Aldborough, Charters Towers
Aldborough is a heritage-listed villa at 25 Deane Street, Charters Towers City, Charters Towers, Charters Towers Region, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by William Henry Allan Munro and built in 1900 by Thomas Barry O'Meara. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 14 August 2008.
History
Aldborough, a large timber residence at the corner of Deane and Hodgkinson streets, one block south of the main business street of Charters Towers, was built in 1896 for the successful draper and merchant Alfred Edwin Daking-Smith. The house is a well-known landmark in the town. Aldborough demonstrates characteristics typical of housing in Charters Towers, and is a good example of a house built for a successful Charters Towers businessman. Between 1872 and 1917 Charters Towers was one of the most important goldfields in Queensland. At its peak in 1899 it accounted for more than a third of Queensland's entire gold production, and by 1901 it was Queensland's second largest town.Gold was discovered at the foot of Towers Hill in December 1871, the find was reported to Warden WFCM Charters at Ravenswood in January 1872, and the Charters Towers Goldfield was proclaimed on 31 August 1872. Charters Towers was proclaimed a municipality on 21 June 1877, and the town embraced, centred on the intersection of Gill Street and Mosman Street. The gold was found in reefs of gold-bearing ore, and as the mines deepened the smaller mining operations were replaced by larger companies. A heightened phase of prosperity was entered after the great wealth of the Day Dawn reef was discovered in 1878. The completion of the Great Northern railway from Townsville to Charters Towers in December 1882 also boosted the town's prosperity, by lowering the cost of supplies and building materials.
Charters Towers boomed throughout the 1880s, overshadowing all other mining centres in North Queensland. A display of Charters Towers Gold in the Queensland Court at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London in 1886 in turn led to an influx of capital from English speculators, and in 1889 the famous Brilliant Reef, the richest on the field, was discovered. During this time many of the 1870s timber commercial buildings on Mosman and Gill Streets were rebuilt in brick. Charters Towers continued to prosper throughout the depressed economy of the 1890s with a peak production of of gold in 1899, and a population of around 26,500 the same year. At the turn of the century Charters Towers, with its multi-cultural population, was known colloquially as "the World".
After 1899 there was a steady decline in gold production. In 1912 the Warden reported that the extreme depth for profitable mining had been reached, and most mines had been abandoned by 1916. The last of the big mines, the Brilliant Extended, closed in 1917, but small mining operations continued to be serviced by the Venus battery, which was owned by the Queensland Government from 1919. By 1921 Charters Towers' population had decreased to 5,682, and many timber buildings were moved to Townsville after World War I. Some villas were reused as schools as Charters Towers adapted to becoming an educational centre for North Queensland.
When Daking-Smith arrived in Charters Towers in 1891 the town was still booming. Born in 1866, he had lived with his grandmother at Aldeburgh on the coast of Suffolk, England, after the deaths of his parents. At the age of 21 Alfred Daking-Smith decided to seek a new life in Australia, and he arrived in Melbourne in 1887, before moving to Brisbane. He was employed by the drapery firm Overell and White as a departmental manager in Brisbane, and he later opened and managed a branch for the firm in Laidley. In 1891 Daking-Smith moved to Charters Towers in North Queensland and established himself as a draper in his own right in "humble premises" in Mosman Street. He moved into larger premises on the corner of Gill and Mosman around 1895. This building was described in 1898 as a two-storeyed warehouse with prominent window displays with a staff of thirty-five working in eight departments.
Daking-Smith built his home Aldborough, named in honour of his years with his grandmother, close to the main business street of the town. In June 1896 three allotments at the south east corner of Deane and Hodgkinson streets were transferred from Louis Hamann to Daking-Smith.
On 21 October 1896 The North Queensland Register reported that Daking-Smith's new residence, one of the finest in the town, was approaching completion. The position of the building, facing the corner, was apparently designed to secure an expansive outlook, while increasing privacy. The building's style, the bungalow, was seen as the most suitable for the local climate, and features mentioned at the time included: a handsome flight of front steps; a spacious verandah with cast iron railings; glass front and rear doors, both with sidelights; an arch in the hallway and one between the dining and drawing rooms; cedar cornices and an embossed stamped paper frieze in the dining and drawing rooms; two floor-to-ceiling bay windows to the front verandah; varnished interior woodwork; three large bedrooms in the main building; ventilation tubing from the ornamental panels in each ceiling, with an iron ventilator on the roof; and bedrooms on either side of the latticed back verandah, separated from the main building. There was also a separate pantry, on piles set in vessels of water, off the rear verandah; and the kitchen wing included the kitchen, a bathroom and three bedrooms. The contractor for the residence was TB O'Meara, the architect was WHA Munro, and the plumber was Charles Fraser.
Part of the site was fenced off for a stable and a bulk store, the latter being a two-storey building measuring. This store fronted Deane Street, and was later retained by Daking-Smith when he sold Aldborough.
