By MICK ROBERTS ©
ALTHOUGH today you would be hard pressed to believe it, prior to gentrification, Surry Hills was home to some of Sydney’s toughest pubs.
The pubs of the inner-Sydney suburb were haunts of the city’s shadiest characters – SP bookies, gun and knife carrying mobsters, and hard drinkers who generally knew how to use their fists. They crammed the small crowded bars of Surry Hills’ many pubs last century. Fights and brawls were common.
One of the toughest pubs prior to its closure in 1954, sitting at the corner of Riley and Albion Streets, was the Sunbeam Hotel. A variety of toughened characters called the Sunbeam their ‘local’. It was undoubtedly the suburbs’ most infamous of ‘blood houses’.
The pub’s history is littered with violent incidents, culminating in a brutal brawl which claimed the lives of two drinkers in its public bar in 1945.
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‘Didyano’ Pub & Beer Trivia
DIDYANO 149: At the peak of hotel activity in 1875, coinciding with the gold rush period, there were 61 hotels trading at one time in Bathurst, NSW.
More pub and beer trivia HERE
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