| Historical notes: | (Note: The cardinal dates of ownership and occupancy of the Carrington given here are taken from the Land Title documents scrupulously analysed by Peter Phillips in the Conservation Management Plan of 1987. The dates conflict with many of the dates given in the published works of Bates, Armitage and the Rotary Club of Katoomba, and in most of the unpublished reports, but are, we believe, accurate and important.)
Katoomba developed initially in a way quite different fromn the other mountain townships along the western railway. John Britty North opened a coal-mine below Katoomba Falls in 1878 and acquired extensive lands to the west of the later Cascade Street as far north as the rail-line.
Trains had already started to halt at Katoomba, primarily because of the quarry called The Crushers, which produced hard sandstone ballasting for the maintenance of the track, and in 1881 a platform was constructed on the site of the present station.
The regularisation of the railway halt encouraged development nearby. George Biles’ hotel, now the Hotel Gearin, to the north of the line, was first licensed in 1881 and the Great Western Hotel south of the station was built in 1882.
The Great Western (known as the Carrington after 1886) was built on part of portion 53 in Megalong parish, a twenty-hectare (50 acre) piece of land bounded on the north by the bend of the railway on both sides of the new station and extending westwards to the boundary of North’s land at the future Cascade Street. Portion 53 was one of the grants held by James Henry Neale, who had made substantial investments in mountain land.
Neale was a master butcher and politician, who had represented East Sydney in the Legislative Assembly from 1864 to 1869 and again from 1872 to 1874, and Hartley in the intervening period, 1869 to 1872. He built a substantial residence called Froma on the south-westerly part of portion 53, the present TAFE site in Parke Street. In 1881 Neale sold the house along with the rest of portion 53 to an Ashfield entrepreneur, Frederick Clissold, who at once sub-divided it in a series of sales in 1882-3 (Hubert 2000). Clissold created the present street system of South Katoomba, with Katoomba Street passing through the middle of Neale’s portion 53 and Cascade Street forming its western perimeter. The southern part of the present Carrington site, along with Froma, was sold to the Metcalfe family, who lived in Froma until 1911. The lots immediately to the north were sold to Harry Rowell, who ran the Oxford Hotel in King Street, Sydney, in 1881-2 (Gazette 1881, III 4714; 1882, III 4741).
Although Rowell did not get legal title to the Carrington site until January 1882, he had already in September 1881 sought from John Kirkpatrick a tender for designing and building a hotel. Kirkpatrick, born in 1856, was a recent graduate from the architectural practice of the celebrated Edmund Blacket, with whom he had trained from 1873 until 1880, when Kirkpatrick was 23 years of age. His remarkable rise to prominence in his early twenties seems to have been assisted by the political influence of his father and the patronage in the mid 1880s of Sir William Lyne, secretary for public works. Kirkpatrick at the age of 24 was entrusted with the responsibility of building the hotel which led the way for Katoomba to become a premier tourist destination (Malone 1983,
611-2).
Kirkpatrick engaged as contractor F. Drewett from Lithgow, who completed the work expeditiously and the Great Western opened in 1882, with additions in 1882-3 completing a sixty-room establishment. The first liquor licence was granted to Rowell on 17 July 1883 (Gazette 1883, III 4756). Rowell’s mortgagors foreclosed in 1886 and the hotel passed first to Hunt and Thorpe and was leased to Frederick Goyder in 1887.
Goyder, with his brother, had been a successful grazier in northern New South Wales and Queensland: they converted Pirillie station back of Bourke from cattle to sheep in the early 1880s (History of Bourke XI 55). Education for the children of successful graziers meant boarding-school and Frederick Goyder came to Katoomba to inspect the new Katoomba College, opened just north of the railway station in 1884. The Goyder family approved and moved to Katoomba. Frederick became deeply involved in the commercial and political life of the town and in 1890 became the first mayor of the municipality.
