CarlislePubs 🛍️ Lost pubs shopShop: T-shirts, hoodies, mugs & a jigsaw

Lost pub · Rickergate

Fox & Hounds

about 1722 to 1960

Built
Believed to date from 1722
Gone
Last orders 30 October 1960; demolished 1961
There now
Carlisle Civic Centre
Address
25 Rickergate
Where exactly
Under the Civic Centre, opposite the Scotch Arms.

A narrow three-storey brick building with a single-storey annex to the south, at 25 Rickergate, opposite the Scotch Arms. Believed to date from 1722, which made it one of the oldest pubs in the city when it went, it traded in its early days as the Horse and Jockey. Not the other Fox and Hounds, not far away in Jollie's Lane.

Jane Smith is an innkeeper in Rickergate in Jollie's directory of 1811 and kept the Fox and Hounds in Parson and White's of 1829, so she very probably had it eighteen years at least. In June 1886 the licence passed from Adam Marchbank to William Smith, 'the son of a person who kept the inn for many years'. A childhood memory of the street survives: Isaac Norman, recalling growing up on Barley Stack Lane around 1900, remembered his father spending what little money the family had at the Fox and Hounds, drinking on the slate. The old building closed on 13 May 1905 and was rebuilt, and the pub that finally shut was that rebuilt version.

It was a Carlisle New Brewery house, then a Maryport Brewery one. A keeper's name survives from the weeks before the Board arrived: the final list of subscribers to the Mayoress of Carlisle's fund for the women's memorial of the war, printed on 8 July 1916, includes 2s 6d from Mrs J. Peat, Fox and Hounds Inn, Rickergate. The scheme acquired it in August 1916, from the New Brewery by Historic England's gazetteer, and it outlasted the 1916 to 1919 cull by forty years. When Redfern's new Malt Shovel went up along Rickergate in 1928 it was built without an off-sales, and the jug and bottle trade was left to the Fox and Hounds.

Mrs Sarah Graham and her husband Arthur took over in 1936, and she ran it after his death in 1955. The back room was where sporting events were organised and argued over, and the hosts stabled the Cricket Club's gear. It was the headquarters of the Gentlemen of Rickergate, the Carlisle Cricket Club knock-out side, who won the knock-out in 1950, 1953, 1957 and 1959 and were runners-up in 1955 and 1958. The idea of entering a side came from Jack Stabler, then a Carlisle United first-team regular, who co-opted John Baird, Geoff Stewart and Denis Easterby, and the captains were Stabler, Bert Moffet and Jimmy Johnstone.

Time was called just before 10 pm on Sunday 30 October 1960, retiring Mrs Graham, aged 74, who had been with the scheme for 30 years. On 16 November she and Mr and Mrs W. Oliphant, Nan and Bill to the regulars, who had been behind the bar for 24 years, were guests of a rugby club, which presented them with gifts and made Mrs Graham and Nan honorary members. The pub was pulled down in 1961, the site having been sold to the Corporation for the Civic Centre. John Foster, born in 1914 and brought up in Rickergate, told the Cumberland News on 18 January 1991 that the Fox and Hounds was one of the street's licensed houses that survived until the early 1960s, unlike the Bay Horse.

A photograph of it taken in its last year survives, though the Cumberland News could find none while its weekly series ran. Closing the series on 24 December 1992, it printed instead a photograph of a painting of the pub by Louis Oswald of Reeth Road, lent by the former regular Denis Easterby of Mayfield Avenue.

Sources 12

Location from geograph.org.uk. The pin marks the site.

Open question

What we don't know yet

Where is Louis Oswald's painting of the Fox and Hounds now? The Cumberland News of 24 December 1992 printed a photograph of it, lent by the former regular Denis Easterby, and said no photograph of the pub itself could be found.

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.

Tell us about Fox & Hounds

Also lost on Rickergate

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

Still serving, near where it stood

All the lost pubs