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What did Wellingtonians do before there were coffee houses? Tea rooms and milk bars, 1920–1950
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The central city
Wellington city centre consists of five main streets: Lambton Quay, Willis Street, Manners Street, Cuba Street and Courtenay Place, and the blocks formed by intersecting streets. The route from the site of the railway station at the north of Lambton Quay to the end of Courtenay Place is easily walked in twenty minutes. Trams or buses, with frequent stops, might take almost as long. If we walk or ride this route at intervals between 1920 to 1950, where can we drop in for a drink or a snack?
Bleak streets?
It is nearly 1950 before there is much sign of the café culture that flourishes along the same route in 2000. Pick up a 1937 Visitors' Guide. Where are the advertisements for places to eat? Not one, apart from a mention of the cafeteria in the new Wellington Railway Station.
The indexes of building permits issued by the Wellington City Corporation (WCC) from 1918 to 1935 confirm this impression. Only six building permits to establish new restaurants in the streets of Lambton Quay, Manners Street, Willis Street, Cuba Street, and Courtenay Place were issued during this period, though additions and alterations to established eateries and public bars did occur.
Escape to the suburbs
How could today's sparkling capital city, with its arts festivals and its café tables spilling onto the pavement, have been so dreary? During the period 1926–1945, Wellington people moved to the outer suburban ring at three times the rate of any other of the four main cities. Come five o'clock, the daytime central city population headed away by tram, bus and train, except for many men who chose to spend an hour with their friends in a pub first, especially on Fridays.
Greek proprietors
This emptiness created a marketing niche, and it was hard-working immigrants, in this case the Greeks, who spotted it. Greek chain migration to New Zealand began after the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, and resumed in earnest between the two world wars. By 1966 the Greeks were the most highly concentrated ethnic group in the Wellington-Hutt urban area. They settled near the city centre, especially in Mt Victoria. Comparatively little capital was required to start a restaurant business, and little knowledge of English was required. The whole family could help during the long working hours in grill rooms and milkbar/restaurants. Stanley Nicholas Garland, born Stratis Nicolas Galanis, was one Greek immigrant who set up several successful restaurants offering traditional English fare in Wellington during the 1930s.
Genteel aspirations
Leisured wives with discretionary spending money shopped in the city, and the big stores—Kirkcaldie and Stains, D.I.C. and James Smiths— were quick to see that tea rooms were essential amenities. The typical image was of high ceilings, cane furniture, palm trees, silverware, white tablecloths, and waitresses in crisp black and white uniforms. For the less affluent, an outing to such tea rooms might be a birthday treat.
Cheap, and maybe clean
These days, Courtenay Place is alive with night clubs, gourmet cafés and theatres. In 1920 it was the shopping area closest to the inner city boarding houses and private hotels of Te Aro and Mt Victoria. People here needed low-cost meals as well as refreshments. Those frequenting the area included recent arrivals from country districts looking for work, transients, and seamen.
An advertisement from Wellington's Evening Post of 3 March 1920 shows the wide range of snacks and meals that a Courtenay Place tea rooms might sell.
Under New Management. Wanted Known - We have opened the most up-to-date Luncheon and Tea Rooms in Courtenay-place. Early Breakfast 1s 3d, Morning Tea 9d, Hot Lunches 1s 3d, Afternoon Tea 9d, Hot Tea 1s 3d, Late Teas 9d, and Dainty Specialty Suppers 1s 6d. Cleanest and Cheapest Meals in the Dominion. The Club Tea Rooms, 125, Courtenay-place.
The Club Tea Rooms are advertised as 'clean' and the suppers as 'dainty'. Wellington women were apt to express doubts about the 'cleanliness' of refreshment places. The reasons for this condemnation were more subtle than a demand for strict hygiene. 'Dainty' was then the most favoured adjective for describing sandwiches and cakes. In the days before electric bread cutters, dainty sandwiches were something of an achievement. At home the trick was not to cut 'doorsteps'.
Different names for eating establishments
The variety of food and drink served did not differ as much as the following names, all used to describe Wellington eating establishments between 1920 and 1950, might suggest:
cabaret
café
cafeteria
coffee palace
confectioner
lounge
marble bar
milk bar
pastry-cook
pie shop
refreshment rooms
restaurant
soda fountain
tea rooms
You could have a meal in a pie shop or a pastry-cook's. Confectioners were also milk bars in later years. Soda fountains took their name from the apparatus for making ice cream sodas and sundaes. Tea rooms merged with cabarets, which were places to eat and drink and to dance, during the day as well as the evenings.
Apart from the period during the Second World War, when it was stopped because of the blackout, the rather festive Friday night shopping for a family might include a meal at the Rose Milk Bar or the California Coffee Shop. This function has been taken over by fast food establishments such as McDonald's and KFC. Nowadays cafés have extensive menus of kinds of coffee, not to mention food. Alcohol is often available, and the tea-room/confectioner combination has been replaced by the café/bar.
Milk bars
Milk bars appeared one by one in Wellington streets in the 1930s. Unlike the tea rooms, they had not come from England with immigrants. They flourished in the United States during the prohibition years of the 1930s. The stationing of American troops in Wellington during the Second World War led to an increase in the numbers of milk bars. The appetite of the Marines for milk was intensified by the lack of drinkable coffee and their dislike of tea. From 1920–1950, 'coffee', to most Wellingtonians, meant 'coffee essence', liquid coffee and chicory served in hot milk.
The changing social function of cafés
The milk bars had one function which was later taken over by coffee bars: they were places for young people to meet. Young women would also wait there while their partners were at the pub, a male preserve. And they became, notoriously, an after-school gathering place for secondary school students. It was European immigrants who were most prominent in establishing the first coffee shops, encouraged by the resident population of Jewish refugees: professionals, artists and musicians who had already during the war years helped shape Wellington's distinctive cultural scene.