East is east and west is west

Bruce Carroll and Perth Ice Palais

It started as a woodyard (owned by a firm still in business in Perth); it graduated to a penny arcade with sideshows; it became Perth's first open-air silent picture theatre (Admission: Adults, sixpence: children, threepence, or empty bottles); it became a revue house; it turned into a boxing and wrestling stadium; it switched back to the stage, but dropped a peg or two with low-class vaudeville; it raised its tone and became a better-class vaudeville theatre; it finished its theatrical career (for the time being, at any rate) with a season of a Noel Coward comedy followed by a season of Shakespeare; and it won't be long now before it will be echoing to the sounds of the Skaters' Waltz, the cutting of skates and the bumps and screams of bouncing beginners.
— Elaine Lynch, The Daily News, Perth, 21 November 1949. [2]

The former Tivoli building soon after it was Perth Ice Palais.

I STAND ON THE CORNER of Bulwer and Stirling streets opposite Perth Oval reading the history of the Premier Theatre on the pavement and thinking my, how easy life is in Perth for old theatre and ice rink buffs. Hard to imagine one hundred years ago the East Perth Football Club promoting an open-air picture show fundraiser from this building tiled in club colours. The plaque was installed by Graeme Norton, the son of Cyril who was Club secretary, then manager of the theatre and gardens, and finally their owner in 1945. Norton seized the opportunity to lease it for conversion as an ice skating rink, when operating the theatre became expensive. The Italian films were moved into the gardens next door and the theatre came to house Perth's second ice rink in 1962. Bruce Carroll's Ice Palais was Perth's first ice rink.

Ice sport in the city was not born in a tin shed. Not in some industrial estate as we had come to accept in Australia for decades. Ice sport in Western Australia came to life in 1949 at the city's home of vaudeville, Beaufort Street, Northbridge. The Tivoli building began in 1911 as the Shaftesbury Gardens, a semi-open-air picture theatre with a seating capacity of two thousand. Today, the converted Tivoli is part of the former Myer Megamart near Perth station, the first on the right as drivers enter Beaufort Street from the CBD.

Tom Shafto, the Tivoli's owner-builder, was a Perth City councillor and owner-builder of the Shaftesbury Hotel located in the same block. In 1915, he closed down a sideshow arcade and showed the first silent picture there in the open air. The screen stood where the theatre entrance later stood. By 1922, the site had become a proper picture theatre with canvas seats, with some raised into a dress circle. A few acts could run on a small stage in conjunction with the picture programme.

When Shafto retired to his hotel, his sons Tom, Ron and Dick built a better stage with dressing rooms, stage properties and lighting. The theatre had a roof, but it was unlined. It rained on the opening night of the first revue. The leading lady refused to go on stage because the din of the rain on the tin roof drowned out everything. At one time or another, the Shaftesbury (1912), the Luxor (1925) and the Tivoli (1944) each occupied the site. It was a celebration of Perth's home of vaudeville where comedians, clowns, tumblers, acrobats, magicians and dancing girls performed.

This fleapit theatre continued as the Shaftesbury until 1924. It re-opened as the Luxor in 1925, which was then renamed the Ritz in 1934. From about 1935, when the Shafto boys gave it up, the theatre degenerated into a low-class vaudeville theatre featuring strip-tease and leg shows under the name of the Hollywood Theatre. It was a boxing and wrestling stadium for a short time until leased by Bruce Carroll in 1943. Carroll was the brother of Melbourne theatrical entrepreneur, Garnet Hannell Carroll, a partner of Sir Benjamin Fuller. They established the Carroll-Fuller Theatre Company Pty Ltd in 1946. Fuller and Harry Kleiner from the Ice Palais in Melbourne abandoned land and plans for a rink in Adelaide.

In 1944 Carroll bought the property, changed the name back to the Luxor Theatre, and soon after to the Tivoli Theatre. From then on, things took a turn for the better. The public of Perth saw the pantomime Cinderella, the all-male show The Kangaroos, Noel Coward's record-breaking comedy Present Laughter, and a series of Shakespearean plays. After World War II, Carroll's brother brought many famous companies to Australia, including the Ballet Rambert (1947-48), the Old Vic Theatre Company with Sir Laurence (Lord) Olivier and Vivien Leigh (1948), and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company (1949). The pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk and Hello 1949 were among the last shows at the Tivoli, finishing at the end of January 1949.

Ice Palais Ltd was formed late-1948 with Carroll as its managing director and later chairman of directors. Dogged by industrial strife, remodelling consumed most of the year, but the rink premiere was on the evening of Tuesday, December 13, 1949. It opened to the public the next day. More than twelve hundred people attended the premiere as guests of the management. The ice-blue interior had Arctic landscape drawings on the walls. The band played the Skater's Waltz from the theatre's old stage, Carroll introduced the rink manager, Edson Richard Banks, the former proprietor of the Silver Dollar Cabaret, and then ice skating made its debut.

The first ice pad measured less than half the international hockey size. Its dimensions were first reported as 95ft (28.9m) by 85ft (25m), but it may have been just 70ft (21.3m) x 60ft (18.3m). Four skating instructors from the UK and eastern states gave ice dancing, trick skating and speed skating exhibitions. Perth's first speed skating championships concluded on April 22nd, 1950, with Nola Gault and L Anderson winning the women's and men's titles. The city's first Ice Ballet was staged there on April 25th, 1950, with twenty-two local girls and three professional instructors. Melbourne professional skater, Charles Armstrong, produced it and other shows soon followed.

