The company known today as Brambles owes both its name and inception to Walter Bramble, a man whose dedication and foresight helped carve out a remarkable legacy within his lifetime and well beyond it.
Born of modest means, Walter was less than a year old when he journeyed with his parents from Hampshire, England to Sydney, Australia.
By the time Walter was fifteen, he and his brothers had turned to river trading, supplying settlers in the growing Hunter Region of New South Wales with meat, fruit, vegetables and dairy produce.
Walter’s story takes flight in in 1875, when at the age of 18, he established a butchering business. Several traditional butchers had already set up their shopfronts in the Hunter township of Hinton so Walter instead offered a “cut up and deliver” service, transporting the meat to customers by boat or horse and cart. Two years later, he had saved enough money to move his business to the rapidly booming port town of Newcastle.
Always finding opportunities, Walter soon expanded the road transport part of his business, operating to and from the railhead. His business grew, handling almost all local supplies of wool, milk, dairy produce, meat, sugar, salt and horse fodder for Newcastle’s butchers and growers. The diversification was successful and in 1890 he began a carrier service between Newcastle and Sydney.
Success would come steadily but surely for Walter and his sons, with the 1913 opening of BHP’s steelworks in Newcastle marking another important turn for the business. Brambles was tasked with helping to reclaim low-lying areas of land for the steelworks and the enduring relationship with BHP would prove to help Brambles expand enormously.
In the intervening years, Walter had met and married Hannah Cooper, a milliner from Wollongong. Together, they would go on to raise three sons (Walter Jnr, Alan and Milton) and a daughter (Mabel). All four children would later join Walter in the family business as it became W.E. Bramble & Sons.
The Brambles’ motto, Keep Moving, became a key part of its advertising. True to its motto, Brambles kept moving through the decades, particularly as the world around it rapidly changed at the turn of the 20th century. The company acquired two steam lorries in 1911, motor trucks during World War I and became a truck and bus distributor in the 1920s. In 1925 the W.E. Bramble & Sons was incorporated as a private company, and began operating as carriers, materials handlers, street cleaning and earth moving contractors, customs and shipping agents, automotive engineers, motor distributors, real estate investors, stevedoring contractors, colliery proprietors, quarry masters, royal mail contractors and demolition contractors.
By the time Walter Bramble died in 1930, W. E. Brambles & Sons Pty Ltd was a diversified business with considerable real estate assets, leaving it in a better position to face the Great Depression than many other businesses.
Walter was survived by his four children, with his wife having died in 1926.
Source: Obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald, 25 June 1930
