Buildings/pearseshall.html
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Pearse's Hall
This is the building next to the Tradewinds (formerly Plympton) Hotel, on the corner of Canning Highway and Sewell Street. As it's an old stone building, I assume this is the remains of Pearse's Hall. I inquired in the liquor store (Port Liquor Store/Cellarbrations, 83 Canning Hwy) one day, but the staff didn't know. There are three tenancies in the building complex, with the liquor store on the corner furthest from the hotel, but I assume all three are part of the same original building.
Excerpt from Jack Lee's book
One of the facilities provided by the Pearse family was the hall built next to the Plympton Hotel. Known, naturally, as Pearse's or the Plympton Hall, it was used variously as a meeting-place, a church, a billiard and snooker room and, when taken over by an illegal bookmaker of the starting-price variety, an "SP joint". Male customers could also get a shave and a haircut at the barber's shop in the building.
But as far as the Anglican community of East Fremantle was concerned, Pearse's Hall reached the heights early in its existence - on September 2, 1900, in fact - when it was the venue of the first Church of England service to be held in the town.
Three weeks later, Archdeacon D. Glyn Watkins reported that collections for the first three Sundays had amounted to 3/11/6 (about $7.15), and that indicates that the attendances were reasonably good. If each person had contributed a halfpenny, there would have been 1,717 present: a penny each represented 858; threepence represented 284: and sixpence represented 142 - and contributions were usually in the vicinity of threepence and sixpence.
References and Links
Lee, Jack 1979, This is East Fremantle (The story of a town and its people), East Fremantle Town Council.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 24 March, 2019 and hosted at freotopia.org/buildings/pearseshall.html (it was last updated on 8 November, 2023). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.