Manly Baths

We have recently received a disc of photos from the family of the late Ken C Foster, including this fine photograph of the old Manly Baths in Manly Cove. The photo, taken in the late 1920s, shows contestants perched ready for the start of a race. It’s standing room only, with every vantage point taken, and even a few spectators in the water. The race starter is issuing last minute instructions through his megaphone, and all Manly is agog.
Ken ‘Ludy’ Foster, who died in 1998 aged 90, was a talented surf swimmer and life saver, who was President of the Manly Surf Club from 1955-67, and a life member of the club. He was one of the first, along with Snowy McAlister to surf Fairy Bower on a surfboard. He served in the 2nd AIF in WWII.
Manly Baths opened in October 1926, and many world champions swam there, including Manly’s own Andrew ‘Boy’ Charlton. They closed in April 1976, following severe storm damage.

Romance of the Breakers

“The first morning she was here I took her along Addison-road, and reaching its extremity, turned to the left and reached the spot where the steps lead down to the beach. The spectacle quite enraptured her.” This line comes from a story published in the Sydney Mail on 7th March 1906, written by one Samuel A Mills. The story, entitled The Romance of the Breakers, concerns a girl from the bush who visits Manly. On her first time bathing in the surf, she is saved from drowning by a handsome rescuer, and falls in love with him. Not much is known about Samuel A Mills. The National Library of Australia has two booklets written by him: Fowler’s Pottery, and The Wine Story of Australia, both circa 1908. A nephew, Lt Com Owen Griffiths, was a well-known Manly figure in the years after WWII.
Mills’ rhapsodic prose-style owes something to the Celtic Twilight movement, and was out-of-date even then, but his description of Manly Beach paints a vivid picture. Read the full story here:
The%20Romance%20of%20the%20Breakers.docx

Manly Ferry History

It's good to see that Anthony Prescott's classic work, The Manly Ferry: A history of the service and its operators, 1854-1974 is now available online, through the University of Sydney Library's Sydney eScholarship Repository. Mr Precott's work, originally presented as an MA thesis, is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and development of the Manly ferry service. It has long been available only under reference conditions in Manly Library and one or two other places, so to have it now freely available to researchers everywhere is a great help. The work is presented as 5 Adobe PDF files, some of which are between 3-8 MB in size, so not every pc will cope with the size of the files. The link is http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/1557