9 Commercial Hotel

28 Church Street

The Commercial Hotel was among the first hotels in Stanley, originally built as the officers’ mess for the Van Diemen’s Land Company.

The weatherboard and stone building was first licensed in 1847 to James Ferguson and operated as a hotel until the 1960s. Its cobblestone cellars are still evident, one in either wing.

Stanley’s hotels thrived after the Second World War when the town itself was busy and business was booming at both mill and port. The Commercial was where townspeople came to play billiards, where fishermen would swap stories of West Coast storms and record catches of shark and lobster over a whisky or two in the corner bar, and it was where families gathered to meet friends.

For John Jacobs, a 20th Century Stanley fisherman, the Commercial was a great place after a funeral “because it was the nearest pub to the cemetery!” He remembers huge gatherings where the whole bar took it in turns to shout one round.

The Commercial Hotel is now owned privately by the Jacobs family – now in its seventh generation in Stanley.