East Melbourne, Vale Street 098

The application to the Council to build this block of flats was dated 31 August 1937. The cost of the building was estimated to be £9050. By early February 1938 the building was completed.  
A house and large garden were demolished to make way for the new building.  The house’s last owner was Henry Isaac Cohen, barrister, business man and MP.  The rate books of 1937 are annotated with the information that the house had been sold to BA Tait and GL Tait of 115 Kooyong Road, Caulfield and on-sold to Mackay Investments of 174 Lt Collins Street, Melbourne.
Betty Alison Tait and Gordon Lindsay Tait were the children of John Henry Tait, one of the five Tait brothers who together were concert, film and theatrical entrepreneurs, using the company name J & N Tait. In 1920 this firm merged with J C Williamson while retaining its own identity and interests. On 12 August 1937, not quite three weeks before the application to build was registered, John Tait, along with his brother, Frank Samuel Tait, Thomas Allan McKay, and William Allan McKay registered a company to be known as Mackay Investments, ‘dealers in land, house, flat, land and estate agents’. Thomas Allan McKay was managing director of The Specialty Press, 174 Lt Collins Street. Among the press’s many clients were the Taits for whom it printed theatre programmes.
The architect commissioned to undertake the project was Charles Neville (Nev) Hollinshed.  Hollinshed had married Janet Evelyn Tait, Betty and Gordon Tait’s sister.  Since the marriage he had become a major architect for J C Williamson. 
Mackay Investments retained ownership of the building until 1946 when the Argus reported on 11 April that ‘Treasury approval was given yesterday to the sale by Mackay Investments Pty Ltd of a block of flats called Vale Court, in Vale street, East Melbourne, for £20,000, to a private investor.’
The private investor was Elizabeth Rutherford Morrell, the widow of Sir Stephen Joseph Morrell, a past lord mayor and namesake of the Morrell Bridge in South Yarra.  Interestingly she was the mother-in-law of Cynthia, married to her son, Donald, and daughter of Henry Isaac Cohen. The Morrell family continued to own the building until the 1970s. 
The building has since been strata-ed and the units are now owned individually.