Business: M & R Lutvey

Story

From the early 1940s, the Lutvey sisters, initially Mona and Rose and then Mona and Mary, ran a mixed business on the corner of Junction and O’Keefe Streets, Buranda for several years. The 1945 and 1949 Queensland Post Office Trade Directories have  entries in Mixed Businesses for Lutvey M & R, O’Keefe Street, Woolloongabba.

Their nephew recalls that during the war, they also ran a sly grog shop at the back of the store:

…the cops got hold of a soldier who was on leave from some camp up in Cairns or somewhere. And they gave him a marked ten quid note, to buy a bottle of whiskey at Mona and Mary’s shop. They got wind of this. And so they, like the story as it was told very colourfully, was the cops are coming in the front of the shop, they’re going out the back, and they go to the train station, and they buzz off to Sydney. And they stay in Sydney for three months, you know, and that kind of educates them in the casinos in Sydney and all that. And they get wind of the fact that this soldier has been sent back to Cairns so that’s the all clear. And that’s when they come back to Brisbane.

References

Dan O’Neill  interview with Anne Monsour, Brisbane, 2019.

Queensland Post Office Directories to 1949.