Arthur Preddey

---

Moruya’s ‘Jack of All Trades’

The history of any town really comes to life in the stories of its most colourful characters.

And Arthur Halley Preddey (1876 - 1952) is, unquestionably, one of Moruya’s more ‘colourful characters’.

He was a builder, sawmill owner and operator, coffin maker, undertaker, garage owner and operator, hire car operator, cinema and dance hall owner-operator, President of the Moruya Chamber of Commerce, Secretary of the Moruya Mechanics Institute, the town’s Deputy Chief Air Raid Precautions Warden in World War II (‘he was constantly seen with a set of binoculars at his ‘look-out’ at the Air Raid Pub’ in Moruya), Secretary of the Moruya Hospital, local Coroner…perhaps the most practical man in town…and the scourge of eleven Matrons at Moruya Hospital.

Arthur’s grandfather, George Preddy Snr., arrived in Sydney in 1827 as a convict. He had been a ‘tallow chandler’ (candle maker) who had been sentenced to transportation for housebreaking and stealing. He was assigned to work for a farmer at Pitt Town (near Richmond in Sydney). In 1836, having served his sentence, he married a free settler, Margaret Carey, and then worked as a mineral surveyor, dairyman, dray proprietor (cart driver) and sail maker until finally becoming a timber merchant, buying a Summer Hill sawmill and acquiring the business of John Booth and Company (wholesale fuel, timber and produce merchants) in Kent Street, Sydney.

In 1876 he established a sawmill, timber yard and wharf in Darling Harbour, and took his two sons, George & William, into partnership. The two boys became owners of the business when he died in 1879.

William settled in Narooma after the Sydney business closed in 1900 and he built Narooma’s first steam-driven sawmill. This mill was subsequently sold to George Mitchell on the condition that George’s son, Arthur, was kept on as foreman…but Arthur had greater ambitions, and erected his own mill on the Wagonga Inlet, at Bryce’s Bay.

Arthur then married Nora Tucker. Nora had her own teaching business in a room above Palings Music store in George St, Sydney and she refused to move to Narooma unless Arthur could first find her six music pupils. Arthur rapidly did so. While at Wagonga the couple had three children - one, a daughter, dying at nine years of age.

In August 1918 Arthur Preddey used his building skills and ingenuity to shift and enlarge Narooma’s private hospital. Assisted by a teenager (Bertie Martin) and others, he lifted the exiting 13-room building onto sleds and then moved it to the centre of ‘a magnificent site’ next to the Narooma Hotel, before adding extensions to the building.

In 1919, a bushfire burnt out Arthur’s Wagonga mill, so he set up another at Potato Point near Bodalla.

But bushfires were the nemesis of all sawmillers, and Arthur was also to lose his mill at ‘the Point.’ So, about 1920, he finally found a permanent home in Moruya - where he was soon to become something of a force to be reckoned with.

Arthur built his first Moruya home on the headland above the mill and named it ‘Tuffwood’, presumably after the ’toughness’ of Moruya hardwood. The house was later sold to Moruya Quarry Master, John Gilmore, about the time the Moruya quarry started operation in 1924 to supply granite for the Sydney Harbour Bridge Pylons.

It is said that ‘Skew Nail’ Preddey (as he was known by the trade) once built a weatherboard house in a week. That may well have been his first home in town, believed to be in Evans Street. The Moruya cheese factory was another legacy of his career as a builder.

Stories of one of Preddey’s other careers, as an undertaker, abound.

He, himself, used to tell of an occasion in his early undertaking days when he arrived at Nerrigundah with a standard coffin, only to discover he had to bury an overlong corpse. He solved the problem with a spot of amputation, using his carpenters saw!

On another occasion an engineer at Moruya’s Donkey Hill Mine was travelling on a gravel road at Bergalia when his car overturned on a bend, killing him, and rendering his wife unconscious. Preddey – short of time and a useful coffin – ‘put him straight down’. On her recovery, his wife demanded ‘where’s our money?...it was in his pocket’. This was a time when one’s life savings may have been kept on one’s person, so the local police constable was called upon to stand guard on the grave overnight. On exhumation next day…sure enough, a wallet containing the money was recovered from a trouser hip pocket on the corpse.

And then there is the story about how detectives from Sydney’s C.I.D. needed the use of a ‘suspects’ hand’ in a murder investigation and asked that the corpse, which was still ‘residing’ locally, be sent to Sydney. Preddey, however, decided it was cheaper to pack just the hand. The trouble was he dispatched the wrong hand!

In January 1937, by which time Arthur Preddey had also become Secretary of the Moruya Hospital, he visited the hospital to take charge of funeral arrangements for a body in the mortuary, so he wrapped the body in a hospital bed sheet and took it away. Later that month another body left the mortuary but, on this occasion, the yard boy was instructed not to permit Mr Preddey to take the sheet. ‘If every body from the mortuary was taken in a hospital sheet, there would soon be none left,’ Matron Bohan reasoned. ‘Mr Preddey visited the hospital the morning following the removal of the body and was very insulting – told me the sheets were hospital property and none of your b…. business: not to be so b…. smart.’

