NSW history: French Prince de Conde’s shock death at Sydney hotel in 1866

A CBD address was both the city’s first beer garden and the place where our first royal visitor lost his life after taking ill while on tour in 1866.

Petty's Hotel in York St, circa 1870.

Businessmen and women toting takeaway coffee cups and smartphones have replaced the suited gentlemen and corsetted ladies that once strolled outside 1 York St, Sydney.

While the address is today a landmark office building reaching 24 storeys high, it was once one of the most exclusive addresses in Sydney.

Taking up the corner block bordered by York, Clarence and Jamieson streets, the site was once a hotel that welcomed the first member of a royal family to visit Sydney and was home to the city’s first beer garden.

Welcome to Petty’s Hotel — Sydney’s first hotel for international tourists.

From the time the last convict ship docked in Sydney in 1840 until the early 1870s when Petty’s Hotel was enjoying celebrity status, there had been a huge shift in Colonial Sydney, explains Max Burns-McRuvie, a Sydney historian and founder of historic walking tour group, Journey Walks, who completed his master’s thesis in December titled As The Tourists Arrived — the local beginnings of Sydney’s international travel industry (1860s to 1880s).

1 York St, Sydney today.

“The gold rush of the 1850s had brought lots of wealth to Sydney and shipping and communications had improved between the southern and northern hemispheres making Australia an easier destination to visit,” he said.

Sydney’s first travel guide in 1868, Handbook To Sydney And Its Suburbs by ST Leigh, listed eight prominent hotels, with Petty’s given the biggest wrap, calling it “one of the best in the Australian colonies” and that “the building is a credit to Sydney”.

It goes on to boast it was “the resort of the most distinguished visitors to Sydney, including English and French noblemen when visiting New South Wales”.

Before it opened as a hotel, the building that became Petty’s was the private home of the first presbyterian minister of Sydney, Dr John Dunmore Lang, who sold his home to a hotel keeper known as Cummings in 1832.

French Prince de Conde, circa 1860, died at a Sydney hotel.

It was refitted and opened as a single-storey hotel, but he sold it two years later to a valet, Thomas Petty, who invested in making it more sophisticated.

When Petty died in 1847, it was sold to wealthy merchant Thomas Farrell and while it would go on to have many different proprietors in the century that followed, it remained in the Farrell family until it stopped operating as a hotel in 1950.

With the ability to inject his wealth into the hotel, Farrell added a second storey and beautiful veranda in the 1860s and 1870s when it was said to have 40 bedrooms and a “tastefully laid out garden” that gave it “all the appearance of a gentleman’s mansion”.

By 1892 Petty’s Hotel was described as being well known to residents around the world.

But it was the arrival of the French Prince de Conde in 1866 which really put the hotel on the map, said Burns-McRuvie.

A grandson of King Louis Philippe, the Prince visited Australia as part of a global tour, arriving in Sydney on April 16.

Prince de Conde suffered raging fevers before his death at Petty’s Hotel.

“He described Sydney Harbour as one of the most impressive natural harbours in the world and Sydney as a city with an air of sophistication,” Burns-McRuvie said.

“He was a real celebrity hosted at balls, recitals and dinners. But about five weeks into his visit, he caught a cold on a fishing expedition to Manly which triggered a respiratory infection.

“Bed-ridden at Petty’s Hotel, he suffered internal bleeding and raging fevers and at 10.30pm on May 24 he died.”

The funeral procession from Petty’s Hotel to St Mary’s Cathedral was accompanied by dignitaries, all consulates flew their flags at half-mast and shops and offices along the street closed as a mark of respect.

The hotel’s proprietress, Mrs Roach, draped Petty’s in black for three days as a sign of respect.

Despite the black mark on the hotel’s name, it prospered, opening Sydney’s first beer garden in 1938.

Last drinks were called in 1950 with the proprietor offering all drinks on the house and the building was sold to the Red Cross. It was demolished in 1976.

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A SECOND ROYAL AFFAIR

It was only two years after the death of the Prince de Conde that Sydney hosted its second royal visitor, Prince Alfred, the second son of Queen Victoria.

Another disaster almost struck when the Prince was out enjoying a royal picnic at Clontarf on the northern beaches and an assassination attempt was made.

An Irish national snuck into the picnic and shot the Prince in the back at close range, the bullet luckily hitting his ribs and missing his major organs.

The embarrassed citizens of Sydney donated to a public subscription fund which led to the creation of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital at Camperdown.

Women allowed in the beer garden at Petty’s Hotel circa 1938.

FINALLY, DRINKS FOR ALL

When the manager of Petty’s Hotel, Mr L. Pearce, created Sydney’s first beer garden on the famed grounds of the hotel in 1938, he was heralding a much larger social change, one that particularly welcomed by women.

Until this time, women were confined to cramped ‘ladies bars’ and denied access to other parts of a bar. The beer garden allowed for mixed drinking and may have helped push for women to be allowed into the public bar.

A female newspaper columnist rejoiced at the opening: “At last we have a beer garden … opened yesterday at Petty’s. Bright umbrellas and lacquered chairs alongside the street.”