This is one of several pages relating to the history of the automatic totalisator, its invention in 1913, the inventor George Julius and the Australian company he founded in 1917 which became a monopoly ( later an oligopoly ) in this field. This page primarily provides a display of images related to early totalisator photographs. If you wish to start from the beginning then go to the index
| Ex ATL meets Ex JP&G |
Since the first release of these pages a year ago I have been attempting to meet with Frank Matthews, the last senior partner of Julius Poole and Gibson who has kindly given permission to use material from the book published by Julius Poole and Gibson titled From Tote To CAD. He has collected George Julius memorabelia which I am interested in. This meeting eventually took place on 23rd March 1998 when I was visiting New South Wales and Frank invited my wife Narelle and I to his house. This meeting I have titled Ex ATL meets Ex JP&G as Frank is ex JP&G and I am ex ATL (Automatic Totalisators Limited). Frank donated several Julius papers and has lent me many photographs some of which I have put on display in the Photo Gallery that follows.
I have had some curious personal coincidences with this history. During a telephone conversation with Frank, I started relating some of my coincidences to him and arrived at the part regarding one of the original partners Gibson of Julius Poole and Gibson, getting married at the church in St Johns Avenue Gordon. I lived nearby for over a decade. When I mentioned Gordon, Frank responded "that is interesting, I am Gordon born and bred"! I indicated that I used to live in Waugoola Street and he informed me that he lived in Lennox Street. After this conversation ended, Lennox Street started to haunt me, as I knew the name well but could not place it. When I looked it up I was surprised to find that Waugoola Street runs into Lennox Street and that I had travelled down Frank's street almost every day for over a decade.
After the Photo Gallery, most of which is from Frank Matthew's collection, I have continued with more examples of the synchronicity events.
| Totalisator History Photo Gallery |
Click on the images below to load the full sized photographs.
The Photo Gallery is continued on the next page accesible via the next page button on the navigation bar at the end of this page.
| Synchronicity |
I am very interested in synchronicity events. I have experienced a significant amount of them in association with totalisator history. The coincidence with Frank Matthews recorded at the top of this page started me thinking more about them. I have recorded some of them here.
On the way to see Frank Matthews, Narelle and I visited her uncle Bruce and his wife Cynthia. During the conversation the subject of the internet was raised and subsequently led to totalisator history. Cynthia said "My father used to work for the TAB in 1921. I think I still have his letter of commendation". I thought to myself that so far as I knew there was no TAB that early and that they were a product of the 1960s. Cynthia found the letter. Sure enough, the letterhead read Automatic Totalisators Limited, the company I was working for! It was dated 9th May 1921. The head office address was 10 Castlereagh Street Sydney and the factory address was Alice Street Newtown the telephone number was L1943. It related the length of service and the final paragraph read " We have pleasure in stating that he performed his duties in a satisfactory manner, and it is only on account of slackness of work that he leaves us." It was signed by the Works Manager.
A postscript to the above paragraph: Not synchronicity but an interesting development. The above paragraph was written mid 1998. On 5 November 2009 I received an email from Jon B based in England. He wrote that he found this website during research into the late Henry Setright, inventor of the "Setright" bus ticket machine.He indicated that he had come across links between Henry and the Tote. Jon asked if I could shed any light on this connection. At the time I had not heard the name Setright and as Jon had identified a reference to Henry Setright on the Powerhouse Museum website I put him in contact with the Principal Curator there.
In December 2011, I was looking for a totalisator history document and was flicking through a mass of pages in a manila folder. As I searched for the document which had nothing to do with the one being discussed here, I became conscious that I had just glanced at something that registered as being significant. I started to backtrack through the recently scanned pages and I found it. It was the name Setright. The document was the letter of commendation mentioned in the previous paragraph. The signature of the Works Manager clearly revealed the surname Setright. The initial of the signature was not so clear and looked like it could be two or three superimposed letters in an ornate fashion, however one of the letters could well have been a H in which case this is likely to be the signature of Jon's Henry Setright.
I used to partake in "bob a job week" with the Boy Scouts when I was in boarding school. One of the streets we frequented was Ocean street Woollahra which is where George Julius lived at one stage.
