Boans city department store was a Perth institution from its opening in November 1895 until 1986 when the doors closed for the last time. See Special Reports for related articles.
Boans city department store was a Perth institution from its opening in November 1895 until 1986 when the doors closed for the last time. David Hough, who has been commissioned by the Boan family to research and write a history of the department store chain, provides an insight into what role the family-owned operation played in the lives of so many people.
Macedonian-born Angelina Naumoska was a young, non-English speaking bride when she arrived in Perth in 1971.
She lived in a rat-infested house in North Perth and walked the length of William Street, over the Horseshoe Bridge, to Boans. She found the rat-trap department but couldn’t make herself understood. Staff gave her a piece of paper and she drew a rat in a trap then mimed a rat eating cheese. She has several stories that illustrate the trouble staff went to to help a newcomer to Perth.
Everybody has a Boans story. My first entry in The West Australian’s ‘Can You Help?’ page produced 50 of them.
Brian Pilkington’s first job when he left school in 1960 was to mop Boans’ marble staircase when someone had an ‘accident’ after drinking too much Passiona. Tracey Craig was in boarding school when the Boans Grove Shopping Centre opened in 1964. Her parents, living in the state’s North West, gave her a Boans credit card so that she could charge-up essentials.
“They showed enormous trust in me and I never let them down. I’ve never forgotten it.”
A nurse at Murdoch hospital told me recently that her mother’s best friend walked through the Boans city store every day for 30 years. As she passed the perfume counter she gave herself a zap from one of the samples. Her work colleagues called her “Miss Rich” because of her exotic fragrances. She wept the day Boans closed, April 12 1986.
Carl, my Swanbourne hairdresser, got his first real job after he left school in 1954 in Boans’ cutlery and jewellery section. It was his first contact with rock cakes and Dagwood sandwiches. “We never had nothing [sic] like that in Italy,” he told me.
Julie George of Bunbury has a 1950s street photo of her mother, her brother Laurie and herself taken outside Boans. “We’d come to town on the Australind. We’d arrived at the central railway station about 10.30am, had morning tea downstairs, done our shopping and then gone up to the cafeteria for lunch. And then we’d caught the afternoon train home.”
It was a big day out for the family. How many families can relate to that scenario, I wonder.
Ross’s Sales & Auctions held an on-site sale on April 2 1986. There were no reserve prices, everything was to be cleared.
In all 504 items were auctioned, including a Beale Baby Grand piano “in situ on the fourth floor”.
I wonder where the piano is today. Some of the furniture and fittings have turned up in interesting places.
Karen Macdonald’s Bookcaffe in Swanbourne has a counter that came from Boans. The Queens Tavern in Highgate acknowledges the source of one of its bars with a suitable plaque.
Architect Mike Patroni, responsible for the award-winning recycling of the Boans Warehouse in East Perth as a block of apartments, grew up in Marvel Lock. The family came to Perth once a year to shop. He remembers the sight and particularly the sound of the fans, with their coloured streamers rippling in the breeze. He keeps one of these fans in his storeroom.
Sir Charles Court remembers as a schoolboy walking along Wellington Street from the train station to Perth Boys’ High School and seeing Harry Boan hanging long poles of merchandise outside the shop. Sir Charles’ mother used to clean the Adelaide Terrace house when the Boan family was in residence. He used to ‘borrow’ some of youngest son Frank’s toys. “I’d never seen a rocking horse until I saw the one in Frank’s room.”
Years later, when Sir Charles and Frank Boan were foundation members of the Highgate RSL, both having seen war service, they became close friends. Frank was the driving force behind Torchbearers for Legacy, and Sir Charles one of his strongest supporters. “I never asked Frank about those early days. Why not? I thought he might be embarrassed, I suppose. I wish I had.”
The history of the Boans department store I have been commissioned to write will tell the story of Harry and Frank Boan and the staff who led retailing and merchandising practice in Western Australia for 90 years, and its contribution as a corporate citizen. But it will be more than this. It will also be a social history of shopping, and look at the way Boans defined the way we dressed, the way we furnished our homes, the way it shaped our culinary tastes.
The book will also try to explain why Boans remains such a central image in people’s imagination.
But to begin at the beginning.
Comparisons can be made between the dramatic opening of Boan Brothers, drapers, on Saturday November 9 1895 and the heart-breaking closure of Boans Ltd city store in 1986. For the first event we have contemporary documented accounts. For the second we have eyewitness recollections from those who were there.
Even so, nearly 20 years on, the memories are still too painful for some to talk about the last day or the events surrounding it.
Harry Boan arrived in Perth “about the middle” of 1895 at the age of 34. He was a born merchant, and Perth in 1895 was just the place to be. The mining industry was “booming all over the state” and all departments of commerce “were reaping the benefit of the tide of prosperity”.
According to the 1897 postal directory there were 12 drapers in the central business district, five of them in Hay Street, the city’s main commercial centre.
