Books and Mateship at the Bread and Cheese Club

Like a one-man local Bodleian or Library of Congress, Scots-descended John Kinmount (“Jack”) Moir was a book collector who set himself the goal of acquiring a copy of every book published by an Australian author in the fields of fiction, poetry and drama. Australian writing didn’t get much of a look-in in the cultural world before the Second World War, and Moir devoted huge efforts to its promotion. He succeeded, and by the time of his death in 1958 had put together “one of the finest private libraries of Australian literature ever assembled”, in the words of the State Library of Victoria, to which it was presented and where its 10,000 volumes are still housed.

Moir, born in Queensland in 1893 of a family that moved to Melbourne when he was a child, seems not to have been very literary himself in the sense of writing books. From the age of nineteen the books he scrutinised most closely were commercial ones with columns of receipts and expenses. He qualified as an accountant and worked for Payne’s Bon Marché, a clothing and drapery department store in Bourke Street, Melbourne, that lasted into the 1960s. He became its credit manager and his secretary for a time was Doris Kerr, a writer who would now doubtless be retrospectively claimed as a feminist.

Yes this credit manager, quietly building up his library with the proceeds of his shrewd investments, had a bohemian side. After two divorces, Moir lived alone, but not in the kind of neat suburban home most people of the era aspired to. He bought a former pawnbroker’s shop in Bridge Road, Richmond, a district now much desired as smart inner-city, but then characterised by malt and tanned hides and other industrial smells and low working-class squalor (just the kind of place where you’d expect a pawnbroker to do well). He turned the shop and dwelling into a library where (for he was no recluse) he received researchers and students.

In 1938, Moir’s patronage of Australian writing led him to found, together with eleven kindred spirits, mostly writers and artists, the Bread and Cheese Club. Why this name was chosen is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it just sounded vaguely bohemian and unsullied by the sophistication represented by haute cuisine—to have called it the Filet Mignon Club would not have struck quite the same note—perhaps some analogy was pictured between a Housmanian farm labourer out in the paddocks eating his honest crusty bread and cheese for lunch and the twelve club founders toiling in the fields of literature and art; perhaps this is what the members consumed once the club was up and running and they were enjoying what its Brief History published in 1940 called “[i]ndulgence in refreshment after work”, a pastime the History enjoined as “an important feature” of club life, adding that “when the spirit of conviviality is in the ascendant, every member is enabled to partake of it to the full”. To do so, and presumably with the liquid assistance of the then ubiquitous Wynvale flagons, they had “specially designed mugs; each mug emblazoned with the Club’s heraldic design, in colours, and stamped with the number of the member to whom it belongs”. The spirit of conviviality is alluded to in the motto chosen for the club: “Mateship, Art and Letters”.  

The club first met on June 5, 1938, when the twelve founders “decided to form themselves into an active body to promote Australian Art and Literature”. The meeting place—one pictures them hurrying there from the tram in the bleak Melbourne winter, heavily overcoated, gloved and hatted against the cold—was the studio of E.J. Turner at 132 Cubitt Street, probably a “worker’s cottage” typical of the gauntly industrial part of Richmond which having now, like the area where Moir lived, shed its down-at-heel reputation, has reverted to its earlier name of Cremorne. Turner was a painter under the name of Ted Turner. There are portraits by him (in the Pearce Collection at the National Library of Australia) of two fellow Bread and Cheese Club founders, the poets John Shaw Neilson and Edward Harrington, the latter often described as “the last of the bush balladists”. Turner’s studio was described by the History as “delightfully bohemian surroundings”. The household seems to have included his mother, so perhaps she was a kind of Soul.

The studio was soon too small. As the club attracted new members (there were forty-two in 1940) a change of premises was made to 272 Post Office Place (now Little Bourke Street) in central Melbourne. Regular meetings were on the first Sunday of every month. One can hear the great clock of the adjacent Italianate GPO (now, naturally, converted by Australia Post into a “retail hub”) marking the hour with an arabesque of chimes as the members directed their steps to the meeting through the dismal empty streets of a Melbourne Sunday, where apart from the chimes the only sounds would have been bits of newspaper whirled along in the wind, the clanging of tram bells and the strident evangelising blare of a street-corner Salvation Army band. (Dreary it might have been but at least, unlike in the exciting vibrant contemporary centre of Melbourne, no Bread and Cheese Club member would have been at risk of being threatened at knifepoint for his mobile phone or mown down by an unhinged misanthrope in a Holden Commodore.)