For many years I thought my knowledge of Julius Poole and Gibson, George's Engineering Consulting Company, was purely related to Automatic Totalisators. When I first saw the book From Tote To CAD it was handed to me at an open page when I was working for Automatic Totalisators. The page contained a photograph of one of the audio consoles in the Sydney Opera House. I had been a member of the engineering staff that installed it. This triggered my recollection that I had known Julius Poole and Gibson a lot longer than I thought at the time, as they were a prime contractor at the Opera House. The photo was from the early 1970s when I was working for AWA (Amalgamated Wireless Australasia) in the Field Engineering Department based at North Ryde when that factory alone had approximately 1500 employees. From memory AWA was sub contracted to JP&G on the Opera House project. The following photograph is one of myselft taken in the Opera House Record and Rehearsal Studio control room during the installation and commissioning phase of the project. The audio console in the book From Tote To CAD was installed in the Concert Hall control room and was exactly the same as the one shown below.
An Opera House Audio Console
Probably my first glimpse of totalisator history came in the early years of working for AWA mentioned above. One of my early duties was to assist with the operation and maintenance of the television system at Randwick Racecourse. My mentor was an excellent technician called Bill Wilson. I recall being impressed by the architecture of some of the old buildings at the racetrack. I did not know it at the time however one of the particularly interesting buildings was the old main tote which was purpose built in 1917 to accommodate a Julius totalisator. Nowadays (2008) it is hidden behind the Randwick Pavilion. The following photo is of this building in its heyday. I had no idea at the time that this building was a harbinger of things to come and that I would spend so long working for the company that designed and built the Julius tote that this building used to house. Additionally I had no idea that I would spend most of my working life in the totalisator industry. I suspect I had little to no idea at the time what a totalisator was. If someone would have suggested to me that decades later I would find such an interest in the antiquated electromechanical Julius totes, one of which operated in this building, which were a dying architecture at the time, that I would be writing and lecturing about them, I would probably have suggested that they should have their head examined.
The Old Main Tote at Randwick 1917
I had my first look at a totalisator during these early years at AWA. Whilst with the Field Engineering Department I had a job to wire a rack in the computer room of the New South Wales TAB. I spent a week there on this job never thinking that three decades later I would become a long term employee of this organisation although the name had changed to TAB Limited and then Tabcorp, both being organisations I have worked for.
To diverge a little, a coincidence which has little to do with totalisator history except that it took place on a totalisator business trip for ATL. One Friday afternoon I was asked if I could attend a course in San Diego starting Tuesday. I was to attend a course conducted by Simpact, on an ICP (Intelligent Communications Processor) and then write the software to implement this device in our front end processors to achieve synchronous operation. After having traversed the Pacific Ocean and caught a domestic flight from Los Angeles to San Diego, I found myself on the phone to the hotel where I had a booking. It was after 11PM and I was hoping that I would be picked up at the airport. I was informed that I had already checked in: I assured them that I had not checked in and that I really was at the airport. This dialogue continued for several minutes. I did not relish the prospect of having to search for alternative accommodation in the middle of the night in a city I did not know . I eventually convinced them to pick me up from the airport and find me another room somewhere. It turned out that a doctor from Ireland with the same surname and initial had arrived without a booking on the day I was to arrive and wanted to stay the exact dates of my booking. The hotel staff understandably assumed he was me!
In August 2004, I visited Sydney on holidays, with the main objective to see a restored Julius tote working at the Powerhouse Museum. One day my wife Narelle and I went to the Northern Suburbs Memorial Gardens and Crematorium to visit her mother's memorial plaque. On the way we passed the old Channel 10 premises between the Epping highway and Delhi road. I worked there for several years in the mid 1970s. Immediately after completing my nostalgic look at my old workplace, I noticed the street sign on the next street running down the eastern side of the building. It was Julius Avenue. Earlier this year, I received an email from Kevin Shaw, from the Ryde District Historical Society, informing me that there was a Julius Avenue named after George Julius in the Riverside Corporate Park. I had no idea that the Corporate Park was next to my old workplace where I had worked for years next to George Julius' memorial avenue. Additionally, whilst Narelle was looking at her mother's plaque, she noticed that one of the neighbouring plaques was a Julius.
