3.2 Commercial Frankston

Hotels

The other principal local meeting places were hotels the first amongst these the Pier Hotel has survived with many additions to the present. After the Second World War Frankston's hotels held special attractions to Melbourne drinkers as they lay outside the limit beyond which visitors could claim bona fide traveller status and so drink out of hours.

As the behaviour of weekend drinkers disturbed the calm routine of seaside life, local police and residents tried to take the most objectionable drunks to court. They were slower to complain about the local publicans, and one local magistrate thought that Frankston publicans deserved sympathy since they had to deal with "undesirables" directed to Frankston by the recent closure of inner city hotels.1 Local residents and the Frankston police had less sympathy for the drinkers referring to: "Disgusting scenes created by these boozy blackguards" The local paper went on to report that the police were amazed by the antics of this Sunday drinking crowd. One senior officer claimed there was not a "decent Sunday drinker" in the whole suburb.

The last Melbourne bound train from Frankston on a Sunday was nicknamed "the drunks' express" and several station staff were assaulted by late night drunks boarding the train.2 Councillors and senior police made representations to the State Government to make changes to the Sunday drinking laws but this and similar disputes around hotels bedeviled Frankston for many years. And it was not only drinkers who headed off to Frankston. On days when Melbourne bakeries were closed, crowds of housewives arrived in Frankston to buy fresh bread before taking the train back to inner suburbs.