The Race Horse Inn ('Racehorse' in Graham; but Hitchcock, 1919, writes it as two words - and he stayed in it in 1869) was on Lot 125 Leake Street. The previous property on that Lot, from 1833, was known as the Plough Hotel, and the later one was probably in the same building – on the third lot from the corner of Leake and Market Streets. Joseph Cooper was the licensee of the Plough until 1835, when he became a farmer in the Murray district. Anthony Cornish was the first licensee of the Race Horse: he was Cooper's son-in-law, having married his daughter, Rebecca. He handed it over to his brother-in-law, Nicholas Paterson, no later than 1854.
The cropped image at right from an 1891 panorama shows the corner of Market and Leake Streets in the bottom righthand corner, i.e. Lot 127, with John Jarvis's greengrocer's store on it. The two-storey building, two to the left of the store, is likely to be the Race Horse Inn, on Lot 125. In an 1899 panorama there is no building visible after the first two, so the Race Horse had been euthenised by then.
The 'same' photo in Hitchcock (1929) is captioned THE TOWN AND RIVER BAR IN 1876 (below).
Hitchcock 1919:
I made my first acquaintance with Fremantle late on a summer’s afternoon in the year 1868. I did not obtain my first glimpse of the ‘Golden Gate’ from the deck of a palatial ocean liner, but from the top of a load of hay, whereon I had been perched since the grey dawn of morning. It was in these prosaic circumstances that I bade farewell to my country home, where I saw the light thirteen years previously. My first night in my new environment was spent under the roof of the old ‘Race Horse’ Hotel in [[../streets/leake.html|Leake-street]], which stood on portion of the site now occupied by the [[../cinemas/princess.html|Princess Theatre]].
Tuckfield 1971:
In 1854, just before Paterson opened [the Freemasons Hotel] he was the licensee of the Race Horse Tavern which was advertised as having 10 rooms, weatherboard dwelling, wine cellars etc., stables for 10 horses, spacious hay lofts, etc. Later it was announced that T. Prosser (well-known in Fremantle) 'has taken over the Race Horse in Leake Street with store attached'.
[[../people/yelvertonhenry.html|Henry Yelverton]] was the licensee of the Race Horse Inn at one point .
Graham:
The Racehorse stood at Lot 125 Leake Street, and Tuckfield described it as a weatherboard two-storey house with ten rooms, wine cellar, good stabling and haylofts and it was one of the principal buildings in the street at the time. The hotel can be seen in a photograph of Fremantle taken in the early 1890s. Even though the Western Australian Government Gazette had not named the Racehorse Hotel, it had opened in January and the Inquirer told of this in the same paper that reported on the death of Curtis. The paper told how ‘The opening of the new tavern, in the occupation of Mr Cornish, was conducted in a most quiet and orderly manner: it is a fine spacious house, and well adapted for the purpose.’
This was not the first time this building had been used as a hotel, for years earlier it had traded as the Plough when it was run by Joseph Cooper. This may have been why the building was again being used as a hotel, for Cornish had married Cooper’s daughter, Rebecca. The hotel may have come into Cornish’s ownership through a family inheritance, for Joseph Cooper had been killed in a cart accident at Woodman Point in 1847. This meant that Cornish was now in competition with his brother-in-law John Thomas at the Southern Cross, as Rebecca Cornish was the sister of Elizabeth Thomas.
Cornish did not run the hotel for long, and in April 1853 he advertised that he had relinquished it to Nicholas Paterson.
The Race Horse Inn is not connected with the convict ship Racehorse, as that arrived in Fremantle in 1865, well after the establishment of the pub.
References and Links
Graham, Allen 2023, Inns and Outs of Fremantle: A Social History of Fremantle and its Hotels 1829-1856, Xlibris.
Robertson, J.R. 1976, Yelverton, Henry (1821-1880), ADB.
Tuckfield, Trevor 1971, 'Early colonial inns and taverns', Early Days: Journal and proceedings of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, 7, 3: 65-82; Part 2, Early Days: Journal and proceedings of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, 7, 7: 98-106.
Historical Panoramas: Curtin/SLWA 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 19 September, 2014 and hosted at freotopia.org/hotels/racehorse.html (it was last updated on 30 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.