Bible society gains its red terracotta home in Adelaide city in 1898, 50 years after first South Australian auxiliary
The former premises of the South Australian auxiliary of the British and Foreign Bible Society on the corner of Grenfell Street and Coromandel Place, Adelaide city.
Image coutresy City of Adelaide.
The South Australian auxiliary of the British and Foreign Bible Society – a vanguard of 19th Century Protestant missionary zeal – gained its first permanent home in 1898.
The auxiliary was formed in Adelaide in 1845 at a meeting chaired by future South Australian chief justice Charles Cooper. The colony’s governor George Grey was appointed president of the committee comprising the reverends Dean Farrell and Thomas Quinton Stow as secretaries, with Messrs Mundy, Richardson, D. Garlick, W. Giles, Smillie, W. Peacock, Flett, Thomas Elder and Dr Mathew Moorhouse.
Plans for a permanent home for the auxiliary, to concide with its 50th year, were made possible in 1885 by a bequest of £1,330 by Thomas Selway, plus two £50 legacies, to build a Bible House. The Adelaide city site for Bertram House was the corner of Grenfell Street and Coromandel Place.
An 1897 advertisement in the daily newspapers offered £10 for the best design for a Bible House that would cost no more than £1,000. Architect Alfred Wells’s plans were adopted, along with the building tender of W. Rodgers. Governor T. Fowell Buxton, a vice president of the parent bible society in the United Kingdom, laid the foundation stone in 1897.
A contemporary report described a building of red terracotta brick with Glen Osmond bluestone base and stucco dressings “and being of gothic design has quite an ecclesiastical appearance’. The large hall on the second floor was described as unique in South Australia. Its interior walls were terracotta brick, and the ceiling was of polished yellow pine, forming a gothic arch: “A pair of lancet windows with lead lights in small squares of tinted glass in front, a white glass paned window in a corner recess, and four sidelights of several colours, give a very pretty and finished appearance to the hall”.
With its gothic windows and original leadlight, the building was sold in 1962 to A. Bertram Cox for use as an accountant's office and its name changed to Bertram House. It was heritage listed in 1984. It was later the home of an antique jewellery store and Stewart’s Stamp Shop before its next life into the 21st Century as the Adelaide Coffee Bar.