Preddey’s dealings with the Hospital Matrons seem to have been tempestuous. The Hospital Day Book for the decade from 1931 is now in Moruya Museum’s collection. For the most part, entries are laconic and statistical – staff on duty and number of patients. Matron Bohan, however, used the Day Book almost as a private diary. She did not find life easy. By August 1936, the cook, described as incompetent, was sacked, and the Matron took over the kitchen until a replacement was found. By July of the following year two nurses who had ‘caused trouble’ had gone, leaving Matron and the night sister to carry the nursing load for the next three days. The nurses ‘gave incorrect impressions to the Secretary’ (Arthur Preddey) with whom Matron Bohan was, by this time, in continuous combat: ‘Secretary constantly interfering in Hospital duties’ (September 1936); ‘Secretary tormenting with petty complaints…. Matron becoming tired of this petty vindictiveness and constant interference with reference toward duties and method’ (November 1936).

The next battle, which lasted three months, was over Matron’s holiday pay, which Secretary Preddey refused to accept she was entitled to. Finally, Matron gave notice: ‘Matron tired of Secretary’s grumbles and imaginary complaints.’. On the day she left, she noted that she had received her salary, uniform allowance and the disputed holiday pay, but in a footnote she records that Secretary Preddey had stopped the cheque! The Hospital President, Charles Moffitt, cashed the cheque himself. ‘Matron completed duty and left the hospital.’

Matron Hayes had preceded Matron Bohan. Secretary Preddey wrote to her to remind her of the fact ’she is a servant of the Board and must take and obey instructions given her by the President and the House Committee.’ Her reaction was to resign. When she cooled down, she wrote an apology and retracted her resignation…but did not, in fact, return to duty.

Matron Murray succeeded Matron Bohan. In September 1938, she was written to and reminded it was her responsibility to rid the hospital of rats. In March the following year, she was asked to resign after she had expressed (in writing) dissatisfaction with the job. Matron Mitchell followed and lasted six months. Matron Gannon, who had been Matron of Cobar Hospital for ten years, was chosen from five applicants. Within weeks she had written her resignation in tones so offensive to the Board that they decided to terminate her employment forthwith. Matron Rita Dovey lasted from April to 20th May 1940. Matron Noland followed, resigned in the December but was persuaded to stay on until Matron O’Connell arrived. Matron O’Connell, having been congratulated by the Hospital Commissioner in March 1941, on her running of the hospital, resigned two months later.

In the seven years from 1935 and 1942, whilst Arthur Preddey was Hospital Secretary, 11 different Matrons were employed at Moruya Hospital.

Arthur Preddey, though, is perhaps best remembered as owner and operator of Moruya’s Amusu Theatre and Dance Hall which was the ‘hub’ of the town’s entertainment & social life. (This is now ‘Silly Willys’ shop, but the stage for the orchestra & movie screen, at the rear of the original theatre and dance hall, can still be seen. The movie projectors were mounted above the front door.)

The Amusu Theatre, at the time the biggest public building in town, opened to a packed house on 21st December 1921. It was the first local cinema to install two projectors – allowing uninterrupted projection of films and eliminating the opportunity for larrikins to make a nuisance of themselves when just a single projector was used and the film had to be paused while reels were changed. These Saturday night film screenings in Moryua were followed by a dance – which led Preddey to add a supper room to the building in 1927.

To maximise profits from screening films, Preddey intermittently ran a circuit of screenings up and down the coast – for example, screening films in Cobargo on Friday evenings. These were not always without incident with one notable occurrence being at Tilba in March 1927 when a fire broke out in the hall, creating a stampede without any injury to patrons, but which resulted in destruction of most of the film.

On one occasion Preddey’s competitors complained to the Council that the ceiling of this theatre/dance hall was too low and against public health regulations, so Council closed the building down.

But Preddey was not one to suffer a loss of income. After erecting a substantial pole at the side of the building, he continued to earn revenue by running a series of slide shows. The images were projected from a machine mounted on the pole onto the wall of the building. When the ‘show’ finished, he seated the orchestra on chairs and the crowd ‘danced the night away’ on the bare ground.

Then, with the help of an apprentice, he jacked up the roof using a system of ropes & pulleys, thereby fixing the height problem, closed in the gaps, and regained his licence before his competitors completed their new building!

This was typical of Preddey’s effective ‘adopt a simple approach’ to engineering challenges. He is also remembered by locals for having shifted a farmhouse over a half mile without disturbing the furniture or crockery….he shifted the boiler from the old Moruya cheese factory, when it was rebuilt, to the new factory in half a day (the nearest other quote from Wollongong engineering firms was four days) using crab winches, resulting in barely a hiccup in production (he had, years earlier, salvaged this boiler from the steamer ‘Benanderah’)…and he re-floated the supply ship ‘Kianga’ from the Moruya breakwater, after two Sydney tugboats had failed to do so, simply by using 6 house jacks, a few long timbers, six locals with cars roped to the jacks and a wait for high tide. When the jacks had done their work, the locals pulled them away with their cars, and the ship slid down the timbers into the river.

(Arthur’s son, Jack, worked as a motor mechanic and auto electrician in Preddey’s garage, next to the Moruya theatre and then in Cobargo, before managing the Monarch Hotel in Moruya for two years.)

Sources: Information from Norm Moore of Moryua, including articles contributed to ‘The Beagle’; ‘Narooma’s Past: Steamers, Sawmills and Salmon’ by Laurelle Pacey; ‘Picture Shows of the Far South Coast of New South Wales’ by Robert Parkinson; ‘Why So Many Matrons?’ by Peter Preddey.