Written by Peter Wilmoth.

The Perseverance Hotel at 196 Brunswick Street Fitzroy is a local icon with a history dating back to 1865 when Stephen Richard Church first established a hotel at this site. It has traded continuously as a hotel since.

In 1868 it was taken over by Martha Morris who renamed it Roserea Hotel. It also for a time went by the name of Roscrea Hotel. At some point it reverted to its original name.

In 1911 the original building was demolished and a new one constructed for the Carlton United Brewing Company. It is likely that it was designed by Mr. Weaver, the Brewery’s architect, as the tower bears the initials C.B. as part of the decorations. The building was altered in 1954 and again in 1960. Around this time the three-storey addition to the east was constructed.

Heritage surveys tell us that the hotel was designed by the architectural firm Sydney Smith and Ogg, who also designed the nearby Bendigo Hotel on Johnston Street, and the Sir Robert Peel Hotel on Peel Street, both of which share the distinctive turreted or towered design which has made the Perseverance Hotel a prominent feature of Brunswick Street.

The Yarra Library’s Past Port tells us that many other landmark hotels in the City of Yarra were designed by this firm, including the Terminus Hotel in Clifton Hill, and the extensions to the Grace Darling Hotel on Smith Street, as well as the Abbotsford Brewery in Richmond.

Just outside the boundary of the city, Fitzroy is Melbourne’s oldest suburb, and Brunswick Street, which dates from the 1840s, is therefore one of Melbourne’s oldest suburban streets.

Brunswick Street is of outstanding historical significance, establishing itself as Fitzroy’s pre-eminent shopping strip rivalling Bourke Street in the central city.

A local Heritage Survey tells us about businesses in the suburb when The Perseverance first opened. By 1864, both Brunswick Street and Gertrude Street in South Fitzroy, and to a lesser extent Smith Street, Victoria Parade and the south end of Napier and Fitzroy Streets, were home to a range of small businesses including an ironmonger, an undertaker, a musical academy, an upholsterer, a butcher, a seed store, two milliners, a stationer, a fancy repository, a dressmaker, a staymaker, a fruiterer, two drapers, a warehouse a hatter, a chemist, a grocer, and a butcher.

The survey reported: “Development of the street was virtually complete by the turn of the century, at which time a number of the original buildings were being replaced. These included the Perseverance Hotel (No. 196), which was built in 1911 for the Carlton Brewing Company, which had purchased the earlier (1865) hotel on the site.” The report noted the pub’s “unusual Dutch-style gabled west facade, and a prominent corner tower.”

The style of the buildings along Brunswick Street – including The Perseverance – reflects the pride and aspiration locals felt about this developing thoroughfare.

Th survey noted: “(Brunswick Street) contains a number of individually significant hotels, shops and other commercial buildings, some of which contain residences at the upper level(s), and which predominantly date from the late 19th century. In some instances their size is testimony to the success and aspirations of the people who traded and shopped in Brunswick Street.”

In her 1971 study Hotels in Fitzroy up to 1906, Nicola A. Piccola noted The Perseverance’s Art Nouveau style. “Certainly the most successful adaptation of Art Nouveau ideas to a hotel building in Fitzroy with its projecting curved tower on which a whole series of decorative panels are carved around its perimeter; the conical roof of the tower reinforces this little gem of Art Nouveau work,” she wrote.

In 1979, the South Fitzroy Conservation Study noted: “The design of this hotel is almost identical to the Dan O’Connell on the corner of Alexandra Parade and Canning Street, Carlton, suggesting that the same architect was responsible for the design.”

It concluded: “This building provides an extremely important corner streetscape element and is of great importance locally.”

So what do we know about the daily events at the hotel, about the people who managed and frequented The Perseverance Hotel?

We gain a clue to this from newspaper reports of the era, mainly court reports relating to minor infringements, but these provide fascinating detail about the life within the hotel and its surrounds.

The Perseverance was one of many pubs in Fitzroy in the mid-late 1800s, and many of those were on Brunswick Street. These hotels underwent all the ups and downs of inner-city Melbourne over the second half of the 19th century including strong business during the heady, confident, post-gold rush days of Marvellous Melbourne in the 1880s and then a decline during the depression of the 1890s.

