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continued to reach Lome by sea. Cobb S Co set up a coach service in opposition to the
Mountjoys in 1878, but it was abandoned seven years later.
Deans Marsh, a sparse collection of huts and farmers' homes, became the coaches' halfway
house, and later on, a depot. The village centred on John Ball's grocery store, set up in 1874 at
a road junction on the 69 acres of land he had purchased six years earlier. Anticipating an
increase in the tourist trade, he built a hotel in 1878 adjoining the store, and a stables. The latter
were pulled down in 1933, ten years after the hotel closed down. The last horse-drawn coaches
ran in 1921. It was in Deans Marsh that the opera singer, Marjorie Lawrence, was born, in
1908.
The heyday of Mountjoys' coaches was in the 1880s. Every day 90 horses were fed at the
Deans Marsh stables and half as many accommodated overnight. 80 coach passengers could be
catered for at one time, each paying 18 pence for lunch at Bell's Hotel. There were enough
coaches on the road to seat 120 passengers every day. In 1879, the Mountjoy and Cobb & Co
coaches would meet the 9.30 am train at Winchelsea. Later, when the coaches met train-
travellers at Birregurra, the journey to Lome was cut from 12 hours to four; from Deans Marsh
the journey took three hours. Smaller three-horse coaches were used in the winter months. In
the summer, six-horse teams pulled coaches over the Otways containing as many as 25 people.
The Mountjoys now ran a mail coach daily in the summer, and thrice a week in wintertime.
It was a slow journey from Deans Marsh - it was actually quicker to walk all the way - and
occasionally, when rain and mud slowed a coach down altogether, passengers had to get out
and push. As the coaches toiled up and down the forested hills, much depended on the drivers'
skills and the efficiency of the brakes. But these excitements and the natural beauty of the
Otways gave the journey a special zest, and sometimes the passengers sang as they went.
One wrote: The road is beyond dispute one vast panorama of ever-changing gorgeous scenery.
Fern gullies can be seen away down to the right or left, and presently a glimpse of the sea
becomes visible ahead of us. It is the light green water of Louttit Bay and of the wide Pacific'
So it was that Lome became 'the fashionable watering-place' and the popular seaside resort it is
today, through the initiative and enterprise of the Mountjoys, the first permanent settlers of
Lome.
By 1888, when the first lamp-posts were erected and a telephone exchange installed in
Mountjoy Parade, Erskine House, enlarged, could accommodate 150 visitors. By then, Caleb
Mountjoy, whose homestead now was at Yan Yan Gurt, owned 4,045 acres of grazing land in
the parish of Bambra, and Thomas had over 4,000 acres near Echuca.
In 1888, Thomas's eldest son, William Allin Mountjoy, born in 1857, became a shire councillor,
as did his brother Edgar later on. They, and Caleb's surviving son, Edmund, inherited the family
businesses and most of the land. But not Erskine House. That was sold to a syndicate in 1889
for £40,000.
Councillor WA Mountjoy, JP, later became President of the Winchelsea Shire. In June 1920, a
train containing the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII)
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stopped at Winchelsea Station for 10 minutes. Schoolchildren, not Thomas Mountjoy, sang for
him on his arrival - although it was Councillor Mountjoy's honour to present the royal visitor
with an Address of Welcome.
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