Having mentioned Channel 10, I will digress a little further. The following photos are of an ACR25 Tape control unit and the associated Tape Transport unit. These two photos are parts of one videotape machine which had two tape transports visible in the right hand photo. The right hand tape transport vacuum column door is open and the left hand door is shut. The ACR25 could handle a complete commercial break on its own by playing one commercial on one transport whilst loading the next commercial in the other transport and switching to it when the previous commercial was over. I worked at Channel 10 in Videotape Maintenance on this and other models of Ampex videotape machines like the AVR1, AVR2 VR1200 and VR2000. These were the most complex machines I have ever worked on. If it had not been for the interesting computer hardware becoming popular at the time I would have stayed at Channel 10. These machines embraced an amazing diversity of electronics applications from digital electronics to very complex analogue servo systems, Radio Frequency circuitry, video and audio systems, automation systems... These are not the helical scan video tapes of today. They were Quad machines with 4 heads, mounted on a rotating drum, which ran at 250 cycles per second, on an air bearing to minimise time base jitter. The head units are clearly visible in the right hand image particularly the right hand tape transport with the door open where it appears as a vertically mounted light coloured oblong object on a black background. The recording was made more across the tape than along it with the actual tracks being the vector resolution of the head travelling across the tape and the capstan pulling the tape under the head. There was a tape guide with a suction line applied to it that caused an indentation in the moving tape as it passed the rotating head. The video tape media was 2 inches wide. I am going to stop this techno-babble before I go completely off track. Only two more non technical recollections of the videotape department at Channel 10 before moving on. Firstly, this videotape medium was very strong. When the Supervising Technician of videotapes Les got married his peers wrapped his car up in videotape. I did not see this event however I believe it was quite some feat for him to retrieve the use of his car. Secondly, although there were interlocks in the videotape machines to stop the tape heads from being operated when there was no compressed air to provide the bearing, there always seemed to be operators who could achieve this from time to time. The result was a fatally damaged head and this was considered a cardinal sin for videotape operators.
| An Ampex ACR25 VTR |  |
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March 2008. I have been reading the ABC "Australian Story" transcript on Wendy Whiteley from Monday 6 September 2004. Wendy is George Julius' granddaughter. There is a link to this titled Wendy Whiteley in the George Julius Genealogy page. The transcript states that in 1965 Wendy and her husband Brett lived at Whale Beach on which her daughter Arkie learnt to walk. I arrived in Australia in 1964 to attend boarding school. I stayed with friends of my parents for a week prior to being delivered to boarding school. I was picked up from the airport and taken to their home, the first place I stayed in Australia, you guessed it, Whale Beach.
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It does not stop! Still March 2008. Brett Whiteley mentioned above was born in Longueville Sydney. His first studio was in the house he grew up in at Lucretia Avenue in Longueville. When my parents moved to Australia from Hong Kong I was taken out of boarding school to live in their new home at Northwood. I continued as a student at the same school as a day boy. Northwood is a neighbouring suburb to Longueville. Again I was surprised when I looked at a map to see where Lucretia Avenue was. It was a place I had visited more often than anywhere else in the suburb. You have to go down this street to get to Dunois Street. My parents and I often visited this street to go for a walk as it had terrific views of Woodford Bay. I used to ride my bicycle to this location. I bought my first motorcycle whilst living at Northwood and frequented this area even more. I had a friend from school Rod who lived nearby and I used to traverse Lucretia Ave to visit him. He too was in the process of purchasing his first motorcycle. When we moved to Gordon and after my grandparents moved to Australia we used to take them there for walks. In addition later when I bought a VJ sailing boat Narelle and I used to launch it in Woodford Bay from Dunois Street requiring passage down Lucretia Ave. I do recall a house in Lucretia Ave with a business sign outside, it could well have been Brett's Studio. He attended Scots College in Bellevue Hill starting in 1954. I attended Cranbrook in Bellevue Hill just down the road starting in 1964. His birthday is 7th April, mine 1st April. Oh and George Julius was born in April also.
March 2009, I have included a couple of extracts from some emails from John Reid about the above two paragraphs. I was informed that John, his father and I share the same birthday, we lived in the same suburb Northwood starting the same year and share an interest in the above history. I was browsing on some information on Brett Whiteley and came across your web page, enjoyed it thanks! My birthday is 1st April too and I grew up in Northwood, I was great friends with the son of WE Pidgeon who was an artist of Northwood and I believe a bit of a mentor for the young Brett Whiteley.
