In 2007 I interviewed Mrs Valerie Crane, the daughter of the man who created Newcastle’s Palais Royale dance hall phenomenon. I recently rediscovered the interview, so here’s what I wrote at the time.
The man who invented the generation-spanning Novocastrian phenomenon of the Palais Royale was a keen
violinist who moved to Newcastle from Tamworth in the 1920s and worked as an ironmonger for hardware merchant Frederic Ash.
Fred Pears must have been a man of considerable energy. He worked full-time, played in dance bands and taught violin to aspiring young musicians. It didn’t take him long to encounter the musical Fortington family, who had been running bands and dances around the city for years. He was soon playing with the Fortingtons, beginning an artistic and business partnership that lasted decades. These were days when home-made music and community dances were highly rated entertainment. Not surprising when there wasn’t much else on offer.
Dances were inexpensive, fun and a great way to socialise and exercise. It was the era of the flapper, of jazz and a little bit of devil-may-care that flourished between the economic slump that followed World War I and the Great Depression that preceded World War II. Fred Pears’s daughter, Valerie Crane, (aged 86 when I interviewed her), wasn’t much more than a toddler when her dad had the bright idea to lease the former Empire Music Hall from the Railway Department in 1929.
“Before then there were dances all over the place, but they were nearly all small events in church halls and schools that could take a couple of hundred people at the most,” she said. Fred Pears teamed up with Les Fortington and created “Olympia Enterprises”, the business vehicle for what was destined to become a highly prosperous and profitable investment.
The Palais building had already been through a range of incarnations when Fred Pears took on the lease.
It was said that a cluster of Chinese businesses operated on the site in the 1800s before they were overtaken by the Elite skating rink which opened in September 1888.
Skating gave way in 1891 to the City Arcade and Western Markets which in turn were replaced in 1894 by the Empire Music Hall. A motor garage had a spell in occupation too, before the propitious birth of the Palais Royale.
The new Palais opened on March 27, 1929, amid posters and advertisements promising that “King Carnival will Reign Supreme”. Thousands turned up on opening night, setting the scene for the venue’s sparkling future.
There were hiccups, of course. The Great Depression was just starting to bite and as the 1930s opened Mrs Crane remembers things getting very tough. At one point in the ’30s things were so bad that the dance shifted to Bramble’s wool store, on the site of present-day Markettown. “Walter Bramble told my father there wasn’t enough wool to fill the stores and he needed to do a deal,” Mrs Crane said. The deal was done, and the wool store venue was known as The Olympia.
Not even the Depression could kill the dance hall completely, though it took away much of the carefree gaiety that had existed before. “People wanted to get away from their problems for a while and dancing was still a cheap way to escape and be with other people.”
World War II changed everything. Money that yesterday couldn’t be found was suddenly washing through society in comparatively vast amounts. Almost overnight there was work for everybody who wanted it. The Army wanted Walter Bramble’s wool stores for warehousing and he quickly struck a favourable deal, sending Fred Pears packing back to the Palais where the dancers, newly prosperous and eager for fun, were waiting for the music to begin.
From now on the Palais pattern was dancing in summer and rollerskating in winter. The venue was beautifully placed to benefit from the invasion of American servicemen that hit Newcastle after the Japanese opened hostilities in the Pacific.
Mrs Crane remembers with fondness the brash Yanks who flooded the city with glamour and dollars.
“They opened our world,” she said. “When the ships came in the first place the men came to was the Palais. They
wanted to dance, meet girls and have fun.” US air crews from Williamtown joined the mix too, and for young Novocastrian women and girls the opportunities for excitement and romance were suddenly endless. Ah, those Americans … so polite, so interesting, so loaded with cash …
Lots of girls signed up for quasi-military service – as often as not to escape from under the thumbs of their parents and take part in the exciting new world that had opened before their eyes. Some married American sweethearts. Others became engaged. Hearts were broken when some men failed to return, casualties of the war or of second thoughts.
After the war society seemed for a time to deflate, perhaps in relief, perhaps from fatigue or more probably both.