Wellington Street was the swampy edge of town and no-one in their right mind would open a business there, close as it might be to the newly opened Perth Railway Station.
Harry and his brother, Benjamin (who died in 1901), bought Wellington Street quarter-acre blocks V.7-8 from W.B. Woods & Co, at £42 a foot. In four months, despite chronic labour and material shortages, they had built and stocked single-storey premises ready for the November opening, on borrowings of £62,000.
Their advertising was masterly, as it continued to be into the modern era. In The West Australian of Friday November 8 1895, there was a special advertisement on page six, the editorial page: “Boan Brothers’ Great Inspection Night”.
At 7.30 that evening the doors opened and thousands of people poured through to just look at “Almost Everything Possible to Think Of”. The advertisement was two-columns wide and ran the length of the page. It was informative, uncluttered and exciting, and refreshingly unlike much competitor advertising.
Next morning, the doors opened for serious business. According to a 1912 account: “So great was the crush and excitement that doors were broken, windows smashed, and damage done to the value of £140; the staff was paralysed with the onrush of the people, and the warehouse had to be closed until the following Tuesday”.
Harry handed over the reins to Frank in 1929 and after 1932 lived in Melbourne, when he wasn’t travelling the world. When he died on Tuesday March 18 1941, Boans employed 1,200 people and had a capital value of £1 million.
Early on, Harry concentrated on a city store. It was Frank who began the move into suburban shopping centres in the late 1950s. Then followed Morley in 1961, Medina, Bunbury, Cottesloe-Grove, Melville, Albany, Innaloo and Garden City-Booragoon in 1972.
It is the 1.6 hectare, multi-storey city store opposite the railway station where Myer and the Forrest Chase now stands, however, that people most identify with the Boans Ltd name.
A contemporary news account summed up the last day: “Boans’ city store ceased trading on Saturday amid nostalgia, tears, quiet reflections, noisy exuberance – and a spree of thieving.”
Staff had expected the last week of trading to be a memorable event but no-one had expected it to be the trading bonanza it was.
Shoplifters were busy, shoppers wrote their own prices for articles, or swapped price tags to reduce still further the heavily marked-down merchandise. Queues reached 25 metres on some cash desks.
Former employees, Cynthia Bailey of Marmion among them, revisited the shop to say goodbye. “It is a sad day and I had to be part of it,” she said.
As the 1.00pm door-closing deadline approached many staff wept openly. But already the demolition team had moved in and was removing fittings and knocking down walls as staff balanced the day’s takings.
When it was publicly announced that the Perth City Council permitted the Coles-Myer group, which had bought Boans Ltd after a difficult and painful takeover contest, to pull down the historic Boans facades, there was a public outcry.
Margaret Feilman, a spokes-woman for the National Trust was furious. Stephen Scott of West Midland said: “They’re taking all the character out of Perth. They’re going to ruin Forrest Place.”
Many would agree today that his was a prophetic view.
Frank Boan’s widow, Betty Canny, said: “We don’t count for anything any more, we’re just has-beens. When I go into Boans and look around, I feel so terribly sad about it. I just think of my late husband and what he would feel”.
But not everyone was hostile to the demolition. Property developers asserted it would be structurally impossible to keep the facades. Bonnie Paull of Warwick said: “If it’s unsafe I say pull it down, it’s not worth mucking around and trying to save it”.
The promise and expectation was that the old store would be demolished and in two years would be replaced by a “five-level building which is thought to be the first completely new downtown department store in Australia for more than half a century”.
Boans-Myer regional general manager, John Anson, said at the time: “The new Boans store will become a major focal point for shopping in the city. And yet it will still be Boans. The old tradition of personalised service will continue. The aromas of tea and coffee and spices and gourmet food will all be there in a magnificent new food hall which will offer so much more than we would ever have been able to in the old store.”
Alas, it was not to be. It is the Myer emporium name that dominates Forrest Place today. How that came to be is also a part of the story of Boans Ltd, the universal provider.
• His Majesty’s Theatre Foundation commissioned David Hough to write the history of His Majesty’s Theatre. Dream of Passion: the centennial history of His Majesty’s Theatre was released on November 8 2004, and short-listed for the WA Premier’s History Prize 2004.
BOANS SNAPSHOT
- Harry and Benjamin Boan buy quarter-acre blocks in Wellington Street for £42 a foot.
- In four months they built and stocked single-storey premises on borrowings of £62,000.
- Boan Brothers, drapers, opens in Wellington Street on November 9 1895.
- Subsequent stores opened in Morley, Medina, Bunbury, Cottesloe-Grove, Melville, Albany, Innaloo, Garden City-Booragoon.
- On-site closing down sale held on April 2 1986; 504 items on offer, no reserve prices.
- The Bookcaffe, Swanbourne, has a counter from Boans, as is a bar at The Queens, Highgate.
- Boans Ltd city store closes its doors for the last time on April 12 1986.