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Lost pub · Corporation Road

The Golden Fleece

1861 to about 1928

Opened
1861
Gone
Closed about 1928, when the rebuilt Malt Shovel opened across the way
There now
In commercial use by 2018
Address
2 Corporation Road
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4008756325, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: commercial.

There were at least five Golden Fleeces around Carlisle, and this is the one on Corporation Road, on the corner of Solway Street at the foot of Rickergate: not the St Nicholas Street house that the South End Constitutional Club took over, nor the one out on the Penrith road at Carleton, nor the shorter-lived ones at Willowholme and Harraby. It began as the Buck Inn and took the Golden Fleece name around 1860, and the man who kept it then very probably brought the name with him.

Stephen Sharp, from Stockdalewath near Castle Sowerby, had the Golden Fleece on St Nicholas Street by June 1858. Its owner advertised that house to let from Whitsuntide 1860; the 1861 census finds Sharp keeping the Buck at 1 Corporation Road; and the Buck became the Golden Fleece at about the same time. He died 'at the Golden Fleece Inn, Corporation Road' on 6 July 1866, aged 48, and that August the licence passed to Sarah Sharp. From then on the town had two Golden Fleeces, at opposite ends of it.

It was the first house over the Eden Bridges from Stanwix. In February 1866 Mary Bell of Sandysykes was thrown from the front of a cart when a line of six carts bunched up crossing Eden Bridge; she 'was immediately conveyed to the nearest public-house, the Golden Fleece, where she shortly expired', and the inquest was held there. The Ordnance Survey's 25-inch maps, surveyed in 1865 and revised in 1924, both mark it as an inn on the corner where Solway Street meets Corporation Road.

Mrs S. King kept it in 1877, when her apprentice son Anthony was before the bench for refusing to work Saturday afternoons at a plumber's; his employers asked for no fine, 'as the defendant's mother would have to pay'. In 1881 a Finkle Street fruit dealer had £8 15s 6d picked from his pocket in the bar. James Lidderdale had it until February 1886, when John Reed came from the White Horse; in 1889 Reed handed it to his mother, Elizabeth Reed.

She passed it that August to her son-in-law, Henry Longhurst, for some time a corporal in the Border Regiment, and the Chief Constable told the bench the house was badly conducted. By December John Wright, fifteen years a Carlisle innkeeper and formerly of the Wheat Sheaf and the Blue Bell in Rickergate, had taken it over. In January 1893 its licence passed temporarily from John Wright to David Glendinning, the keeper in the directory of 1894.

By 1895 the licence was held by Jane Bell, widow of William Mark Bell, a nail manufacturer, which was a common enough way for a woman to end up running a pub in that period. She took lodgers, and in 1897 sued one who had left owing most of two months' board and gone into the army; by 1898 she was calling it the Golden Fleece Hotel. In 1890 the house belonged to Trimble's Dalston Brewery, and by 1916 to the Maryport Brewery.

In 1907 the licence went to David Maher, Danny to his customers, who had played professionally for Carlisle United in 1906 and brought a lot of trade to the pub. He enlisted in 1915, and that June the licence passed to his wife Emily. In November a soldier home on sick leave, Private Charles Cassidy of the 6th Border Regiment, told an inquest he had left the Golden Fleece at 9.15 on the night of a fight in Rickergate, after two pints, 'because I could not get any more. I had not had any money for eight months.' The Mahers stayed until 1927.

The scheme acquired the house from the Maryport Brewery in October 1916 (the Cumberland News of 21 October 1916 names it among the houses taken over that week); it is number twenty-one on the scheme's 1920 roll, which puts it on Corporation Street. It closed when the rebuilt Malt Shovel opened across the way in 1928. The scheme's annual report for 1929 says so in as many words: the opening of the new Malt Shovel 'made practicable the closing of the neighbouring Golden Fleece Inn and the sale of the premises'.

The Cumberland News of 24 April 1992 puts it at No 2, the far right house in a photograph of the three, and says it was the longest surviving of them, in the directories from 1829, though the column does not say under which name, until 1929. The window sills at the side carry small metal spikes, put there on Mrs Maher's instructions early in the century to stop soldiers from the Castle sitting on them with their drinks.

On 15 May 1992 Rex Black of Currock Street, for whom No 2 had once been home, said the Golden Fleece belonged to Trimble's, the Maryport brewers, and later became the headquarters of the Lochinvar Bus Company. A circular, stone-built, roofless public urinal stood nearby with some sheep pens, and the main entrance to Bitts Park was behind the property, where the ring road now runs. After the bus company left, a joiner occupied it, then the city council bought it for housing; Mr Black's family, with four children, rented it and bought it when council house sales were allowed.

He remembered a roomy town house with half moon doors to the cellar, but because of the very busy Malt Shovel across the road they decided to sell up and move somewhere quieter. On 22 May 1992 Mrs Evelyn Buttrum and her mother, Mrs Vera Graham of Upperby, then 85, confirmed that Maher was her father, and that the spikes were to stop the soldiers sitting on the window sill, which was just below her bedroom window when she was a little girl.

Photograph

Old Ordnance Survey map of Corporation Road and Solway Street near the Eden Bridges, with a row of houses along the street, a red circle round the corner house lettered Inn, and a red label reading Golden Fleece
The corner of Corporation Road and Solway Street on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map surveyed in 1865, while Stephen Sharp kept the house. The Golden Fleece is the inn on the corner, circled National Library of Scotland, CC BY 4.0
Old Ordnance Survey map of Corporation Road, Solway Street and the old pig market, with a hatched row of buildings, a red circle round the corner building beside the word Inn, and a red label reading Golden Fleece
The same corner on the 25-inch map revised in 1924, during Danny and Emily Maher's last years there; the Malt Shovel's rebuilding, across the road, closed it four years later National Library of Scotland, CC BY 4.0

Sources 27

Open question

A date we can't pin down

Did the Golden Fleece on Corporation Road close about 1928 or in 1929? The scheme's report ties its closing to the new Malt Shovel of 1928, while the Cumberland News of 24 April 1992 says the directories carry it to 1929, with a licensee from 1907 until 1927.

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.

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Also lost on Corporation Road

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