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Lost pub · Irishgate Brow

The Ship Inn

1829 to about 1869

Built
In local directories before 1829
Gone
Gone from the directories by 1869
There now
Not established
Where exactly
Irishgate Brow ran down from the castle towards the Caldew and has gone; the pin marks roughly where it was, not the building. The position is approximate.

Irishgate Brow ran down from the Irish Gate, below the castle, to Caldew Bridge, and for a time it had two Ships. The older one became the Victoria Steam Packet about 1840 and later the Royal Victoria. This was the other, known as the Old Ship and trading before 1829; the Carlisle Encyclopaedia has it named on an 1865 Ordnance Survey plan simply as the Ship.

It stood at the bottom of the Brow, near enough to Caldew Bridge that the papers gave either address, and close to the Caledonian line. When a young fireman, Thomas Harris, was killed in a collision at the Caldew Junction in January 1850, his body was carried to the Old Ship, and the coroner's jury went there to view it after looking over the smashed engines in the shed.

By the 1860s it was Thomas Park's, and Mrs Park did most of the talking in court. Fined half a crown in May 1863 for being open in church hours, Park told the bench 'I'm fined innocent', adding that 'if there was not so much charity given there would be less drunk'. That August Mrs Park answered a charge of a noisy house at midnight by saying it was so still 'a mouse might have been heard crossing the floor', and the case was dismissed. In 1865 the women the police counted in the house were, she said, 'all married women', and the fiddler 'a blind man looking for a living'.

The Mayor wanted the licence refused in 1864 and was outvoted by his two fellow magistrates. Fines followed for harbouring prostitutes, £1 in May 1865 and £5 that November, and at the brewster sessions of August 1868 the bench withdrew the licence of Thomas Park of the Old Ship as a black-list case. A W. Johnstone had signed for a Ship in the innkeepers' memorial of February 1867. The directories have it gone by 1869; another record keeps it trading until 1880.

In 1891 a report on the Hound and Otter listed the houses that had gone from the streets round Annetwell Street, among them 'the Ship Inn' at the Irish Damside. Irish Damside ran north from the foot of Irishgate Brow, and the same list puts at the Irish Damside the Black Lion, which stood on the corner of the two. No other record has a Ship on Irish Damside, so it is very probably this house under its other address. A different pub from the Ship Inn on Rickergate.

The name spread to a lane on the Brow: in 1861 the fortune-teller Jane Docherty, 'Clubby', gave her address as Ship Lane, Irishgate Brow, at the inquest on the deaths at the Pack Horse.

Sources 8

Open question

A date we can't pin down

Did the Old Ship on Irishgate Brow trade on after the bench withdrew Thomas Park's licence in August 1868? The directories have it gone by 1869; another record gives 1880.

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.

Tell us about The Ship Inn

Also lost on Irishgate Brow

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Still serving, near where it stood

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