And in reply to my response. Yes 2 april fools and my dad is also one! We lived in point rd in northwood from 1965, my parents left there around 2000. Yes the Whiteley story is very tragic, I remember Arkie quite well as went to a few parties of hers around the late 70s I think. Apparently Brett Whiteley lived in our house when he was a boy for a little while, (ill have to ask my dad for the detail on that). I noted your various comments on synchronity and co incidence so thought the Northwood and birth date connection would interest you.
And in reply to another response. I probably walked past your place many times on my way from school or the northwood shops, what period did you live in northwood for?
Shortly after having posted John's email here I received another email from Gavin Oughton, an extract follows. I see a reference to WE Pigeon and brett Whitely. I was raised at 82 Northwood road Northwood, and I knew WE (Bill ) Pigeon well. In fact he drew a watercolour of me on a bike which I am looking at now as I type. I was about 10 then, and I'm 52 now! It is true Whitely was a "student" of sorts of Bill's. Bill used to love the Longueville pub at Lane Cove. Lloyd Rees lived in Northwood too Great place to grow up in. I was at Brett Whitely's wake at Lucretia Ave. Bill had already died, and Dorothy, his lovely wife was there with us Wish I was still there. ... Excellent effort here. Well done Gavin Oughton
And the synchronicity continues, after I put John and Gavin in touch with each other it turns out they knew each other in Northwood.
Of course the greatest link to this history is that I worked for Automatic Totalisators, George's company from 1977 till its demise. I continued to work at the Brisbane racetracks for most of my working life alongside the remnants of totalisator equipment from George's era.
June 2008. I have just read an old boys magazine from my old school in Sydney. The archivist is looking for informal photographs of boarding school life in Street House when it was located in a mansion called Leura. When I rummaged through my collection of photographs from this early era of my life, dragging out an old archive tin which would hardly see daylight in a given decade, I discovered an enigma. I found a slide of the St. Ledger Stand at Eagle Farm. The photo predates my knowledge of this stand as there is no evidence of a large fig tree which now reaches the top of the flag poles which are the highest points on this large stand. From the location where this photograph was taken this fig tree now obscures a major section of the Western end of the stand. Neither my wife nor I have any knowledge of this photograph or how it came to be in this archive. I did not create this photograph. I recognise every other photo in this archive. My interest in totalisator history only began about 20 years after the rest of the photos in this tin became archived. Additionally, I can identify the source of every photo in my totalisator history collection. I would not have been particularly interested in this photograph anyway as it has nothing to do with totalisators. If I had been presented with it prior to starting work at Automatic Totalisators I would not have attributed any significance to it. If I had received it after acquiring an interest in totalisator history I would have found it irrelevant. Even now I find it unremarkable except for one thing. Somehow I came to possess a photograph which showed me where I would spend 30 years of working life to date. I have installed and dismantled temporary totes for carnival meetings underneath this stand and done the same in tents outside the front of this stand for 3 decades. Our office, maintenance facility and computer room has existed in the adjacent building for most of this time and a Julius tote has remained in this adjacent building all of this time. This Julius tote has recently been incorporated in the new Eagle Farm racing museum. At one stage I used to have a warm lunch under this stand when a servery provided this facility during race days. At the Tattersalls meeting at Eagle Farm held on 21/6/2008, I confirmed without a doubt that the photograph was of the St. Ledger Stand. That night my wife had rented a DVD of The Celestine Prophecy. I was taken by the passage that appears right at the beginning. "Look not from the mind, but from the soul. For the life that is coming is already before us, waiting to open up the world. Just look more closely. Find the eyes to see. From the First Insight". It appears that I have not been looking closely enough!
The Western view from Street House in 1964
July 2008. I have now had the Street House slides mentioned in the previous paragraph converted to JPEG files. I have discovered another connection with totalisator history that I was not aware of till now, which existed since the start of my time at boarding school. One of the converted slides is a view taken from Street House looking west towards the city shown above. It looks over Double Bay and has the Harbour Bridge in plain view. I was astonished to notice that the Opera House construction site is visible, in particular the large cranes near the Southern pylon of the bridge. I have confirmed this by magnifying that area of the original JPEG file. This photograph was taken in 1964 and I had no idea the Opera House construction began this early. This was the year I arrived in Australia and I often looked at this magnificent view of the city. I never realised I was looking at the Opera House being constructed. I have researched this and found George Julius' company Julius Poole and Gibson had been working at this site for about 6 months at that time. I have been unaware till now that embedded in this view was the construction of a workplace where I would start approximately 8 years later. Not only was this a view of the future but also of the past, something I would not become aware of for decades. George Julius used to live at Rushcutters Bay which is the next bay in the photograph after Double Bay towards the harbour bridge. I have mentioned a connection with another of George Julius' domiciles above, at Ocean Sreet Woollahra, which has relevance to this photograph. Heading north, Ocean Street runs into Ocean Avenue after crossing New South Head road which then reaches the beach at Double Bay at a location hidden by the bushes on the left hand side of this photograph. Finally, for those interested in numerology this photograph was taken in 1964 and George passed away in 1946.
