12 July 1842 Richard Dixon Hawkins

Richard Dixon Hawkins arrived in Adelaide on 12 July 1842. He was licensee of eleven hotels during the 34 years of his life in South Australia. He began his career as a publican in the Crafers Inn in 1843 and after four years moved to the Sturt Arcade in the city for a short spell. For the next 15 years he moved around country hotels until he built his own inn at Aldgate in 1864. The inn at the junction of the road to Strathalbyn and the main road to Mount Barker was a single storey building constructed of local stone with a shingle roof and large verandah. Hawkins sank a well and installed a pump so that horses as well as travellers could slake their thirst. He named his hotel after the Aldgate Pump on the corner of Leadenhall and Fenchurch Streets in London near where he was born and the township of Aldgate grew around this hostelry. He also built a smithy on the opposite corner which proved to be a good investment too. He sold the hotel in 1875 and moved to the Hagen Arms at Echunga where he died in 1877.

Tom Dyster, Pump in the Roadway, Investigator Press, 1980, pp.46-49.