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Rose & Crown Guildford
105 Swan Street
Claims to be oldest hotel still operating in WA, since 1841. The Albany Hotel claims to have been established in 1835, and therefore to be the oldest.
Hasluck:
A fourth inn—the Rose and Crown—was opened by Thomas Jecks in July, 1841. It stood on the same site in Swan-street as the building which was known as the Rose and Crown until its delicensing last year [1926]. Thomas Jecks had previously been associated with the Jones family at Woodbridge. Besides being one of the earliest inn-keepers he opened one of the first stores in the town. Hasluck 1927: 8.
The Rose and Crown in 1974
Carter:
By the beginning of the second decade of white settlement, the pattern of land usage at West Guildford was becoming more clearly defined. Few of the landowners lived on their properties, preferring io lease or rent them out if they were relatively large farms such as the Bassendean and Burner estates, or keeping them as investment blocks if they were the smaller villa or town lots. Even the Cleikum Inn was run by lessees (Smithers took it over in 1840) and had started to lose its position as the foremost hostelry in the township. The inn’s decline became further advanced after the Agricultural Society transferred its meetings to William Devenish’s inn in James Street Guildford in 1840 and Jecks built up the popular Rose and Crown hotel. Carter 1986: 49.
Erickson has William Steele as the licensee of the Rose and Crown in 1846.
Tunnel:
There is said to have been a tunnel from the cellar of the hotel, where there is also a well, to the river. The tunnel may have also been associated with the Padbury buildings just across Swan Street and then also with St Charles' Seminary, which is further along on the way to the river. The hotel entrance to the tunnel has been bricked up. There is no sign of where it might have debouched on the riverbank, due to radical changes in the landscape there.
References and Links
Bourke, Michael J. 1987, On the Swan: a History of Swan District, Western Australia, UWAP for the Swan Shire Council.
Carter, Jennie 1986, Bassendean: A Social History 1829-1979, Bassendean Town Council.
Hasluck, Paul 1927, 'Guildford: 1827-1842', Early Days, vol. 1, part 2: 1-19.
Tuckfield, Trevor 1971, 'Early colonial inns and taverns', Part 1, Early Days: Journal and proceedings of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, 7, 3: 65-82; Part 2, Early Days, 7, 7: 98-106.
Midland Kalamunda Reporter, 'The Rose and Crown: digging up hotel’s historic past', 30 November 2016.
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 22 August, 2020 and hosted at freotopia.org/hotels/rosecrownguildford.html (it was last updated on 13 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.