David Reid had the sort of childhood that’s been romanticised in books and movies like Huckleberry Finn.
When David’s parents were first married they lived at 36 March Street, Richmond, moving in later years all the way to number 56, on the corner of Paget Street.
His parents started a corner store at their house when his dad came back from World War II. His dad built an actual shop on the corner of the block in 1948.
Unlike kids these days, David and his mates would roam free all day. “As a youngster I had plenty of mates and we had so much freedom then! Plenty of rabbiting, fishing, bird trapping, bike ridIng everywhere,” he said.
“We loved to help the Moxey milkmen deliver milk house to house with the old measuring dippers. Customers would leave jugs, billies on their front verandahs to be filled. We also used to go down to the Moxey farm in Francis Street and loved climbing into the silo to fill hessian bags with silage. We would then be pulled out by rope and pulley to the top. The silage would then be fed out to the cows.”
It was a special time when the circus came to Richmond. “Wirths would come to town on their own train. When they arrived at Richmond railway yards in the early hours of the morning, there would be elephants roaring and bellowing as well as the lions. The carriages containing all the animals were unloaded and pulled up our street, past our house by the elephants to the park on the corner of Bourke Street and Blacktown Road. I don’t think there was one circus that came to town where there wasn’t a child bitten by a monkey, from the tormenting.
“Our local baker was Roy Pearce who delivered bread by horse and cart. His horse didn’t like circus time because of the smell of the lions and elephants. As he went from house to house the horse would follow on its own up the street keeping pace with Roy. At the time there were lots of fox terriers around and they would roll in the fresh manure the horse left.
“Roy carried the bread in a large cane basket with canvas cover. If the customer wasn’t home he would go into the kitchen and check the bread crock and leave what he thought you might need. He had a bad habit of helping himself to grapes at our home. We had a friend, Mrs McKenna, who lived down the road. She came into our shop one day very annoyed. Roy had helped himself to her only bottle of Coke in the fridge, which she had bought for her husband when he got home.” She got him back by filling up the bottle with black tea and leaving it in the fridge for next time he came. He never took it again.
The steam trains were always a big attraction too. “We would hang around the railway yards to help turn the steam engine around on the turntable. We would watch Mr Fuller the engineman filll the coal hopper on the engine from the coal bunker. He could shovel a ton of coal in 10 minutes.”
He and his mates would rove far afield ferreting to catch rabbits – in Cocky Reynolds’ cow paddocks (now Richmond High), Grose Wold, Grose Vale, carrying the box of ferrets, nets, bags and a mattock to dig out the ferret if it got blocked by a rabbit down the hole. They also caught a lot of fish.
“Our fishing trips were on the Hawkesbury River, Pughs Lagoon, catching eels, perch, mullet and catfish.”
A poor Mr Douglass was the target of a lot of Richmond boys. His farm in Lennox Street backed onto Cocky Reynolds’ paddocks. He grew a lot of watermelons, grapes and vegetables to sell and the melons and grapes were regularly poached. “So many green melons were damaged [by careless raiders] for every ripe one,” David said. “Mr Douglass would hide and wait with his shotgun in hand, the shells filled with saltpetre. Many kids could be seen under the streetlights licking their wounds while others would end up in Dr Steele’s surgery.”
Just as dangerous a pastime was riding impounded stock in Bourke Street at the end of March Street. “We would watch for animals to be impounded (cows, horses, donkeys, pigs etc) and try our skills at riding them.” They had to keep an eye out for the impounding officer though.
David also remembers the days before refrigeration. “There was an ice factory in Dight Street. We had an ice man delivering blocks of ice for people who had ice chests.”
Door to door selling was still very common then. “We had a Bilpin orchardist Mr Scrivener who would drive the streets of Richmond in his large truck calling out “Apples and pears!”, selling them by the bucket.” There was also a door to door rabbit seller. “Mr Mills had the skinned rabbits in a hessian sugar bag slung over his shoulder. When a customer wanted one, he’d get it out and pull off the bits of hessian off it.”
One of the classic pranks of the time David remembers was carried out by a man 10 years older than him, Bob Silk. “He was a bit of a character. He had a telephone magneto he would hook up to the tin fence at the Blue Danube dance hall on March Street [where Richmond Nursing home is now]. At interval time many of the men would go around the corner and relieve themselves against the tin fence. Bob would be on the other side and crank up the magneto. Many young men would go back inside with their trousers wet after getting an electric shock.”
He also recalls the ‘sano man’. “Everyone had an outside dunny . Once or twice a week the sano man would come and change the toilet pan. Now and then there would be a leaking pan. You would ring Mr Ossie Richardson who would come around with a clean replacement pan in the back of his new Dodge Phoenix sedan. He used to say ‘poo paid for my car, poo can ride in it’. Many times over the years the sano man dropped a pan in our yard, but always did a good job cleaning the mess up.
“In Hawkesbury flood times dad would put his boat in the flood waters at Moxey’s (Francis Street) and we would visit the stranded farmers and take supplies to those who preferred to stay and keep an eye on things.
“I left school at 15 after passing the Intermediate and worked for dad in his grocery business. I used to ride my bike from Richmond to Kurrajong Heights to collect the grocery orders for delivery in a couple of days. I also rode my bike around Cornwallis towards Windsor, and out to Agnes Banks and Castlereagh. It was so much easier when I bought my first car, an Austin A40 second-hand from Fitzgerald Motors in Windsor.”
David later got married and he and wife Helen bought one of the first blocks in Pecks Road in North Richmond, only selling up recently to move back, not too far from Cocky Reynolds’ paddocks.
