Lost pub · Botchergate

The Earl Grey

1935 to 2010

Built: Opened 9 July 1935, replacing an Earl Grey of about 1837
Gone: Closed as Jesters, 2 October 2010
There now: Carlisle Taekwon-do Centre
Address: 161-163 Botchergate
Where exactly: Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4062355334, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building has since been demolished.

Botchergate has lost two Earl Greys. The first began as a beerhouse in 1837. M. Hetherington signed the innkeepers' memorial of February 1867 as its keeper, Birrell and Little, the wine merchants, held it in 1884, at 151 Botchergate, and T. and H. Skelton in 1894. It was a rough house by one account: a 1900s memory piece recalls it as 'a rough place, and not very nice to pass, with perhaps a group of toughs at the doorway, not always sober', part of a sermon at St John's on 'the three P's' nearby and in that order: the pub (this one), the pawnshop on Union Street, and the poorhouse on Fusehill Street.

It was a Carlisle Old Brewery house when the scheme acquired it in August 1916, or July by Historic England's gazetteer, and is number fifteen on the scheme's 1920 roll. In 1922, when Colonel Claude Lowther accused the Board of taking away the well-kept houses of men such as Henry Skelton and John Minns, the Advisory Committee's chairman named the old Earl Grey among the houses they had run, still licensed under the scheme. It had a women's bar, crowded on Saturday nights by 1923, when the scheme cited it against a prohibitionist's charge that it had drawn women into the pubs: 'Women were drinking in Carlisle public houses before the Control Board came here'.

The second replaced it and opened on 9 July 1935: an Art Deco building by Harry Redfern, put up by J & R Bell, on the corner of Rydal Street. Redfern called his plans of February 1934 so plain that little explanation seemed necessary. He beat J & R Bell down to £7,850, and the new pub's opening closed the nearby St Nicholas, Queen Adelaide and Golden Fleece. The scheme's press notes called it a departure from traditional types: fawn-grey brick, blue glazed pantiles, green metal windows, and chromium on the seats and beer engines. Redfern was pleased with the bricks, 'beautiful bricks' he called them, set off by coloured mortar, and its bull-nose corner copies the old pub.

He would not spread the public rooms over two floors here, so they were all on the ground floor: a public bar at the front off Botchergate, a large smoking room for men and women behind, a smaller women's room beside it, and an off-sales with its own door on Union Street, as Rydal Street then was. Each room had its own entrance. The women's room was Redfern's insistence. There were worries that women made too comfortable in the smoking room would be hard to clear out at closing time, so they got a room of their own, smaller than the other two but as well lit and heated, with its own lavatory, something of a novelty in the area then. The ladies' lavatory off the vestibule was for women using the smoking room with gentlemen, preferably their husbands.

The scheme sold it to Greenall Whitley on 21 May 1973, or 28 May by one record. It had stopped trading as the Earl Grey by 1987, and went through a run of names after that: Rydal's, Casablanca and the Carlisle Rugby League Supporters Club among them between 1993 and 1997, then Jesters from 1998 until it closed for good on 2 October 2010, though Historic England put the change to a taekwondo school in 2009. The building is still there and is now a taekwondo school, and the smoking room's domed rooflight was still there in 2017. Look at the Rydal Street wall and the letters EWS are still painted on it, for Emergency Water Supply, put there in the war so the fire service knew where to draw from if the mains went.

Sold to Greenall Whitley as part of Group 4, handed over on 21 May 1973. Who bought the rest

Photograph

Old newspaper photograph of a 1930s bar room with plain panelled walls, tubular steel chairs around small tables, globe lights hanging from the ceiling, a clock and a servery window with a slatted grille — The bar of the Earl Grey, Botchergate, as remodelled in 1935 Cumbria Image Bank, image ct50824, used with permission

Sources 11

co-curate.ncl.ac.uk
CARLISLE_PUBS_Ver_3.xls (Mike Tuer's pub database)
Historic England, Countering the 'deadliest of foes': public houses of the Central Control Board and the State Management Scheme, 1916-73 (Clare Howard, Research Report 89-2018): Appendix C, gazetteer of scheme premises
Historic England, Countering the 'deadliest of foes': public houses of the Central Control Board and the State Management Scheme, 1916-73 (Clare Howard, Research Report 89-2018): Appendix B, summaries of key State Management public houses
Historic England, Countering the 'deadliest of foes': public houses of the Central Control Board and the State Management Scheme, 1916-73 (Clare Howard, Research Report 89-2018)
The State Management Story documents: Temperance Legislation League papers: correspondence answering Peter Chalmers, January 1923
Carlisle newspaper, 10 June 1941: obituary of R. C. Bell of J & R Bell, builders (via newspapers.com)
The Cumberland News, 18 November 1922, p. 9: 'Control in Carlisle', letters of Colonel Claude Lowther and G. A. Rimington (via newspapers.com)
Carlisle Patriot, 22 February 1867, p. 7: 'Carlisle Town Council: the Public House Closing Act', with the innkeepers' memorial (via British Newspaper Archive)
Bulmer's History, Topography and Directory of East Cumberland (1884), Carlisle: hotels, inns and taverns, beerhouses, and wine and spirit merchants (University of Leicester digital copy)
Kelly's Directory of Cumberland (London: Kelly and Co., 1894), Carlisle: street directory and public houses (University of Leicester digital copy)

Open question

A date we can't pin down

What order did the Earl Grey's 1990s names run in? One source gives Casablanca, Rydal's, then the Jester; another gives Rydal's (1993-97), then Casablanca and the Carlisle Rugby League Supporters Club, then Jesters (1998-2010).

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 The Earl Grey