For 40 years from the 1890s until the 1930s, George Norbert Kilduff ran a popular hairdressing saloon in Richmond’s Windsor Street.
From 1902 until his death in 1954 George lived with his wife, Emily Pye, in a substantial cottage they had built at 9 Paget Street.
When his widow sold the house in 1961, she inadvertently left behind a furniture catalogue printed in 1897 by Hall of George Street in Sydney. It was subtitled ‘The Grandest Display of Household Furniture in the Colony’.
Tucked inside the catalogue were some bills, all paid in 1897. Emily had bought curtains, towels and bed-linen from Anthony Hordern on March 2, 1897, her wedding day.
On March 3, as Mrs G.N. Kilduff, she bought 22 metres of oil-cloth from another Sydney firm. At the same time the couple had been poring over Hall’s illustrated catalogue, since they needed to furnish their cottage in March Street which George had leased from Louise McDougall.
Hall’s catalogue provided three sample lists of what a couple might need to furnish a three-room cottage and the Kilduffs plumped for the most expensive.
Their six Austrian bentwood chairs, a rocking chair for Emily, a settee and couch, tables, a sideboard, a wardrobe and the matrimonial bed with a wire-woven spring mattress, together with two cornice poles with rings and brackets for their new curtains, cost £24 (some $3000 today).
The couple also bought from Sydney ironmongers McLean Brothers a bellows, a washboard and boiler, an axe, hammer and grater, brushes, broom and bucket, a clock, a kerosene lamp, cooking equipment and six sets of cutlery, all for nearly £5 (some $600).
In 1902 George and Emily moved all these goods to their new house in Paget Street, where they spent the rest of their long married (but childless) life.
The hairdressing business flourished and George became a committee member of various football clubs and treasurer for the Hawkesbury Juniors. Meetings of the club committees were often held at his shop.
He was well-known as a dedicated billiards player. But his long-term hobby was trotting. He owned a number of horses. He was secretary of Londonderry Trotting Club and eventually Chief Stipendiary Steward at Harold Park in Sydney.
When George died at Paget Street in 1954 at the age of 84, there was a long and appreciative obituary in the Gazette, which had in 1896 dubbed him Richmond’s ‘tonsorial artist’ (the term means hairdresser).
He was buried in St Matthew’s Anglican Church graveyard in Windsor, where Emily joined him in 1965.