On May 22nd, 1950, the Bulldogs defeated the Wildcats, 8-7, in the first women's basketball match on ice. On June 6th, two motorcyclists raced on machines fitted with a skate suspended between the front forks in place of a wheel. Each machine was equipped with studs on the rear wheel to bite into the ice. Run over ten laps, George Scott, a well-known Perth motorcyclist, raced Jack French, a noted rider from Melbourne. New York's Cissy Trenholm from the Sonja Henie Show at the Centre Theatre NY trained there for Ice Follies in August 1950 and Mirey Reid, Sydney's foremost instructor, gave private lessons under contract. The English professional instructors, Audrey Laxton and Eric Stanbrook taught there in the 1951 season. Laxton later published the skating book, Someone Like Me (1963).

About forty ice hockey players hustled around to find suitable playing equipment to get them onto the miniature ice. They were a mix of local and overseas players. Roy Stedman, Colin Hardie, Jim Carter and Bob Cody were familiar faces to Perth's first ice hockey fans at mid-week games. Ice hockey made its Perth debut when Western Dodgers played Collegians on Monday evening, July 3rd 1950.

Perth Ice Palais employed two former state ice hockey players from Victoria to coach the Dodgers. Ray Abbott, who played for the Tigers, had won the 1949 VIHA premiership. Bob Cody won in 1947 with the Blackhawks. Both teams were members of the new Western Australian Ice Hockey Association and played 5-men a side. The crowd loved it, and why not? They drowned out the hiss and scurr of skates, the crash of sticks, and the thud of the puck on the walls. The roar that greeted the scoring of each goal drowned even the referee's whistle.

Brian Strack of the Collegians ice hockey team was a top player of the time. He played senior field hockey for Western Australia, not unlike Benny Acton in Melbourne, who later captained Australia in ice hockey at the 1960 Olympics. Strack found his nine years of field hockey experience a great asset and felt the miniature rink was more conducive to teamwork. Opposing defenders could keep a closer watch on attacking forwards on a small playing surface, and so the puck changed hands frequently. Strack, who made his fourth trip with a State field hockey side in 1950, was the only member of the Perth ice hockey clubs to play first-grade field hockey.

A third team joined a few months later. The Perth Penguins club was composed of Dutch migrants, formed by 22-year-old Bob Pals. He said he represented Holland in the amateur championships at Montreaux in Switzerland in 1948 and played many international games against France and Belgium. His younger brother, Pam, was a goalie who had represented Holland in eleven internationals. Luc Markies won seven medals for long-distance skating in Holland, including 100-mile races. Louis Kramer was a leading figure skater and ice dancer on Dutch and English rinks. Rudi Willems played international games for Holland and the Amsterdam Icebergs.

Players purchased gear from the eastern states or improvised when the cost was too great for the individual concerned. Five players a side were the most that could fit on the small rink—a discovery made by trial and error at practice. The nets were against the ends of the rink, instead of six feet in from the boards. There were special rules for goalkeepers and forwards. Bert Craven, a professional skater at the Palais, gave his services as referee and adviser, while Carter, the Dodgers' captain-coach, passed on the benefit of his broad skating experience. The small rink offset to some degree the superior play of the new arrivals from overseas.

The three-team league comprised hardy ice warriors who tore around in shorts, long socks and lacrosse gloves. Goalies made do with baseball gloves and baseball catcher's chest protectors. The goal nets and some sticks were homemade. Teams played for the Ice Palace Cup and Challenge Trophy. The Penguins won the first premiership in 1950 without losing a match.

The West Australian Ice Hockey Association resumed in April 1951 with four teams: Western Dodgers, Collegians, Penguins and the new Magpies that included two American players in its line-up. Its captain was Francis Bergeron of Leominster, Massachusetts, who had played for his State league. All four teams were strengthened numerically, and the local press anticipated faster play "as each team will be able to send in replacements more often than was the case last season". British Ice Hockey Association rules were adopted, with adjustments to rink markings for one-third international size. League matches played May through to September when a new competition for the Challenge Trophy commenced. The finals between the top two teams took place on October 11th.

Despite all this, the Ice Palais closed after just two seasons on Saturday, February 2nd, 1952. The original Ice Palais Prospectus had intended to expand business operations into large-scale freezing and refrigeration like its counterparts in the eastern states. In the end, the company accountants said overhead costs such as power for refrigeration had increased until it was impossible to carry on. A few months later, Bruce Carroll, the founder of Perth Ice Palais, died suddenly on a theatrical tour of New Zealand at the age of 49.

Players reluctantly turned to other sports or faded into oblivion. Stedman speed skated into the Eighties. The building converted again, this time for dancing. In 1955 it became Canterbury Court Ballroom with a multi-story car-park addition in 1969. The building was demolished when the site became Myer Megamart (2001). In 2014, a consortium proposed to build Perth's tallest skyscraper there.

Ice hockey did not return to the city until early 1963. The Canadian manager of the Premier ice rink in Perth asked Larry Deghelli to set up an ice hockey league on the small square floor in the converted picture theatre. A half-a-dozen prospective players responded to an ad, including Canadian Jim Gray and two Scots, Jim Bremner and Norm Taylor. It was a woefully undersized rink with square corners, no boards, and plenty of holes covered with buckets. In no time at all, Deghelli and the players built boards on three sides of the rink, strung up a cray fishing net to protect spectators, and welded up a set of goals. They scrounged, begged, borrowed or crafted their hockey equipment and by 1964, four teams consisting of six players each were competing four-a-time on the tiny ice surface—Black Wings, Pirates, Vikings and Tigers.

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Citations

1. West Australian, 25 October 1949 p 9. Ice Sports Planned for New Perth Rink

2. The Daily News, Perth, 21 November 1949 p 6. Article by Elaine Lynch.

3. West Australian, Perth, 1 May 1951 p17. Perth Ice Hockey Players' Move to Boost Game

4. Goodall Cup program, Sep 1985, Western Australia ice hockey association. Courtesy June and Shaun Muller.