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49 High St, 1887
Number 49 High Street stands on original Town Lot 106 (up to its western boundary). In 1834, Anthony Curtis's Stag's Head Inn was on this lot. Original town lots in this part of High St were each half of one block of the street. This building is sometimes discussed as if it were part of the Ajax Building, but it is a much earlier building than that.
Hooper's building still exists in 2024, currently as two small shopfronts. The eastern was, until early 2024, a design shop called Compendium; in about July 2024 the Otis and Mave cafe opened there (no relation to the characters in the Netflix series Sex Education; it's named after the owner and her dog — or rather the dog first). The western shop has been the David Giles Art Gallery for many years.
Probably none of the buildings shown in the 1887 or 1888 photograph (at right, with the signwriting on the wall visible) between Hooper's building and the Town Hall still exists. To the left of the Hooper building now stands the group known as the Ajax Building (1899, at 51-59 High St) and to the right is now the Union Stores building.
Heritage Council:
According to National Trust assessment documentation, the original town lot 106 ... was the site of the [[../hotels/stagshead.html|Stag's Head Inn]] from 1834. Extensive research by City of Fremantle Local History staff in 2013 shows that No 49 was built in 1887, and Nos 51-59 was built by 1899. No. 49 appears in the rate books as a new building in 1887 (originally No 69). It was for William Hooper, business, watchmaker, jeweller and optician. He had earlier established himself in the same line of business in Barrack Street in 1881. ... An early photograph (c. 1888, appearing in Dorothy Erickson's Gold and silversmithing in Western Australia, p 54 [part of which appears above] shows that Hooper’s business was in a stand-alone, two storey building with verandahs and balcony, with wrought iron Federation Filigree details. Heritage Council.
Frontage of Hooper's shop in Barrack St Perth, perhaps giving an idea of what his Fremantle shop might have looked like.
Google Maps image of 49 High St c. 2015.
Library:
John T. Lyons was a signwriter. Here he is painting a sign for William Hooper, a watchmaker and jeweller in High Street from 1881 to 1940/41. Mr Hooper supplied and installed the Town Hall clock, which arrived from England aboard the SS Port Darwin on 4 April 1888. Ref. no. 2182, n.d.
References and Links
Heritage Council of WA
Many thanks to Franc Koning, owner of 49 High Street, for information about the Hooper Building and about Lot 106 generally, including the [[../hotels/stagshead.html|Stag's Head Inn]], which was the first building on that site.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 9 March, 2016 and hosted at freotopia.org/buildings/hooper.html (it was last updated on 28 December, 2023), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.