Of the twelve club founders, some names are still recognised today. Moir, Turner and Harrington have already been mentioned. John Shaw Neilson, one of the portrait subjects, was a farm labourer, road-builder and bush poet son of a manual-worker poet. Con Lindsay was a poet. The other founders were J. Alex Allan, J.C. Davies, S. Ford, J. Neild, J. Newbold, N. Rankin and T. Tierney.

One of the newer members was Henry William (Harry) Malloch, who in 1940 wrote the account referred to above, A Brief History of the Bread and Cheese Club, Melbourne (“necessarily” brief as he himself put it, after only two years of the club’s existence). The History was intended as a “Souvenir of the Club’s Australian Art & Literature Exhibition”, held in November 1940 at the “Velasquez Gallery” of Tye’s, a furniture retailer in Bourke Street. Visitors would have threaded their way through the Genoa velvet lounge suites and maple dining settings to enter the gallery in a large basement under the store (which closed in the 1960s). The club had been prolific in its publications and visitors to the exhibition were able to purchase copies of the Bread and Cheese Book, an anthology edited by P.I. O’Leary, and Light of Earth, by naturalist, biographer and poet Victor Kennedy. There were E.E. Pescott’s Life of Joseph Furphy, who as the author of Such is Life in 1903 was already regarded as “the father of the Australian novel”; “Radiant Land” and Other Verses by T.V. Tierney, and various other volumes, some published by the Hawthorn Press (an imprint refounded in 1981) such as The Moon Turned Round by William Allder Morrison. Revolution by J. Alex Allan was published by the club itself. These were all serious works by serious writers, and even if obscurity has overtaken some, they were read, if not on a wide scale, by serious people. As the History confidently stated, “All these publications have had a ready sale, and have done a great deal in extending the reputations of the writers concerned.” In all the club eventually brought out about forty publications.

J.K. Moir with his financial expertise contributed a volume of history: Australia’s First Electric Tram, recounting the “vicissitudes of the Box Hill–Doncaster electric tramway” in Victoria and its entrepreneur Henry Hilton, to whom, wrote Moir, “too much credit cannot be given … for his fight to keep it running”. Conceived at the time of the Land Boom, the tramway failed in 1896 after the banking crash, when, in Moir’s words, “Chaotic financial conditions prevailed and it is no source of wonder that the tramway closed.”

Whether the club acquired or rented its rooms on the first floor of 272 Post Office Place is not stated in the History, but the clubrooms certainly had an air of permanence. “The walls of the Club,” wrote Malloch, “are covered with photographs and sketches of Australia’s leading writers and artists, interspersed with paintings, etchings and black and white drawings.” These included “a series of silhouettes of many of the members” by Victor E. Cobb, a still highly regarded artist, printmaker and painter of whom the Australian Dictionary of Biography records:

Cobb’s reputation rests on a large oeuvre of etchings, built up during his lifetime and depicting with meticulous accuracy the architectural splendour of Melbourne’s colleges and churches, vistas of the city, the tea-tree patterned foreshore and the outer areas of bush and countryside. State galleries hold many examples of his work.

Malloch adds that “here and there throughout the room are many objects of interest presented by the members”. The fate of these, the silhouettes and other works of art since the dissolution of the club is not recorded.

The club was anything but insular. Not only did it have “members in every Australian state” but “as a contribution to Australian Art and Literature”, it allowed “kindred societies desiring to meet in its rooms to do so free of charge”.

Officials of the club rejoiced in a quaint hierarchy of names. J.K. Moir was at the pinnacle as the Knight Grand Cheese. Did this phrase derive from “the big cheese”, itself from the Urdu chiz or “thing” which apparently made its way into English from India in the mid-nineteenth century? E.J. Turner was Worthy Scribe, presumably secretary, and Harry Malloch was Trusty Bagman, presumably treasurer. Members were known as “Fellows”, and “any member inadvertently addressing another as ‘Mr.’ is fined a penny for the insult”. Comments the History, “The Club’s revenue has benefited considerably from lapses of memory in this direction.”

There is no doubt that Moir was, as John Arnold puts it at the online resource eMelbourne, the “mainstay” of the club. He is described in the History as “The Club’s Dynamic Leader”. Malloch waxes eloquent in his praise, with a contemporary reference. “The credit,” he says, “for the pre-eminent position in which the Club finds itself to-day is indisputably due to the Churchillian doggedness of purpose and inspiration of the Club’s leader, Knight Grand Cheese, J.K. Moir.”

