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Lost pub · English Street

The Skinners Arms

Gone about 1827

Gone
Gone from the record after June 1827
There now
Not established
Where exactly
On the west side of English Street, fronting east towards the Market Place, with a back entrance on St Cuthbert's Lane. The exact building isn't known, so the pin marks the street, not the building.

A freehold public house on the west side of English Street, fronting east towards the Market Place and running back "a considerable distance" to a second opening on St Cuthbert's Lane. The sale notice of January 1819 lists a yard, out-offices, "excellent cellars", brewing conveniences and good stabling, and three sittings in a pew in St Cuthbert's Church went with the house. Mrs Taylor kept it in 1803, when the tenant of a farm at Linstock was to be declared there.

Henry Nanson "of the Skinners' Arms inn" died in April 1814, aged 44, and by 1817 it was Matthew Webster's. On 12 July 1817, a market day, the city's Orange Society met at the Skinners' Arms "according to custom" to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne, under a flag borrowed from John Comerford, the auctioneer of King's Arms Lane. A crowd gathered in the street between the Guard-house and the inn, chased the society's deputy master, Thomas Douglas, back to the door and broke the windows.

Mrs Webster opened the door to stop it being forced. Douglas spent the night hidden in the garret, not daring to go home, and the rest of the club left by the back door into St Cuthbert's Lane. Mrs Webster told the court she had been warned that the crowd would forgive her this time, but if she ever let the society meet there again "the highest stone of her house should be the lowest". Six weavers stood trial at the Easter Quarter Sessions of 1818.

The jury found them guilty of the assault but not of riot, and they were fined between 20 shillings and five pounds. In January 1819 Comerford advertised the inn for sale by auction on the premises, with Webster as tenant, together with four new-built dwelling rooms and a large stable behind it in St Cuthbert's Lane. Webster stayed on: an estate at Scotby was auctioned at "the House of Matthew Webster, Innkeeper, known by the Sign of the Skinners' Arms" in June 1823.

The last sighting is June 1827, when Isaac Fell of Upperby, a damask and carpet weaver, moved his Carlisle receiving station to Mr M'Glasson's Joiners' Arms, "second door from the Skinners' Arms". The Joiners' Arms of English Street was very probably the house later called the Liverpool Arms, which would put the Skinners two doors from 78 English Street. After that the name drops out of the record.

Sources

Open question

An unsolved mystery

What became of the Skinners' Arms after June 1827? It was still trading under that name then, two doors from the Joiners' Arms, and then drops out of the record. Was it renamed, taken into a neighbouring house, or closed?

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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Also lost on English Street

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