From Australia’s Jewish past

Hannah (Phillips) Maclurcan – hotelier, celebrity chef, bestselling author, fashion icon, entrepreneur, and society-page queen

Hannah was born on 17 October 1860 at Tambaroora, near Hill End, New South Wales, the fourth child of Jacob Aaron Phillips, a London-born Jewish storekeeper and later hotelier, and his first wife, Susan Moses from Scotland.

The family had moved to Toowoomba, Queensland by 1862, where Jacob became the proprietor of hotels in Toowoomba and the Brisbane area.  Hannah later told her children that her father put her in the kitchen of one of his hotels at an early age, and she gradually worked her way through the hotel from the dining room to the office, ensuring she knew the organisation of the hotel thoroughly.  At age fifteen, she was sent to manage the Osbourne Hotel at Sandgate, Queensland.

On 25 March 1880, Hannah married and had two daughters.  In 1883, Hannah and her family returned to Australia, but unfortunately, her husband died in tragic circumstances during the voyage, caused by a tsunami following the eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia.  Hannah wrote: ‘The ship, Roma, sailed through the debris of the explosion – the sea covered with pumice stone, floating bodies, both human and animal’.  Hannah remarried on 2 July 1887 to a retired master mariner and a hotelier from the UK, and within two years, two further children were born. Together, they managed the Criterion and later the Queen’s hotels at Townsville. In 1898, in Townsville, Hannah published her first book Mrs Maclurcan’s Cookery Book: A Collection of Practical Recipes Specially Suitable for Australia.   She even helped the printer to set the type, which she bought herself, and reprinted it when it sold out in a couple of weeks.  In 1901, in England again, she published The 20th Century Cookery Book: A Thousand Practical Recipes for Everyday Use and presented a copy to Queen Victoria.  This book was designed for the British market with less kangaroo and more venison.   Hannah’s great-grandson, John, compared his grandmother’s love of cooking for a mass audience to that of Nigella Lawson.  Hannah’s cookbooks would never sell as many copies as Nigella’s, but his great-grandmother was at the time a publishing phenomenon.

In 1901, the family moved to Sydney and the couple leased the Wentworth Hotel on Church Hill, near Wynyard Square, which Hannah described as “with 30 rooms and an unpopular name”.   Her husband died in 1903, and Hannah assumed the responsibility of managing a business, a considerable undertaking for a woman at that time.  She did all the cooking for two years with only the help of two Chinese boys in the kitchen. When her chefs at one point refused to work at the hotel, she locked the gates on them and hired new staff.  In 1909, Hannah purchased the hotel’s lease and undertook ambitious plans to expand.  In 1912, she raised capital on the Sydney Stock Exchange by forming The Wentworth Hotel Limited, a limited liability company, and she became its governing director — a position she retained for more than 20 years. It has been said she may have been the first woman to become managing director of an Australian-listed company.  During that time, she bought land on either side of the hotel, remodelled and rebuilt a modern hotel, creating an elegant al fresco dining area where ladies who lunched could be seen in all their fashionable glory, ‘a palatial ballroom’ decorated in the style of the Georgian period, and capable of accommodating a thousand dancers and diners.  The Prince of Wales danced at its official opening in 1920.  She added extra storeys and installed one of the first lifts in Australia (the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story on this technological marvel). To publicise the hotel, in addition to her books, Hannah contributed to a cookery column in the society magazine The Ladies’ Sphere. She encouraged art exhibitions, charity functions, and fashionable weddings to be held at the hotel. The Wentworth ballroom, ‘one of the finest in the Southern hemisphere’, was said to be a favourite haunt of the Prince of Wales when he was in Sydney in 1920.

She continued to manage the hotel until 1932, when she handed over the responsibility to her son, Charles, an electrical engineer who used the flat roof of the hotel for his pioneering experiments in wireless transmission. He became one of the pioneers of wireless in Australia.  He had been a director of the company since 1916 and Hannah’s daughter Evelyn was also a director.

The hotel was renowned for its fine cuisine, especially the cold buffet luncheons served in the Palm Court, ‘Sydney’s Premier Café’.  She was perhaps the first Australian celebrity cook writer (and perhaps also the earliest to be accused of passing off others’ recipes as her own). Mrs Maclurcan’s cookery books showed some evidence of her Queensland origins, with occasional recipes using tropical fruit and seafood. Still, by the 1920s, they reflected the stodgy depths to which Australian middle-class cooking had descended.

She had no shame and courted titled and celebrity visitors, generating publicity through her glossy, in-house magazine known as the Wentworth Magazine, and illustrated with pictures of wedding receptions and other significant events taken by leading society photographers.  The hotel was furnished with some very beautiful antiques, which Hannah promoted, as well as stunning floral arrangements, her cars and collection of Pekinese dogs.  Her magazine fostered such very well-known writers as Dame Mary Gilmore.  She also gave space to poetry, theatre, and book reviews.

By 1928, the Wentworth had its own parking station with space for 400 cars a day and a ‘modern car laundry and filling station’ under the management of G. Underwood Grimes.  The following year, she established a ‘chic and delectable little stall in the lounge ‘selling curios, lingerie, hosiery and ‘toiletry trifles a man may have forgotten to pack’.  The Depression, however, brought a decline in occupational rates and a reduction in tariffs, as well as the demise of the Wentworth Magazine.

In 1931, Hannah married a third time and retired as the hotel manager in 1932.  On the marriage certificate, her husband’s occupation was described as ‘gentleman’, hers as ‘domestic duties’.  Her son, Charles, an electrical engineer (who used the flat roof of the hotel for his pioneering experiments in wireless transmission), was one of the pioneers of wireless in Australia, took over the hotel management, having been a director since 1916.  Her daughter, Evelyn, also served on the board.  Hannah continued as managing director.

As a retreat from the hotel, she acquired Bilgola, the house built originally as a weekender at Bilgola Beach, where she lived in style.  Most years, she travelled to the United States to study developments in hotel management and add to her collection of curios and antiques.  She also gave her time to numerous charities.  She died on 27 September 1936 in St Vincent’s Private Hospital. Her husband, two daughters from her first marriage and the son and daughter of her second marriage survived her.  The Wentworth Hotel continued operation under the control of the Maclurcan family until 1950. Qantas purchased a controlling interest and constructed a new 400-room hotel, which operated until 1982 when it was sold.  In 2022, the hotel was purchased by the ‘Accor’ hotel group and remained in safe Jewish hands for many years, with David Baffsky as Executive Chairman of Accor Asia Pacific from 1993 to 2008, and Michael Issenberg, who then took over the reins as Chair and Chief Operating Officer Asia Pacific.

The AJHS acknowledges the following references in the preparation of this story:

Wikipedia; Australian Dictionary of Biography – Beverley Kingston, State Library of NSW; Australian Food Timeline; Woman of Spice Steve Meacham and Great Grandson John Maclurcan, State Library of NSW; Museum of History NSW; Australian Women’s History Forum

 

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