Index                                         Back                                         Next

1928 -  A major fire in Howard Street

The details for this account were taken from the Nambour Chronicle. The issue of 29-6-1928, page 2 describes the fire and its effects three days before, and the issues of 14-9-1928, page 8 and 21-9-1928, page 5 depict the events that took place on the night of the fire, as revealed by evidence presented to the official inquiry.

On 26th June 1928, the western end of Howard Street in Nambour suffered a major fire. The conflagration started in the Brighton Boarding House, a two-storeyed building on the northern side of the street, opposite today's Burson Auto Parts premises. The boarding house had been opened in mid-1925 by a Mrs Pringle, so was just three years old. By 1928 it was owned by Mr and Mrs Rood Singh. It adjoined the Diggers' Hall on the western side and the Olympic Hall (by then the Nambour Preserving Company's cannery) on its eastern. All three buildings were totally destroyed in the fire. {12-12-1924, p.8} {17-4-1925, p.3}

At its street frontage the Brighton Boarding House contained four shops. An entrance hallway between the third and fourth shops led back to the boarding house's dining room and kitchen, and to a flight of stairs going up. Boarding house bedrooms were located on the upper floor above the shops, and balconies outside these rooms overlooked the street and, together with awnings, provided shade for the street's footpath below.

The site of Rood Singh's shops in 2008. 

The shop closer to Currie Street had been occupied for four years by the Royal Café, owned by Mrs Beatrice Cope and her family. Today's Tram Track Café is on the same site. The Royal Café had been so named in 1924 as it adjoined Mr A. D. Rawlinson's Royal Pictures, a cinema which operated next door in the Diggers' Hall through a leasing arrangement. By 1928 this same venue was being leased by Mr Michael Harcourt Gray who had renamed his cinema the 'Empire Pictures'. The Copes lived in residential quarters at the back of their café. The second shop had been recently fitted out as a dress-making business by Miss Rosa Hallam. The third shop was used as a General Store by Mr Rood Singh, and the fourth shop was vacant. On the top floor lived Mrs Dorothy Biltoft and her daughter Hilda. They operated another café near the Nambour Railway Station. The only other tenant on the top floor was Mr Bill Allsop, a railway engine driver, who had been boarding in No. 10 room for the past six weeks.

Some rooms in the building were lit by gas lamps, an acetylene plant being housed outside at the back. The rest of the lighting was mainly by kerosene lamps, although there were a few electric lights and power points in the building. Mains electricity had been available to Nambour residents for the previous nine months.  

The evening of 25th June was a cold, damp and misty mid-winter Monday. The fire was first noticed shortly before 1 am, when Mr Allsop was awoken by smoke. On looking out, he saw flames at the back quarters of the boarding house and yelled "Fire!" a number of times.  

On the ground floor, the Cope family was woken by the slamming of Miss Hallam's door, the sound of furniture being moved about, and the breaking of glass. Mrs Cope's two sons and a daughter got up immediately and ran to the doors. One of her boys shouted, "Get up quickly, the boarding house is in flames." She opened the door leading to the rest of the boarding house and was confronted by smoke. Looking up, she saw the top floor above the dining room was ablaze. All her family were then astir. She rescued her canaries first and then the family started moving all their furniture and personal effects out to the street. The café fittings and stock were left where they were as they were insured, whereas the Copes' personal belongings were not.  {21-9-28, p.5}

People rapidly made their way to the scene to help. Suddenly there was a scream from above. The three tenants in the bedrooms on the first floor were trapped. Feeling the door and walls of their bedroom heating up, Mrs and Miss Biltoft stepped onto the balcony over the footpath, calling for help, as there was no fire escape. The balcony was sixteen feet (five metres) above the ground. 

A neighbour in a house across the street, Mr Thomas Longden, was woken by the "screams for help by the terror-stricken women." He saw their predicament and shouted to them to go to the Currie Street end of the balcony and then climb down onto the awning of the Royal Café. He called for a ladder, and soon Mrs Singh located a step ladder and brought it to him. Placing it against a supporting post, he climbed up and helped the hysterical ladies down to safety. He then went back up the ladder to rescue their clothes, but was beaten back by the flames. He later said that, five minutes more and it would have been a case of jump from the balcony or perish. 

The Nambour Chronicle described Bill Allsop's narrow escape: "Mr Allsop had to fight his way through the blinding smoke and heat to dash down the back steps. As a result his face was badly scorched and singed, and attention from the Ambulance was necessary. Deprived of all his belongings, excepting those he stood in (which were only scant), his bandaged face indicated only too well the close call he had encountered. The ladies, who were unhurt, were able to save a few of their personal belongings." Oddly, both Mrs Biltoft and Mr Allsop did not remember to rescue their sets of false teeth, which were lost to the flames.  

The Brighton Boarding House was by now totally alight. Gusty westerly wind lifted showers of sparks and cinders high into the air, and the two adjoining halls came under threat.  

The worst fire that Nambour had previously suffered occurred at 9 pm one Saturday evening, when there were many people about and 150 people at the Town Hall Pictures. Then there were numerous volunteers to put it out. This present fire had started at 1 am after a quiet Monday night, when the streets were deserted. Over a hundred people hurried to the scene, including a handful of volunteer fire fighters who had little equipment. They  formed a 'bucket brigade', but there was no possibility of their saving the boarding house. The best that could be hoped for was to prevent the fire from spreading to the adjoining buildings, the Nambour Preserving Company's cannery in the Olympic Hall on the eastern side and the Empire Picture Theatre in the Diggers' Hall on the western.  

