Honiara Now Has An Hotel
p. 66 · Read in the full issue
From Our Own Correspondent
Honiara, May 15.
THERE opened with a flourish in Honiara on May 14, the Woodford Hotel, whose licensee is Kenneth Houston Dalrymple Hay, formerly of Levers’ Pacific Plantations Pty., Ltd., well-known BSI identity who remained behind when the civilian evacuation of the Solomons was carried out.
Precipitated into existence by the loss by fire of the Guadalcanal Club, which contained Honiara’s only bar, the new hotel has its being in a former Army hut, a stone’s throw from the Government offices in the centre of the “town”.
Free beer for Honiara customers marked the hotel’s opening yesterday morning. In the evening the doors opened again for business with the as sistance of a hatchet—the new licensee having mislaid the key.
The hotel is named after the first Solomon Islands Resident Commissioner, C. E. Woodford, CMG, who was appointed in 1896 as a result of his close study of the Group as a naturalist-collector. It is owned by the Trade Scheme and is the forerunner of a projected permanent residential hotel for Honiara.
Mr. Hay has also taken over the handling of the Trade Scheme’s Honiara butchery, as well as leasing Levers’ property, Three Sisters, in South-eastern Solomons.
Flying Officer Victor Hjorring, a mem ber of a former well-known Levuka family, Fiji, received the MBE at the hands of the Governor-General of New Zealand, at an investiture in Auckland in May.