_{By MICK ROBERTS ©}

REGULARS at Thirroul’s Ryan’s Hotel can thank pioneer baker George Whitford for his persistence in establishing their local watering hole.

Whitford was determined to have his bakery opened as the village’s first pub, trying for almost 20 years to have a license granted for the building.

Thirroul is located in the Illawarra region of NSW, 13kms north of Wollongong.

An American adventurer, Whitfield arrived in the region during the 1850s when Thirroul was a rainforest-blanketed wilderness, his great grandson Ross Jones of Woonona revealed in an interview I had with him in 1996.

Mr Jones delved into the life of George Whitford who, he said, escaped the poverty of his parents’ farm at Sandy Beach North America for a better life in Australia.

The region around the Canadian/American border was in turmoil with the French fighting the British, as well as the Native Americans, and 18 year old Whitford decided to leave the family farm – 17kms down stream of Niagara Falls – for Australia in 1853.

The Ballarat goldfields were luring fortune seekers from all over the world, including young Whitford who was making his way down the coast from Sydney.

“He got to Campbelltown and came across Thirroul where he started cutting timber – probably to help finance his trip further south to the goldfields,” Mr Jones said.

Whitfield, then aged in his early 20s, built a slab hut in today’s Phillip Street not far from another sawyer and a ticket of leave convict Bill Masson.

Masson had been ‘done’for horse stealing and sent to New South Wales as a convict leaving his family behind in Scotland. He became mates with Whitford and arranged for his daughter Jane to be sent from Scotland to marry the American in 1857.

George and Jane Whitford, both 22, built a home and bakery on the corner of George and Phillip Streets – the site of today’s Ryan’s Hotel.

“George received the contract to supply the Bulli Coal Company with timber for their new jetty off Bulli Point (Sandon Point) in the early 1860s,” Mr Jones said.

“And, what was common practice at the time, he was paid in barrels of rum.”

Although Whitford was partial to a rum or two, he had far more then he could drink, so while he continued cutting timber his wife Jane sold sly-grog from the bakery.

As the district progressed, especially after the discovery of coal, the rural hamlet known as Newtown would make an ideal place for a licensed inn, Whitford speculated. He knew, however, there was fierce opposition to a pub and offered local cop Senior Sergeant Ford £5 not to oppose his license application.

As a consequence his application was unanimously refused by the magistrates when they heard of his attempted bribe in April 1879.

There can be little doubt the young American and his Scottish wife were running a sly-grog shanty as Tooth & Company Brewery records show Whitford as a customer during the early 1880s.

At least three times he tried to open his bakery as a pub and – at a cost of £25 – he added another storey to the building in a last ditched effort to have the building licensed.

The Illawarra Mercury reported in May 1885 ‘he could hardly have chosen a less suitable site (for his pub), unless he intends to sell ‘Christadelphian’ or ‘temperance’ beer. The people of Newtown are most law abiding, and temperate.”

Whitford gave up on his idea of becoming a publican. Instead, Bulli publican Sam Kirton, late host of the Black Diamond Hotel, applied and was eventually granted a license for “Whitford’s fine new premises” in January 1888. By this time, Newtown had become known as Robbinsville before it gained its current Aboriginal name of Thirroul in 1891.

There was some controversy with the approval of the license when it was revealed during the 1888 application that “the case is a glaring breach of the 41^st section of the Licensing Act, which states that after a license has been refused twice, no application can be granted within three years”.

Despite this, the license was granted to Samuel Kirton at the Wollongong Licensing Court on January 17 1888.

In a letter to the editor of the Illawarra Mercury a few days after the license was granted, a correspondent stated: Ï hope an appeal against the decision of the magistrates, and not allow this license to be thrust upon them contrary to law.”

Named after a local pioneering family, the McCauley Park Hotel was opened in January 1888 with Sam and his wife Mary at the helm.

The pub’s name changed to The Bulli Pass Hotel in 1895.

After Whitford’s death, from Cirrhosis of the liver and kidneys aged 61 in 1897, the pub remained in the family until the legendary Joanna Ryan bought the pub in the early 1900s.

Johanna Ryan demolished the Bulli Pass Hotel in 1914 and replaced it with the current brick building, which has been much altered. She changed the pub’s name yet again in 1925 to Ryan’s Thirroul Hotel.

George and Jane Whitford were buried in the graveyard beside the Presbyterian Church in Gray Street Woonona.

Read more about Johanna Ryan and the Bulli Pass Hotel at the Time Gents story: Johanna Ryan: The untold story of an Irish landlady and her pubs 

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_{© Copyright Mick Roberts 2025}

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Categories: Australian Hotels, Illawarra Hotels, NSW hotels, Publicans

Tags: aussiepubhistory, australianpubhistory, australianpubproject, history, pubs, Ryans Hotel Thirroul, Thirroul, timegents