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Lost pub · Botchergate

The Queen Adelaide

1830 to 1935

Built
A beerhouse by 1830, a full pub from 1837
Gone
Closed 1935, replaced directly across the road by the new Earl Grey
There now
The building stands; in commercial use in 2018
Address
142-144 Botchergate
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4060755313, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: commercial.

On the corner of King Street and Botchergate, at the London Road end, and a pub with two names in use at once for most of its life: the Queen Adelaide on paper and in parliamentary evidence, the Queen Inn, or the Queen's, in the street and in the court reports. It was a beerhouse by 1830, the year William IV came to the throne and Adelaide became queen, which is very likely where the name came from, though no record says so. The directories have it from 1844 at 13 London Road, then as 130 Botchergate in 1869 and 1884, 128 and 130 in the 1890s, and 142 from about 1906, as this stretch was renamed and then renumbered around it. The Ordnance Survey's 25-inch map revised in 1899 marks it 'Inn' on the corner, with the Earl Grey across the road.

It became a full inn in October 1839. John Forster, a joiner, had for some years rented two rooms here at nine guineas a year; his landlord, Mr Black, a clothier, then took in the premises next door, put up new buildings at a cost of about £200 'with the view to let the whole as an inn', and let it to Forster at £30 a year. Forster's daughter Jane died at 'the Queen Inn, London Road' that April, aged nine, and his wife Elizabeth there in November 1846, aged 53. In the bribery inquiry into the Carlisle election of 1847 a witness was asked whether he knew 'a person of the name of Foster, who keeps a public-house called the Queen Adelaide', and whether he had sent in a bill to the party agents. He had, for about £40. In 1848 Black sued to put Forster out.

By 1850 it was 'Fortunate George's, the Queen inn', kept by George Blackwell, where the backers of Charles Haywood, 'the Lancashire Pet', lodged for a £200 quoiting match for the championship of Britain that September. That November Blackwell was summoned for a very disorderly night, which he blamed on a party of the 81st Regiment billeted on him; the officer said Blackwell and his friends had used the soldiers very badly.

In 1853 a vagrant woman robbed the bar. Edward Sharp, of the Queen Inn, gave notice in January 1855 that he would not be answerable for his wife Hannah's debts, and by June Mary Biglands had the house, when a constable who came in by the back door on a Sunday night found one man standing in the stable 'with a glass before him on the ground' (laughter). She said her brother and his wife had only called for supper. In August 1856 an old labourer, Thomas Higgins, died after a fight with railwaymen on the road between Crown Street and Tait Street, and his son saw three of them at the door of the Queen public-house, where the landlady opened the door and let them in.

Richard Crossland kept it by 1880, when he was on the police black list. When he died, in 1886, it passed to his daughter Mary Graham Crossland, and in 1889 she married George Watt, eldest son of George Watt of North Bank, Eamont, near Penrith; the licence went from Margaret Ann Crossland to George Watt in September 1890, and he is the innkeeper of the 1891 census. That was the year a seller of parrots and cages was knocked down outside after a quarrel in the bar; asked in court whether he was sober now, he said, 'I am. What do you think of me?' 'Not much.' It was a Carlisle New Brewery house by 1889, when the brewery's plans to turn a beer cellar at the back into a kitchen and two bedrooms were turned down twice. In 1894 the licence passed from Mary Graham Watt to John R. Boone.

Under Boone it was a trade house. The Carlisle and District Licensed Victuallers' Association held its annual meeting there in October 1897, with Boone on the committee, and spent the evening resenting the magistrates' advice not to serve children under thirteen; the publicans had offered eleven. In 1900 the licence was renewed only after a caution, because a boy had been served whisky there. Mrs Ann Boone kept it in 1901, and John Telford, who also had the Albion, in 1914.

The scheme acquired it from the New Brewery in August 1916 and shut its off-sales in 1918. In September 1917 a soldier who had been drinking in the Queen Adelaide crossed to the Earl Grey, was refused at the door, and hit the barman; he told the bench that 'a soldier's pay did not allow him to get too much' (laughter), and, given a month's hard labour, 'That's what you get for fighting for your country.' A 1931 photograph survives showing the pub with its landlady, Mrs Ruell. It closed in 1935, the same year the new, Redfern-built Earl Grey opened directly across the road: one pub for another, in the same year. The building survives, and Historic England's gazetteer found it in commercial use in 2018.

Photograph

Two-storey rendered building with the name Queen Adelaide on a dark fascia above a curtained shop-style window, and two women standing on the pavement beside an arched doorway
The Queen Adelaide, Botchergate Cumbria Image Bank, image ct23190, used with permission
Old Ordnance Survey street plan where King Street and Princess Street meet Botchergate, with a red circle round the corner building labelled Inn on the King Street side, a red label reading Queen Adelaide, and a grey label marking the Earl Grey across the road
The Queen Adelaide, marked 'Inn' on the corner by King Street, with the Earl Grey across Botchergate, on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map revised in 1899 National Library of Scotland, CC BY 4.0

Sources 36

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