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Alfred Benjamin Brown (known as Ben) was born on 4 September 1923 at Nurse Loveland’s hospital at 19 Perth Street in Cottesloe. Ben had three older siblings: a sister Pat, and two brothers Fred and Lindsay. Ben’s father was Alfred Billsom Brown, a boot maker. Ben described him as “a big bloke, six foot two and weighed about seventeen stone.” His mother was Ethel Theresa Brown (nee Curwood). Ben described his mother as lovely. She was the daughter of Ben Curwood, who was a mining engineer working on the Sons of Westralia Goldmine at Morgans. His parents moved down to Perth from the Morgan’s Goldfields in 1911. They built the family home at 2 Stuart Street, Mosman Park in 1913. The block of land and the house cost £350. The builder was Ted Fieldgate from Mosman Park. Ben spent the next 65 years living in Mosman Park.
Ben lived at 2 Stuart Street until 1934. Alfred by then had purchased a block of land and the house behind at 7 Glyde Street (it had originally belonged to Webb and Co. photographers). This house was larger. The Stuart Street house was let out from 1934 to 1946. When Ben returned from the war and married his wife Dorothy (née Eboral) in 1946, they moved into 2 Stuart Street on a Peppercorn rental and lived there for forty years. Ben eventually inherited the house from his mother and bought out his other sibling’s shares. The house finally became his.
Ben said he was ‘a bit of a ratbag as a kid’. Ben remembers when he was about ten or twelve years of age he and his friends would run up and down the streets at night and throw bricks onto the roofs of buildings. They would worry the shopkeepers, especially Mrs Lancaster, whose haberdashery shop was on the opposite side of the street. They would regularly open and slam the shop door. Ben recalls they also had hill trolleys. and would go up and down Glyde Street annoying everyone. There was a Salvation Army Citadel a couple of vacant blocks down from Ben’s Glyde Street house. The service would start about eight o’clock in the morning and they would start to throw bricks onto the roof. Ben said, ‘a bloke would come out and go crook and say we should be in there listening to things.” The family never went to church and Ben said he has never believed in religion.
Ben attended Cottesloe Primary School from the age of five. He remembers some of his teachers. He said Mrs Green was a lovely lady and when he was in the plumbing business, she would ring up and say, “Send Benny up to do some plumbing for me.” She lived in Mann Street in Cottesloe. Ben remembers Bill Love was a good bloke too. Mr Cole was the headmaster; he was in charge of the pre-primary school. Ben recalls he was also a nice bloke and he lived in the house adjacent to the pre-primary school. Ben remembered doing some plumbing work for Mr Cole. During his school years Ben received the cane several times as punishment for fighting as well as having to frequently fill the woodshed. Ben recalls he and Harold (Wright) …” never saw eye to eye. We used to have a fight every night or every second night … I would give him a belting and the next night he would give me a belting it went on and on and on… they used to deliver wood for the wood fires in the school. Every time there was a load of wood Harold Wright and Ben Brown used to have to chuck it into the woodshed.” Ben later attended Fremantle Boys School where he also received the cane on several occasions but recalls that it was a good school, and he gained his junior certificate.
From a young age Ben was involved in entrepreneurial activities. As a boy he used to work for Jeffreys the Greengrocers, making deliveries on his pushbike. He used to save his pay and when he was around fourteen or fifteen, he purchased a Ford T truck. His brothers had bought a car wrecking business by this time. Lindsay found a buyer for the truck and Ben sold the Ford T for a profit. Ben was to buy and sell many more.
When he finished school a friend of Lindsay’s worked as a plumber for Ernie Sherwood and helped Ben obtain an apprenticeship there. Ben described Ernie as a good bloke who eventually took a liking to Ben. When he was sixteen years old Ernie would tell him to take the truck home at weekends to clean. Ben would use it for personal use driving his friends and girls around town. As an apprentice, Ben would dig drains and put in water pipes. Ben’s apprenticeship was interrupted by war service. He was away for four years including twelve months stationed in Borneo. He said, “Everybody treated you different when you came back … they’d give you a bit of respect which you deserved.” Ben returned to Sherwoods to finish his apprenticeship and later left because he said, “I couldn’t be bothered with his son.” Ben didn’t like the way Sherwood’s son Gus treated the apprentices including himself.
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Ben went to work for Bill Vivian, whose premises were on the corner of Jarrad Street and Railway Street, Cottesloe. Ben was employed there for three years until he eventually decided to go out on his own. He recalls Bill came to him and said “Any way I can help you, let me know. I don’t mind if you pinch my customers, I’ll get other ones.”Ben said, “That’s the sort of bloke he was.”
Ben also went into the rag and bone trade. He said it was a very lucrative business collecting rags, bags, bottles and bones. He collected bottles from around Subiaco and from around the lanes of Mosman Park and Cottesloe calling out ‘Bottle-O’. Ben said, “There were mostly beer bottles around Mosman Park …there were some good boozers in Mosman Park in those days.” Ben worked with Lindsay at the Fremantle Bag Factory collecting rags to clean and recycle and he would collect the bones from the butchers shop. The bones would be made into fertilizer. All his finds would be taken back to 2 Stuart Street to be sorted.
At 2 Stuart Street the backyard was full of bones, trucks, rags and bottles. Ben had also built a Nissan Hut next to his shed where he ran his plumbing business. It had no doors or windows and was never quite finished. Dot his wife described the yard as “Rubbish!” Ben said, “…there was stuff all over the place … ‘All sorts, bits and pieces. No junk – all good stuff’.” There was no garden. Ben said ‘A bit out the front, that’s about all’. There was a shade house for Dot so she couldn’t see the rest of the yard!
Ben ever the entrepreneur also built and rented out trailers and later Cargill Caravanettes. After several years, when the canvas of the caravanettes deteriorated, Ben started to build his own with a steel roof. He made and sold more than eighteen of these from the 1960’s to 1980’s. Ben used to get the body made and Tommy Holt, a friend of Ben’s brothers, used to make up the chassis. Ben purchased the springs and axles and put them altogether. One day, Lindsay suggested he buy a welding plant even though Ben had had no previous experience in welding. Ben said, “So, I got myself a welding plant and taught myself to weld… none of them ever fell to bits!” Ben also used to build Ute bodies. He would cut the backs off cars and build Utes. He also purchased two Thames trucks; one was smashed in the back and one in the front. He cut them both in half and joined them together. Ben also used to buy trucks and vans for the business. He said he ‘always had a couple on the go’. They were profitable to sell on.
Ben also went into partnership with Johnnie Langer in a car-wrecking business. Johnnie Langer had the service station on the corner of Willis Street and Stirling Highway. Together they built a shed out the back of the service station and started wrecking cars. This was also in addition to the plumbing business. They would get rid of the car bodies and send them off to scrap metal. Ben remembers one friend of theirs, Billy Turnbull, had a Chev 4 car which had recently had two new tyres fitted. Billy had brought the car to the service station to put petrol in. but after he had filled the car with petrol it wouldn’t start. Ben offered Bill a pound for it in jest but was surprised when Bill accepted. Ben said it turned out to be the worst car they ever bought! In the end they towed the car out to the Sea View Kindergarten in Cottesloe because the kindergarten wanted a car for the children to play in. However, the Kindergarten required modifications to be made for it to be suitable for the children including welding and repainting. Ben said, “It was there for years but it cost us money.”
When Ben retired his son Russell Brown took over the family plumbing business. Ben moved to East Fremantle in his retirement years and sadly passed away on 23rd June 2011.
Mosman Park History 