"The Gut Factory"

William (Wilhelm) Klages and his family arrived in Ingleburn as immigrants from Switzerland in 1928. Ingleburn was a small village at the time with a few shops, poultry farms and dirt roads. William established a factory with a compatriot, Adolph Bolliger, which used sheep intestines for the manufacture of medical sutures. This was known as the Olympic Gut Manufacturing Company and was situated on the corner of Kings and Fields Roads, Ingleburn.


William (Wilhelm) Klages (Truth, 27.11.1932)

Two years on, the partnership between Bolliger and Klages was dissolved and a new one formed between William and Paul Witzig. The business must have proved successful as permission was obtained to build a new factory and offices in Kings Road. In 1939 the company was renamed the Australian Suture Company - trading as ASCO. Johnson and Johnson later took over the company.


ASCO - the "gut factory" (Campbelltown Library Local Studies collection)

Margaret Firth of Ingleburn remembers her time working at the factory -
"Oh well, he used to make the surgical gut it was, he used to get the special intestine things from the abbatoirs, and they used to prepare them, sterilise them and all that sort of business, cut them up, and then we girls used to have to roll them, when it was dry, roll them and smooth them down, and they'd get it fine enough to sew eyes with, you know, and then the coarser stuff".
William's son Eric learned the trade after attending the local school, Granville Technical College, and then studying chemistry at Sydney Tech. He worked for the family business before building his own factory, designing machines for treating, stretching, polishing and manufacturing what was commonly known then as "catgut" - nothing to do with cats! He also branched out into the manufacture of tennis racquet strings and violin strings.


A 1946 advertisement for Spiroflex tennis gut strings.

Eric's business was known as "Spiroflex, and was on the corner of Carlisle and Cambridge Streets, Ingleburn. At one stage the factory was turning out 3 million feet of gut a year for surgical sutures alone, with more than 90% of the product for export.
Eric died in 1982, and the factory ultimately closed in 1986.

Eric Klages checking the quality of the material under manufacture.
(Macarthur Leader, 5.12.1972)

Written by Claire Lynch
Sources:
Local Studies Pamphlet files
Grist Mills Vol.21 No.1
Trove
Margaret Firth oral history - Local Studies collection
"From many lands we come" by Hugo Bonomini et al.

A Bird's Eye View

 

Local identity Lennie Hayes recently donated this wonderful aerial photograph of Campbelltown taken about 1959. The scene is dominated by Crompton Parkinson's factory in the foreground built in the 1940s. It was the first major company to build in Campbelltown. Many of the buildings have sadly been demolished. Some streets such as Milgate Lane (first street to the left of Crompton Parkinson) and Railway Street (extreme left) have lost all their buildings. How many buildings do you recognize?

Thanks for your donation Lennie and saving the photo from the scrapheap!

Written by Andrew Allen

"Enough and to spare" - Mrs McMullen of Moreton Park.

As mentioned in the earlier post "The Old Swagman of Wedderburn", swagmen, or 'swaggies' were not an unusual sight in rural areas of Australia during the 1800s and the early 1900s. Itinerant workers who carried their whole lives in their swags, they travelled between pastoral stations throughout the countryside looking for work, a meal, and somewhere to sleep for the night.

Two swagmen resting beneath a tree, Australia,
c1887. J.W.Lindt, NLA

One person who was known to look after swaggies was Mrs McMullen of Moreton Park. Ellen Rosetta McMullen was known to be a most generous and kind hearted soul. She came into possession of Moreton Park in 1858, and for the next fifty years would provide wayfarers with food and shelter. Her generosity was known thoughout the state.
Her family history is by turns complicated and fascinating. Born in 1828, Ellen Rosetta Hughes was the daughter of John Terry Hughes and Esther Hughes, and the granddaughter of Samuel Terry, a convict transported for theft who had arrived in the colony in 1801. By 1807 a freed Samuel Terry was well on his way to making a great fortune. He arranged for John Terry Hughes, his nephew, to come to the colony to join him in his business endeavours. John married Samuel Terry's step daughter Esther.
Ellen was brought up in one of the family properties "Albion House" in Surrey Hills. She married a cousin, Samuel Hughes in 1847 and they had four children. Through her various inheritances, which included the ownership of Moreton Park, Mrs Hughes became a very wealthy woman. She and her husband built the house at Moreton Park which still stands today.
The kitchen was described as "...a beautiful old kitchen and beside it, it had the storerooms, and the places where all the hams and bacon hung and all that, and the great big spit and the old ovens, 'cause they'd be cooking an immense lot at night time, there'd be thirty or forty swagmen there some nights. But over the top of this big fireplace she had written into the stone "Enough and to spare". It's still there. " The swaggies "....were supposed to come to this enormous table, and they could have their night meal and their breakfast, and then go down the sheds, and then they were to move on, but some of them were there for weeks!"

Moreton Park

Ellen's husband Samuel died in 1868, and her second marriage in 1874 was to Franklin McMullen with whom she had one child. Sadly, Ellen would outlive all her children, although she did have a number of grandchildren.
Moreton Park was run with tenant farmers, and other examples of Ellen's generosity included Christmas gifts and a Christmas party every year for all the children of the tenants. In 1896, during serious drought conditions, Ellen, now Mrs McMullen, suspended rent from her tenants for six months owing to the losses they had sustained.
Ellen Rosetta McMullen died in 1914, and was buried in St John's Cemetery, Camden. Such was her reputation that even years after she was gone swaggies would continue to show up at Moreton Park hoping for some of her famous hospitality.


Written by Claire Lynch
Sources:
Oral History with Mrs Cora Wrightson, Campbelltown City Library
Mountbatten Group at Moreton Park Conservation Management PLan 2013
Trove