Meanwhile in Melbourne, the Edward Beale juggernaut was gaining momentum.
Beale
opened his first salon in 1968 and, until 1976, when fellow Melbourne
stylist John Morrey followed suit by dispensing with the dryers and
shampoo-and-set clients, was the only new player. Beale opened up his
training school and started sending people over to London to learn the
Sassoon technique off The Master himself. They’d return and work in the
school – “A bit like a pyramid”, describes Beale. As Perth's Maurice Meade says, "I didn't have enough money to go to London so I would catch the midnight flight to Melbourne to do Edward and John's courses and then come back and implement what I thought would work in Perth to suit our market."
In 1975 Rob Hastie graduated from the Melbourne College of Hairdressing and Beauty Culture, after struggling with the constraints of an antiquated and uninspiring teaching regimen. “Edward was new and fresh. I was allowed to attend training sessions at the Edward Beale salons and I could see the kind of hairdresser I wanted to become, not the way they were teaching me at the Melbourne College,” he says.
Paul Whitehead was also attracted to Beale’s professional panache. He finally landed a job with Beale and said he’d never experienced anything like it. “The music was so loud you couldn’t talk to people but I felt like I was home.” Whitehead carved a niche for himself as a colourist for Beale and says, “I was the only one who knew how to fix the mistakes.” At the South Yarra ‘Yellow Submarine’ salon, Whitehead trained 38 colourists over 18 months. They were all female except for one. “The men just couldn’t cope with the pressure,” he says.
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Whitehead adds that the Beale salons were the first to do foil
highlights in Australia in 1973.
“Everybody takes foils for granted
today,” says Beale. “But we brought Daniel Galvin out from London and
trained a couple of hundred hairdressers. When we first did them in the
salon people would come back and say they didn’t work because they
didn’t have the obvious stripes you got from the old cap.”
Beale
also organised the legendary Leonard of Mayfair tour complete with
Zandra Rhodes gowns and the latest colour trend: henna. Whitehead
learnt how to use the dye, taking methods from both Daniel Galvin and
Anne Humphreys to push it that bit further. “Using henna we could get
blue and green flashes onto the hair just by timing how long we left it
on the hair.”
Whitehead also helped Beale formulate his EB
product range in 1974 which was originally meant to carry the VS logo.
“Vidal had asked me to put together his product range for Australia,”
recounts Beale. “Surprisingly, the decision to launch here was
overturned. I rang Vidal at home and he said, ‘Well, you’ve got it all
there so if we don’t do it, why don’t you?’ and it’s still around
today.”
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