East Melbourne, Berry Street 042, 44, 46, 48

This terrace of four houses was built in two stages. The first three houses, Nos 42, 44 and 46 were built in 1886 by William Gates & Son, 38 Bank Street west, South Melbourne. The last house, No 48, was built in 1888 by William Boyne, Eltham Street, Flemington. All were designed by the well-known architect, William Pitt, for Charles George Allee. Charles Allee was a man of private means and owned many properties around Melbourne. He is best remembered as a good cricketer playing in many interstate games. He was a founder of the East Melbourne Cricket Club and a keen supporter of it throughout his life. His wife, Amy Marie, was the daughter of Henry Augustus Tulk, the long serving librarian at the State Library of Victoria.

The four houses, although similar in decorative detail are two pairs of different widths. Nos 42 and 44 have frontages of 19 feet, while Nos 46 and 48 have frontages of 25 feet.

The houses all had individual names, rather than a single name for the whole terrace: No 48 was Casa de Santiago; No 46 Casa de Carlos; No 44 unknown and No 42 Lesbia House. Casa de Carlos may be a nod to Charles Allee’s own name.

The Allee family lived at No 46 while the remaining houses were tenanted. Charles Allee died in 1896, aged 49. Amy died in 1921. Dolores Tulk Stampe, Amy’s niece, kept No 46, while the other three were sold to separate buyers. No 48 went to warehouseman, John Henry Broughton, who lived there with his sister, Bertha; and Nos 42 and 44 went to three sisters: Maud, Pearl and Aimee Reid.

Many of the tenants occupied the houses over a number of years. In particular the McLean family were the first occupants of No 44 and remained there until the 1930s. The first generation consisted of Thomas McLean and his wife Mary, who died in 1896 and 1901 respectively. Their children remained there until their deaths, Robert in 1931 and Mary Jane in 1933. Robert was an ironmonger and is easily confused with the William McLean family, who lived at Torloisk on the corner of Vale Street and Wellington Parade. William was an ironmonger and founder of the nation-wide hardware firm of McLean and Rigg, but no connection between the two families has been found.

Rhoda Marie Henderson, later Rhoda Marie Sevior, and long-time tenant of No 48 eventually bought it from John Broughton in the late 1950s. She gave her occupation as manageress in the electoral rolls and was possibly running it as a boarding-house. She lived there from 1931 to 1977.

The Reid sisters, who became the owners of Nos 42 and 44, lived in the former while renting out the other. By 1937 they had converted No 44 to two flats, and by 1939 No 42 was also two flats, with the Reid sisters, by then only Pearl and Aimee, living in the upstairs flat.

The November 1939 edition of The Australian Home Beautiful used the ground floor flat at No 42 as an example of how to convert a terrace house into flats simply and without spending a lot of money. In the article no clue was given as to the address of the house other than that it was in East Melbourne. However, the article did include a photo of the façade which featured a cartouche bearing the house’s name. The name seemed to be illegible but some guesswork suggested the possibility of Lesbia House. This was confirmed in Trove when several newspapers reported the death in 1889 of the then occupant of the house, William Hughes, solicitor. This was the one and only occasion that the house’s name appeared. The difficulty in reading the name in the photo could be that the ‘SB’ part of the name had been deliberately disfigured. Lesbia was deemed unsuitable. The names of all four houses have now been removed or replaced.

The Reid sisters sold Nos 42 and 44 in the late 1950s to Ronald Harcourt Sullivan. Winston Burchett, East Melbourne historian, refers to these two houses as Harcourt House at this time. Sullivan owned the houses into the 1970s.

The houses are unusual for the stability of their owners and occupiers, many lasting decades.