Feldheim, Gotthelf & Co

Hardware, china and glassware, musical instruments, fancy goods, rubber, leather, stationery, drapery, oils, medicines – virtually every object needed to appoint, embellish or equip a modern household crossed their counters. The company’s ambitions and influences are vividly conveyed in a surviving trade catalogue from around 1905, part of the Caroline Simpson Library’s extensive collection of trade catalogues. This substantial volume, richly illustrated with engravings of household goods, speaks of a business at the height of its success: confident, expansive and embedded in Sydney’s commercial life.

Beginnings in tobacco and fancy goods

The story of Feldheim, Gotthelf & Co, like many 19th-century mercantile tales, begins with migration. Isaac Jacobs (born 1834 near Graudenz, in what is now Poland) arrived in Melbourne from England in the 1850s. He entered the tobacco trade and moved to Sydney, expanding his business into ‘fancy goods’ (ornamental and novelty items). Meanwhile, Isaac and Heyman Feldheim – trading as Feldheim Brothers – were establishing themselves as Melbourne-based jewellery wholesalers. In 1860, 20-year-old Moritz Gotthelf (born 1840 in Burgdorf, in what is now Germany) disembarked in Melbourne. Around 1867, he relocated to Sydney and joined Jacobs’s business. Their firm soon expanded its import lines, and by 1870 the partnership was re-formed by Jacobs, Isaac Feldheim and Moritz Gotthelf as Feldheim, Gotthelf & Co.

The partnership underwent several changes: Jacobs retired in 1881, and by 1885 Isaac Feldheim had withdrawn as well, leaving the business in the hands of Gotthelf and William Gross (supervisor of the London branch of the firm) – but the name, presumably well recognised by then, remained unchanged.

Fire, rebuild and expansion

Disaster struck in 1890, when a major fire destroyed the firm’s warehouse in Moore Street (now part of Martin Place). The blaze affected a number of major warehouses and was widely reported in the press as ‘the most disastrous fire ever known in Australia’.¹

Operations shifted temporarily to York Street until, in 1892, the company unveiled its impressive new premises on the corner of Clarence and Barrack streets.

The new warehouse ushered in a period of growth. Edward Ranson, manager of the china and glassware department, oversaw the import of objects like this 1892 ‘Wattle’ meat platter (above), part of a range of dinnerware with an Australian flora decorative scheme specially produced by Doulton in England and imported by Feldheim Gotthelf & Co to sell on the Australian market, where a taste for local design motifs was developing.

The c1905 trade catalogue

It is against this backdrop of prosperity that the c1905 trade catalogue was produced (FTC 658.871 FEL). The catalogue held in the Caroline Simpson Library appears to be the only extant copy in a public collection, and is a compendium of the goods Feldheim, Gotthelf & Co supplied to households, retailers and commercial clients across NSW.

Trade catalogues were commercial tools, but can now also be read as cultural artefacts. They conveyed aspirations, dictated taste and determined what Australian consumers could buy. For historians today, Feldheim, Gotthelf & Co’s catalogue provides an encyclopaedic record of the products available to Sydney households at the turn of the 20th century.

Demonstrating the breadth of products stocked by the firm, a small sample of its pages include china and glass – from decorative table services to utilitarian kitchenware; hardware of every type for domestic, agricultural and industrial use; musical instruments, including American and European imports; fancy goods and furnishing items, echoing global trends in interior ornament; and rubber goods, saddlery, stationery, leatherware, chemicals and oils.

A public company, decline and liquidation

By 1910 the remaining partners, Gotthelf and Gross, were also planning their retirement. The firm was floated as a public company with £200,000 capital, and long-time employee Lewis Edward Isaacs was appointed managing director, but died unexpectedly soon after. This misfortune marked the beginning of a difficult decade.

Gotthelf appears to have retired around 1911, after decades of service – including 20 years on the council of the Sydney Chamber of Commerce. Around this time he took an extended trip away from Sydney, an occasion marked by the presentation of an illuminated address by the employees of Feldheim Gotthelf Ltd, expressing their gratitude and well wishes to him.

Despite strong turnover, the company soon struggled with heavy stock levels, rising handling costs and diminishing profits. Dividends were suspended in 1913, and losses continued through World War I. In the midst of these difficulties, Feldheim Gotthelf Ltd nonetheless planned and built a new warehouse on Clarence and Kent streets around 1916.

By 1924, after several years of poor performance, shareholders had opted to voluntarily wind up the company. The Victorian firm Small Arms Pty Ltd purchased the business and assets – but this failed to stem the decline. Moritz Gotthelf, the last surviving member of the original partnership, died at Elizabeth Bay House in 1926, and the old firm finally ceased to exist when liquidation concluded in 1927.