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Lost pub · Rickergate

The Light Horseman Inn

Gone 1900

Built
The building carried the date 1683 over its passage doorway
Gone
10 October 1900, when its licence lapsed
There now
Carlisle Magistrates' Court
Address
36 Rickergate
Where exactly
Under the Magistrates' Court, at the former corner of Rickergate and Warwick Street.

Stood at 36 Rickergate (21 before the street was renumbered in the 1860s), on the corner of Warwick Street: the last house on the west side before Warwick Street, which led through to the new markets. It was a tall, narrow, three-storey inn with a painted horseman on the front. The building was older than any record of the pub. Over the passage doorway to the right was the date 1683: W. Y. Hobbiss sketched 'the date over the passage at the old Light Horseman Inn' for his prize-winning Rambling Sketches in Carlisle at the School of Art exhibition of December 1882, and the Cumberland News read 1683 there in a Tullie House photograph in 1991.

The pub itself first appears in the 1820s. Pigot's directory of 1828-29 lists a 'Keg, John Gibson, Rickergate', very probably this house in its Letters Keg years, and Parson and White's of 1829 already names Joseph Henry as keeper of the Light Horseman. It was also called the Flying Horseman: the 1861 and 1891 censuses use that name, and so did the papers now and then in the 1860s. The licence, the advertisements and the courts always called it the Light Horseman.

In November 1840 two soldiers, Paul Reed of the 87th Fusiliers and Martin Harrison of the 4th Dragoon Guards, laid into the landlord, Jacob Chokes as the Carlisle Journal printed his name, and anyone else in the house. Reed hit him over the head with a heavy iron scraper; Harrison seized the poker, struck 'indiscriminately every person who came in his way', and ran off. As Reed was taken down Rickergate to the Police Office, soldiers of the 87th and a mob tried to rescue him. The Superintendent was knocked to the ground, and Constable Kent laid out one of the attackers with his staff, a blow across the cheek that the paper said would make him easy to identify. Reed and Harrison were fined 20s. each, or a month's hard labour.

Mrs Poole had it in 1846, when the creditors of a Stanwix master builder, Thomas Atkin, were told to send their claims to her at the Light Horseman. In race week of July 1848 Peter Campbell, a stranger in the city, was found dead in its privy, the inquest giving the address as Bewley's Lane. He had lost a leg as a railway labourer and since lived by begging round the country with a certificate 'written in gilt' that set out his misfortune; he had lodged in Drover's Lane for the races and enjoyed them 'pretty freely'. In November 1852 John Poole announced that he had moved from the Light Horseman to the Rising Sun in Scotch Street.

On 12 July 1858 Orange lodge 78 dined at Mr Sherrington's, the Light Horseman, with James Hamilton, district master, in the chair and 'harmony until a late hour'; the Cumberland News's 1933 list of the street's licensed houses has John Sherrington keeping it in the 1860s. That November the inn was advertised to let at Martinmas. Marion Armstrong had it by 1861, and in 1865 advertised for a lost white pointer bitch with a brown head. At midday on 10 July 1863 a swarm of bees turned the corner into Warwick Street and settled in the eaves of the house behind; the tenant set a straw hive on a lower roof, coaxed them in and blocked their other door. They went in, the Carlisle Examiner said, 'most ungraciously and unwillingly'.

In February 1870 a man walked into Bradford police station at half past eleven at night, the worse for drink, and said he was wanted in Carlisle for killing a man in a quarrel at the Flying Horseman in July 1867. He was Richard Mason, who called himself Joe Goss after the English middleweight champion of the day, and 'aspires to the reputation of a boxer'. He had fought a Stanwix man in the pub and run off, believing he had killed him. Nobody had died. The Bradford police didn't believe him either, and the Carlisle Patriot suspected he had hoped for a free ride home to Carlisle: 'In this he has been baulked.'

The year before, in April 1869, the coroner sat in the Light Horseman on Thomas Ewart, a butcher of Bewley's Court, aged 33. When another butcher, James Hetherington, 'better known as Jim o' the Bank', refused to go away from his shop door, Ewart picked up a butcher's 'belly stretcher' in fun and struck him on the shoulder. The stick sprang back and burst Ewart's own left eye. He died raving four days later, tied to his bed. The doctors found 'a drunkard's brain', and the jury found he had hastened his own death.

