Teetotallers are entitled to grand architecture too!

The George Hotel, Fitzroy St StKilda

opened as a coffee palace in 1885-6.
Now a licensed hotel.

The Sons of Temperance was one American fraternal organisation that was estab­lished in New York in 1842. Many of the original temperance societies had religious affiliations and Leah Rae Berk noted that at the height of evangelical American temperance, one out of every ten Americans was a member. The Sons of Temperance, and its private rituals and regalia, quickly spread across the USA and Canada, and by 1849, this order had establishing itself in the UK. In 1868 an Australian branch of the order was established in the colony of New South Wales by a Baptist minister.

As had been customary in medieval guilds, Sons of Temperance paid $30 to cover the burial costs of any brother who died and less for a member’s widow - the organis­ation was acting as an insur­ance company. Members had to look after any brothers who were ill and to visit them daily.

Queens Coffee Palace 1887, 5 storeys
corner of Victoria and Rathdowne Sts Carlton (demolished).
Architects: Oakden, Addison & Kemp.

Collingwood Coffee Palace, Smith St.
1880 (largely demolished since)
Photo: State Library of Victoria 

The Independent Order of Rechabites was a Friendly Society founded in Britain in 1835 as part of the wider British temperance movement. Always involved in financial matters, it grad­ually transformed into a financial institution which promoted temperance. The Order became active in Australia from 1843, the same year that the Rechabites est­ablished themselves in the USA. Membership of the Rechabites was open to all who would sign a pledge to completely abstain from alcohol. Thus citizens were invited to join a beneficial as well as a benevolent society. There were death and sickness benefits for work­ing families

A Total Abstinence League was formed in South Australia in 1840 and great rapidly in size. By the 1880s the Independent Order of Rechabites was flourishing in South Australia, offering health care and social insur­ance to working families whose lives might otherwise have been financially unstable.

The Temperance & General Mutual Life Assurance Society was an insur­ance company that operated in Australia and New Zealand. T & G, as it was called, was founded in Victoria in 1876, once part of the Assurance branch of the Independent Order of Rechabites Friendly Societies. T & G was operating in Australia at a time when social services were close to non-existent, but more of T & G later.

By the last decades of the C19th, the temperance movement could rely on strong support from Methodists and other Nonconformist Christians, among whom total abstinence and a hostility to the liquor trade was de rigueur. Conferences and assemblies of these denominations regularly passed resolutions declaring their opposition to intemper­ance, which they identified as a major moral and social evil.

In the late C19th, the temperance cause was strengthened by the arrival of alcohol-free Coffee Palaces & temperance hotels in Melbourne, Adelaide and other cities. These provided food, smart accommodation and opportunities for socialising in pleasant surroundings, with no drunk men vomiting on the floor or making lewd comments to women. In Melbourne one of the first extrav­agant temperan­ce hotels, designed by Charles Webb in the 2nd Empire Style, was the Grand Hotel (1883) in Spring St. Now called the Windsor Hotel, this coffee palace building was extend­ed to 360 rooms to accommodate over­seas and interstate visitors to Melbourne’s 1888 Cen­tenary Exhib­it­ion. 

In Adelaide the Grand Coffee Palace (now the Plaza Hotel) was first built in 1889 and Grant’s Coffee Palace (now Arts SA) a decade later, opposite each other in Hindley St. The Grand Central Coffee Palace Hotel in Clarence St Sydney, which opened for business in 1889, was designed with spectacular external architecture and internal design.

Coffee Palaces for teetotallers did very well in Australian cities from 1880 to about 1905. Then the magnificent buildings were given hotel licences for serving alcohol, were converted into schools and finance companies or were destroyed, either intentionally or other­wise. Before WW1 started, there was no longer any profit to be made from the once hugely-popular Coffee Palaces; the temperance movement stopped moving.

Temperance & General (T&G) Building, 1928-29

143 Collins St, corner of Russell St, Melbourne

Temperance & General (T&G) Building, 1933-4
corner Moorabool and Ryrie Sts Geelong. 

Now let us by-pass WW1 and return to civilian society, a time of damaged young soldiers, high unemployment and suggestions of the imminent Great Depression. It comes as something of a surprise, then, that the T & G started expanding its building programme in the 1920s and 1930s.

Did they think the temperance movement would become financially viable again? Alcohol consumption in Australia began at a VERY high point of 13.6 ls of pure alcohol per head per year in the 1830s. It declined to 5.8 ls a year during the economic downturn in the 1890s, then to a nadir of 2.5 ls during WW1 and then again during the Great Depression. According to this possibly counter-intuitive view, the highpoint of the temperance movement came during World War I and the Depression!

Just before the Great Depression destroyed economies, insurance companies were hot. So staggering amounts of insurance money was thrown at temper­ance archit­ect­ure, in Melbourne, Geelong, Mildura, Horsham, Hobart, Sydney, Newcastle, Albury, Wagga Wagga, Brisbane, Townsville, Perth, Adelaide and in New Zealand’s cities (Auckland, Napier and Palmerston North). The T & G buildings all had distinctive characteristics, being multi-storey buildings on corner sites. Pinnacle towers were a common feature, symbolic of strength and able to be seen from a distance, and featuring the initials T & G in Art Deco signage. 

Examine the T & G Building on the corner of Collins and Russell Sts Melbourne, for example. It was built in 1929 and later expanded, becoming the largest and most prominent interwar office block in the City. The Commercial Palazzo form topped by a stepped tower was repeated in Sydney, and in smaller versions in other cities. This was a unique form of corporate branding, using architecture to make a very public statement. Later, when the insurance hall was demolished in Collins St and rebuilt, the entry mural painted by Napier Waller in 1928 was saved.