Rose & Crown Hotel, Guildford

The claim

A Georgian-style hotel in Guildford, the historic river town upstream from Perth, that claims to be Western Australia's oldest operating hotel, built in 1841. Set on two and a half leafy acres along Swan Street, it combines a beer garden, dining rooms and boutique accommodation, and in recent years has won state hospitality awards.

What the records show

Western Australia's heritage record for the place says Thomas Jecks moved to Guildford in 1839 to open a general store and in 1841 extended the business to include an inn he named the Rose and Crown, its buildings grouped in a U set back from the street and used as a public meeting place, for the Town Trust and for the court, in the absence of a public hall. Its description of the fabric puts most of what stands later: the two-storey Georgian block is about the 1850s, the east wing and stables the 1880s, and only the single-storey sections at the rear are believed to be Jecks's. The cellars under the 1860s section, brick-walled with round-arched doorways, hold a well said to have supplied the hotel's own brewing; the record adds that the truth of the tunnel story could only be settled by digging under the verandah. The place went on the State Register on 7 October 1997 and is graded of exceptional significance in the municipal inventory. Behind that summary sit the Heritage Council's assessment papers, compiled by the architect John Pidgeon and dated 7 October 1997, and they cite documents where the summary asserts a year. Jecks was assigned the allotment in March 1839, applied for the freehold in August 1840 and advertised a store on it in the Perth Gazette of 11 July 1840; the first contemporary use of the name Rose and Crown the assessor could find is a notice in the same paper on 12 March 1842, which is why he allows that the main building may have gone up in 1840 and not been worked as an inn until 1841. The plainest early record is an advertisement Jecks placed in the Inquirer of 9 October 1844, headed Rose and Crown Inn, Guildford, quoting breakfast, dinner and tea in the parlour and again in the tap, stabling by the day and by the night, and goods warehoused at half rate: a house serving drink and food over a counter, and the earliest record of that trade traced here. The papers carry it forward. Jecks died in 1856 and his widow and eldest son kept the inn on; a younger son, Walter, was barman in 1879 and licensee by about 1880; the house was called an inn until the 1870s and a hotel afterwards. They also speak to the awkward fact this page has been carrying. Paul Hasluck, writing in 1927, said the house had been delicensed the year before, which is 1926; the Heritage Council's assessor writes that the licence was withdrawn in 1924 and that the place was still run as a private hotel. The two are three years apart, neither cites the licensing court, and nothing traced here records when a licence came back. What can be said of today is that the house's own licence notice names a special facility licence, number 637003531, held by Markeptra Properties, rather than a hotel licence. So the claim to be Western Australia's oldest operating hotel is a claim about trade that kept going, and not yet a claim to one unbroken licence: the interruption in the 1920s is on the record twice, and its length is not. The rest comes from the historians gathered on Freotopia, Garry Gillard's compilation of Western Australian history, which names every author it quotes. Hasluck's article on Guildford between 1827 and 1842, in the journal of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, makes the Rose and Crown the town's fourth inn and has Jecks open it in July 1841, a month more than the register gives, though he wrote eighty-six years after the event and cited no licence. Jennie Carter's social history of Bassendean of 1986 has Jecks building the house up into a popular one from about 1840, as the Cleikum Inn lost its place as the township's first hostelry. Rica Erickson has William Steele holding the licence in 1846, the earliest licensee traced under a name. The same page sets this house's 1841 against the Albany Hotel's claim to 1835, a year earlier than the 1836 recorded here for that house.

Dated evidence for Rose & Crown Hotel, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1841	Claimed founding	The pub
1844	First record of a drinking house here	rosecrown.com.au

What to look for inside

Claims WA's oldest operating hotel (1841)
Local legend credits it with prompting construction of Guildford's gaol and courthouse

Visiting

Rose & Crown Hotel is in Guildford, Australia, at 105 Swan Street, Guildford WA 6055. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

rosecrown.com.au Directions in your maps app