Murray's biscuit factory, Coromandel Valley

When the India put into Port Adelaide on 23 February 1840, five months out from Greenock near Glasgow, Alexander Murray was in his late thirties and his youngest son was a month old. The voyage had not been easy: storms had carried away masts and rigging and cost the ship two of her crew. With Murray were his wife Jane, his sister Elizabeth, his four-year-old son Alexander, and an infant of one month.

Murray's first South Australian property was eighty acres at Morphett Vale, purchased sight unseen before leaving Britain. He farmed it through the worst years of the colony's financial troubles, and when the economic collapse of the early 1840s forced him to sell, he bought ten acres in Coromandel Valley instead, taking the land from a minister named Samuel Gill. Gill's son — then a young man — would go on to become the colonial painter S.T. Gill, whose work now hangs in galleries across Australia. Murray named the new property Craiglee, perhaps for his wife Jane's maiden name of Craig.

He was a man of practical invention. By 1844 he had developed a mechanism he believed could supersede the use of steam in industrial processes, and he returned to Scotland to patent it and to seek the financial backing of a Glasgow draper named Peter Cumming. He also took with him, for exhibition in Glasgow and London, a collection of paintings of South Australian life and scenery — the Glasgow Argus of November 1845 called them deeply interesting. Murray arrived back in South Australia in 1846 with Cumming and his family.

He planted Craiglee with mulberries, apples, pears, and plums. Jam-making came first, then biscuits — tentatively at first, with a horse-wheel driving the cutting and mixing machinery, then with gathering seriousness as demand grew. By the mid-1850s he had built the early stages of a factory on land adjacent to Craiglee, on a site Cumming had purchased and later sold to him. The building was cut into the hill so that production could move downward by gravity: flour tipped into the top-floor hopper fell through to mixers, rollers, cutters, and ovens, with hands needed only to tend each stage rather than to shift materials between them.

Murray's biscuits were shown at the Grand Exhibition in London in 1861. The Crown Prince of Prussia tasted them and pronounced them excellent.

There is no commodity of colonial manufacture more steadily and surely pushing its way into popular favour than Murray's Coromandel biscuits.

Adelaide Observer, 1 April 1865

By April 1867 the factory had risen to three storeys and the horse-wheel had long been replaced with a ten-horsepower steam engine. Governor Sir Dominick Daly accepted an invitation to visit that month, arriving with members of the ministry and a group that included D. Fowler of the distribution firm D. & J. Fowler Limited. The previous year had seen 164,820 pounds of biscuits leave Craiglee, valued at nearly £5,000. The works consumed over ten thousand pounds of butter annually, all from colonial producers. The Honourable W. Milne observed that Murray had absolutely excluded the foreign article while keeping his prices moderate and his profits fair. Murray replied with his characteristic directness:

I have never applied to the Government for a bonus. I want a fair field and an open market.

South Australian Register, 27 April 1867

Alongside the biscuits, jam production had grown into the factory's equal in scale. Murray pioneered steam-heated copper boilers for jam-making in Australia, years before any competitor matched the method. By the mid-1870s the factory was expected to process around two hundred tons of jam a year. In 1876 Murray travelled to Philadelphia for the Centennial Exhibition, returning with new machinery and boilers that brought the workforce to fifty or more.

Alexander Murray died in 1880 at the age of seventy-seven, found one morning in his garden at Craiglee. He had served in the House of Assembly for the district of Sturt, and the free-trade conviction he expressed at the factory gate was one he had carried into parliament. His widow Jane followed him a few months later. His son Alexander, who had married Elizabeth Cumming — a daughter of the Glasgow draper who had bankrolled the enterprise — continued the factory and extended it further. The following year, Craiglee biscuits and jams occupied a position in the centre row of the main building at the International Exhibition, among the other South Australian manufacturers.

A visitor in 1883 counted sixty-two workers — roughly a third of them women — processing 340 tons of jams and jellies from fruit grown in the surrounding hills, with the biscuit machinery running alongside at up to three-quarters of a ton per day. The range ran to around sixty varieties: Captains, Adelaide, wine, cream, Abernethy, nonpareil, rusks, and cracknels among them. The factory also made unleavened bread each year for Jewish congregations in South Australia and Western Australia, a commission it filled without interruption from the early years until the end.

