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Lost pub · Kingstown

Dog Inn

Gone 1917

Built
Recorded as the Dog Inn in 1854
Gone
Closed 19 January 1917, trading by then as the Kings Arms Inn
There now
A house
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY3955359180, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The six-inch maps of about 1865 and 1900 both mark it at this corner, as the Spaniel and then the King's Arms. The building's use in 2018: residential.

The village inn at Kingstown, and one building under four signs. It stood on the west side of the main road at the corner where the village street turns off, next to the post office: the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of about 1865 marks the Spaniel public house there, and the edition of about 1900 puts the King's Arms in exactly the same spot.

It was the Dog Inn in 1854, when John Nichol kept it and land sales were held there; the Pointer Dog Inn, with stable, byre and twenty acres, when Nichol was still the tenant and Jeremiah Irwin of Solway Terrace advertised it to let in 1864 and 1865; the Spaniel Dog when the map was made, and still in 1877; and the Kings Arms by 1879, the name it closed under. Directories also have a Pointer Dog at Kingmoor, the hamlet Kingstown belonged to, from 1869 to 1876, and the Post Office directory of 1858 already has the 'Pointer, J. Nichol, Kingstown'. The 1864 advertisement offered two cottages at Hethersgill as well, and Hethersgill is where the other Pointer Dog, at Bolton Fell End, stood; whether that explains the shared name is not recorded.

Thomas Jackson, who owned the house as well as keeping it, was granted the licence in May 1877 after several weeks on a temporary one; the Carlisle Patriot's report of the same hearing calls him William. He did not keep it long: Alexander McGuinness had the licence from 1879, and Isabella Birkett held it until June 1886, when her furniture and bar fittings were auctioned on the premises and the licence passed to a Thomas Jackson again, almost certainly the owner back in his own house, described now as formerly manager to Charles Armstrong of the Kingstown brickworks, whose kilns stood behind the cottages across the road.

Under Jackson it was where the village did its business. Cottages were auctioned there, and at a stormy vestry meeting of the hamlet in the Kingstown schoolroom in March 1890 the brick manufacturer W. Scott accused 'Mr Jackson, of the King's Arms Inn, and his party' of bringing a new system of electioneering into the hamlet: collecting proxy votes from farmers to swamp the votes of the working men, who, Scott said, were the actual majority. The meeting passed a motion of indignation, and Jackson, beaten 24 to 9 over the road surveyor, said he would demand a poll. He died in December 1893, aged 56, of blood poisoning, after a needle left in a pair of mended trousers worked its way into his thigh.

In February 1894 the licence went to George Graham, 'the licensee of the other inn at Kingstown', the Jovial Butcher. By June Graham was dead too, and it passed to his daughter, Mrs Margaret Pearson. She kept it for thirteen years, and by 1906 she owned the Jovial Butcher as well; when that house was given up for compensation, its tenant, William Rayson, took the Kings Arms over from her, in 1907. Rayson was still there in 1910, and John Waiting by 1914. It was a Carlisle New Brewery house when the scheme acquired it in October 1916.

Its tenant fought the takeover. The Board's 1919 memo on unsettled compensation records that he conducted an abusive correspondence with the Board in 1916 and refused the £100 the valuer had agreed. It closed for good on 19 January 1917, when a Carlisle Journal report records the decision to shut it and convert it to a beerhouse, and it was lot 3 in the Board's auction of 3 May 1919: a dwelling house at Kingstown, formerly the King's Arms public house, with a cottage adjoining, a stable and gig house, three bedrooms and two box rooms.

It was offered again by private treaty in June. The Cumberland News's list of July 1916 has it as the King's Arms, Kingstown, next to the Coach and Horses, and the Coach & Horses is still trading a few doors south. Not the much older Kings Arms Inn on English Street, near Kings Arms Lane.

Sources 26

Also lost in Kingstown

2 other lost pubs stood within 250 m of here. See them on the map

Still serving, near where it stood

All the lost pubs