John Wainman died in May 1881, and his widow Deborah took the house on with nothing but the furniture and a little stock. She catered the judges' dinner at the Horticultural Society's first summer show in 1884, was on the magistrates' black list in 1885 and again in 1889, and went bankrupt at the end of 1888, nearly £900 short, blaming bad trade and standing surety for her son. She had kept no books at all, and her stock sold for £2 1s. In October 1889 the mortgagees put the inn up for auction with the shop beside it, five tenements behind and three houses in Warwick Street: 'old-established', with 'a very influential patronage'. John McCormack, born in Scotland, was the tenant.

In 1893, with the house still in the hands of its mortgagees, the owners planned to rebuild. The temperance North Cumberland Reformer feared they would turn it into a 'heavy horseman' and suggested a baker's shop instead. Their solicitor asked the city magistrates to approve the plans before any work began, so that the licence wouldn't be lost over the alterations. Because of this case the magistrates agreed on 30 October 1893 that every plan to alter a licensed house in the city should come before them first. Then, in November, a very full bench refused the Light Horseman's plans.

In January 1894 the bench three times refused to pass the licence to Joseph Wallace, though two teetotallers wrote to say they had 'watched Mr Wallace's movements' and found him most respectable (laughter in court). Mary Peascod, lately of the Old Bush, took it instead, and in September 1894 passed it to John Best, whose name is on the sign in the photograph. That summer the owners, the Sauls, a family of Carlisle solicitors, offered the whole property to the Corporation, since a new building line in Rickergate and Warwick Street would leave them 216 of their 530 square yards. The council said no: buying it 'would only open one end of the bottle-neck'.

In August 1898 the Chief Constable found it 'filthy', with defective sanitation and 'a most objectionable back door'. When the works were done he called it 'an abominable place before', and objected to a box room by the urinal that he had seen full of youths of 15 to 20. The licence was renewed on condition that room was kept out of use, and the owners' solicitor said an application would shortly be made to move the licence 'to an entirely different place'.

The place was Lindisfarne Street, near London Road station, where Mr Saul proposed a new hotel. On 28 August 1899 the residents held an open-air meeting on the very site; a railwayman, Robert Long, asked 'What have the licences done for Rickergate?' and was warmly applauded, and 430 of the 700 to 800 households signed a petition. The justices granted the removal that September by a small majority, the Carlisle Journal calling it 'an anomalous arrangement': a new district got a public house because an over-crowded one gave one up. In September 1900 the removal was made absolute, with Edmund Blair as tenant. Asked what the hotel was to be called, the solicitor said: 'It hasn't been christened yet.' (Laughter.)

The Light Horseman's licence lapsed by arrangement on 10 October 1900, and Blair opened the new hotel, the Linton Holme, now the Lint, on 12 November. In February 1901 the owners asked the Corporation to widen the two streets, and the City Surveyor understood they meant to make the old inn a shop; the Cumberland News in 1991 found it in the city directories until 1902-03. Rickergate was losing pubs long before the State Management Scheme: of the fourteen or so the street had at the end of the nineteenth century, only eight lasted to 1916. The site is under the Magistrates' Court; the 1991 column put it where the police station stood.

Photograph

Old photograph of a tall narrow three-storey rendered inn with a painted sign of a horseman, a board reading Light Horseman Inn, John Best, licensed retailer of ale, wine and spirits, a doorway on the right, and a group of men and small children outside
The Light Horseman Inn, Rickergate, while John Best kept it, between 1894 and 1900. The 1683 datestone was over the doorway on the right Cumbria Image Bank, image ct01084, used with permission
Old Ordnance Survey street plan of the west side of Rickergate, with Warwick Street turning off to the west and Gibson's Court below it, a red circle round the corner house lettered Inn on the north side of Warwick Street, and a red label reading Light Horseman
Rickergate at the Warwick Street corner on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map surveyed in 1865. The map says only 'Inn'; the house circled, on the corner, is the Light Horseman, which the 1889 sale put 'at the junction of Warwick Street and Rickergate' National Library of Scotland, CC BY 4.0

Sources 37

Location from geograph.org.uk. The pin marks the site.

Open question

An unsolved mystery

Where was Bewley's Lane? The 1848 inquest put the Light Horseman 'in Bewley's lane', the butcher whose inquest was held there in 1869 lived in Bewley's Court, and a Miss Bewley was one of its tenants in 1889, yet the 1865 Ordnance Survey map names no Bewley's Lane or Court beside it. And was Gibson's Court, just south of Warwick Street on the same map, named after John Gibson of the Keg?

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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