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Lost pub · Willowholme

The Golden Fleece

1837 to about 1855

Opened
1837
Gone
Gone from the directories after 1855
There now
Not established
Where exactly
At Willowholme; the pin marks the district, not the building. The position is approximate.

Willowholme is the low ground north of Caldewgate between the Caldew and the Eden, which flooded regularly and was given over to industry rather than housing, so a pub there was serving working men rather than a neighbourhood. This one had two names. Mike Tuer's database has it as the Saddle from 1838 to 1847 and the Golden Fleece from 1848 to 1858, and the directories list a Saddle Inn at Willowholme from 1844 to 1848, though they also give a Golden Fleece there from 1837.

The keeper bridges the two names. Adam Sewell kept the Saddle in September 1848, when a licence suspended for irregularities was granted back to him, and by June 1849 he was 'of the Golden Fleece inn, Willow-holme', acquitted on a first charge of selling spirits after hours. So the house was the Saddle first, and took the new sign between those two dates.

Thomas Ismay had it by 1850, and it was on its last warning. At the adjourned licensing court that September his was one of three houses held over as disorderly, and the magistrates certified his licence only 'after many scruples' and 'numerous apparently penitent assurances of more exactness and better conduct in future'. In October a weaver's wife from Paddon Beck told the bench how she had lost 7s 2d on a sofa there. She had had 'just two cheerers': 'a glass of whisky with hot water and sugar in it' (great laughter). The landlady had told her to be quiet, 'as plenty of things of that sort had happened in their house already'.

The man she accused had been 'drinking backwards and forwards at the Golden Fleece till twelve o'clock at night', and was discharged for want of evidence, but the Mayor said the affair was discreditable 'also to the person who kept them in his public-house; and if they had any more of these reports from the same house, they would take their license from them'.

In November four men well known to the police, charged with the 'highway robbery and ruffianly midnight attack' on a Scaleby farmer, Mr Palmer of Hall Flatt, were drinking rum in Ismay's front parlour just before the watchman cleared the house at midnight. A man from the back kitchen walked up the Holm with them and bought a piece of the stolen beef on Caldew Bridge, and Ismay's evidence of the times cleared him of the robbery itself. Ismay, a block cutter who had kept a beerhouse in Annetwell Street before coming to Willowholme, went insolvent that winter: the county court gave him its protection in January 1851 and made its final order that May. The Golden Fleece drops out of the directories after 1855.

It shares only a sign with the Saddle Inns on Botchergate and Fisher Street, both gone under that name by the late 1830s, and with Carlisle's other Golden Fleeces, on Corporation Road and St Nicholas Street, and at Carleton and Harraby.

Sources 11

Open question

A date we can't pin down

When did the Golden Fleece at Willowholme close, and did it really trade under that name as early as 1837? The directories carry it from 1837 to 1855, Mike Tuer's database has it as the Saddle until 1847 and the Golden Fleece until 1858, and Adam Sewell kept it as the Saddle in September 1848 and as the Golden Fleece by June 1849.

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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