After 120 years the Windsor Hotel, in Dalby on Queensland’s Darling Downs, is still there and hides a dark history. I told a version of this story live on radio 4WK.

Mr. Harry de Stokar was a master mariner with the British East India Company (Indianman ship above). He went to Toowoomba in the late nineteenth century and continued business as a commercial trader, but no everything went well. He was a director of the Darling Downs Brewery Company which went into liquidation. In 1900 he took over the license of the Royal Hotel which burnt down. In 1905 he moved to Dalby where he built the Windsor Hotel.

It was possibly thanks to Harry’s wife Jeanie, who after his death took over the license for twelve years, that the Windsor flourished to become extremely well-known across the district and around Australia. Loads of big social events were held there. It was said that the “Windsor” was a household name. After thirty years, in 1935 Jeannie transferred the license her youngest daughter Victoria. Just a few years earlier, a man had helped Victoria’s husband marking lambs, and then mysteriously disappeared and was never seen alive again.

The license transfer to Victoria may have caused some family tension because it bypassed their only son and heir, thirty-three year old Ormond de Stokar. Just months later Stokar accepted a position working for Frederick Green. Green was a grazier at Bunya Park Station which was thirty miles from Dalby. Green and his wife Maisie were going away and needed Stokar to be caretaker of the property.

Stokar accepted the job and remarkable events and conclusions followed. One of the witnesses later called was Henry Priebbenow. He was a dairy farmer at Bunya Vale which was less than a mile from Bunya Park station. Priebbenow had previously been the victim of a pick pocket when he lost his spectacle case and spectacles. The poor woman involved was given what seems an incredibly harsh six months imprisonment.

In any case, in September 1936, the Greens arrived back on the station, but Stokar was nowhere to be found. Maisie Green packed up his belongings and sent them into town.

But as the property was searched further, they found a heap of ashes with remains of a jacket identified as Stokar’s, metal components of a shotgun, and there were also bones believed to be human. A note was found neatly folded in a tree nearby purporting to be from Stokar and expressing the tragic intention of taking his own life.

Police determined that the ashes were that of Stokar and he had indeed ended it all. But that seems remarkable because that would have required Stokar to have done away from himself as well as building his own funeral pyre and placing himself on top. At the same time the possible murder weapon was destroyed.

That mere prospect seems as dramatic as any story written by Stokar’s similar-namesake Bram Stoker who of course wrote the horror novel Dracula. 

The Windsor Hotel today hides this secret and I’ll keep researching, hoping that some new evidence will surface to hopefully add some clarity to it all.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A VERSION OF THIS STORY TOLD ON RADIO 4WK.

Photo credits:
Indiaman Royal George in the Downs, 1779 – Wikipedia Commons.
Windsor Hotel Dalby, c1920 – Western Downs Regional Council.
Ormond Stokar, Dalby cemetery – Find a Grave uploaded by ClubHerron 2020.