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Lost pub · St Nicholas Street

The Golden Fleece Inn

1857 to 1936

Built
First recorded as a pub in 1857
Gone
1936, when the club took it
There now
The Carlisle South End Constitutional Club
Address
38 St Nicholas Street
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4066455158, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: recreational (South End Constitutional Club).

A fitting name for a wool and textile town. It stood at 38 St Nicholas Street, or 36 by one record, on the west side just south of Court Street, 'at the foot of Botchergate' as an 1858 sale notice put it. The earliest dated record is October 1857, when William Murray, until then a gardener on London Road, advertised that he had 'entered upon' the inn, with a £3 prize for pigeon shooting from a trap on 9 November; one record has it trading from 1856.

It was a house with land. The 1866 to-let notice lists two front parlours, five bedrooms, a kitchen and back kitchen, a good cellar, two stables, a gig house 'and a very productive Garden, of about an Acre, behind'. The Ordnance Survey's 25-inch map surveyed in 1864 shows the inn set back from the street with the garden and a field behind it, and there was still a field beside it in 1877, when a builder's stock was auctioned there. The owners were the Browns: William Brown of St Nicholas in 1858 and 1859, and John Brown of Welton in 1866.

Murray lasted six months. His furniture and stock were sold under a county court warrant in April 1858, and by July he was a labourer in Union Street, petitioning as an insolvent debtor. Stephen Sharp had the house by June 1858, until the owner let it again from Whitsuntide 1860; by 1861 Sharp was keeping the Buck on Corporation Road, which took the Golden Fleece name at about that time, very probably from him (see the Golden Fleece, Corporation Road).

Joseph Forster, a former grocer and bookkeeper from Lowther Street, had it by May 1861, when he offered its stables to let as warerooms. He went bankrupt in 1863, was discharged that August, and stayed on. His New Year rabbit coursing, for 14-, 16- and 19-inch dogs with silver prizes, held in a field called Birney's meadow and later near Botcherby, drew bigger crowds than any such meeting the city had seen, and by 1865 was 'one of the most important meetings of the kind in the north of England'. Coursing men came back to the Golden Fleece to settle their stakes.

Standing between the railway yards and the St Nicholas crossing, it was where the coroner sat for the district. On 27 December 1858 the inquest was held there on James McGibbon, a 26-year-old who took waggon numbers for the railway clearing house, killed by a Caledonian engine running tender first near the crossing; the jury asked for lights at both ends of tenders. Others followed: James Haddow, a fourteen-year-old engine cleaner crushed between buffers in 1869; Margaret Parker in 1885, whose drunken husband was held on suspicion of poisoning her until the analyst cleared him; a London and North Western shunter killed in the goods yard in 1886; and old people and children from the streets around, to 1905.

In November 1877, during closed hours on a Sunday morning, two plain-clothes constables were shown round the house by the landlord, Mr Phillips, who called one of them 'the biggest scamp in Carlisle'. Upstairs he opened his son's bedroom door, and the son, a commercial traveller with about £300 on him, hit the constable on the nose. 'I think it was a good 'un,' the landlord told the bench. The son was acquitted, to applause in court.

Peter James Peascod kept it from about 1884 to 1886. His servant sued him in 1886, without success, after he sacked her for lighting the kitchen fire before the bar fire; he had also blown out her candle on the stairs, saying he could not afford candles burning in the bedrooms. The bench had allowed him singing in the house, and he moved on to the Old Bush. William Lees kept it in 1891 and 1897, and Thomas Edward Nicholson in 1906.

The Maryport Brewery owned it from 1894. In June 1897 it asked the magistrates to let it bring the frontage nineteen feet forward over the waste ground in front, for a larger bar, a smoke room, five bedrooms and an assembly room: 'practically to turn what had been an inn into an hotel'. George Armstrong was the architect. The 25-inch map revised in 1899 still shows the house standing back from the street. That year the Chief Constable gave it as fully licensed and only 45 yards from the White Ox, which was refused a full licence that September; the White Ox's tenant put the distance at 60 or 70 yards.

The state took it in 1916. In 1917 it was run by a salaried manager, Thomas William Sproat, on £3 a week with a free house, coals and goods such as soap; his appeal against call-up failed that August. In 1922, when Colonel Claude Lowther complained that the Board had taken away the well-kept houses of men such as Henry Skelton and John Minns, the Advisory Committee's chairman listed the Golden Fleece among the eleven houses those men had run, and pointed out that it was still licensed under the scheme.

One record ends its life as a pub in 1934; the South End Constitutional Club took the building in 1936. Historic England's gazetteer treats it as later part of the White Ox and closes it in 1935, when Redfern's new Earl Grey opened on 9 July and the scheme shut the Golden Fleece, the St Nicholas and the Queen Adelaide nearby. The Board's sale of 'formerly the White Ox Inn premises' on the street in April 1919 makes that merger hard to credit: the White Ox was a shop by then.

The Cumberland News of 16 April 1992 says drinking on the site has gone on since 1858, and that the directories show the Golden Fleece in business for around three-quarters of a century, closing in about 1934. A few doors along, the Golden Lion survives as Gallagher's: two Golden pubs on one short street, one lost and one still serving.

Photograph

Old coloured Ordnance Survey map of St Nicholas Street, with pink terraces along the street, an open field and a tree-lined garden behind a building set back from the street lettered Inn, a red circle round it and a red label reading Golden Fleece
St Nicholas Street on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map surveyed in 1864, in Joseph Forster's time. The Golden Fleece, circled, stands back from the street, with its garden and a field behind National Library of Scotland, CC BY 4.0
Old Ordnance Survey map of St Nicholas Street, Court Street and Lord Street, with hatched terraces, a red circle round a building lettered P.H. set back from the street, and a red label reading Golden Fleece
The same spot on the 25-inch map revised in 1899, with terraces built over the fields; the Golden Fleece, circled, still stands back from the street National Library of Scotland, CC BY 4.0

Sources 36

Also lost on St Nicholas Street

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

Still serving, near where it stood

All the lost pubs