Murray had attended to the welfare of those who worked for him as well as to the quality of what they produced. On the Craiglee land there was a recreation area with playing fields and an artificially formed pool in the river, large enough for swimming and boating; trout still ran in the Sturt in those years, and workers could fish in their off-duty hours. Cottages on the estate provided housing for the factory hands.

The younger Alexander served on the Mitcham District Council from 1881, becoming its chairman in 1889. In December 1898 he was coming home from a council meeting, leading his horse along the Belair Road near Mitcham — the animal had served him for twenty years but would not grow accustomed to bicycles — when a cyclist came around a bend:

His horse, which was being led, shied at a passing cyclist, with the result that Mr. Murray was dragged violently to the ground. He was picked up in a semiconscious condition, and was able to get into the trap of a fellow councillor who was passing. Mr. Hewitt drove him to the top of the Craiglee Hill, and from there Mr. Murray walked home. He became unconscious after this.

Express and Telegraph (Adelaide), 16 December 1898

He never regained consciousness and died at half-past two on Thursday morning. His three sons — Albany, Ronald, and Gordon — ran the factory for the next five years. In early March 1903 the executor of Alexander Murray's estate advertised for tenders on the factory's assets: machinery and plant — including twenty-five sets of biscuit cutters — valued at £320, stock on hand at £131, and rolling stock at £91. Some of the machinery found its way to Western Australia; Albany took a position managing a biscuit factory in New Zealand.

Craiglee House, the stone homestead Murray had built in 1844, remained in the family long after the factory closed. Alexander Jr.'s daughter Nellie had married Lachlan McTaggart of Wooltana Station in the far north, and though the couple spent years there they were drawn back to Craiglee; by 1915 they were in semi-retirement at the house. Lachlan died in 1936 and Nellie lived on at Craiglee until her death in 1964, ending a hundred and twenty years of Murray family occupation. The estate then passed to Harvey White and his wife, who subdivided the grounds and sold the factory building separately. John Daliwitz bought it in 1971 and spent some thirty thousand dollars converting it to a private residence. The foreman's two-storey sandstone house beside it — set into the hillside above the Sturt River, its street face built of neatly finished masonry — was listed as a State Heritage Place.

Sources

• Glynis Conlon, A Brief History of the Murray Family and their Coromandel Valley Jam and Biscuit Factory (2012) — family background, voyage on the India, Morphett Vale settlement, Craiglee, Peter Cumming, Philadelphia Exhibition
• The Advertiser (Adelaide), 22 July 1881 — "The South Australian Court. The Main Building" — Murray's Craiglee biscuits and jams in the centre row Trove
• Adelaide Observer (Adelaide), 1 April 1865 — description of the factory operations, products, and production figures Trove
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 27 April 1867 — account of the Governor's visit to Murray's biscuit manufactory Trove
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 22 June 1868 — machine biscuit factories: Murray's, Calder's, and others Trove
• Adelaide Observer (Adelaide), 8 January 1876 — "South Australian Industries: The Craiglee Jam and Biscuit Factory" Trove
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 8 February 1883 — "What We Do With Our Fruit. At Coromandel Valley" — jam and biscuit operations Trove
• Express and Telegraph (Adelaide), 16 December 1898 — "Death of Mr. Alexander Murray" — account of the fatal accident, councillor's tribute, family history Trove
• The Advertiser (Adelaide), 19 December 1898 — "The Late Mr. Alexander Murray" — obituary and funeral Trove
• The Advertiser (Adelaide), 5 March 1903 — tender notice for the estate of Alexander Murray, A. Murray & Sons, Coromandel Valley Biscuit Manufacturers; asset valuations Trove
• Coromandel News, 6 July 1956 — "Local Industries: Murray's Biscuit Factory" by Perce Jones, from material by Gordon Murray Trove
• Blackwood Action Group, "Craiglee House" — citing A Sanctuary in the Hills (Winter 1987) and Louise Gregory / Coromandel Valley & Districts National Trust; worker welfare, estate and family history, Nellie McTaggart
• State Heritage Place listing, Heritage ID No. 14257 — Former Biscuit & Jam Factory Foreman's Residence, 406 Main Road, Coromandel Valley; building description