The Cumberland Wrestlers

Built

Completed 3 October 1938 to Harry Redfern's design

Gone

Closed as a pub in 2004

There now

The building survives on the corner of Rome Street, boarded up

Address

4 Currock Street

Where exactly

Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4018155217, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The 1938 building still stands on the corner, boarded up.

One of the last things Harry Redfern built, and the third house to carry the name, which is for Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling, the region's own grappling code, still fought at shows across the county every summer. The first two belonged to Iredale's brewery and followed it across the city when the railway pushed it out.

The first Cumberland Wrestlers stood on Water Street and is in local directories from 1848. Denis Perriam placed it at the corner of Water Street and Brown's Row in Wapping, attached to Iredale's original brewery, by the tunnel under the south end of the Citadel station. Mrs Smith kept it by December 1856, when William Murray, a gardener, left 'the house of Mrs. Smith, a relative, who keeps the Wrestlers' Arms public house, Water-street' about eleven, was set on in the tunnel, and escaped into Mr Iredale's yard, where the brewery men rescued him.

In February 1858 the Carlisle Patriot reported that Iredale had just finished a vaulted cellar at the Water Street brewery more than a hundred yards long, holding nearly 2,000 barrels, its earth-covered roof sown with wheat; he was sending beer to a depot in Melbourne. The inn went by the Wrestlers' Arms about as often as the Cumberland Wrestlers. Sarah Smith signed the innkeepers' memorial of February 1867 for the Cumberland Wrestlers, and the Post Office directory of 1873 still has Mrs S. Smith there.

Her neighbour on the street was the Pack Horse, and in May 1867 the two houses ended up in court. Ann McClean of the Pack Horse was charged with abusing Elizabeth Ward, servant to Miss Smith 'at the sign of the "Cumberland Wrestler"', whom she regularly called 'a murderer', saying she had two children. The annoyance, the court heard, was constant. McClean's witness said the young woman had 'laughed' as she went past the house. Cross-examining, Mr Ostle said the servant ought to have been charged as well, 'as she was nearly as bad as her mistress'. McClean was fined a shilling and costs and warned. That September the Pack Horse lost its licence.

It was not the city's only Wrestlers. In August 1864 John Bouch was granted a spirit licence for the Wrestlers Arms Inn, Drovers' Lonning, Rickergate, and he signed the 1867 memorial for the Wrestlers' Inn. The Cumberland Wrestlers on Drovers Lane in the 1870 directory was very probably his house, and it may have been the one later called the Otter: the directory of 1873 lists the Otter, under Mrs Mary Wren at 11 Drovers Lane, beside the Cumberland Wrestlers in Water Street. A third, a beerhouse, traded as the Wrestlers Arms on Annetwell Street.

In 1875 railway extensions forced Iredale's out of Water Street, and the firm built a new High Brewery on a one-acre site in Currock Street, beside the railway. The Water Street inn was demolished in the 1870s for the station extension. Its licence followed the brewery. On 5 May 1876 Mr Wannop applied for Sarah Smith to transfer the licence of the Wrestlers' Arms Inn, Water Street, to a house in Currock Street, 'the new premises to be called the Royal Hotel'; the application was adjourned to the Monday. The new name never took. By 1878 the house was the Cumberland Wrestlers' Hotel.

The second Cumberland Wrestlers stood at the junction of Currock Street and Rome Street, next door to the brewery and joined to it by an archway. A Victorian account of the High Brewery describes its frontage of 150 yards, taking in 'the Cumberland Wrestler's Hotel, abutting upon the main thoroughfare', then the gateway into the brewery yard, with the brewer's house on one side and the traveller's on the other, then eleven cottages for Iredale's workmen and their families, and at the far end the Moulders Arms, 'also the property of the firm'. When it came down in 1937 the house was said to have been built as a double-fronted private house.

T. Nixon, four years at the Red Lion Hotel at Armathwaite, had it by June 1878, and advertised 'that new and commodious House known as the Sign of Cumberland Wrestlers' Hotel, where, with every modern convenience', he would give every attention as before: 'only five minutes' walk from the Railway Passenger Station'. A Hill followed him, and in May 1884 the licence passed from Hill to Joseph Story, the old licence having been mislaid. Story stayed until 1888, when he moved to the Lorne Arms in Shaddongate. In 1887 he was one of the bidders for the Horse and Jockey at Cumwhinton, withdrawn at £485.