The Nambour Chronicle said. "Those who assumed the great task of combating the flames and attempting to save threatened premises worked as usual with that redoubtable energy which has earned for them unstinted praise from the community, but the adverse effects of working on such a night as last Monday were only too apparent. The risk was altogether too great, with the flames being blown in all directions. It was generally conceded to be an impossibility to effect a save, beyond a remote chance on the canning factory, excepting by a forceful supply of water which could only come by means of town reticulation, and that, we fear, is a long way from realisation."  

Mr Michael Gray rushed to the Empire Theatre, which he leased from the R.S.S.I.L.A.. The building, also known as the Soldiers' Memorial Hall, was well built, lined, ceiled and with a stage. It was separated from the fire by a laneway that was too narrow to act as an effective firebreak Flames curling out from under the eaves of the boarding house were reaching the eaves of the Hall.

The site of the Soldiers' (Diggers') Hall, operating as the Empire Pictures in 1928.  

As the building was clad with corrugated iron, Mr Gray hoped that it would resist the heat of the next door fire long enough for him to remove his equipment. He was able to rescue his biographs (motion picture projectors) although a mirror arc lamp and some accessories were lost. The piano was pushed to safety, and the ceiling was afire as the last few of Mr Gray's 200 canvas chairs were brought out. He and his helpers had to run for their lives as the roof fell in. 

Mr Gray therefore saved most of his equipment, his electricity generating plant being housed in a separate engine-room behind the Hall and untouched by the fire. The western side of the Hall had been separated from Mr Melville's fruit shop by a 13 feet wide laneway (today's Queen Street). Fears were held that the fruit shop would also catch alight, and everything moveable was taken across to the other side of the street. After the Empire Theatre's roof fell, volunteers pushed down the still-standing western wall onto the fire. This covered the flames with corrugated iron sheeting, which stifled it on Mr Melville's side and his shop was saved.

Attention now turned to the Nambour Preserving Company's cannery on the eastern side of the burning boarding house, once the Olympic Theatre. By 3 am it became threatened. Their Chevrolet motor truck was driven to safety, but little else could be moved in time. If a small jet of water had been made to play on the corner of the building where it caught alight, then the building could have been protected, but no water was available. The factory was completely destroyed, except for an electric motor and two fruit slicing machines. Large stocks of canned fruit, sugar and syrup were ruined. This part of the fire was accompanied by an explosion that hurled tins of jam as far away as the banks of Petrie Creek. 

The Opp Shop and Leading Edge Real Estate now occupy the site of the Nambour Preserves Cannery in the old Olympic Hall.

The next building down the street was Mr J. A. Morgan's Motor Garage, a Buick and Chevrolet dealership established four years earlier. It was soon threatened, but the fire was dying down, and only scorched the walls. Two cars and a truck in the garage were driven out, but not before the heat had blistered their paint. 

The next morning revealed a scene of utter devastation to the area, the two large halls, the boarding house and four shops being reduced to blackened ruins, mixed with crumpled corrugated iron. The Nambour Preserving Company never recovered, and instead sold off the equipment that had been saved (including their truck) and the remains of their factory in an auction held at the site on 28th July 1928.  {27-7-1928, p.2}

Eighteen months later, the sites of the boarding house and the two halls had been cleared but were still vacant. Mr J. A. Morgan had given up his garage proprietorship, but had repaired his building and leased it to the Queensland Railways Department as a workshop and supply depot for the railway construction work which was being carried out in the district.  {20-12-1929, p.4} 

In the weeks following the fire, the call went out again for an official fire brigade service for the town, as it had done after the calamitous fire in January 1924 and other conflagrations in the town. Once again, nothing was done, not even a few buckets or hand pumps purchased. 

The Nambour Chronicle printed a letter from a reader, A. T. French, describing a Yass farmer's idea of using the engine of his Thornycroft truck to drive a pump with which to fight bush fires. Mr French wrote, "Such a 'fire-engine' with a tank holding 500 or 600 gallons of water, pump and hose, should not cost more than ₤500, and could be on the scene within 15 minutes." As ever, this sensible suggestion came to nothing.  {6-7-1928, p.4}

Four months later, Nambour had another serious fire when three businesses and a private residence in Currie Street were destroyed. A year after that, there was another disastrous fire in which the Nambour Town Hall was lost. The succession of major fires in which Nambour lost its most gracious and historic buildings continued unabated until 1948, when a fire brigade service with permanently-employed firemen was finally organised after a disastrous fire severely damaged Nambour's best building, the Maroochy Shire Hall, completely destroying its auditorium. Click here to see early fire appliances and fire-engines used in other parts of the world at the time of the Howard Street fire, and Nambour's first two 'fire-engines'. A new purpose-built fire station was eventually built at the southern end of Currie Street, opposite the Catholic Church, and opened in 1956 with a staff of two firemen and a Chief. It lasted until February 2010, when a new station with a staff of 29 men was opened on the Bli Bli Road, near the Nambour Showgrounds.