Sam Perry: Shropshire lad who lands in South Australia in 1888 and by 1915 owns its biggest engineering company
Samuel Perry (inset) built his engineering company into South Australia's biggest by 1915 by taking over the James Martin Phoenix Foundry at Gawler.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia
Samuel (Sam) Perry, who would start what became South Australia’s biggest engineering company by 1915, arrived in Adelaide aboard the steamer Liguria in 1888.
Perry had left school at 10 and served a seven-year ironworker apprenticeship with prominent Quaker-owned Coalbrookdale Company in his home courty Shropshire. He later worked for a marine engineering company in Hythe, Hampshire.
At 21, Perry followed his Methodist minister brother Isaiah to South Australia where he first worked as a blacksmith and wheelwright with T.J. Wilson and Sons, Gawler, and then at iron founders W. Durnell and of Dale Street, Port Adelaide. In 1890, Perry went to Melbourne and was employed at Braybrook Implement Works, Footscray, before being foreman with engineers John Dans and Sons of Bourke Street, Melbourne.
In 1894 Perry, briefly returned to Adelaide to marry Mary Jane Rofe. Back to Adelaide in 1897, initially for a holiday, Perry bought Tubal Cain ironworks on the Hindley/Gray streets corner in Adelaide city where he set up a general ironfounder and blacksmith shop on land leased from William Henry Gray of West Torrens. In a struggling economy, Perry only employed “two men and a boy” in his early days of taking whatever work he could find from mending the axle of a hawker’s van that broke down outside his front door or fixing a bicycle pump. Business slowly improved and Perry moved on to horseshoeing, general blacksmithing and building small carriages and trolleys.
An important early contract for Perry was supplying iron fencing for Prince Alfred College. In 1902, Perry bought, from James Wedlock’s estate, the Cornwall Foundry next to his factory and operated under that name, employing about 40. A little later, Perry set up a bridge and girder yard nearby on North Terrace.
Although Perry won the 1908 contract to make poles, support arms and ornamental top pieces for Adelaide’s burgeoning electric tram network, his firm progressively moved into the more lucrative supply of builders’ steel and ironwork. Cornwall Foundry also built small bridges at Narridy/Crystal Brook (1910), Port Adelaide (1910) and Morgan (1912).
A key 1912 breakthrough for Perry was a £17,955 contract to supply 10 locomotive boilers to the South Australian government. Perry didn’t have the equipment to carry out the order so he sailed to England in 1912, bought the 45 pieces of machinery and returned to Adelaide that year. Already employing about 120, the locomotive contract set off plans to expand.
In 1908, Perry had secured 3.9 acres from the South Australian Company on the west of Railway Terrace, Mile End South, about 100 metres south of Hilton Road (later Sir Don Bradman Drive). Perry was attracted to the area being near to the proposed Mile End railway yards and Adelaide city. Perry’s later helped build the railyards, in 1911 securing a contract to construct 34 coal staiths or unloading docks for the yards and, in a 1913 contract worth £11,000, to build a bridge over the yards on Hilton Road.
The 1912 government locomotive boiler contract was too large to be carried out at Perry’s Hindley Street premises so he transferred his entire operation to the Mile End South site. A railway siding was later built into the factory. Perry’s was the first of several businesses to build factories at Mile End South. By the late 1920s Perry’s site had expanded to 12 acres.
In 1915, Perry won a £45,650 contract to build six freight locomotives for the commonwealth government that were used to construct of east-west transcontinental. Deciding the Mile End South site was too small for the project, Perry almost immediately bought James Martin and Company’s ailing Phoenix Foundry at Gawler.
Perry Engineering, as it was known from October 1916, had become the largest engineering company in South Australia.