Although Goyder was not yet even the lessee of the new hotel, it was he who welcomed the governor, Lord Carrington, to the Great Western in 1886 and it was he who successfully sought the governor’s permission to change the name to the Carrington. In October 1887 Goyder was given the lease of the hotel and finally purchased it in April 1888. As lessee and owner, Goyder was responsible for many garden plantings, with shrubberies and pines, and he moved the tennis court from near Bathurst Road to the Katoomba Street frontage of the main garden. (See the photographs of c.1889 and c.1890 reproduced in Low, Pictorial Memories, 1991, 37, showing the two successive locations of the tennis court.) The unexplained and undocumented stone building free-standing on the south side of the hotel, looking south to Echo Point and the Jamieson Valley, seems to have been built in Goyder’s time. The most plausible explanation for this fine but stylistically alien stone house alongside the brick hotel is that Goyder built it as his own personal family residence, just as Joynton Smith was later to have a private flat in its upper storey.
The economic problems of the 1890s affected Goyder and his hotel and the mortgagors again foreclosed in 1901, leasing the property to a group including Arthur Peacock, the manager of the Imperial Hotel at Mount Victoria. Peacock soon became sole lessee and ran the hotel for ten years. He made substantial improvements, internally to the plumbing. Externally Peacock constructed the sandstone retaining wall which remains so significant a feature of the Katoomba Street garden frontage. In 1911, however, the mortgagors sold the hotel to James Joynton Smith.
Joynton Smith was a self-made man, who shared with Mark Foy, creator of the Hydro Majestic, a passion for sport and for well-run and luxurious hotels. The son of a London gasfitter, Smith left school at the age of twelve and soon joined the P & O company as a cabin-boy, graduating to third cook in due course. He settled in New Zealand in 1874, when he was sixteen, and worked modestly in coastal shipping and in the catering industry. After an unsatisfactory first marriage, he returned alone to England in 1886 and lost his savings through gambling. He returned to Wellington and helped to found the Cooks’ and Stewards’ Union: he remained close to labour politics all his life. When Smith finally came to Sydney in 1890, he earned his keep by calligraphy, but in 1892 he moved into hotel management. With a new wife in 1893, a daughter of a New Zealand hotelier, he became outstandingly successful, converting the old Imperial Arcade Hotel in Sydney to the prosperous and up-market Arcadia in 1896. Dissatisfied with a life too exclusively metropolitan, Smith determined to invest some of his new wealth in the Blue Mountains, buying the Imperial Hotel at Mount Victoria, where Peacock had been manager, crowning this in 1911 with the purchase of the Carrington and soon afterwards leasing the Hydro Majestic from Mark Foy at Foy’s own suggestion. The Imperial and the Hydro did not make any money for Smnith but, as he remarked in his autobiography, ‘they replenished the bank of health’. It was the Carrington which brought a satisfying profit, averaging a return on capital of 8 to 10 percent throughout the 1910s and 1920s (Smith, My Life Story 1927, 216-24; Cunneen 1988, 650-1).
Smith retained the Carrington until his death in 1943 and remained a force in Katoomba, although his principal home was at Coogee Beach in Sydney. He was prominent in Sydney pony-racing, dog-racing and rugby league. He was an inactive member of the Legislative Council from 1912 until 1934 and briefly an alderman of Sydney City Council, becoming Lord Mayor in 1917-8. He became a newspaper proprietor in 1919, launching Smith’s Weekly with R.C. Packer as manager, and in 1920 establishing the Katoomba Daily, with other newspapers added to his empire up to 1939. In 1920 he was knighted and around this time he married for the third time. The Carrington’s history is often written as though the Katoomba hotel was the centre of Smith’s life: it was only an aspect of a many-faceted career of business and sporting pleasure centred in the metropolis. He seldom visited the mountains except at weekends (Smith 1927, 217).