Fred Pears, always trying to second-guess the social mood. came up with the idea of “old-time dances”. These tapped into a yearning for the lost Australia of the prewar years, represented by the old tunes and dance steps. The future was coming – Novocastrians had already had their glimpse of it- but many weren’t quite ready to let go of the things they loved best about the past. The old-time dance succeeded beyond Pears’ expectations and some musicians built enduring careers on the strength of the formula. Musicians like Jimmy Hunt and Phil Furley became well-known – in NSW at least – largely because of their involvement at the Palais.
For the Palais these were glory days indeed, increasing in splendour as the postwar economy recovered some of its vigour. By the 1950s the venue was invariably packed. It was Newcastle’s premier meeting place and scores of
couples who met at the Palais – dancing the foxtrot, the quickstep and the progressive barn dance – went on to marry and raise families. Because it didn’t serve alcohol the Palais had no age limit and the management organised special visitors’ nights for the families to bring their most senior members to watch and reminisce.
Novocastrian night life may have been punctuated by occasional clashes between opposing “pushes”, but it was infinitely safer than today for the average dance-goer. At the Palais, Fred Pears hired well-known footballers such as the Gibb brothers to make sure any young lads who had drunk too much didn’t cause problems for themselves or others.
But times were changing, and Mrs Crane said her father carefully registered every social change that might work to the detriment of the dance halls. The rise of rock ‘n’ roll music was one. The end of the “six o’clock swill” was
another. Until 1955 pubs had to close at 6 pm, so many young men – after gulping down several beers they’d bought before the magic cut-off time – danced for the rest of the night. After 1955 the closing time was extended to 10 pm, effectively putting many male dancers out of commission and ensuring that others who turned up too dance late at night were often not quite up to performing.
Pears, who’d invested in drive-in movies as a sideline to the dance hall business, was less than impressed by the appearance of television. “He said it would make more people stay home at night and it would be bad for
dancing and for drive-ins,” Mrs Crane said. Pears took sick in 1956 and handed the business on to his family. He died three years later, sensing the much-loved Palais was in decline and mourning the approaching end of an innocent and happy style of community entertainment.
The family kept it going through the decades that followed. One former patron, David Lister, recalled going to the Palais nearly every Saturday night from the time he turned 18 – in 1962. He met and befriended members of the popular band the Hi-Fis, who played the Palais regularly, and he reminisced about top quality guest artists like Little Patty and The Bee Gees.”The progressive barn dance was so big they had to form a sort of horseshoe shape so everybody could fit in,” he said.
Sadly though, by the late 1960s the Palais’ ageing formula was beginning to lose its appeal to a youth market which was being introduced to drugs and to a new, edgy kind of nightlife.
By the early 1970s a handful of popular Newcastle discos put the Palais in the shade and the old dance hall became a furniture store for several years. In 1979 it reopened as a cabaret-style restaurant – this time with a liquor licence – and in 1985 it got a pub licence and offered rock concerts by big-name bands, cage dancers and saucy dance shows. In the years that followed it housed a billiard hall, a disco and The Loft youth venue but it could never recapture the extraordinary glamour of its early years.
In 2007 there were plans for an eight-storey apartment building for the site. The facade of the old Palais was to be incorporated into the new development, but this requirement was dropped when it was argued that the facade had managed – with the help of some neglect and carelessness – to become structurally unsafe.
Next, developers were required to pay for an archaeological survey of the ground beneath the demolished building. The survey uncovered some sensational finds, particularly relating to the long Aboriginal occupation of the site. Unfortunately, although the survey was a legal requirement, there was not at the time any legal requirement to make the survey report public, so it was not until the construction on the site of a massive KFC outlet – reputed to be the biggest one in the Southern Hemisphere – was well underway that the public heard of the archaeological discoveries.
Click here to view a terrific list of resources about the Palais on the Newcastle on Hunter website.
Souvenir of Phil Furley’s old time dances at the Newcastle Palais and Maitland Town Hall. PDF download.
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