 |
| THE TAMAR HOTEL |
Well, thought this one would be
easy....silly me. Today this building houses Boag's Visitor's Centre
in William Street, Launceston. A sensible person would probably stop
there however.......
After much looking, the history of the
building is still as clear as mud, but I'll go with it anyway if only
to illustrate the issues that one can find when trying to research
the history of Launceston pubs.
It is important to be aware that
various hotels operated under the same name at different locations.
Occasionally this was co incidence, but more often the licensee
changed establishments and took the name with them. Street numbers
weren't commonly used and thus even when you've pinned down the
street, the specific location within it can't be assumed (although at
least if its on a corner it narrows the location down to four
possibilities). Hotels can be rebuilt or modified to such a degree
that the existent building bears little, if any resemblance to the
original structure. In the past, as much, if not more so than today,
typos happened – sometimes newspaper reports give incorrect
locations. These are just some of the things that can obscure the
facts.
According to Wikipedia: “The Lame Dog
Hotel (later known as the Tamar Hotel) was constructed in 1826 and by
the 1930s the Georgian style building had become one of Launceston's
most notable hotels. George Radford and his family operated the hotel
for 26 years. The building was restored to house the Boag's Centre
for Beer Lovers.”
An address by E Whitfield recollecting
the early days of Launceston and reported in The Examiner on
6th February 1897, however claims that the Tamar Hotel was
once known as the Golden Lion and before that as the Sawyers Arms.”
and that “at the foot of George Street there was a ferry and near
that ferry stood another public house. It was named the Lame
Dog.” In other words the Lame Dog and Tamar Hotel were different
places.
Whitfield may, however, have been
mistaken, as in 1836, Antonio Martini had a hotel called the Sawyers
Arms which, depending on which licensing report you read was either
on the corner of Tamar and Cameron Street or Tamar and Brisbane
Street. (The block may have been big enough to span both adresses?)
A letter of complaint about the state
of the road written in 1838 suggests that the Lame Dog was located in
William Street between Tamar and George Street.
In September 1831, a license was issued
to George Radford for an un named hotel in William Street. The
license for the Golden Lion in William Street, passed from him to his
son (also named George) in December 1841. An advertisement placed
for the hotel in this month refers to it as a “newly erected
premises” - hardly true if the building was already ten years old.
So was the hotel rebuilt, renovated, moved to another location in the
street, or was George just “talking it up?”
At this time, and until at least the
mid 1860s, there was a Tamar Hotel, located on the eastern side of
the river some nine miles from the centre of Launceston.
When Alf Turner, previously of the
Burnie Coffee Palace, took possession of the William Street Tamar
Hotel in 1901, he described it as “once known as the Golden Lion”.
This would tend to suggest that it had still been known as such in
relatively recent times, however in 1874 Benjamin Crow applied for a
new licence to operate the Tamar Hotel in William Street, and there
was an 1872 report of a fire that began in the stables of “Bank's
Tamar Hotel” in William Street,(which destroyed three cottages and
damaged others). Might the name have been switched from one building
to another in the same street?
Well I don't know if I've confused you,
but I've certainly confused myself. I'm sure the mystery of how many
hotels were involved, and exactly where it/they were located and how
this relates to the Boags visitor's centres, and precisely which year
this was built can be solved with further research. One day if the
time pixies give me a few more hours in the day I might put in the
effort!