Having touched on the subject of school life, one of the most remarkable events of this year, 1964, was my introduction to the Melbourne Cup. I have a description of this in the introduction to this website on the index page. I could not believe other students who were telling me that classes would be interrupted to listen to something called a horse race, the Melbourne Cup. Furthermore I was introduced to the concept of a sweep, something that just fuelled the impression that this was all an elaborate hoax. After all this came to fruition, the final amazing event was that for someone who is not lucky in games of chance, I ended up winning the sweep with a horse that I had been told had no chance of winning, Polo Prince. This was my introduction to an event that I had no idea would become such a prominent part of my life. I have spent decades in the totalisator industry with the Melbourne Cup being one of the two, often ovewhelming annual hurdles, providing major additional temporary totalisator facilities on racetracks.
Nancarrow Avenue in front of Factory
30 July 2008. On my way home today, I heard a person talking on the radio with the name of Nancarrow. This attracted my attention as Nancarrow Avenue is the location of the last Automatic Totalisators head office and factory shown above. This was my head office for a decade and a half. It never occurred to me that Nancarrow was a family name and that there were Nancarrows in Australia. Nancarrow Avenue did not exist when George Julius built his factory. At that time there were only orchards in the area. I decided to Google Nancarrow to see if there was anything interesting about the name as Nancarrow Avenue came into existance after the factory was built. The result was quite unexpected. The very first reference the search engine provided for Nancarrow was Conlon Nancarrow. This surprised me as it linked Nancarrow with my surname Conlon. Conlon and Nancarrow are not common names and Conlon Nancarrow does not seem to be a person's name at all but two surnames, however it does link my name with something to do with totalisator history. I have never seen Conlon used as a Christian name. I wonder what the probability of finding a name like this would be, definitely a lot closer to zero than one. Yet Conlon Nancarrow was a person, an experimentalist composer writing music which had to be played on player pianos as it was so complex and fast it was beyond the capabilities of pianists. Add to this the probability against him being someone that warranted people writing about him and presenting this information on the Internet and a search engine rating one of these pages as the number one response for the Nancarrow keyword search and the fact that I initiated this search when these conditions existed, makes me wonder what it means other than yet another abstract connection between myself and totalisator history.
August 2008. I have come across a Web page connection between Awdry Julius, George's son and Railway Avenue Wahroonga. My wife to be and I used to pick her father up from Wahroonga station when he was returning from work in the first half of the 1970s. We often parked in Railway Avenue to wait for his train to arrive. I have since learnt that Awdry used to live in Wahroonga. Awdry was still a director with Automatic Totalisators when I joined the company in December 1977.
After attending a school reunion in July 2008 I discovered that the school's new Internet Portal was supplied by a company called Praxa. They have their Sydney office in Julius Avenue mentioned above. Apart from being located in a street named after the person who invented the world's first automatic totalisator they have an additional association with totalisators by having Unitab as one of their customers as well as my old school.
I have mentioned Julius Avenue above. There is another Julius memorial street name. It is Julius Road in Canberra on Black Mountain. I present this more as a statement of historical interest than a coincidence. I do have a brother in law in Canberra and I used to fly friends down to Canberra at night from Sydney to have tea and return the same evening. This oddly became rather popular as it was quite unusual to say I had tea last night in another city. I have been a regular visitor to Canberra and have certainly seen Black Mountain on multiple occasions particularly from the air.
