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Lost pub · Rickergate

The Ship Inn

1789 to about 1909

Built
In local directories before 1789
Gone
Licence ended 1909, after the compensation hearing
There now
Not established
Address
15 Rickergate
Where exactly
Placed by house number on the east side of Rickergate, between the Drove Inn and the Fox & Hounds, from the order of the houses in Kelly's directories of 1894 to 1906. The Ordnance Survey map of 1865 marks an inn on the second house south of the Swift's Row corner, which fits. The position is approximate.

The Ship stood at 15 Rickergate, on the east side at the Eden Bridge end of the street, just past the opening of Swift's Row. It was there before 1789, and between 1820 and 1822 it appears as the Three Ships and as the Maltman before settling on the plain Ship. In 1828 Mrs Busby was the innkeeper, with the house to let and a Mrs Owen its owner, and Parson and White's directory of 1829 names Mary Bushby. A Mrs Mary Bushby died in Rickergate in May 1846 aged 96, very probably the same woman, who would have been nearly eighty when she kept the inn.

It was a drovers' and dealers' inn. Rickergate ran down to Eden Bridge, and at the bottom were the Sands, where the cattle and horse fairs were held, and the Bitts, the corporation's thirteen-acre pasture where cattle bought on the Sands were kept overnight. A stallion for sale on the Sands in 1834 could be seen at the Ship; strayed heifers and ponies were to be brought back to it; and a Lanercost estate, a Bewcastle public house and a bankrupt Bewcastle farmer's dividend were all dealt with in its rooms, for its customers came in from the farms of the north and east of the county.

Robert Richardson kept it from about 1840 until his death in April 1844, aged 41. His widow Mary carried on 'the above Old-Established Inn', with three stacks of potato oats to sell and the Bitts to offer cattle dealers, 'immediately adjoining Eden Bridge'; in December 1846 she took the lease of the Bitts from the corporation herself, at £50 a year. By 1848 John M'Adam had the house.

Two days before Christmas 1850 a man calling himself Sheppherd, 'from about two miles from Rosley Hill', sold three heifers and a bullock on the Sands to a dealer from Ireland, among the Irish cattle, for £3 7s 6d a head, and the two went to the Ship, 'which adjoins the cattle market', to be paid. The cattle had been stolen from a farm near Penrith. M'Adam had seen the seller in his house that morning and picked him out in the gaol: William Watson Askew, alias Atkinson, already convicted of cattle stealing at Derby. He was sentenced to transportation.

The next November Jonathan Corrie, a farmer's son from Rigg Shield near Irthington, put thirteen steers in the Bitts and took a bed at the Ship. Mrs M'Adam saw the £5 note in his purse when he paid for a glass of gin. He walked his brother to the end of Eden Bridge, and on his way round to the cattle a man seized him by the throat from behind and passed the purse to a woman, who ran. Corrie held on, so the robber held on too and shouted for the police to come and take Corrie up. M'Adam's ostler pulled them apart. John Praile, who carried a thimble-rigger's nutshells and peas, got eighteen months' hard labour and took it 'with evident marks of delight', having expected transportation.

In December 1852 M'Adam retired and recommended Daniel Harris, for many years coachman to John Dixon of Knells, as his successor. Harris advertised good stabling, well-aired beds and horses taken in 'to Break and Clip', and sold the odd setter and retriever on the side. The Cumberland News's 1933 list of the street's houses remembered him there in the 1860s, and the 1861 census has his wife Margaret, born at Longtown, at the head of the house. In 1861 their servant, Susannah Gilbertson, had her Saturday boots stolen from the market room. Asked what she did when she missed them, she said, 'Why, I just had to do without them.'

Not every lodger was a drover. Henry Randleson, a former Carlisle druggist, had lived at the Ship for a year, drinking hard, when one night in October 1854 he got up in the dark, mistook his window three storeys up for the door and swung himself out. Margaret Harris was woken at five by the glass breaking in her own window below and found him standing in the back yard in his shirt. 'It's Harry,' he said, and Daniel Harris asked him 'Whatever has put thee here?' He walked back in, asked for a dry shirt and some brandy, and died that morning before the doctor came. The inquest found that he had walked out of the window thinking it was the door.

A letter of 1858 found its way to a lodger addressed 'care of Mr. Harris, innkeeper, Rickergate, Ship Inn, Cumberland, Carlisle, in haste'. Harris died at the inn in April 1864, aged 44, and his old ostler James Montgomery kept the horse clipping going there. By 1870 William Little had the house, fined 40s for a disorderly one. In 1873 the licence passed to Mary Phillips and Margaret Wills, very probably sisters, and Margaret was still at the Ship when she died there in 1891. Behind it was the Ship Inn yard, with stables and a loft, where in January 1871 a man helping to stack forms collapsed and fell headfirst through the trap door.

It still had an ostler in 1889, when Isaac Milburn had his watch snatched by a man who said it was rightly his, and in 1890 one of the city surveyor's schemes for a road from Lowther Street to Eden Bridges would have gone 'through the Ship Inn at the foot of Rickergate'; a cheaper route along Eden Street was preferred. Kelly's directory has Thomas Marshall Hudson keeping it in 1906.

Its end, at the compensation hearing of March 1909, was greeted with laughter. Detective-Inspector Pattinson described three doors, one into a back yard shared with four other tenants and one only 5 ft 9 in high, a passage a yard wide, damp walls and floors, and horses led up the passage while the carts stood in the street. 'Well, they've always done it,' said Mr Errington for the owners. The house was well conducted and sold 307 half-barrels in 1907; the objection was only that there were too many houses there. The Chief Constable said the last time he went down he could not get in. 'What were you wearing, a cap or what?' said Errington. 'We can't undertake to take in top hats.'

It was referred for compensation with the Durham Ox and the Railway Hotel on Botchergate, and in June 1909 its owners did not apply to renew the licence. In 1914 an auctioneer offered 'the Premises lately known as the Ship Inn' with Nos 1 to 6 Swift's Row. The Cumberland News of 29 March 1991 remembered it at the north east end of Rickergate and blamed the wartime takeover for its closing; the licensing records have it gone five years before the Board arrived. A different pub from the Old Ship on Irishgate Brow.

Photograph

Old Ordnance Survey street plan of the foot of Rickergate, with the Drove Inn and a drinking fountain at the bridge end, Swift's Row opening off the east side, a red circle round a house lettered Inn just south of the Swift's Row corner, and a red label reading Ship Inn
The foot of Rickergate on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map surveyed in 1865. The map says only 'Inn'; the house circled, just past Swift's Row, is the Ship by the order of the street in the directories and the 1914 sale of the Ship with the houses of Swift's Row National Library of Scotland, CC BY 4.0

Sources 20

Location from geograph.org.uk. The pin is approximate.

Also lost on Rickergate

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Still serving, near where it stood

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