The claim
A long settler inn on the Kowie Road at Bathurst, built by Thomas Hartley, a Nottinghamshire blacksmith who came out with the 1820 settlers and raised a forge and a house here. The inn beside it is dated 1832 by the house and 1821 by the architectural record, which also names a different man as the first licensed innkeeper. Airmen from a nearby wartime flying school gave it the name it carries now.
What the records show
The inn calls itself the oldest continuously licensed pub in South Africa, and its own history is the fullest account traced: Thomas Hartley, a blacksmith from Nottinghamshire, came out with the 1820 settlers, built a forge and a house in Bathurst in the early 1820s, and by 1832 had opened an inn beside the forge. A second and independent account disagrees with that year and with part of the story. The architectural record kept by Artefacts dates the house to 1821 and says it was meant as an inn from the start, with subscription rooms for gentlemen; it names John Jarman, chosen in September 1820 to keep an inn at Bathurst, rather than Hartley, and it disputes the widely repeated name Bathurst Arms, holding that those references belong to another house since destroyed. It also gives the earlier name Peg and Wassail. English Wikipedia dates the building to 1821 as well. No licence, deed or directory has been read behind any of these years, so the grade stays at C, and the later date is the one this page records because it is the one the house itself puts on the inn rather than on the smithy. The building is a declared provincial heritage site, proclaimed a national monument on 20 October 1989. Whether a visitor may drink without eating is not in doubt: the house advertises bar hours of ten in the morning to one at night and a whisky bar at weekends.
What to look for inside
- Painted in oils by the explorer and artist Thomas Baines in 1849, by the inn's account
- Named the Pig and Whistle by airmen from the wartime flying school nearby; it traded before that as the Bathurst Inn
Visiting
Pig and Whistle Inn is in Bathurst, South Africa, at 268 Kowie Road, Bathurst, Eastern Cape. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.
Sources
- www.pigandwhistle.co.za/index.php/history
- www.pigandwhistle.co.za/index.php/pub
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathurst,_South_Africa
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heritage_sites_in_Eastern_Cape
- www.artefacts.co.za/main/Buildings/bldgframes.php?bldgid=4523
Know something we don’t?Suggest a correctionLast checked Sept 2026
Run this pub? There is a badge for it
Free to put on your own site, no permission needed. It shows what the pub claims and what the records support, and it changes when the data does.
How to use it, and how to change what it says — if you have a document we have not seen, we would like to read it.