Smith inevitably aroused opposition, not least in Katoomba. R.V. Smythe, who ran the rival newspaper The Mountaineer, fulminated in 1920 about the way in which ‘a set of Johnny-come-latelies are now practically endeavouring to take possession of the township, at the bidding of a Joss, whose only claim for consideration is the weight of his purse, and the malignancy with which he utilises its contents’ (quoted in Armitage 1998, 170).
Whatever the political aspirations of Smith and his cronies towards Katoomba Municipal Council, Smith left an indelible physical mark on the Carrington and therefore on Katoomba Street, bringing capital and determination to modernise the stately Victorian hotel created by Rowell and Goyder.
Smith commissioned the prominent local architect, Edward Hewlett Hogben, in conjunction with the architect sons of F.C. Goyder, to remodel the elegant frontage of Kirkpatrick’s iron-laced hotel with the present undulating piazza and balcony, reached by a flight of once grandiose steps and sustained by stone Doric columns recycled from the Members’ Stand at Victoria Park pony-track. This racing facility had been built by Smith himself in 1908 in the Sydney inner suburb of Zetland, off Joynton Avenue and close to the Royal South Sydney Hospital which he also founded in 1910. Presumably the five-year-old Members’ Stand was also remodelled in 1912-3 when it lost its stone columns (Painter & Waterhouse 1992, 50, 64).
The stables on Parke Street, built originally for Frederick Goyder, were remodelled as lock-up garages in 1911-2 and three extra garages were constructed to the design of Hogben, who also built around 1913 the two-storied building at 15 Katoomba Street for the City Bank (now the second Carrington bar). This building intruded on the original north carriageway from Katoomba Street to the front steps of the hotel and the present alignment, with its four out of Smith’s five gateposts, was introduced.
Finally in the flurry of change in 1911-3, the front garden was remodelled. The pine trees planted by Rowell and Goyder, which ‘had cast a sombre shade and rustled rather mournfully in the western breezes’ were removed and ‘the new clipped hedges, the smooth lawns and parterres of
flowers give a geometrical lightness and beauty to the grounds’ (Blue Mountains Echo, 7 Nov. 1913).
In keeping with his largeness of vision, Smith built his own electric power station on the Parke Street side of the Carrington in 1913. He had earlier installed his own generating equipment in Imperial Arcade in Sydney but had been forced to sell his enterprise to Sydney City Council and obliged moreover to agree not to generate power anywhere else in the city area, He had retained his generating plant, so decided to transfer it to the Mountains. He bought out the local gas company’s statutory right to supply electricity and erect power poles, built a network of distribution poles not only in Katoomba but as far as Mount Vicoria to the west and Woodford to the east, together with the railway stations, and build a large power-house on Parke Street (Smith 1927, 177-83). The towering chimney, also designed by Edward Hogben, became at once the principal landmark of the town and remains Katoomba’s iconic structure whose dominance should not be challenged. The power station supplied electricity to the upper mountains for twelve years, until the municipality of Katoomba erected its own generator north of the railway in 1925, and acquired most of Smith’s equipment, itself second-hand from Sydney in 1913. The building remains as a shell. The large boiler, manufactured by D.H. Berghouse of Ultimo and brought apparently from Smith’s Arcadia Hotel in Sydney, was not moved to the municipal power-station in 1925 but continued in use to heat the Carrington (National Trust Industrial Archaeology Committee listing sheet, 1987). Unfortunately it was removed from the building around 1990 and presumably scrapped.
In 1920 Smith acquired the Clarendon guesthouse built about 1883-4 just south of the Carrington.
The importance of the Clarendon is twofold: its early date and the undisturbed quality of the site. It was only the fourth substantial building to be erected in central Katoomba and probably the first guesthouse (followed by 150 others over the years). It was run by Mrs Simonson from 1884 until 1902. One of her daughters married John Douglass, the well-known and wholly admirable foundation schoolmaster. It remained a guesthouse for nearly forty years, until the Leslies transferred the name and goodwill of Clarendon to their newly built premises at 68 Lurline Street. They then sold the 1880s house to the next-door neighbour, Joynton Smith.
