Hero of Waterloo

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It was the last night in Sydney for a couple of friends of Charles and Jo, so we went along to farewell drinks at the Hero of Waterloo in The Rocks. This is a pub that had been mentioned to us by the tour guide on the free walking tour we went on a few months ago, so we’d been keen to check this one out for a while.

The legend is that the sailors who would come drinking at the pub would be treated favourably by the bar staff, and would be given a free beer for each beer they bought. This would carry on for the evening until the sailors got so drunk that they passed out. It was then that the bar staff would push the sailors into the cellar through a trap door and chain them up. They would then be taken through an underground tunnel which connected the pub to the harbour and be put onto ships to work as slaves – the sailors would then wake up already on the boat out at sea! The bar man also informed us that this was the oldest pub in Sydney, clarifying that other pubs in the city claiming the same record have either moved location or not held their license for consecutive years like the Hero of Waterloo.

The pub gives free tours of the cellar, so we got to go down and see what’s left of the cellar and the tunnel that once led to the Harbour. Unfortunately the tunnel was blocked off by the local authorities many years ago, although the cellar was interesting to look round with the topical artefacts and bats! The barman also told us that a TV show was coming later that night to film in the cellar because the previous landlord fell down the steps to the cellar and died and there have been reports that she now haunts the cellar! Unfortunately we didn’t get to see the TV show being filmed as we had an early start in the morning.

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