39 William Street

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 6^th 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!