Smith intended that Clarendon should become a mountain residence for his third wife, but Lady Smith perhaps occupied the house only briefly, since five shops (numbers 49 to 57 Katoomba Street) were built in her front garden in 1924, presenting very plain rear elevations to Clarendon’s front door and verandah (Rate Books). Smith then leased Clarendon as a rooming house. It gradually deteriorated and after a fire, it was demolished in 1960. Nothing has been built over the foundations or over the tennis court beyond. The court was used by the Carrington’s guests after the court adjacent to Katoomba Street (opened in the 1880s, converted to croquet early in the 1920s, reverting to tennis by 1944) was closed around 1950 (Beaver & Smith 2000, 16-18). The site of Clarendon has unusually high archaeological potential.
In 1923 to 1927 Smith added substantially to the hotel accommodation. He removed the dormer windows and enlarged the attic bedrooms (originally for servants); he demolished the west end of Rowell’s north wing and replaced it with a new wing. A lift was installed and the dining-room was enlarged, just in time for the visit of the future George VI and the present Queen Mother in 1927.
Smith died in 1943, but the hotel remained in the family trust. In 1967-8, however, the Joynton Smith Management Trust finally sold the property to another self-made immigrant, the Greek entrepreneur, Theo Morris (who also owned the Hotel Gearin just across the railway line). The large and rambling Carrington was in need of extensive conservation and up-grading of facilities. Despite a successful, though premature, celebration in 1980 of the centenary of digging the foundations, the hotel did not enjoy the care it required and an interim conservation order was placed on the buildings and most of their historic curtilage in 1982 by the New South Wales government and made permanent in 1987. Morris sold the hotel in the late 1980s and it is now in process of renovation by the new owner, Geoffrey Leach.
In its heyday, the Carrington attracted well-known guests, British royalty, Australian prime-ministers, New South Wales premiers, actors and film stars and, even in competition with the Hydro Majestic, enjoyed through its gubernatorial cachet a certain pre-eminence among the mountain hotels.
Key Aspects in the Development of the Garden and Grounds
When the Carrington (Great Western) Hotel was built in 1882, it was sited in a prominent location facing east towards Katoomba Street. The fenced and planted grounds provided the large hotel with a suitably ample setting, their extent to the south defined by the boundary with Clarendon, the fourth building to be constructed in Katoomba Street. By 1887 the introduction of a gravel driveway lined with shrubs and flowerbeds gave the visitor a sense of arrival (Beaver and Smith 2000 p. 19) and was illustrated on the hotel's letterhead (National Archives Sydney SP32/1/Box289 Katoomba, 1887). Although changes were made after that time, an integral aspect of the grounds of the Carrington - the driveway entering the grounds from Katoomba Street and the relationship of the hotel to a street frontage - was formed. The tradition of a tennis court for the hotel was also introduced. The grounds became an important feature of the hotel during the Goyder ownership and the front of the hotel was described as being 'attractively improved and laid out into carriage drives, walks, shrubbery, ornamental trees, tennis lawn...'( Beaver & Smith 2000 p.7). The Monterey Pine (Pinus radiata) was possibly part of the 1880s planting, the Bunyas (Araucaria bidwillii) were likely planted in the 1890s (Bates 1983, p. 15, p. 12) and early in the twentieth century more of the current surviving trees were planted - the magnolias and plane tree (Beaver and Smith 2000; photographic evidence) and a large triangular-shaped bed was well established in the northern corner of the front garden.
In 1902 the Nepean Times, reported that a 'substantial retaining wall and picket fence' had replaced the old paling fence on Katoomba Street (Beaver & Smith p.7). It is unclear as to whether the sandstone retaining wall reported to be surmounted with an iron palisade in 1911 (Beaver & Smith p.7) is different from that constructed in 1902. By 1911 and almost certainly by 1890, (cf photographs, Low 1991, 37) the tennis courts had been moved to the lower terrace, implying that part of the garden layout had been established prior to the Joynton Smith ownership, which commenced in October 1911.