The following entry is just an odd occurrence however in totality it seems to be part of the same thing. I wrote about a 1970s television series called Monkey Magic in the Kota Kinabalu chapter of this website. This is something that no one I have spoken to recently recalls. This page is a fairly recent addition to the web site. On the 19th of August 2008 I was attracted to an ABC program called Foreign Correspondent as the subject of that night's program was the safety of aviation in New Guinea, a subject I have long been interested in. This fascinating insight consumed half the program and as I was about to turn the TV off I heard the subject for the second half of the program. I could not believe it, the subject was Monkey Magic, suddenly come out of the blue, to coincide with my having just recently thought about it, in relation to this web site and not having heard anything about it for something in the order of 30 years, except for the conversation described in the Kota Kinabalu chapter and that was almost a quarter of a century ago. Evidently the novel it is based on, Journey To The West, is one of China's leading pieces of literature and there is a resurgence of interest in it and it looks like there is going to be a new TV series.
In March 2009, I was sent an image of Churchill Julius, George's father, on the occasion of his first experience aloft in an aircraft. The photograph was taken in 1930 and the pilot was Francis Chichester, later Sir Francis, also in the image. I did not initially take much notice of the airfield which was Wigram in New Zealand. Eventually curiosity got the better of me and I searched the Internet for Wigram and when I discovered the Air Force Museum Christchurch was at Wigram airfield I realised I had recently been there.
In April 2009 I was sent an email from an ex employee of Jtec the company that occupied the old ATL Head Quarters after ATL vacated it. The email tied two of the items mentioned above together. I worked in the television industry, with the ACR25 photographs above showing one of the machines I worked on at Channel 10, prior to working for ATL, initially in the ATL Head Quarters and factory shown in the Nancarrow Avenue photograph on this page. The television industry has now come to the old ATL Headquarters. The email informed me that a television series called Swift and Shift Couriers is now filmed at these premises. Since this email other ex ATL employees and I have seen episodes of this program and recognised locations in the old ATL premises.
Alan Rose was a totalisator engineer and project manager with ATL and mentioned in other parts of this website and who incidentally is a fan of Swift and Shift Courriers mentioned in the previous paragraph. I received a phone call from him in the evening of 21/11/2009. Alan was visiting a friend in Sydney and had been talking to Ian, a friend of this friend. Alan and Ian found they had something in common, knowledge of electromechanical shaft adders and Automatic Totalisators. Inevitably my name came up resulting in the abovementioned phone call. Alan introduced Ian to me on the phone and Ian informed me his name was Ian Bryce. I immediately recognised the name. Ian had emailed me in 2001 and we then engaged in an email discussion of totalisator history. Ian now asked me about restoring an electromechanical shaft adder he had in his possession. I had forgotten I had donated it to him. It took 9 years from the time we had emailed and I had donated the adder, to get to talk to each other through this unlikely coincidence. There is an extract from Ian’s original communication in the Accolades section of this website. I recall being impressed by someone working in the aerospace industry finding such an interest in the origins of computing and in particular totalisator history.
In December 2009, I was asked when the Julius tote started operating at Ipswich. I indicated that I was not sure however I knew exactly when it ceased operating which was 1979 as I worked on the computer totes that replaced it. As if in answer to this question, I received an email shortly after from Rod Richards, who had contacted me long prior regarding totalisator history and Automatic Totalisators as Rod had worked for the company in years predating mine. I now was made aware that Rod had actually worked on the installation of the Ipswich Julius tote and not only could remember when it was installed but had kept the opening day racebook for 60 years along with a newspaper clipping relating to opening day. I have since donated a shaft adder from this system to Rod. Ironic that it is being sent to the person who installed it in the first place 60 years prior! The original question came from the Ipswich Turf Club and I have also donated a shaft adder to them to commemorate their 150 year celebration in 2010.
The racebook image that Rod Richards sent me
I had an email from Peter at Stanford University in 2000 who was interested in using extracts from this website in his doctoral thesis. In 2008 I discovered someone had provided a domain name of georgejulius.com which pointed to this website, something I am grateful for. In late 2009 I discovered that the company Julius Finance had been named after George Julius and used the georgejulius.com domain name on their website. I then wrote to some who share my interest in the subject of totalisator history and informed them that a company had been named after Sir George Julius. In the email I thought I had sent a link to the Advisory Committee page of the Julius Finance website where it states that it is named after Sir George. At this stage I knew the company had opened a new office in New York. When I received a reply to my email I noticed I had not sent the link I thought I had and sent a link I had not even seen instead. The link I sent was to the Julius Finance locations page. A curious circumstance to bring it to my attention! When I looked at the locations page I could not believe Julius Finance had an office in Australia, not only Australia but Sydney and of all the suburbs in Sydney the office was at Double Bay. The photo presented above, taken from Street House where I viewed my future workplace related to George being constructed, as described above, also clearly shows Double Bay. Double Bay is the nearest water in the photo when looking at the left pylon of the Harbour Bridge, which has the suburb of Double Bay next to it. This is where Julius Finance a company named after George has located its office some 45 years after the photo was taken! An additional irony is that the namesake of this company lived at two neighbouring locations as mentioned previously on this page at Woollahra and Rushcutters Bay.