The club seems not to have been concerned with politics. Certainly, unlike many Australian literati of the time, and despite having published J. Alex Allan’s Revolution, it was not remotely revolutionary, even though Clem Christesen, founder of Meanjin, and the similarly leftish Alan Marshall, perhaps the club’s most celebrated author, were members by 1940. It may be that most members were apolitical. In the History, there are but two references to the Second World War, in which Germany at the time was sweeping all before it: one was the tribute “Churchillian” to Moir; the other was a reference to Allan resigning “to engage in war work”.

The commitment to “mateship” in the club motto was taken as seriously as that to art and letters. The History states that the club committee

is particularly pleased at the spirit of mateship which has already made itself appreciably felt. Members and writers all over Australia who have never met one another, are in constant friendly and fraternal communication and their correspondence with one another is doing much to establish and consolidate a desirable harmony and concord among those interested in Art and Literature.

One gets the impression that at times like Christmas they let their hair down. “Activities in this direction are very marked at festive seasons, when there is a wide exchange of felicitations.”

There was a keen sense of entrepreneurship. “The Club has spread itself in every direction and has interested itself in many causes,” writes Malloch.

Besides arranging lectures and exhibitions at public libraries and other places, playing a big part in Australian Book Week, gathering literature for hospitals and other institutions, etc., it has conducted two highly successful Junior Competitions, one for Poetry and the other for Black and White Drawings.

These were a great success. “Both these competitions attracted entrants from all States of the Commonwealth and New Zealand and helped considerably to enhance the Club’s reputation.” The one disappointment was a monthly journal, Bohemia, which, while it “reached a wide circle of readers” and secured a “strong footing as a virile Australian Literary production”, failed after sixteen months because of “lack of financial support from advertisers, coupled with the [wartime] paper shortage”. The fate of Bohemia seems not to have deterred the club from supporting bohemians, in the persons of “a newly formed body of young writers known as the Young Bohemians”, for whom the club was “doing its best, by lending its room and its helpful advice, to foster and encourage the talents displayed by these young aspirants for literary and artistic honors [sic]”. There is no mention of their names.

Wild life (in a different sense from “the spirit of conviviality”) was a club interest, with a Natural History Medal donated by the Knight Grand Cheese to be awarded annually for “signal services in connection with Australian flora and fauna”. The first winner was A.H. Chisholm, naturalist, ornithologist, journalist and, in the words of the ADB, “conservationist long before it became fashionable to be one”, who went on to become editor of the ten-volume Australian Encyclopaedia published in 1958.

That was also the year that J.K. Moir died. The spirit of the club seems to have died with him. Moir, writes John Arnold, had devoted “much of his considerable energy to its activities” and without him the club began to run out of steam. It kept going for another thirty years, but as Arnold puts it, “increasingly only as a shadow of its former self”, and closed in 1988. If anything about its demise was published in the newspapers I have been unable to find it.

The Bread and Cheese Club would be looked at askance by enlightened opinion today since, as the History stated unapologetically, “Women are not admitted to membership or to meetings of the Club.” Nevertheless, an exception was made in the election of Mrs Susan Turner (“mother of the first Worthy Scribe”) as Patroness. This was a recognition of “her many acts of kindness while the Club met at her house”. What those acts consisted of is not disclosed, but one imagines her rattling through from the kitchen with endless cups of tea and biscuits. Or perhaps they were thanking her for listening to them all go on into the small hours at 132 Cubitt Street. The only other woman who had anything to do with the club was Miss Beatrice Milne, “a student at the Swinburne Technical College”, who designed the “attractive” poster for the exhibition at Tye’s gallery. 

Now here is a curious recollection, which prompted my interest in the Bread and Cheese Club. An aunt of mine, a jolly soul, was when younger an amateur but gifted singer. She told me once, amid gales of laughter, how she had been recruited to sing at an Edwardian house in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick where what she described as “a lot of funny old ducks in big flowery hats” sat around and composed things. The composition she was asked to sing, and which was recorded—I wish I hadn’t lost the recording—was entitled “Buttercups Are Blowing in the Fields Today”. The little circle of feminine creativity which presented the world with lyrics such as (from memory)

Shining golden goblets in their silken gowns

They shall bloom forever, spreading beauty round …

Stay a little longer, hurry not away

Buttercups are blowing in the fields today.

called itself, my aunt told me, the Bread and Cheese Club. Was it connected with the all-male one in central Melbourne? Did the Knight Grand Cheese and the other members adopt more liberal post-war views—this would have been about 1950—and change the rule against female members? Were the ladies in hats a separate club with coincidentally the same name? I don’t know, but if anyone does I should like to hear.

Christopher Akehurst, who lives in Melbourne, is a frequent contributor.