The Exchange Hotel

‘The six o’clock swill’ was a phrase used to describe the frenetic ‘swilling’ of beer before the hotel’s restricted 6pm closing time. For some of the publicans in Bay Street, including the Exchange’s Norman Morris Dalwood, the 6pm regulation established during the First World War, didn’t mean very much. Dalwood would continually flout the regulation. On one evening in 1923, police raided his establishment to find open beer bottles, used wine glasses and people lying fully clothed in their beds upstairs ‘asleep’. Charged for still serving after the legal closing time, he argued that his bar door had not been open until the police had forced it open; he had therefore committed no crime. Dalwood said it was a police conspiracy! Unfortunately, the judge found his story nonsense and fined him £7.

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