Store's old shopping cart

No, I'm not talking about famous old time race horses, or "four-legged lotteries", as the great Aussie yarn-spinner Billy Borker called them.

I'm reminiscing now about the forgotten role ordinary horses played pulling carts around our suburban streets from Belmont to Cessnock, delivering bread, milk, groceries, fruit and vegetables and even ice, to customers in their homes.

The most thriving operation of them all would have to be the one once run by the Newcastle Co-operative Store.

Back in the 1930s, its stables at Clyde Street, Hamilton North, housed 125 horses. Yet, despite the wide introduction of petrol-powered vans, the Co-op still had 24 of its entire 150 fleet of work horses raring to go on daily delivery rounds in December 1973.

That's when some drivers with their horse-vans posed for a happy news snap (see picture).

It's easy to understand why The Store once needed so many horses. In 1937, its Clyde Street bakery, for example, was producing 60,000 loaves of bread weekly.

It seems hard to imagine in today's machine age that 40-50 years ago the familiar "clip-clop" sound of horse-drawn delivery wagons, often bread carts, seemed everywhere.

Drivers of the colourful bread carts would stand at the back of them, jiggling reins as if steering a Roman chariot and frequently complain of their particular horse being flatulent.

It was a totally different era: milk was delivered to homes in glass-bottled pints before dawn, while every second suburban corner seemed to have a small, after-hours convenience store where small bells would tinkle above doorways every time a customer entered.

Forget all that, though, because younger generations are likely to have never even heard of the original Co-op, or The Store, as it was better known.

It was a Newcastle institution right up until its demise in 1981, after trading for 83 years. My thoughts strayed to The Store because its former giant headquarters building in Hunter Street West is now the focus of attention again. Now all but empty, recent speculation over the building's likely future has revived the idea of its potential use as a vital part of the Wickham transport interchange.

And why not? The proposed rail stop there is next door and the site even has a multi-storey car park attached, which once made it attractive to the electricity authority, Shortland County Council, before it relocated out to a greenfields site at Wallsend decades ago.

In recent years, market traders operated in the Hunter Street building run by Newcastle businessman Con Constantine, who had kept the name "The Store" after a reported $6 million site refurbishment in 1997.

The original Store Co-op business there had closed its doors on April 10, 1981, after shareholders voted to wind it up.

From 1982, it became the home of the Pink Elephant Markets. Then in September 1987, the Hunter Street building became the last of The Store's properties sold.

Incredibly, seven years before its closure The Store had 98,000 members, 1450 employees, 15 retail stores and 11 service stations.

Former staff said that until the 1960s The Store network had a virtual stranglehold on Newcastle retail trade. Twice a year it paid its customers (shareholders) hundreds of thousands of dollars in dividend rebates (the famous "divvy") as a reward for buying goods with them.

Having survived the 1930s Great Depression and two world wars, people wrongly assumed The Store would last forever. Apathy among younger shoppers, an ageing client base, unprofitable new branches and the rise of suburban shopping centres all played a role in The Store's eventual collapse. By mid 1980, The Store was losing $3 million a year.

Long-term Store employee Jack Gunn once told the Herald five co-operative societies had served the Newcastle area around 1900. Three of these (Stockton, Lambton and Charlestown) soon closed, with the Merewether Store amalgamating with the Newcastle and Suburban Society.

At its zenith, in maybe the late 1950s, the Newcastle and Suburban Co-operative Society was claimed to be "the biggest and most successful co-operative venture in the southern hemisphere".

"We operated 72 bread runs, 16 green grocery carts and 32 milk runs, all with horse-drawn vehicles," Gunn said.

And at least two of the original horse-drawn wooden Store carts have survived.

Belonging to the Newcastle Museum, they're now in storage. They seem to have come from a group of six carts auctioned off in 1980 when the Store had total debts of $12 million.

Museum deputy director Julie Baird said this week their historic bread cart dated from 1900, or only two years after the Co-op began in a rented Hunter Street store in 1898.

"The cart was restored in 1987. It used to be displayed regularly at the annual Newcastle Show in the commercial vehicle class. It's painted red/brown with a cream trim. The colour scheme is called 'burnt umber'," she said.

"Little is known, however, about our other museum item, a fruit and vegetable cart. We have a big collection of Store items actually, with lots of bread tokens, plus a huge Oak Dairy company collection."

My own lasting memory of Store bread carts comes from the late Don Maskey, a well-known Newcastle retail identity.

As a youth, one of his early jobs was delivering bread from a Store horse-drawn cart, but he soon discovered there was no loafing on the job. As it turned out, he only lasted two weeks.

Rain initially smudged customer names in his bread delivery order book, causing confusion.

Another time his cart horse bolted across a main highway with a helpless Maskey yelling for him to stop.

Another time he tethered his horse, Toby, to a picket fence as he made his rounds by foot only to soon discover his grazing horse had pulled the fence down while moving to munch fresher grass.

Besides having a grip on retail trade for decades, The Store was the first medical fund in Australia to sign an official agreement with the then Medibank.

A world unto itself, the Newcastle Co-op store once also had a credit union with 1500 members, a travel agency, finance company, funeral fund and a wholesale goods society. It also raised money for Hunter charities and its Christmas window displays were legendary.

Little wonder then a former Store general manager once said: "The only thing you couldn't buy there was a motor car [but] you could buy all the spare parts, though."

Who would need a car, though, with so many horses around delivering your goods?

mikescanlon.history@hotmail.com.