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Lost pub · King's Arms Lane

The Kings Arms

Gone 1891

Gone
Licence refused at the Brewster Sessions, 7 September 1891
There now
Not established
Address
5 King's Arms Lane
Where exactly
In Kings Arms Lane, a few doors in from the English Street end, going by its low number, and placed using the lane's line on Carlisle's 1794 town plan. The exact building isn't known, so the position is approximate.

A small house in Kings Arms Lane, behind the old Kings Arms Inn on English Street, that ended up with its name. It was the Unicorn first: Pigot's directory of 1828-29 lists 'Unicorn, John Comerford, King's Arms lane', and Parson and White's of 1829 has Susanna Comerford there. An 1841 sale advertisement for the 'long established' Old Unicorn falls in that phase.

It traded as the Unicorn until 1843, the Golden Pheasant until 1853 and the Crown until about 1861; the Post Office directory of 1858 lists the Crown, King's Arms Lane, under T. McGowan, beside the King's Arms on English Street. In February 1860 John Bell, late of the Rose and Crown in Lowthian's Lane, advertised that he had entered the Crown Inn, King's Arms Lane.

When the English Street inn closed, about 1861, the lane house took its name. Mrs Gordon signed the innkeepers' memorial of February 1867 for the King's Arms, and the Post Office directory of 1873 has Mrs Isabella Gordon at the King's Arms, 5 King's Arms Lane, the only King's Arms in the city that year. James Johnston kept it in 1884, and in December 1890 the licence passed from John Wood to Thomas Leslie. A Cumberland News column of 6 September 1991 gives its last directory entry as 1890.

It was a drinking shop rather than an inn by then. In May 1891 Tom Leslie was summoned after police found three men drunk and fighting upstairs, one with his eye 'bunged up'. The Society of Plasterers met in the house every Saturday night, and Leslie had gone for a policeman himself; the charge against him was dismissed, the chairman calling it a case of strong suspicion.

At the licensing sessions on Monday 7 September 1891 the Chief Constable objected to renewal of the licence on the grounds that the house did not afford sufficient accommodation, was not necessary and was insanitary. There was no backyard, and the conveniences were within the house. The owners, Messrs Trimble of Dalston, had tried to put it right but were told that it could not be made thoroughly satisfactory, and it was described as purely and simply a drink shop with no accommodation for man or beast.

The Chief Constable said that on inspecting on 28 August he had found a urinal boarded off in a corner of the bar and an unventilated water closet at the kitchen entrance, and that the house had been transferred four times in four years. The owners' solicitor, Mr McKeever, said that some five years earlier the justices had sanctioned large additions to Hope's bar at the other end of the lane, which showed the needs of the locality were not then fully supplied, but the bench unanimously refused to renew the licence.

The owner, W. T. Trimble, appealed to the county Quarter Sessions in October 1891; by then the tenant had gone and the house stood empty, the Chief Constable called it unfit for a licensed house, and the appeal was dismissed, with costs. Not the Kings Arms at Kingstown, which took the name in the 1870s.

Sources 13

Open question

An unsolved mystery

Was the King's Arms Lane house once part of the English Street inn's premises? The English Street inn could be entered from the lane, and the name passed from one to the other about 1861.

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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