The start and end of an era for the Mercantile Club

Hotel, tavern, bar. We know them all simply as ‘the pub’ — where generations have gathered to celebrate, commiserate, and everything in between. It’s a place where romances blossom, business deals are sealed, and long-standing friendships are made and tested. In this series Pub Crawl Through Time, the Geraldton Guardian explores the colourful history of Geraldton’s favourite watering holes. In part four, we take a look inside the mysterious Mercantile Club. The history of the Mercantile Club goes much further back than its association with the building it now occupies. Although they developed side-by-side. The club was established in September 1900, and held its first meeting nearly a year later in a Masonic Hall a few blocks down the street from the lodge we now know — not the current Augustus Street building. Headed by explorer and politician Maitland Brown, the club served as a place for local businessmen, politicians, and the gentry of the day to meet and discuss their dealings. Mr Brown said in opening the club: “Here, men will meet on an equality. So it is necessary that each member should be of such a stamp that no one would hesitate to take his right hand.” The Marine Terrace building that would become their home had already been built by this time, but nobody is quite sure when, why, or by whom. Theories floating around the club date it as early as 1853. Photos of the street, usually focused on the Club Hotel — more on that in a future instalment — tell us the building has been there since at least 1893, and has remained much the same from the outside. The two triangular protrusions on the roof provide a beacon to any budding historian. It served as a billiards saloon upstairs, with the shops on street level as they are today occupied by a range of businesses over the years, including a tobacconist, a dentist, a jeweler and a grocery shop to name a few. Few records of the Mercantile Club’s early operations exist. A fire in the warehouse they once resided in, which doubled as the Freemasons hall, destroyed all but a few accounting books, which are on display in the pool room today. It is rumoured both the Mercantile Club and the Geraldton Club had their own rooms in the Club Hotel, which brought about a brotherly rivalry. The Geraldton Club made a reputation for exclusivity, with only the who’s who of pre-World War I Geraldton allowed in. The Mercantile broke from its gentle roots and became the haunt of sailors, railway men, and miners. This carried on through the club’s move to the Merc we know today in 1949. Current chair Tony Denneman said the club boomed once it had its own space, and remained popular well into the 1990s. “There were nights in here where you couldn’t move, there were so many people. You’d have five or six of us along the bar flat out pouring drinks,” he said. While the clientele may have become more “common”, membership was still highly sought after, with more than 700 financial members at its peak. Everyone from the mayor to the janitor wanted in. Mr Denneman regrets COVID has seen the club in sharp decline since its hey day. The club has just 50 members, and is looking to sell the building to reduce costs. “We’re finding a place where we can transfer the licence, but do it in a smaller way. Just enough for the dart competition,” he said. “I’d like to keep it going for some of the older ones. You don’t throw the towel in, there’s other clubs doing it hard.” While they’ve had “a couple of sniffs”, the club hasn’t had any bites on the nearly 130-year-old building. Whatever happens, the mystery of the Merc is certain to continue.