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Lost pub · Botchergate

The Albert Hotel

Gone 1892

Gone
Closed 1892
There now
Not established
Address
18 Botchergate
Where exactly
On Botchergate. The exact spot isn't known, so the pin marks the street, not the building.

Traded from at least 1822 as the Founders Arms, became the Moulders Arms in 1828 and the Albert in 1852, styled the Albert Family and Commercial Hotel by 1855. It was an Iredale's Brewery house. Its address is 150 Botchergate in the directories of 1847 and 1858 and 18 and 20 from 1873, one house before and after Botchergate was renumbered. The same run of names and the same end are recorded for the Albert Tavern, and Thomas Hilton, the Albert Tavern's innkeeper in the 1891 census, is the Albert Hotel's licensee in the newspaper reports of 1890 to 1892, so the two are the same house under two styles.

As the Moulders' Arms it was one of the busiest society houses in the city. Pigot's directory of 1828-29 names George Lightfoot as its keeper, and Parson and White's of 1829 John Carruthers. Thomas M'Kennel had kept it before 1835; a mechanic of 'considerable talent and ingenuity', he died in Manchester in 1838. Richard Kirkbride was landlord from at least December 1835 until at least the end of 1850. In the city's first council election, on 26 December 1835, it was the polling place for Botchergate Ward, and a fight broke out that afternoon over a trading society's flag hung outside it. That morning Kirkbride had chaired a rival meeting of Botchergate burgesses at the Saddle Inn across the street.

The Druids' Victoria City Lodge had its lodge room here by 1839 and processed from the house to St Mary's Church each September, coming back to dinners of sixty to ninety. The Odd-fellows' City of Carlisle Lodge was also held here, and gave Kirkbride a £25 gold watch at Easter 1849 for his work as corresponding secretary of the Carlisle District. The Carlisle Mechanics' Band held its annual dinners here and the Wrestling Committee met here. Kirkbride married his own housekeeper, Miss Armstrong of Wigton, at Gretna in 1845, ran a Derby sweep in 1846, was among the publicans who took their bills to the party agents after the 1847 election, and saw one of the city's 1851 Exhibition clubs formed in the house in December 1850.

As the Albert it went on more quietly. A J. Kirkbride was still keeping it in 1867, and in the 1870s it advertised a first-class billiard room. A members' club called simply 'the Albert' was founded in October 1841 and ran for over fifty years, closing in 1893; whether it met here is not recorded. Mary Gray took the hotel over and renovated it in 1884 and passed the licence to William Markham in 1886, and the Carlisle Association Football Club held its annual meeting here in September 1889.

Under Thomas Hilton it went downhill. He was fined 40s for permitting gaming in March 1890, after the police found four men with money in front of them finishing a game of cards; Hilton said he had 'made a mistake', the 'missus was away', he was short-handed, and he had 'had trouble in the house lately and a run of bad luck'. In June that year a man who had tried to stop the police handcuffing a soldier was found drunk in the house, telling the constables that 'if it was not their blue coats he would knock their heads off'.

In January 1892 Hilton was fined again, for opening in prohibited hours, and the owners put him out. His successor, Jonathan Sumpton, nine years at the Central Hotel before that, was convicted in July 1892 of letting the house become the habitual resort of prostitutes. In September 1892 the city bench unanimously refused to renew the licence, though the owner, Mrs Iredale of Portland Square, appealed. The police counted eleven licensed houses within 266 yards, and the Chief Constable complained of a urinal in a very narrow lane.

It shut as a hotel that year, very probably the 'one hotel less' in the Chief Constable's count of 1893, and reopened on 28 August 1893 as the Botchergate Conservative Club, the same year the members' club called the Albert closed. In November 1894, just after the club bar shut at midnight, a director, J. Lowther Shield, was knocked into the gutter outside its lobby by a man he had refused to serve. The club's annual dinner of February 1895 was held in its Club Assembly Room. It managed ten years as a club before the Carlisle Journal reported, in July 1903, that it had been struck off the register for drunkenness on the premises.

Sources 35

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