His successor, Joseph Pape, lasted eighteen months. He had started at the Royal Oak in Maryport with £30 and a little furniture, and had to borrow to buy the fixtures at the Wrestlers; the Official Receiver thought he was 'only just solvent' when he came. A receiving order was made on 30 July 1889, and his examination was adjourned so that he could account for what had become of July's takings. That week the High Brewery advertised the Wrestlers' Arms to let, fully licensed. Pape moved on to the Spinners Arms at Cummersdale the next year.

After a few weeks in the name of Henry Parish, the licence went in September 1889 to Butterworth Ivison, for many years barman to Mr Pearson at the Globe Lane vaults. Ivison, 63, is recorded as publican there in the 1891 census. Like most corner pubs it was the coroner's room for the streets around it, James Street, Hewson Street, Water Street and their courts. In August 1889 the jury sat there on an engine driver of the Maryport and Carlisle Railway who had come home from an excursion to Edinburgh at two in the morning, seen a friend to her door in James Street, and dropped dead on the pavement. Twice, in 1890 and 1895, the jury gave its fees to the bereaved family.

It was a meeting place for the trade, too. In May 1895 the Carlisle and District Licensed Victuallers' Association held its protest against the Local Veto Bill there, a measure that would have let ratepayers vote to cut or end the licences in their district, with Lowingham Hall of the Crown Hotel in the chair and the Wrestlers' landlord, William Chambers, in the room. Hall's best story was about Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the temperance MP, who on one train journey between Newcastle and Carlisle had eaten two whole boxes of chocolate creams: proof, said Hall, that the stomach was a tyrant and must have a craving for something. (Laughter and applause.)

John Edward Miller had it by 1898. He showed ponies and sold them, and in April 1899 the Red Rose Football Club gave a farewell dinner there for its captain, David O'Hara, who had won them the Carlisle Charity Shield; about fifty sat down. Miller died at the hotel on 28 September 1901, aged 34, without a will, and his widow Ann said she wished to carry on the business. She did, for about twenty-six years. Mrs Ann Miller is its keeper in the directories to 1914, and when she died in July 1927 she was still at the Cumberland Wrestlers' Hotel, very probably kept on as the Board's manager.

The Central Control Board acquired it in the week to 24 August 1916, with the Carlisle New Brewery and ten other city houses, the year it shut the Iredale brewery. That November the Board's report gave the Cumberland Wrestlers' Arms, James Street, as one of the seventeen houses where spirits could still be bought to take away, and its neighbour Iredale's brewery, where brewing had stopped, was being turned into a hostel for the workmen the Board was bringing into the city to rebuild its pubs. It opened on Sundays from February 1919, and from March 1926 it sold pies and sandwiches, one of ten houses without a dining room to do so.

It was on the Board's 1924 shortlist of houses with a case for rebuilding, but the work came thirteen years later. By then the old house was, in the Cumberland News's words, 'both worn out and ill-adapted for licensed premises in the light of modern usage'. Redfern drew its replacement in January 1937 and called the plan 'so simple that a detailed explanation of it is uncalled for'. The pub closed that July, and J & R Bell, who had beaten John Laing and Hodgson and Company to the job, began work on 12 July. By December the old inn had been demolished and the new one was going up on the same site.

A public bar and a men's smoking room faced Currock Street, a mixed smoking room lay behind on Rome Street, and the off-sales had its own door, all worked from a central servery. The corner plot sloped, so to keep the ground floor on one level Redfern gave it a raised terrace along the Currock Street front, reached by shallow steps, with iron railings and an arched wrought-iron gate. The plainness was deliberate. 'In this environment,' Redfern wrote, 'a plain, straightforward elevation, nicely grouped and proportioned, not out of scale with its surroundings, and of good materials, is what we should try to achieve.'

Critics have not been kind. One survey of every Redfern pub calls the exterior more conventionally Neo-Georgian than the Crown at Stanwix and quite plain by his usual standards, though Historic England's survey called the seven-bay front striking and a strong answer to a difficult plot. At the opening the Cumberland News saw brick walls, stone dressings and a green slate roof in the late eighteenth-century local manner, and 'a comfortable and friendly look'. The inside was another matter: oak in the public bar as usual, and in the smoking rooms panelling to seven feet in elm and Australian black bean, a Queensland hardwood, with furniture to match in rexine and hide, in a pub on a terraced street beside a coking plant.

