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Mrs Pace's Hotel/Boarding House
1830s, Lot 45 & 46, 25 High Street & Mouat Street.
Elizabeth Fennie (1792-1874) married Captain Walter Pace of the East India Company. He had arrived as the master of the immigrant ship Medina in 1830, and probably returned to England with her, as he arrived again, apparently as an immigrant himself, on the Ann, in 1832. His wife travelled here independently, arriving in 1834 on the Quebec Trader.
He was granted Lot 45 & 46, High Street & Mouat Street, probably in 1832, and built a stone house on Lot 45 (see the map below). At some point, probably after Elizabeth's arrival, it was decided to trade there as a hotel. The site has had a hotel on it ever since, making it the oldest hotel site in Fremantle.
Clip from an 1844 Chauncy map redrawn 1983 by Campbell shows the Paces establishment on the corner of High and Mouat Streets. According to Coralie Solomon, the 'garden' shown on the plan was a 'stockyard'in 1870.
Mrs Pace's hotel was called the Crown and Thistle by Alexander Francisco 1840-44 when he leased the premises from her. It became Mrs Scott's Victoria Hotel in the 1870s. After her death, the owner and licensee of the Victoria Hotel was (in 1888 for example) Patrick Hagan, who died in 1891. He left his estate to his brother James, (who is the licensee named in the PO directory of 1893) who sold both his hotels (the other was the National) in 1893, and went to the WA goldfields.
Francisco took the name Crown and Thistle with him to a new establishment on Lot 61 in High Street. Also known as Wellard's Hotel, it was on the site of what is now the Cleopatra Hotel.
The Victoria Hotel was sold again in 1898 and rebuilt as the P&O Hotel, completed 1901.
David Hutchison:
Architects: Cavanagh and Cavanagh (1890s), Allen and Nicholas (1930s)
On the south-east corner at 25 High Street, on the site of an earlier small hotel owned by the Pace family. After the death of Mrs Pace—whose husband Captain Pace had died earlier—this hotel was managed by Ms Scott and Pat[rick] Hagan and named the Victoria, although sailors who frequented it called it the 'Cockpit'.
References and Links
as above
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 15 June, 2023 and hosted at freotopia.org/hotels/pace.html (it was last updated on 29 November, 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.