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Lost pub · Botchergate

Deakin's Vaults

Gone 1917

Gone
Taken over by the state scheme in 1916 and closed in 1917
There now
Half absorbed into the Border Rambler; the rest was sold by the Board by 1923 and has since been cleared
Address
51 Botchergate
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4039555537, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building has since been demolished.

A Botchergate house with three names: the Broom from about 1822, the Jovial Butcher, or Jolly Butcher, from 1829, and Deakin's Vaults, or Deakin's Spirit Vaults. The Cumberland News column of 24 May 1991 puts it at No. 51, on the east side of the street next to the Albion Hotel, which stands on the corner of Portland Place, and reads the street numbering in the Lanes Library's pub file as showing that it was once the Jovial Butcher, listed in the directories from 1829.

Parson and White's directory of that year names Ann Irving as its keeper, and a sign for 'the Jolly Butcher' was advertised for sale on 5 November 1831. Not the Jolly Butcher on Scotch Street, the house later called the Three Cannons, which used the name between 1827 and 1840: two unrelated pubs that shared a sign.

S. Wardrope signed the innkeepers' memorial of February 1867 for the Jovial Butcher. He is the 'Watty Wardrope' of a reminiscence in the Cumberland News of 2 December 1922, which recalls 'Watty Wardrope's Jovial Butcher', known after the premises were altered as Deakin's Vaults, and says the shoemaker's shop next door, kept by the father of the Carlisle auctioneer W. L. Tiffen, had been merged into the licensed premises. By August 1868 it was in W. Roe's hands, and the city bench suspended his licence for a fortnight as a black-list case. In September 1884 a permanent transfer of the Jovial Butchers Inn from Mrs Deakin to Thomas Kirkbride was held over, because the new tenant had been convicted since his temporary transfer and was on the police black list.

The local directories give it as Deakin's Vaults from the 1880s, though Bulmer's of 1884 still lists the Jolly Butchers, under Mary Hannah Deakin, and one record dates the new name from the 1890s. The 1991 column dates the change to about 1880, with Edmund Bulman the first landlord under the new name and then Mrs Mary Deakin for a number of years, the source of the name, before Bulman was listed again, to be succeeded by George Bulman. In December 1890 its licence passed from Alice Beattie Fisher, formerly Mrs Carruthers, to Jane Little.

Edmund Bulman kept Deakin's Vaults for twenty-eight years. Born at Scaleby Castle in 1840, where his father worked, he had been butler at Salkeld Hall, a constable in the Lancashire force at Prescot, a Cumberland policeman at Wigton and Castle Carrock until the hill patrols wore him out, and a railwayman, before he took the house; afterwards he moved to the Star at Botcherby. A photograph in the Cumbria Image Bank, dated to about 1900 to 1909, shows the fascia lettered 'Edmund Bulman, Deakin's Vaults'. At his death in 1928 the Cumberland News thought him 'probably one of the best known men in the Carlisle area' as a licensed victualler.

The 1991 column has the house owned by the Carlisle New Brewery; by 1916 the Maryport Brewery held the lease. The Cumberland News of 21 October 1916 lists Deakin's Vaults among six fully licensed houses the Control Board took over that week, and it was closed in 1917 as superfluous to needs.

When Harry Redfern took on his first Carlisle job in 1917, reworking the Albion next door over nine months, the scheme had him take half of Deakin's Vaults into it. In November 1922 the chairman of the local Advisory Committee, G. A. Rimington, wrote that 'part of Deakin's Vaults' now formed part of the Albion Tavern. That year, when Colonel Claude Lowther complained that the Board had taken away the well-kept houses of men such as 'Bulman and Hewitt', Rimington listed Deakin's Vaults among the eleven houses they had run. Historic England's gazetteer tells it more plainly: acquired in October 1916, closed the same year and let as shop premises, with no mention of the Albion.

The rest was no longer the Board's by February 1923, when Joseph Dobson of Newcastle told the licensing bench he had bought 'the property known as Deakin's Vaults' from the Control Board, together with 32 Cecil Street, so that he held the whole site from Botchergate through to Cecil Street.

He proposed a £25,000 scheme on the site of the Crown Billiard Hall and some twenty tumbledown tenements behind it, picking up a plan that had won a provisional licence in 1914 and then stalled over access and the war: Deakin's Vaults 'entirely pulled down' and replaced by an entrance with a dwelling above, a tea room and a cinema for about 1,074 people (exits into Back Portland Place), with a garage and a billiard hall behind, and no intoxicants sold. The bench granted the licences. The report does not say whether the scheme was built, and one record gives 1924 as the year the shop closed.

Accounts of what became of the building differ. The Carlisle Encyclopaedia has it demolished in 1951 for the Pearl Assurance office, and Carlisle: The Archive Photographs (p91) reproduces a photograph captioned 1951 with the publican, E. Bulman, though Edmund Bulman died in 1928, so either the date or the identification is out; the Image Bank's fascia fits his years there and not 1951.

Another record gives the demolition as 1999. The 1991 column says the property was converted into shops and the original building had since been replaced by modern offices for an insurance company, which fits the Pearl Assurance account better than a demolition in 1999. By 2018 the building was gone and its site lay under a leisure development of the late twentieth or early twenty-first century. The Albion became the Border Rambler, which is still trading.

Photograph

Two-storey pub front with a long fascia lettered Edmund Bulman, Deakin's Vaults, above a shopfront marked 51 and 53 with spirit vaults windows either side of a central doorway where a man in a waistcoat stands
Deakin's Vaults, 51 to 53 Botchergate, about 1900 to 1909 Cumbria Image Bank, image ct01621, used with permission

Sources 21

Open question

A date we can't pin down

Was the Dobson cinema and billiard hall of 1923 ever built behind Botchergate, and when did the rest of Deakin's Vaults come down? The Cumberland News of 24 May 1991 has it closed in 1917 and replaced by offices for an insurance company, and says the Carlisle New Brewery owned it, where the site has a Maryport Brewery lease, a closure in 1916 and a letter of 1922 putting part of it in the Albion.

If you know the answer, or where it might be found (an old photograph, a family story, a document), tell us and it goes into the story above.

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