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opened the shop for business - when the low-level Inkerman Bridge was completed in
September, thus enabling the first train from Bowen down south to steam into Ayr.
A photograph of the shop and the Honeycombe home, probably taken towards the end of that
year, shows Bill, aged 9; Alma, 11, and Len, 6, on the verandah steps; and Rene, 13 and
Esther (who is barely taller than Rene and was then 34), standing to one side in a pocket
garden. Also in the picture is a thin young man wearing a slouch hat and holding a bike. This
was Bill Aitken, a weedy youth, son of Esther's half-sister, Sis. He was Esther's first full-time
employee and lived with the family, probably bedding down at the back of the shop. In later
years he married and managed a small store that the Honeycombes opened on Macmillan
Street.
Another early employee was Dave Tosh, who was taken on at the age of 14 to assist at the
Munro Street store.
Freda King, nee Shann, in 1991 recalled some memories of those days. She wrote; 'I
remember when the first shop was opened - the little corrugated shop where sweets, etc, were
available. I was a small child about 7 years old I
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think and used to come from Klondyke (Road) with my brother Athol in a dogcart to school.
Sometimes, if I had been very good, my mother would give me a threepenny piece carefully tied
in the corner of my handkerchief. I always bought small lollies - they went further! I remember
Alma... I also remember Len. He used to do a round in town selling fruit.'
He would have done this round on horseback. For horses, a capital investment then, were used
by Esther for several years for making deliveries and collecting supplies, with panniers or
baskets slung on either side of the horses' backs. Charles Coutts' Federal Store in Queen Street
was way ahead. He already had a solid-tyre, belt-driven motor delivery van.
Esther's horses would have been stabled in a shed at the back of the shop, where there would
also have been a dusty chicken run, a fenced vegetable plot and a dunny (an outside toilet).
Another major feature of the backyard would have been a whirring windmill over a well or
water bore. Almost every house had its own windmill, and Ayr was known as the Town of
Windmills in those days. Beyond, the clank and whistle of steam trains, their coming and going,
were an ever-present sound.
Across the road, in Ayr State School, which the three youngest Honeycombes attended, Bessie
Carcary, aged 16, was teaching five-year-olds for 12/6 a week. She bought sandwiches from
Esther Honeycombe and got to know her children. Bessie studied at night and at weekends and
in due course qualified as an assistant teacher. When she was 20 she transferred to the school at
Brandon. Two years later she married Frank Smith, whom she met at the Delta Theatre; he
'played in a band in front of the Theatre for an hour before the pictures began.' He would
complain in later years: "There are three kinds of people in this world, men, women and school
teachers, and I went and married one.'
Although three of Esther's children were still at school in 1913, all four of them were employed
by her in the new business before and after school, and at weekends. It was a family business
from the start. Rene, who was 14 in December, worked fulltime.
Rene was never happy working for her mother. It was not to her liking, and according to Alma,
Rene and her mother 'didn't get on very well'. Rene argued a lot, and was 'stuck up' according
to Alma - 'she didn't want to work in a shop'. It was too smalltime and smalltown for Rene; she
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