What Even Was A 'Coffee Palace' Anyway?

This was a question I found myself asking when I discovered that the heroine of my novel, Mrs Maydwell, aka Christiana Whitfield, ran just such an establishment in the Australian outback in the early twentieth century.

It turns out that so-called coffee palaces were another name for temperance hotels which came into vogue in England in the 1850s and really caught on in Australia in the late 1870s.

Coffee houses first became popular back in the 1600s when coffee was a new beverage and an alternative to the alcohol sold in taverns.  However, that particular craze had died out by the late 1700s.

The temperance movement itself began in the United States in the early nineteenth century and campaigned against the ill-effects of over-indulgence in alcohol, which was pretty much ubiquitous at the time, partly because water itself wasn’t safe to drink - ale was safer!

In no time the temperance movement was promoting total abstinence from alcohol in the UK as well as the States, with premises for meetings, entertainment, food and accommodation being converted or built to put into practice the doctrine that was being preached.

The first temperance hotel in England opened in Preston, Lancashire in 1833, intended to offer an alternative to the local pub and quite soon every town had at least one.

The same imperative applied in Australia - another nation famed for being fond of a tipple!

At a meeting at the Melbourne Temperance Hall in 1878 the goal was expressed thus:

“[to build a place] as attractive as possible for the working man, [which] should combine every

facility for harmless amusement and intellectual enjoyment, with the advantages of a large

hotel, the only difference being that coffee should be vended instead of intoxicating liquors.”

The first Australian coffee palace was the Collingwood, which opened in 1879 in Fitzroy, Melbourne followed by the Melbourne Coffee Palace in Bourke Street in 1882.  The buildings were grandly ornate with richly ornamented facades and interiors.

Of course, all of this was a far cry from Mrs Maydwell’s Coffee Palace in the rural backwater of Sea Lake, a small town in the Mallee district of north west Victoria.  Her establishment was a single storey wooden structure with a tin roof, fronting onto a dirt road.

The intention and purpose of her business was just the same as the grander versions in the big cities and for a number of years she made a good living providing baths, bedrooms, food and a ‘bar’ - non-alcoholic, of course - for men who wanted to steer clear of the demon drink.

Quite a transformation for a woman who had run pubs and hotels back in England for over ten years - talk about ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’!