Another ghost sign

“What are you looking at? Is there something wrong?” asked the lady. I suppose I cut a strange figure, standing in a laneway peering into the mid-distance. I explained I was trying to decipher the lettering above the side doorway to the factory. I could make out COO but was struggling with the other letters. “Oh that was Sidney Cooke Fasteners” she said, blithely. “And before that it was a woodshed. Now it is a dry cleaning factory.” And in the future it will be a massive apartment complex, I thought.

“My parents live just here, have done for the past sixty years and so we know. Yes, it used to be a wood yard.”

I wished she had time to chat, but no doubt her parents were waiting for her and so we said goodbye. When I got home, I asked Vince whether he had heard of Sidney Cooke Fasteners and what it could be. “Of course, every man who ever had a workshop has heard of them, they made nails and screws and bolts.”

 

 

A New Zealand company now claims to be the successor and has an interesting potted history on its website. There is a green cardboard box of nails with the Sidney Cooke Fasteners Pty Ltd brand name in the Museum Victoria; it is part of the Bruhn collection, the contents of a woodturning business which had been owned by three generations of the Bruhn family in Melbourne. The collection of nearly 900 items includes a lathe, cutting tools, hand tools, products, workshop fittings, office equipment, portraits, and an accounts ledger. Perhaps that green cardboard box of nails was made in the factory in East Brunswick.