63 Gawler St, Gray’s Inn
Gray’s Inn was constructed in 1855 by Benjamin Gray (1809-1879), brewer, builder and surveyor of Blakiston. There were more than a dozen pubs, large and small, in the Mount Barker and Littlehampton district in the nineteenth century, and Gray’s Inn is one of only three survivors, along with the Mount Barker Hotel and the Great Eastern Hotel. In its first fifty years Gray’s Inn was enlarged in stages to become a grand Victorian hotel, and has now become a hotel complex with restaurant and bottle-shop.
The building has had many licensees over the years. The first, in 1855, was Richard Cornelius (1815-1874), who had formerly been the landlord at the Great Eastern. John Rundle (1815-1881) then held the license from 1859 to 1875 and purchased the building in 1873. The fact that the hotel’s name has never changed is at least partly due to the fact that it is based on a nineteenth-century pun: “Gray’s Inn” would have been familiar to many immigrants as the name of a well-known London-based legal institution, as well as meaning “Gray’s pub.” The double-meaning has stuck through several changes of ownership, despite its increasing obscurity.
The announcement of the railroad in the 1880s was a major social and economic event for Mount Barker, and particularly for the hotels. Gray’s Inn had the good fortune of being just a stone’s throw from the station, convenient for both day trippers and lodgers. In 1881 proprietor George Schunke announced that additions to the hotel, which included the addition of eleven new rooms, had been completed:
The new rooms are now ready for occupation; and having been constructed with due regard for thorough ventilation, and newly furnished throughout with every attention to comfort and convenience, they afford superior accommodation for families and visitors. Commercial Travelers will find their requirements have been specially catered for. . . . G.S. would call particular attention to the fact that every article in his cellar is of the best quality procurable.
The balcony with its cast-iron lace was added at this time.
As Gray’s Inn Hotel has expanded over the years it has absorbed its uphill neighbour, a former shop and residence that now forms part of the drive-in bottle shop. Happily, the intriguing little shop branded with “Mount Barker Store: 1883” has been allowed to retain its façade. Robert Ashley (1813-1883), an elderly ex-tailor from Clare, lived in the house on that site for about five years until 1882. He was not coping well, so he moved down to Mitcham to be cared for by friends. According to the Mount Barker Heritage Survey, the building appears to have originally been a symmetrical u-shaped villa which mirrored the form of the 1875 police station opposite. The right-hand side of the house (as viewed from the road) was converted to an attached shop in 1883, while the middle section of the house was lost when the bottle shop was put through.
In 1882 the empty house was used as a temporary studio for travelling photographers producing “ferrotype,” or “tintype” portraits:
LAMING AND KENNY, PHOTOGRAPHERS, propose being in Mount Barker about the end of the present month, and they will then introduce a new and life-like method of Portraiture, called the Ferrotype. . . . Their work will all be carried out in the best possible style, and at prices hitherto unprecedented. As the pictures are completed in a few minutes the customers are not kept waiting, but can take them away at the time.
In the same year, Laming and Kenny took their portrait service to Laura, Gladstone and Port Adelaide.
In 1883 draper James Pritchard (1831-1917) bought the house, presumably when his lease expired up the road (see 23-23a Gawler Street). It would have been Pritchard who converted the eastern end of the house to the “Mount Barker Store,” while retaining the remainder as a residence. There were several drapers active in Gawler Street at the time, and Pritchard gradually differentiated his stock to make a point of difference. In 1890, for example, as well as offering the usual “plain and fancy drapery, men’s clothing, hosiery, millinery, grocery, crockery, and fancy goods,” he also sold “wallpaper and patent medicines.” By 1894 he advertised himself as a “family grocer and general draper.”
In 1895 Pritchard leased his business for five years to storekeepers Thomas Henry Stephenson and his son, but he resumed trading after the end of their lease. Following Pritchard’s death in 1917 the store was used for several different enterprises, including watchmaking and dressmaking, before being acquired by the owners of Gray’s Inn in 1951.
In 2004 the Mount Barker Heritage Survey identified the heritage aspects of the Gray’s Inn complex as:
All original and nineteenth-century masonry to Gray’s Hotel, barn, former general store and former residence; cgi [corrugated iron] roofs to the above; timber detailing including posts and bargeboards, 1880s cast-iron detailing to hotel balcony, finely-detailed red-brick chimneys, balcony and verandah to no.63 [the Hotel]; timber frames to openings, timber-framed windows (mostly double hung sashes) and timber doors; and parapet, verandah and shop-front to former general store.
The first photo below, which shows Gray’s Inn in 1952, reveals that the external structure of the hotel has remained largely unchanged over the years.
The second photo shows the “Mount Barker Store” integrated into the drive-through bottle shop. (Click on photos to enlarge.)
