An Aussie Legend to Pie For - Free Version
📍 Dad and Dave’s Milk Bar, Beehive Building, Bendigo
They say history is written by the victors — but in Bendigo, it was piped into pastry and hurled steaming into the open mouths of post-war Australia. And the man doing the hurling? Just a flour-dusted madman named Leslie Thompson McClure — baker, inventor, and the patron saint of heartburn.
Les didn’t just rewrite the rules of fast food. He torched the rulebook, rolled it in beef mince, lathered it in margarine, and sealed it inside a golden shell of flaky pastry. Forget the flag. Forget Waltzing Matilda. This was our true national emblem: Four’N Twenty Pies, a scalding, gravy-laden meat missile. Sauce-optional but socially required.
But before the empire, there was Dad & Dave’s — a Bendigo milk bar tucked into the Beehive Building like a snack-size shrine to working-class worship. The décor was murals. The house special: pineapple crush so cold it burned your fillings. Chips hissed in brown paper like they knew the end was coming. You thought you were ordering lunch. What you were really doing was joining a revolution — one pie at a time.
Les started out like any other dairy farmer turned wartime entrepreneur: broke, hungry, and up to his elbows in ambition. He baked from scratch. Lugged supplies. Filled pastries by hand. This wasn’t just meat in a crust — it was survival disguised as comfort food.
Then one day, somewhere between the bombs and the blackouts, Les had a vision. He came up with something called the “Dad ’n Dave” pie. But soon, he gave it a new name — lifted straight from a nursery rhyme remembered from every Aussie childhood:
Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie.
He ditched the birds, doubled the beef, and invented a pie that could survive the apocalypse — or at least a footy match. The Four’n Twenty was born. And the nation never looked back.
MINCE MEETS DOUGH
His pies exploded in popularity. By 1949, Les had taken his pies on the road — all the way to the Royal Melbourne Show. And this wasn’t some small-time country bake sale. This was industrialised meal prep. An edible blitzkrieg.
His dining hall didn’t say “Welcome.” It said: EAT IT AND BEAT IT.
And mate, they did.
The crowds came in droves. Punters shoved past grandmothers for a shot at the Bain-marie. Bookies laid bets while inhaling pastry and peas. Les wasn’t just feeding people — he was feeding an era. A machine-era. He built a dining room so mechanised it could plate 30 three-course meals a minute. Pies flew down the line like munitions. A whole generation of schoolkids grew up thinking “waiting for food” was a foreign concept.
Les wasn’t a cook. He was Henry Ford with a meat thermometer. A pastry pioneer. A logistical lunatic. By 1956, he’d built a factory in Ascot Vale that could pump out 1000 dozen pies an hour. By 1960, his pie fleet was 98 vans deep, delivering molten parcels of national identity to every petrol station, stadium, and sticky-floored milk bar of Victoria.
He employed an army of in-house sign writers, artists ready at a moments notice to whip up an ad and keep milk bars across the state papered in pie propaganda.
Then came the pie nights. Legendary events. At footy clubs across Victoria, men with nicknames like “Butcher,” “Drongo,” and “Gorgeous Gorging George” faced off in eating contests that left spectators horrified — and competitors traumatised. While some of these blokes pigging out on pastries emerged victorious, others were one step away from needing to have their stomachs pumped.
And then — poof. Sold it all in 1960 to Peters Ice Cream. Just like that. The empire passed into corporate hands like a sacred scroll sold at a garage sale. The brand lurched through decades of mergers, takeovers, and overseas buyouts. American hands. Asian equity firms. Local pie manufacturing gone full late-stage capitalism.
And yet — somehow — the flavour stayed. Like meat memory.
THE PIE IN THE SKY
At the Showgrounds, Les didn’t just sell pies. He sold a vision — a pie-fuelled future of speed, satisfaction, and gravy on demand. They built the “Pie in the Sky” — a high-tech gastronomic utopia where you could place a bet, eat a four-course meal, and still make it to the cattle judging.
It was mass catering on a scale no one had dared before. Conveyor belts. Rotating tray wheels. 100 staff serving 65,000 meals in nine days. It wasn’t food. It was war-time logistics turned lunch. One Herald reporter wrote it with awe: “Each tray revolved like a roulette wheel. You didn’t eat so much as surrender.”
The Showgrounds dining hall was ground zero for Les’s culinary megalomania — and it worked. Every pie was hot, every punter fed. If you left hungry, it was your own damn fault for being too slow off the mark.
THE PIE AS PROPAGANDA
They’ll tell you pies are “working-class.” Footy food. Hangover food. Servo food.
Don’t buy it.
The meat pie is not a joke. It’s not a snack. It’s a cultural battering ram — one that sneaks up on you at 3am with a flaky grin and a steaming mince-filled centre.
It’s classless. It’s truffle-slicked in Double Bay. It’s frozen in four-packs in Footscray. It’s served in bespoke ramekins by chefs with sleeve tattoos and French accents. But it still tastes like home.
Even the culinary elite can’t escape its gravitational pull. Wagyu oyster blade. Braised rabbit and juniper. Snapper and truffle. Still a pie. Still Aussie. Still Les.
LES DIED IN 1966. THE PIE DIDN’T.
He shuffled off this gravy-soaked mortal coil on St Kilda Road, presumably with a pie in each pocket and a sauce-stained ledger of profits clutched in his cold, dead hand. But the Four’n Twenty? Still steaming. Still strutting. Still squelching out of hotboxes and microwaves like a golden god of processed nationalism.
There’s no headstone big enough to contain what Les built. No plaque that can explain why every servo, stadium, and school canteen smells vaguely of his legacy. All we’ve got is the taste. And the stories. And the quiet groan of indigestion that tells you: that was worth it.
Next time you bite into a Four’n Twenty — tongue scorched and blistered from the molten meat inside — raise your tongs to Les McClure, the pastry prophet of Pall Mall. The man who stared into the abyss of hunger and pulled out a product line. Who looked at a humble milk bar and imagined a factory the size of a football field.
He didn’t just bake a pie.
He built a goddamn legacy.
And mate — it’s still warm.
Beautifully penned Sean! Four ‘n’ Twenty Pies sit proudly aside other Aussie icons such as Kangaroos, Emus, Galahs, Dim Sims to name just afew. What was Saturday's footy match with that hot meat and gravy burning a season punter's mouth and chin. The detail in your words is worth bottling! Thanks for the history!