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Lost pub · Water Street

The Pack Horse Inn

1845 to 1867

Built
Very probably named by Robert Brown, who came from the English Street Pack Horse in the early 1840s
Gone
Licence withdrawn September 1867
There now
Not established
Where exactly
On Water Street, beside the railway south-west of the Citadel station. The house's place on the street isn't known, so the pin marks the street, not the building.

The second of the city's Pack Horses, and in a sense the first one moved. Robert Brown kept the old Pack Horse on English Street until it was pulled down for shops about 1841, and he was a timber merchant as well as an innkeeper. He moved his timber yard to Water Street, beside the railway south-west of the Citadel station, and by June 1845 he was signing his sales from the 'Pack Horse Inn, Water Street': Honduras and St Domingo mahogany in logs up to nineteen feet long, veneers, ash planks and larch, sold at his new timber yard there. No earlier record puts a Pack Horse on Water Street, so the name very probably came with him.

In October 1843 the body of a new-born child found in the dam near Denton Hill was laid at Brown's house in Water Street to await the coroner. In December 1845 the Carlisle Patriot reprinted a handbill announcing that five shares in the new gas company would be raffled at the Pack Horse on New Year's Day, sixpence a throw, 'when the whole of the Subscription Money will be spent on the Premises'. The shares, the paper said, belonged to a town councillor, and it used the raffle to mock the corporation's gas and water schemes as 'mere bubbles'.

Brown was very probably still there in January 1852, when a man was bound over for an assault in 'Mr. Brown's Pack Horse inn'. By January 1855 the house was in the occupation of Mrs Brown, and it was let from Candlemas through a George Brown of 10 English Street. Its neighbour up the street was Iredale's brewery, owner of the first Cumberland Wrestlers. In 1858 Iredale finished a vaulted cellar more than a hundred yards long for nearly 2,000 barrels, its roof covered with two feet of earth and sown with wheat, 'so that when harvest approaches we may expect to see a crop of grain in the heart of our city'. He was shipping beer to a depot in Melbourne.

Like most small inns it served as the street's inquest room. In January 1859 the deputy coroner sat there on Hannah Connerton, a weaver's little daughter whose clothes caught fire while her father was out, and in April 1860 on Margaret Hill, 73, wife of Benjamin Hill, 'a well-known veteran angler'. He was 77 and ill himself; getting out of bed to fetch her water, he fainted on the way, and when he came round she was dead.

The house is remembered for the night of 11-12 April 1861. Jane Davidson, 49, had come from the King of Prussia at Penrith and taken it at Candlemas. Her husband, a farm labourer at Scotby, was home about once a fortnight, and there were two beds: one for a married daughter and her husband, one for Mrs Davidson and two children. Her son-in-law William Horsley, 23, a draper's assistant at Hyslop's in Scotch Street whose wife had died some eighteen months before, came down most evenings and often slept on the kitchen settle. She had written him nearly forty letters and named the Rose and Crown in Lowthian's Lane as their meeting place.

The Carlisle Journal said the case was mixed up 'with a superstitious belief in witchcraft'. Jealous of a young woman Horsley was seeing, she had a neighbour follow him, and consulted Jane Docherty, a club-footed widow of Ship Lane known as 'Clubby', who read her fortune in a cup and promised that her husband would soon die and she would marry again. A pennyworth of 'dragon's blood' burned in the fire was to keep the young man from his sweetheart. At the inquest Clubby said she had sent out for a noggin of rum with Mrs Davidson's sixpence, drunk nearly all of it herself, and 'blathered' away 'just for a bit rise and nonsense'.

That Thursday night Horsley drank late in the kitchen after the others had gone to bed. In the morning he lay dead on the settle, a pillow under his head and a quilt over him, his neckerchief so tight the police officer could hardly get a finger under it. She had been sick all night, and as the coroner and jury were viewing his body, she died. The analysts found arsenic in her, and blood was found on her dress and apron. On 2 May the jury found her guilty of his wilful murder and of felo de se, self-murder.

A week after the deaths the Pack Horse was advertised to let through Mr Wright, solicitor, and by May it was trading again. By 1864 Robert McLean had it. He ran a drinks tent at the races that July, where a man paid for a round with a half-crown that looked very bad; McLean threw it on the table twice, 'remarked that it rattled very well and would have to do', and marked it with his teeth before pocketing it. It was one of a run of counterfeit coins, and the man was committed for trial. That September McLean, fined twice that year for Sunday drinking, kept his licence over the Mayor's objection, with a warning.

By the spring of 1867 the house was at war with its neighbour, the Cumberland Wrestlers. In May Ann McClean of the Pack Horse was fined a shilling and costs for abusing Elizabeth Ward, servant to Miss Smith of the Wrestlers, whom she regularly called 'a murderer', saying she had two children. It was not her first time before the bench for it. Her witness said the young woman had 'laughed' as she went past the house, and she was warned that a heavy penalty awaited the next charge.

In September 1867 the justices withdrew it, with those of the Silloth Railway Inn and the Liverpool Arms, 'the irregular manner in which those houses had been conducted being such as to demand their suppression in the public interest'. The house belonged to Iredale by then. In August 1868 Mrs Dover applied on behalf of her husband, John Dover, of the Pack Horse, for its licence, with Iredale's support; the bench refused every application that day. A John Dover was keeping the Drove at Stanwix Bank by 1873.

One record gives the house a later name, the Queen Victoria, and an end about 1862, but the newspapers of the 1860s call it the Pack Horse until its licence went, and none of them uses the other name. Not the Pack Horse Inns on English Street or Newtown Road, or the Packhorse at Burgh.

Sources 22

Open question

A date we can't pin down

Who kept the Pack Horse on Water Street between Mrs Brown, who left at Candlemas 1855, and Jane Davidson, who came at Candlemas 1861? And was George Brown of 10 English Street, who let it in 1855, Robert Brown's son, the owner, or both?

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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