The Queensland Post Office Directory first lists Daking-Smith as living on the site in 1900. In 1901 the Charters Towers City Council Valuation Register listed Alfred Daking-Smith, draper, as occupying allotments one, two and three of section eleven with a capital value of. Initially he is listed in the postal directories on Deane Street, and then from 1906 he is listed on Hodgkinson Street.
Aldborough is aligned to the northwest, facing the corner, which is also roughly in the direction of the intersection of Gill and Mosman streets, where Daking-Smith had opened his 1895 shop. The most common houses in Charters Towers were two or four-room timber cottages, and in plan Aldborough is an expanded version of these simple buildings, many of which were prefabricated to standardised plans. Aldborough's style and fabric, including the light timber stud frame, reflect construction techniques common in Charters Towers. In a technique well-suited to the climate of North Queensland, the walls of houses in Charters Towers were lined with horizontal boards, and the timber frame was left exposed externally. From vertical boards were more likely to be used.
Aldborough shares other features in common with Charters Towers housing, such as sheet metal acroterions on the corners of its guttering; a sheet metal ventilator at the crown of its roof; and shades and screens around its verandahs to reduce the effect of the hot climate - such as latticework, timber louvres, canvas blinds and drop-down timber blinds. Aldborough's extended verandah eaves are also characteristic of Charters Towers housing.
In 1906 Alfred Daking-Smith married Beryl Maud Hooke, and the couple soon moved to Sydney, where Daking-Smith attained even greater wealth. He built the mansion Berith Park at Wahroonga, North Sydney in 1909. That same year Daking-Smith erected the Daking-Smith Building as a purpose built department store in upper Gill Street, Charters Towers. Although Charters Towers already had a number of drapery stores, Daking-Smith believed that a more modern, "genteel" shop was needed. Between 1860 and 1920, with the industrialised world's rising level of affluence and leisure time, the "art of shopping", once the prerogative of the wives of the wealthy, was adopted eagerly by the wives of the emerging middle classes. The impressive architectural style of the brick Daking-Smith building was unique for a remote North Queensland town. From his new building Daking-Smith advertised himself as a draper, furnisher and boot merchant. Through this business activity, he made an important contribution to the commercial development of Charters Towers.
In 1913 Daking-Smith built the office block Daking House in Sydney. He also purchased, rebuilt and re-equipped the old Parramatta Woollen Mills in 1913, under the name of the Sydney Woollen Mills. He became a director of the Automatic Breadbaking Co. of Sydney, and The Jungle Ltd of Innes Springs. His mining investments and interests were extensive as were his active memberships of many public institutions. By now Alfred's preferred name was Dakingsmith. He lived for some time after 1923 at the Astor, Sydney's first co-operatively owned residential flats, but he retired to his country home Beraldor in Bowral. He died in Sydney on 7 August 1943 aged seventy-seven years.
Although living in New South Wales from 1909, Dakingsmith maintained his business in Charters Towers, and he returned on regular visits for some years. He was an unsuccessful National candidate for the seat of Queenton in the Queensland state elections of March 1918. From 1909 Dakingsmith rented out Aldborough before it was sold in 1919 to a medical practitioner, Thomas Roy Edmeades, on a reduced parcel of land.
At the time of the 1919 sale allotments one and two were resurveyed into subdivisions one and two. Dakingsmith retained subdivision two while Edmeades took possession of the land on which Aldborough stood, subdivision one of allotments one and two and allotment three. Dakingsmith continued to operate his store on subdivision two, and "D Smith and Co. Stores" is listed at this location in the postal directories from 1912 to 1923 inclusive.
Dr Edmeades used Aldborough as a surgery and residence, the bedroom at the corner of the north-east and south-east verandahs reputedly serving as his waiting room. Edmeades became a highly respected and long serving medical practitioner to the people of Charters Towers. The park beside City Hall in Mosman Street is named in his honour.
In October 1922 Aldborough was transferred to Jessie Mary Beach, from Muttaburra. Jessie's husband had drawn a selection at Julia Creek in a land ballot, but Jessie lived in Aldborough so that their three children could be schooled in Charters Towers. Jessie died in September 1954, but the property remained in the Beach-Steele family until auctioned in 2008. Local interest in the fate of this landmark building attracted 300 people to the auction, and the sale made the front page of The Northern Miner.
Sometime in the 1920s or the 1930s the main section of the house was painted internally, with stencilled patterns over the base colours. Accounts differ as to whether it was painted during the ownership of Edmeades, or the Beaches. As the paint was applied over the varnished timber walls and ceilings of the hallway, living room and dining room, it soon cracked into a crazed pattern, which remains a feature of Aldborough's interior to this day. In the bedrooms, which did not have varnished walls, the stencilled designs are more intact. The house was also reputedly the first in Charters Towers to have electric lighting, run by a 32 volt generator under the house.
When Dakingsmith wound up Daking-Smith & Co. in 1925 his property and store in Deane Street, adjacent to Aldborough, was transferred to bakers Herbert Powell Jones and William John Lang in January 1926. After their business folded the land was sold to Jessie Beach in 1947.