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Princess May Park
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Princess May Park is named after Princess Mary of Teck. She visited Fremantle in 1901 as Duchess of Cornwall and York, and was in 1910 to become Queen Mary, consort of King George V. She is said to have been called May after the month of her birth. It was the Princess May Girls State School that was initially named after her, the Park following suit. What is now the Park was the grounds of the 1855 Government School, aka the Fremantle Boys School, and those of the PMGS. The third building in the Park was the Household Management Centre of the PMGS; it has been Clancy's Fish Pub for some time. The Boys School was the home of the Film and Television Institute for many years; that has now moved to the Arts Precinct in Northbridge. What is currently planned for the building and the whole Park is currently available for discussion. The image above is from Facebook and shows that the planner thinks that the schools were the property of one boy and one girl respectively.
CircusWA, the WA Circus School, lost its tenure in the Phillimore St Customs House in 2017 and moved to a 'big-top' circus tent in Princess May Park for a planned two years, opening 14 May 2017. It is still there in 2024.
The site on which the tent stands was used as an outdoor cinema called Bohemia Outdoor Cinema. This was in association with the Film and Television Institute, which was at the time in the Fremantle Boys School building next door.
References and Links
Hitchcock, JK 1929, The History of Fremantle, The Front Gate of Australia 1829-1929, Fremantle City Council.
Wikipedia page for [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_of_Teck Princess May
]
Notes on the saving of the Park in 1996 in Fremantle, the newsletter of the Fremantle Society.
See also the long article by Joe Fisher on the Clancys page.
FCC proposal (may have been taken down - they don't leave them up for long)
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 21 July, 2015 and hosted at freotopia.org/parks/princessmay.html (it was last updated on 7 June, 2024). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.