From their Fitzroy shop, one family continues the dying art of making billiard tables
In the most beautiful Victorian shop on the oldest commercial street outside Melbourne’s CBD, three generations of the Evans family are on the floor.
There’s Gordon, 94, who comes to work a couple of days a week and who still signs the cheques. “He hasn’t relinquished the role,” says his son David, 67, who tells how the enterprise “gets offers all the time to see if we want to sell the building. An agent was in last week.”
A local agent unwilling to be named – because he hasn’t run a tape over the double-fronted, double-storey premises on Gertrude Street with the iron-lace front veranda and vast rear workshop where the billiard tables are made and repaired – concurs it would be a pricey property.
“It’s a valuable shopping strip”. He hazards $4 million as a potentially tempting offer.
But the Evans descendants aren’t for tempting. As David says: “If we move from here that would be the end of the business. Yeah. We’d have a pocket full of money and then what would we do?”
The shop on Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, where the family business has been for decades. Photo: Carmen Zammit
Sometime in the future David’s son Luke, 37, will decide the fate of the Harry Evans and Sons Billiard Table Makers and Repairers, a business that could more accurately be called Harry Evans and Sons and Grandsons and Great Grandsons and Great-Great Grandsons because, in the Australian business that was established in 1895, Luke is the fifth generation.
He comes to the counter sneezing. “Allergic to chalk dust,” he says sheepishly. But he does envisage furthering the enterprise started by a colonial billiards champion, “Harry Snr”.
“I’d like to continue the tradition. But with the industry not looking so great I’d have to make changes and come up with a few new angles.”
As the Evans men discourse in the shop filled with square expanses of green cloth covering the hand-smoothed slate that makes billiard and snooker balls roll true, people pass and look in the windows with obvious interest.
Not many come inside to see the racks of cues, the overhead light fittings and shades, and the stout-legged tables of various sizes that cost upwards of $6500 – most of which are made or refurbished in the dusty backroom workshop that is so antiquely atmospheric period dramas are sometimes filmed in it.
The shop is on one of the oldest retail streets in the city. Photo: Jenny Brown
The high days of the trade were, David says, in the 1960s and ’70s. But today pubs are increasingly deleting tables in preference for more dining areas or poker machines.
Gordon – “Pa” – says, “it was a good little business after the war in the ’50s when the military wanted tables for their army bases. We had 16 employees at one stage.”
Back in the day they could sell 20 in one order. Now they make about 10 a year and mainly for private buyers who put them into dedicated pool rooms or man caves.
“The last one we made went into the basement of a mansion with a wine cellar and cinema”, says David.
In former eras billiard tables were a status symbol. For the wealthy of this millennium they are as well. One of the most expensive tables Harry Evans and Sons ever made was for a California-based Australian who wanted a table made out of Huon pine with granite, opal and emu egg detailing, and a red cloth. The emu eggs were filled with silicon. “It took a lot of doing”, says David. And the cost: $26,000.
The workshop where the billiard tables get made. Photo: Jenny Brown
One of only a few Australian billiard table manufacturers still in operation remains viable, yet could be even more so, David feels, if more families, social and sporting clubs realised just how a game of billiards or snooker can facilitate such rich communications between colleagues, fathers and sons or teammates.
“It’s such a social game”, says David Evans. “If you’ve got a kid in trouble who’s not talking and you put a pool cue in his hands and start playing, you’d be very surprised what information you’ll get.”
There are days when David would rather be sailing. But Gordon sees no reason to stop turning up and doing some french polishing in the back room. “It’s good fun. I come to work to have a bit of banter.”
It’s an heirloom business, confirms young Luke, patting his grandfather on the dusty shoulders of his grey dust coat. “And he’s the heirloom”.
