CHAPTER ONE
THE EARLY YEARS
Bird Cameron began practice on 27th March, 1922 as The National Service Company. The founder, Edgar Robert Woolcott, later known as “Bill” and in the firm as “ERW” or “the old man”, was born in Sydney on the 30th of December 1887. He was the third child of Thomas and Ruth Woolcott. His father, a draper, was born in Devon UK and his mother was born in Brisbane, Queensland. The family moved to Western Australia in approximately 1897 and Bill was brought up on a station in the North West, where he learnt a lot of practical skills. He joined the services at the outbreak of the Great War and spent most of the next four years overseas as a Quartermaster with the Australian Army but before departing from Australia he married Jessie Mauger in 1915. Jessie was born in Jersey in the Channel Islands. An important requirement of being a Quartermaster is to be good at record-keeping and ERW seems to have excelled at this. Exhibiting a flair not only for record keeping but also skills in organisation and delegation he devised a recording system so that his deputy could properly maintain the records thus freeing him of the obligation of being present at all times. The installation of an efficient but simple business recording system was to be the principal service offered by the new firm. The war ended and he was discharged in 1918. He spent a few months in Sydney and then he and Jessie came to Western Australia. He got a job working for a firm called “WA Taxpayers” which involved selling a simple system of books for three guineas ($6.30) cash. He was a natural salesman and was particularly successful in selling the bookkeeping system to farmers and small storekeepers. He covered the state by horse and sulky. A typical day would be: Arrived at 5pm at a farm -milked two cows and killed a sheep sold a system and stayed the night. After about three years on the road for WA Taxpayers, at the age of 34, he made the big decision to start out on his own. He rented a room in the old AMP Chambers on the comer of St Georges Terrace and William Street Perth, formed a partnership with his wife, registered the name “The National Service Company” and
commenced operations on Monday, 27th March 1922. The division of work was simple. ERW travelled around the city and country among the clients doing the books and bringing in the fees while Mrs Woolcott attended to the typing and general office work. The recording system ERW had devised as a Quartermaster during the war was further developed and no doubt the favourable aspects of the WA Taxpayers system were incorporated and there finally emerged the “Business System” of The National Service Company. On the 25th of June 1924 the Commonwealth Registrar of Copyrights registered E.R. Woolcott as the “Owner of the copyright in a literary work viz., a book entitled ‘The National Business Service for Business Men”’. This, together with a type of self-balancing spreadsheet known as the B 10/11 was the mainstay of the firm’s accounting service for small business people and farmers for many years. While the recording system was the basis of the service, taxation was also important. Note that the occupation of the firm as registered in March, 1922 was “Accountants and Taxation Experts”. As Government expanded so did taxation and increasingly people, whether in business or employed, were being drawn into the taxation net and required the firm to advise on this subject. Soon there was too much work for Mr. Woolcott to handle on his own and in September, 1925 he engaged Alex Redmond, an accountant, followed in February, 1926 by Percy Paull to assist with the marketing and promotion and in July, 1926 Bill Keene, another accountant. Bill completed forty-one years’ service with the firm, retiring in October 1967. The year 1927 saw the start of a period of rapid expansion. Percy Paull and Bill Woolcott were bringing in a steady flow of new clients. Accountants Bob Thorn, Percy Johnson and Arthur Greaves were engaged and on the support side, Connie Glasson, the first female staff member, started in February, 1927 as assistant to Mrs. Woolcott followed the same month by Delphi Steadman a senior typist and in March, Belle Edmonds as secretary to Mr. Woolcott. That year also marked the beginning of a more structured approach to handling the country work. Instead of a party of accountants visiting a specific town or area and then returning to Perth before heading out in another direction a start was made 100 years of successful connections
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