Remember when: Popular Gold Coast couple Mr and Mrs Tom Nutta Singh lost house to fire

ON SATURDAY, Southport couple Mr and Mrs Tom Nutta Singh were the happiest people on the Gold Coast.

Gold Coast History: Gold Coast Bulletin 1969, July 16, Front page.

Gold Coast Bulletin, Wednesday July 16, 1969

ON SATURDAY, Southport couple Mr and Mrs Tom Nutta Singh were the happiest people on the Gold Coast.

Their second daughter, Rina Elizabeth, born on Thursday morning, had made their joy complete.

Jane Nutta Singh, a well-known personality on the Gold who previously owned the Taj Mahal Indian restaurant in Nerang Street, told the Bulletin: “I am the happiest woman in the world, I have a good husband, two beautiful children and a comfortable home. I have everything woman could want,” she said.

But on Sunday morning at 2.30am their house burned down.

Tom, who had been sleeping in a spare room-cum-ironing room, at the back of the house, after having spruced the place up for his wife’s return form hospital, awakened to find the house in flames.

Within half an hour the house which had recently been remodelled and redecorated, was completely gutted and all the furniture, bedding, clothes and personal effects were ashes.

Mr and Mrs Nutta Sing bought the house several years earlier after Mrs Nutta Singh completed her training as a nursing sister.

Meanwhile the Bulletin gave the Gold Coast City Council’s 1969 budget a passing mark declaring it was “in itself not such a bad document after all”.

“To the investment world it shows the Gold Coast is a favourable light and this is very important when it comes to stability for real estate and stimulus for building, which are mainstays in the development structure of the future,” it said.

“Certainly there are slugs in the budget which the Bulletin thinks shouldn’t be there.”