04/09/2026
Leonora Glass was one of Newcastle’s great old manufacturing names, a glassworks that grew out of the old Lambton Colliery site after the pit shut down. It was started in 1947 by three Czech glassmakers, Joseph and Henry Vecera and Josef Tvrdik, along with a manager named David Marr. They’d come to Australia before the war as trained glassblowers and had been making light globes and radio valves during it, so when peace came they decided to go out on their own. The factory opened its doors on 15 August 1947, mostly turning out tableware, though its very first big contract was an order for 100,000 glass chimneys for kerosene fridges.
A fire wiped the place out in July 1957. Rather than fold, the owners picked up and moved to Douglas Street in Wallsend, and had the furnaces running again within three weeks, which says a fair bit about the people involved. Philips bought the business in 1960 and steered it towards light fittings, and through the seventies it was a proper going concern, close to 200 workers, exporting product all over the world.
It couldn’t survive the shift to cheap overseas labour though, and Philips pulled out just before Christmas in 1982. A few of the old staff tried to keep a small operation going in Hamilton afterwards, but it folded within a couple of years despite some government help.
For a lot of Novocastrians, Leonora is remembered less for the business side and more for the spectacle of it, generations of schoolkids taken through to watch the glassblowers work molten glass on the end of a blowpipe.