On the 29th of August 2009 I received an email from Dermot Elworthy, George Julius' great nephew. We share many common interests including steam engines. Dermot made reference to this subject in his email Talking of trains - which we weren't - a few weeks back I went on a local train drawn by "Tornado". I don't know if news of this thing reached Oz but "Tornado" is an A1 Peppercorn-designed engine only recently completed as a brand new loco. It was exquisitely built over about five years at a cost of three million GBP (my American computer won't do pound symbols) and is now earning its keep hauling passenger traffic on nostalgia and enthusiast lines . I discovered on the Internet that Tornado is a Pacific class engine.
On the 13th of September, I made a discovery and wrote back to Dermot to relate it. I am finding that life is becoming full of synchronicity events. You were writing about the A4 Pacifics in this email. All the time I have been thinking about them after you wrote, a plate has been in the same room as my computer where I have written about them to you. The plate is a Royal Doulton collectors plate with the painting of a steam engine on it. It is "The South Yorkshireman" and I just noticed that it had the class A4 under the engine number on the engine painting. I looked on the back of the plate and it has the inscription "The streamlined LNER Pacific No.4498, Sir Nigel Gresley, named after her designer, represents the final development of his express locomotive design. Sister engine No. 4468 Mallard holds the world speed record for steam locomotive at 126 mph." I did not immediately recognise it because of the streamlining.
I did not place this event on this website at the time as I did not think it was particulary related to this website apart from Dermot's family connection with George. In January 2010 I discovered a model steam engine in the Powerhouse Museum's archive. On the Powerhouse Museum's website it states the model was made by Sir George Julius and that it is a Pacific Class engine! That did it and here it is!
I have also placed a link, in the links to other pages chapter of this website, to the Powerhouse Museum's website page that records this model steam locomotive.
Coincidence regarding this model continues... In December 2010 I was communicating with Brian Campbell from Sydney University who contacted me about the retirement of Prof Trevor Cole and Brian's inheriting custodianship of the Julius Tote Shaft Adder I had donated long ago. I made reference to the Powerhouse Museum in my reply and Brian wrote back indicating that it was a strange coincidence I had referred to the Powerhouse Museum as he had just read the Summer 10/11 edition of the Museum's Powerline magazine. He indicated there is an article in this magazine on page 5 relating the return to Broken Hill of a model Pacific Class Locomotive made by Sir George Julius in 1932 which was lent to Broken Hill TAFE in 1957 which was recalled in 1987 to be refurbished.
On the 10th of August 2011, I received an email from Charles Norrie, the Northern Hemisphere expert on George Julius and his totalisators. He wrote a comment about George Julius that constituted a connection to one of my family members. Charles wrote When I came to Aus, 20 years ago now, the Adelaide O-bahn (you use the original German) was a highlight of the trip as were the Melbourne trams, the Skytube and the Blue Mountains Railway as well as a trip on the railways of W Australia by steam train, passing through Midland where GAJ was employed in the design office. GAJ in this sentence refers to George Alfred Julius. At the time of this email I had already written about Midland in the chapter George Julius Genealogy and other latterday interest under the heading A Trip to Perth March 2011 . Midland in Perth, is where my elder son Paul is employed as a software engineer. It is also the location of the now closed racetrack Helena Vale where George's company Auomatic Totalisators used to operate a totalisator system. Charles' comment here refers to a prior connection to George, as George worked for the West Australian Government Railroads prior to him founding the Australian companies Julius Poole and Gibson and Automatic Totalisators. According to Charles, George worked in Midland whilst in this position. An additional connection between Paul and this history is that Paul used to work part time for Automatic Totalisators and helped with cleaning many Julius Tote Shaft Adders in preparation for donation to museums and educational institutions.
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Comments and suggestions welcome to
totehis@hotmail.com 
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