Pharmacies in High St during the 1950s and 1960s

During the 1960s, there were at times six pharmacies operating in Maitland’s High St; now there are two plus another nearby in Pender Place. There was no Stockland Green Hills in East Maitland back then, but there are three pharmacies in that centre now. The change in numbers and distribution provides an insight into how Maitland’s retailing has changed over the past half-century.

High St was unrivalled during the 1960s as Maitland’s main shopping centre, much bigger than Melbourne St in East Maitland. But High St was narrow, and the coal trucks that used it made for severe congestion. Parking was very problematic.

High St was ripe for competition from a new-style, planned centre of the kind then being developed in every city and large town in Australia. Westfield and like companies created a radically new type of undercover shopping centre, modelled on developments in the USA, whereby cars were purposefully separated from shops and shoppers. In Maitland’s case, the Green Hills centre originated in the early 1970s and expanded greatly in later decades.

The pharmacies that operated in High St during the 1960s were Jakeman’s, Stanistreet’s, Morris’s, Tubman’s, Wallis’s and Soul Pattinson’s. All except the last, a franchised operation, were ‘family’ firms.

The Wallis pharmacy

Wallis’s operated at No 455 High St from 1948 to the late 1970s, owned and operated by Robert (Rex) and his wife Phemie, who lived in Lorn and later Bolwarra. They had first leased and then bought the premises from Phemie’s father, George Mallaby, a chemist and optician, who had acquired it from another chemist, GC Stevens: Stevens doubled as an optician, while Mallaby also developed photographs in the pharmacy. Before Stevens, the building was owned by TB Hill and earlier by PK Quaye, both chemists. Hill was followed by AG Greentree, also a pharmacist.

The pharmacy in Quaye’s time, about 1890.

(Maitland Mercury)

An advertisement by TB Hill, late 1890s.

(Maitland Mercury)

The daughter of Rex and Phemie Wallis, Susan, remembers working in the 1950s after the end of her day at Maitland Primary School in Church St. Her tasks were to unpack boxes of pharmaceuticals and wash off bottle labels for re-use. Later, at the end of a high school day, she often did the banking. Later again, while studying for her own B.Pharm degree at Sydney University, she worked at times under her parents’ supervision in the dispensary. Every prescription was manually processed and recorded. Much later, she learned that her father had hoped she would take over the practice after her parents’ retirement, but she went to Sydney and never again lived in Maitland.

Women employed at Wallis’s pharmacy, 1960s

Left to right: Betty Walker, Nancy Elliott, Joy Walterback, Jan Greenwood

(Susan Steggall Collection)

High St’s pharmacies were competitors, but they co-operated in relation to establishing after-hours rosters for emergencies occurring at night, on weekends and during public holidays. Doctors did the same. The pharmacies also loaned each other materials when some ran out of ingredients for prescriptions.

Relations between them were generally cordial, but Soul Pattinson’s was rather frowned upon by the others for stocking non-pharmaceutical items. The family firms thought this was unprofessional, but it eventually became the norm among pharmacies in Australia generally. William Lipscomb, a legendary High St pharmacist in the mid-1800s, had also sold many items apart from pharmaceuticals. Specialisation on pharmaceutical items was probably never the only model followed, but there may have been fashions or norms in operation that varied from time to time. Wallis’s at one stage became a franchise operator for Helena Rubinstein cosmetics, for example, a departure from selling pharmaceutical items only.

The interior of Wallis’s at 455 High St, 1950s

(Susan Steggall Collection)

Like many other High St businesses, the Wallis pharmacy was affected by the 1955 flood. Water surging down High St got into the premises and ruined the floor coverings. Documents in a safe in the office were covered in mud. At the time, the family had just sold their house in Nillo St, Lorn, and moved to Glastonbury in Bolwarra, which was on higher ground. The Nillo St house was deeply inundated.

 Floodwaters outside Jakeman’s chemist and the Commercial Bank of Australia, High St, 1955.

(Jim Lucey photograph, University of Newcastle).

Immediately east of Jakemans was the site of the former Albion Inn, which for a time accommodated several doctors’ surgeries including those of Dr RJ Pierce and Dr William J Russell for whom the chemists operated as dispensers in the later nineteenth century. The inn, a major Maitland landmark for years, was demolished in 1915.

Changes in pharmacies and retailing

Gradually, from the 1970s, High St’s chemists disappeared. Wallis’s closed in about 1978 after Rex Wallis had a stroke: Phemie carried on the business for two years but then sold up. The premises were operated thereafter by a building society.

Meanwhile, the franchise operations came more and more to dominate the field in Maitland and nationwide. Terry White Chemmart, for example, now numbers more than 550 stores across Australia, and about 80 stores operate under the Soul Pattinson label. This has become a general theme in retailing. Many fields, from spectacles and fast food to car tyres, are today controlled by a small number of entities, each with many franchise operations.

Our cities’ shopping areas have been transformed over the past 50 or 60 years. Big, often overseas brands increasingly dominate. There is less variety in ownership than there used to be, fewer ‘family’ operations, and less competition. Locationally, retailing increasingly resides in large, planned centres rather than in strips along the old main streets like Maitland’s High St.