Hotels

 

The same correspondent on 21st October 1881 mentions that the officers of the 14th and 15th Hussars held a ball at the Royal Hotel and states that the band of the 15th Hussars played until 2 am. There is a photograph taken in 1880 that shows the Royal Hotel as a tin shack. An earlier report however, dating back to 19th August 1850 and taken from the Klipriver Women’s Institute Annals, states that Alexander Lamont was the owner of the Royal Hotel. From the same source we note, that the owner during the Siege, was Charles James Jones, possibly the same Jones who was the owner of the Crown in 1881.

On 3rd November 1899 the Royal Hotel opened a new dining room and as if to christen it the Boers sent a shell through the room into a small adjoining cottage, blowing out the whole side and destroying the contents. Luckily no one was hurt despite of the dining room being crowded with lunchtime guests. Fortunately Mr Pearse of the London Morning Post, who was renting the cottage, was out at the time. Doctor Starr Jameson, Frank Rhodes and others of Jameson Raid fame were living in the hotel which probably accounts for the Boer interest in the building directing their shell fire at it more than any other. Most correspondents chose the Royal as their “watering hole”. On the third occasion that the hotel was hit Dr Stark was killed.  

A third hotel, the Railway/Midland, was sited at the station and the Natal Register for 1902 has the Railway Hotel owned by LA Barnard.

The Junction hotel is mentioned in 1868 as where Katharine Mary Jane FRIDAY lived with her second husband Thomas Arthur BUTLER as manager of the hotel, he was born in London in 1870 and died in Ladysmith 31 May 1935.

Samuel John FRIDAY is first mentioned in Ladysmith in March 1861 when he is signatory to a petition for remission of the death sentence on Johannes de LANGE. On 22 June 1861 he goes into partnership with Thomas Wyatt MINTER to form Minter and Friday hotelkeepers with their hotel Wildebeeste.

Other Hotels and Inns were sited along the roads connecting Ladysmith to Colenso, Newcastle, Dundee and the Drakensberg mountains but bear no relevance to the Siege of the town

 

 

 

 

                                                 The Royal Hotel circa 1900