During 1911-13 the changes made included the alteration of the northern arm of the driveway (reported in the Blue Mountains Echo on 26 April 1912 (Beaver & Smith 2000 p.8)) and the introduction of the sandstone gates and terracing on the upper level, which established the present form of Carrington's garden setting. This period is the most crucial in understanding the layout and garden setting (reduced from its 1882 extent) for the Carrington that still exists, as the garden was an integral part of the Carrington Hotel experience, providing a venue for receptions held by a number of celebrated visitors (Beaver & Smith p. 1 0) in addition to being an area where guests indulged in both passive and active recreation. A panorama from the Carrington toward Katoomba Street (Phillips c. 1920 reproduced in Bates) shows plane trees along the Katoomba Street frontage and an axial path to the lower terrace lawn. Bollards defined the edge of the asphalt drive, protecting the edging to the garden beds and a well-formed path, which led to Clarendon, entered the shrubbery in the area of the rose garden. The development of the garden during the early years of Joynton Smith's ownership also brought Danish landscape designer Paul Sorensen to the Blue Mountains. Although Sorensen did not stay working at the Carrington for long, it was the first place he worked in NSW and it influenced his decision to stay in Australia and he became a prominent twentieth century designer of domestic gardens.
The design for the front garden appears to be fairly symmetrical, although the central axis is not quite perpendicular to the front facade of the hotel itself. This is because the northern arm of the driveway was moved slightly south in 1912 and the bank building was soon constructed in 1914 on the Katoomba Street frontage following the oblique line of the relocated driveway. (Examination of 1932 and 1996 Landsphoto aerial photography). The terracing, the driveway alignment with flowerbeds and sandstone gate pillars (one of which was removed in the 1970s) and sandstone walling from this period have remained. Structural additions within the established layout during the 1920s added a level of sophistication to the garden - gazebos, a pergola covered carriageway, a semi- circular stone seat and sundial, the introduction of garden beds beside the axial path and the construction of a trellis over the steps. The lower terrace appears to have been formed with more care than the upper terrace due to its function as a tennis lawn, a croquet lawn and later again, tennis. Some changes in planting occurred, the most prominent was the replacement of the plane trees with (Washingtonia filifera) palms. These were planted slightly back from the retaining wall and picket fence, allowing a grass pathway and hedge between the row and the fence (site inspection February 2001) and were in place until the 1960s. From 1914 to 1947 the gardener at the Carrington was Samuel Timmings (Beaver and Smith p. 11). This implies a consistency in horticultural practices and maintenance.
A photograph taken during the 1940s (Beaver and Smith p.28) when the tennis court was in place on the lower terrace lawn and the Katoomba Street frontage was hedged indicates that views to the Carrington were partially blocked on the lower levels, the dominant element being the massing of the upper storeys of the hotel and Carrington's chimney stack, a landmark in the local area. Both the hedge and tennis court had been removed by 1951 when Carrington's lower lawn terrace was used as a vantage point for viewing the re-enactment of Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth. The tennis court used at the time was likely the court behind Clarendon. The date of the construction of the Clarendon court is unknown but it was there by the 1930s (Aerial photo).
During the later years of the twentieth century elements such as the pergola, trellis and some garden beds were removed and a swimming pool (since filled in) added to the upper terrace. New trees were planted, some, e.g. the deodar cedars, were placed with respect for the symmetrical nature of the 1911-13 design and others planted seemingly at random. From the 1960s onwards there was a gradual erosion in the level of maintenance on the garden resulting in a loss of detail. The introduction of bus shelters on Katoomba Street in front of the early twentieth-century stone wall of the Carrington Hotel has obscured and detracted from traditional views to the place. |