The pubs of Fitzroy also experienced the influence of the temperance movement of the 19th- and early 20th centuries. Temperance advocates regarded alcohol as a social evil and sought to have it banned or restricted. This movement helped instigate six o’clock closing of pubs, a disastrous policy introduced during World War One which led to men drinking as much as they could between work ending at five and the pub closing an hour later.

What of The Perseverance’s licensees over the years? Who ran the pub?

A notice in The Age on 31 October 1865 reported that “a licence for The Perseverance Hotel situated at the corner of Brunswick and Moor streets, was granted to Mr Stephen R. Church.”

Church stayed at the hotel for just a few years, but Margaret McSteen owned and ran the hotel for more than 30 years.

Running a pub in a street and suburb with a lot of competition and a reputation for being a “rough” area was a challenging role, and Mrs McSteen ran into trouble with the law on several occasions. They were mostly minor infringements that many publicans of the time experienced, such as having people on the premises after hours.

One such incident was reported in The Age on 20 November 1925. Headlined “Sunday Morning in a Fitzroy Hotel”, the article, which goes into some detail about the Sunday morning escapade, noted that “Margaret McStein [with a different spelling], licensee of the Perseverance Hotel… was charged before Mr Conlon at the local court with having had persons on the premises during prohibited hours of trading”.

The newspaper report gives us a good flavour of that morning. Two policemen “deposed that at 9am on Sunday 15th September they had the hotel under observation. A side door was opened and the licensee looked out. The door was again shut. “Witness went round to the Brunswick Street door which he found open. He ran up the passage and when six feet from the door leading to the bar parlour noticed three men, followed by the licensee, running into the dining room. The three men smelt of liquor.

“In the bar a tap used for washing glasses was running and on the draining board were three glasses containing the dregs of beer.

“Three men charged with illegally being on the premises swore that they had gone to the hotel for breakfast.”

The story takes us right into the pub on that day, and includes a wonderfully implausible reason for the gentlemans’ attendance at that hour.

It wasn’t just the licensees who made the newspaper. Sometimes customers too came to grief with what seemed very minor infringements, as reported in The Argus on 12 October 1934 when Adam Whitling of Fitzroy Street, Fitzroy, was charged with “having registered in the lodger’s book of The Perseverance Hotel, Brunswick Street, an address other than his usual place of abode”.

Juggling the demands of running a busy hotel in the middle of a popular thoroughfare must have eventually become too much as Margaret McSteen lost her hotel licence.

In ‘Reflections of Fitzroy’ (published in 2008 by The University of Melbourne School of Historical Studies to commemorate the suburb’s 150-year anniversary), Edwina Byrne notes that Mrs McSteen’s record of infringements “hampered her attempts to reclaim the hotel licence”.

It sounds like it wasn’t for a lack of strong-minded, tough stewardship. Byrne quotes an un-named supporter writing that Margaret operated under difficult conditions. “Generally a rough type of customer frequents this locality in which this hotel is situated and very firm management is required.”

There were other minor incidents at the hotel which made the newspaper. Under the headline “Accused Tells a Plausible Story”, Horace Gajs, 29, a labourer of Oxford Street Collingwood, was charged with having stolen a bicycle from The Perseverance.

“The (accused) had made a wager that he could ride the bicycle around the block. While he was doing so he was intercepted by police.”

We learn from The Herald on 29 October 1901 that David Cowan, the hotel’s licensee, had been accused of trading on a Sunday, a common infringement of the late 1800s. “Albert Cawthon, brushmaker, gave evidence that he was served with “three-pennyworth of beer on Sunday the 20th.” (The licensee “swore that he did not serve Cawthon”).

The Perseverance Hotel today stands proudly on a very different Brunswick Street from the one in which Stephen Richard Church first proudly opened his new hotel 159 years ago. The pub will forever be a central part of the history of this famous street, and, as they made them to last back then, will be a much-loved part of its future.