The history of Manly Oval

Manly Warringah District Cricket Club | December 27, 2024

According to the late Mr. F. Trenchard-Smith, a former honorary secretary of the Club and a person to whom the Club owes a great deal for providing much of the information about the Club's very early days and about the Oval in particular, the site upon which the Oval now stands was, in the early 1800's, a dairy farm. The farm, in due course, was purchased by a Mr. Thomas Adrian, the grandfather of one of the Club's best-known players, the late Bruce Adrian, and he converted it into a recreation reserve and on a portion of it built a hostelry called the Ivanhoe Hotel. The recreation reserve he called Ivanhoe Park, and cricket was played on the Park on a concrete wicket covered with matting.

The hotel stood just outside where the present Memorial Gates are situated, on a site occupied until the 1960's by the Manly Croquet Club. Just about where the bowling green is today, Mr. Adrian built a large dancing pavilion with semi-circular ends and a semi-circular domed roof. It was in this pavilion that the once popular Manly Wild Flower Shows were held some time later.

In those days Manly was only a very small village, with a population of only a few hundred people. On public holidays, however, crowds of trippers came to Manly by ferry just as they do today, and Ivanhoe Park was the centre of attraction, there being no surf bathing permitted except before seven in the morning. Being well away from the city and not under too close observation, the holiday crowds at times revelled in their freedom and made a welter of it, despite the efforts of the proprietor who did his level best under the circumstances. Consequently, the park was not looked on too favourably on these holidays by local resi-dents, particularly by those owning land adjacent to the park.

Despite these problems, the park was obviously a valuable public asset and was rightly regarded as such by the local residents. When it became apparent that the hotel proprietor would be forced to sell the property, there was every probability that the park would be cut up into building allotments and sold at public auction. The same thing applied to that portion of the present park behind the bowling greens. It was a rather tempting opportunity for a speculative purchaser, for several streets at that stage ran through the combined area, and the amount of street frontages was thus very great.

In fact, things went so far that the whole area was sur-veyed, a sub-division plan was prepared showing lots on both sides of these streets, and arrangements were well under way to have the whole park sold at auction as building blocks. However, a group of local residents came into the picture, urging resumption by the Manly Municipal Council, which at this stage had not been in existence very long.

There was considerable doubt as to the Council's power to close the streets running through the properties, or whether the necessary powers could be obtained without Parliamentary authority, even though a plebiscite of ratepayers and residents was taken on the subject.

The matter was ultimately solved by the action of the then Mayor of Manty, the late Mr. C. Hayes who was sometimes called, not without justification, "the father of Manly". Acting entirely on his own initiative and on his own responsibility (without bringing the matter before the Council or his fellow aldermen, lest making the affair public might start conflicting elements in the community) Mr. Hayes had a confidential interview with the then Premier of New South Wales, Sir Alexander Stuart. He urged the land's resumption by the Government. This, he thought, would eliminate automatically the difficulty of closing the streets, and would provide a magnificent asset not only for the people of Manly, but for the people of New South Wales and Australia as a whole, for even in those days tourists came from everywhere to visit Manly.

Sir Alexander Stuart was found to be in enthusiastic support of the proposition, for he well knew the facts. The vendors and their real estate agents were consulted as to the price, without the name or purposes of the proposed purchaser being disclosed.

So it came about that the Government of New South Wales acquired the properties and appointed the Manly Municipal Council as trustees for the public. At the next meeting of his Council, Mr. Hayes was able to announce the good news as an accomplished fact, much to the chagrin of the owners of the rear portion of the property who no doubt would have stuck out for a higher price if they had known just what was in the wind. The owners of the rights over the main portion of the park, however, were fully satisfied, and the hotel proprietor transferred his hostelry to a building on the Corso which, much enlarged and modernised, is still called the Ivanhoe Hotel.

One shudders to think what Manly would be today had the park been lost. Certainly it would not be the pleasant district we all tend to take somewhat for granted today!