The plan had E M Dinkel painting a sign with portraits of the wrestlers Matthew Steadman and George Lowden. The sign that went up showed George Steadman, heavyweight champion at Grasmere seventeen times, on one side, and on the other Steadman in a hold with Hexham Clarke, after one of the best-known photographs of the sport; the scheme's 1966 supplement says Steadman held the world championship for over thirty years. The two signs on the front in its last thirty years showed the same pair, and they came down at the start of 2007.

The replacement was managed to the day. It opened on Monday 3 October 1938 under J. J. Hodgson, who had run the Woolpack on Milbourne Street for several years. The Goliah on Crown Street and the London and North Western Railway Inn on James Street both closed on the 2nd, and the scheme's annual report said that the improved Wrestlers had made it practicable to close them: shut the old drinking shops, open the improved house a few streets away, and lose no time about it. The Carlisle Journal covered the opening, illustrated, on 30 September 1938.

A contributor to the Closed Pubs project who grew up next door remembers what stood around it: the railway behind the brewery, a busy signal box on Rome Street, outside gents built into the sandstone walling on the way to the gas works, and a coking plant whose acrid fumes got into the houses and clung to the fabric of everything. A bedroom built over the brewery archway. Big wooden yard gates. The pub laid out the old way: a men's public bar with sawdust and spittoons, a snug, a lounge, a function room with a piano, an off-licence.

From the early fifties a large, homely Aunty Maude ran it, hair in a turban, with a snappy spaniel called Molly. The neighbours had no hot water unless the fire was lit, and were allowed to fetch bucketfuls from the pub. In the early sixties came cigar-smoking Robert in a suit and glamorous, bouffanted Nellie, very probably Bob Burns and his wife Nellie, and the Horsemans from the corner shop led the singing at weekends into the early seventies.

Bob Burns, 'Bonzo' to his friends, had managed the Nelson Bridge Inn in Denton Holme before he came to the Wrestlers, as people who drank in both remember, and from about 1961 he made it a sporting pub. He started its darts about then and its football teams two years later, and took the entries for the Carlisle Summer Darts League. By July 1966 the shelves behind the bar were packed with trophies from seven darts teams and two football teams, with players coming from as far as Abbey Town and Lazonby. 'When darts playing is in progress, everything takes a back seat, including World Cup football,' he said. 'I had to take the T.V. set out of the bar for the darts and put it in another room.'

In February 1967 his customers set about chartering a 55-seat plane from Newcastle to Ipswich for Carlisle United's FA Cup fourth-round tie. The scheme's jubilee supplement of October 1966 credits him as the driving force behind the pub's sporting success, and he was photographed with its football team in 1969.

In January 1981 word went round that Bonzo had died. Pound notes went into hats, and collections were taken at Robertson's Bakery and among his friends at the Pedestrian Arms, until he walked in the door. He had been in intensive care at the Cumberland Infirmary. 'Who's dead? Not me,' he told the Cumberland News, which called him the man who had made the Wrestlers famous for its Burns suppers, having managed it for twenty years. The collections, he said, had not been handed over to him, just because he was alive. He ran it until 1983.

In the sell-off of 1972 it was in the first of four tender groups, 'the popular Cumberland Wrestlers', with the Board Inn and the Border Terrier, and the scheme sold it to Scottish & Newcastle on 16 April 1973. Then juke boxes, then scampi and chips in a basket. The old brewery building next door stood until a fire in November 1974 led to its demolition the following year. Then the terraces came down row by row, the Metal Box factory shut, and there was nowhere to park.

Harry Crellin, the last of the scheme's managers to retire, left in March 2000 after fourteen years at the Wrestlers. He had joined the scheme in 1954, and he and his wife Edith had kept the Horse and Farrier at Raffles from 1959 and opened the Border Terrier at Morton in 1967 before they came here. In October 2001 the pub that had had one of the oldest landlords in the business had one of the youngest, a landlady of 22.

It stopped being a pub in 2004, the year Historic England's survey gives, and in April 2006 the Cumberland News reported that a local man had bought it to turn into a house. In 2016 the outside was almost untouched and the inside stripped bare, the central servery gone even before the 2006 conversion. It was a carpet shop, then a fireplace centre, and it is boarded up now. Redfern's work outliving its use is not unusual: the Black Lion at Durdar is a Turkish restaurant and still his building.

Photograph

Also lost on Currock Street

• The Oddfellows Arms
• The Moulders Arms

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

Still serving, near where it stood

• The Scott & Brassey

  City Centre
  320 maway

• Carlisle Station Hotel bar

  City Centre
  350 maway

• Smiley's

  City Centre
  360 maway

• Bees Knees

  City Centre
  360 maway