to Key Personnel but also to wear when I got a job at Girlock.
I loved it because you used to have to come down Murray Street, and on the corner of Murray Street there was Myers [department store], and as you walked further down you got to Boans [department store]. And then on the other side Ahern’s [department store], and they all had fabulous clothes shops.
And there were the boutiques that I knew were on the corner of various arcades, and I got to look at all of those. It just made me grow up very quickly, and become streetwise very quickly.
And I’ll leave it there.