Belmore street, Enmore: where it all began.

Image © State Library of NSW, BCP06954.

This is the photograph that really started it all. Not only is it simply labelled “House in Belmore Street, Enmore, c.1875” in the archives of the State Library of New South Wales, but I love the proprietary air of the young woman standing at the gate, watching over the children posing out front. Her manner suggests that she is the inhabitant of the house, and I was intrigued by the possibility that, armed with an approximate date, I could find out something more about her. Soon after, I found myself within walking distance of Belmore Street, and was delighted to discover that the house is still standing, albeit in a much altered state – so much so that it looks more like a twentieth century addition to the streetscape, rather than something potentially far older.

 

I started with the obvious, and pulled out the old Sands directory. The numbers on Belmore street have never changed, so it was short work to discover that not only had the same family inhabited the house from 1878-1898, but that they were among the first inhabitants of the street.

 

The head of the household, Frederick Clark, was a compositor by trade. Frederick married Georgina Pond on March 2 1878 at St Stephen’s in Newtown, and together they set about creating a family home. They wasted no time: on Christmas Eve of the same year, Georgina gave birth to their first child, a daughter called Harriet, at their residence in Belmore Street.

 

In the 1878 assessment books, Frederick Clark was listed as both occupier and ratepayer of an unfenced block of land on Belmore road, near the corner of London street:  plot no 5, “Land, Brick House, 4 rooms”, with an assessed value of three pounds, not much more than the land value, suggesting a very modest dwelling. (Most of the completed houses in nearby streets were assessed at upwards of £35-50, suggesting the Clarks’ original dwelling was quite basic.)

 

According to Sands, the Clarks are still the only residents of the high side of Belmore street in 1880, although the other lots had registered owners in the 1878 assessment. A man by the name of Josiah Perry had purchased the allotments on one side of the Clarks, but was busy erecting rows of terraces on land he had purchased in nearby Phillip St, which were completed in about 1880. Only two neighbours faced him on the opposite side of the street: "Jesmond" and "Mulwaree", which appear to have been more substantial estate houses, and seem to have existed prior to the subdivision of the rest of the street.

 

At about this time Frederick advertises for builders to create a new family home on his block. The family may have attempted to relocate during or even after these works: Frederick advertises a house for rent on Belmore Street (presumably theirs) in September 1880, but if the Clarks ever left Belmore Street during this period, it wasn’t for very long. A combination of lack of neighbours, building their new home, or construction noise from nearby blocks may have prompted the temporary move, but we’ll never really know.

 

It wasn’t until after all this that Frederick and Georgina started to see some life in their little neighbourhood. First, next door at number 34, came a piano tuner and his elderly mother, followed throughout the next decade by builders, a stonemason, a grocer, a chemist, a hairdresser, and sundry salesmen, and a quiet, respectable middle class neighbourhood began to form. The two large, older houses remained across the street, lending an air of respectability to the terraced rows on the Clark’s side.

 

The Clark family grew apace with their new neighbourhood: after Harriet came William (born in St George in 1881, at about the same time as the current house may have been constructed), Frederick junior, Elizabeth, the whimsically named Orchard (a boy), Georgina junior, Norman, and Rupert, who would tragically die in action in France in 1916. Only one more child would be born after the Clark’s left Belmore street, another boy called Walter. The family had also been joined in 1884 by Georgina’s widowed mother, Mrs Martha Pond, from her little cottage in Darlington.

 

Based on all I have been able to glean about the Clark family, I suspect that this photograph was taken in the 1880s, and features mother Georgina and two of the children, possibly Harriet, the eldest girl, and either William or Frederick junior. The younger of two children in the photograph is just as likely to be a little boy as a little girl. Victorian fashions dictated that small children of both sexes wore dresses, and gender did not dictate fashion choices for children in the way it does today.

 

While all I have discovered about the Clark family does not prove definitively that it is them depicted in this photograph, upon returning to the archive I did notice something that, for me, seals the deal. Another photograph, entitled “Mrs Pond, Alma Street, Darlington” from the same collection bears a consecutive accession number, suggesting the two photographs were donated together. This photograph appears in my first post.

 

By the time the Clarks left Belmore Street, their little corner of Enmore had transformed from a series of vacant blocks into a thriving community, with bustling rows of terraces and workers cottages. Although much altered today, the Clark’s house still stands, and to my knowledge is the oldest surviving house on the street.

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The Archive Detective: beginnings…