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Lost pub · Wham

The Sportsman

Gone
Closing date not recorded
There now
A house
Address
Wham, by Aiket Gate, Armathwaite
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4770446785, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The 25-inch map of about 1900 marks 'W'ham Inn' here. The building's use in 2018: residential.

A roadside inn at Wham, just west of Aiket Gate on the road from Armathwaite to Low Hesket, with two names in use at once: the Sportsman Inn on its sign and in some reports, the Wham Inn on the maps and in others. The Ordnance Survey's one-inch map of the 1860s marks 'Wham Inn' above Aiketgate, and the 25-inch map of about 1900 'W'ham Inn' at the corner of the lane.

Mr McCormac kept the Wham Inn in November 1848, when the executors of Thomas Housby let his 72-acre estate at Old Town near Hesket there, cranberry moss and all. One cold Saturday evening in January 1850 two Armathwaite men and Mrs Hope of Ainstable, coming home from Carlisle market, called at the Sportsman Inn near Aiket Gate for ten minutes' refreshment, and while they were inside somebody took a parcel of new clothes from their cart at the door; three tramps who had asked the overseer for a bed ticket that night were last seen at Barrock End, heading across the fields for Coathill.

In August 1867 the landlady of the Sportsman Inn at Aiket Gate, Mrs Kerr, gave evidence against a stranger from Wethersfield who had walked about the house all night after the sports. A High Hesket farmer, Henry Lambert, had fallen asleep in the parlour at four in the morning. Three times Mrs Kerr heard someone overhead from the cellar and went up, the third time without her shoes, and found the man with his arms round Lambert and his pockets turned out. 'Now, friend,' he said, 'it's time to go home.' He got a month's hard labour.

On Whit Monday 1880 John Shannon, a farm servant at Causeway House, won £3 betting on the horses at Armathwaite sports, missed the last train and accepted a lift back to Carlisle in a cab from two Rickergate men well known to the police. At the Wham Inn they stopped for four glasses of ale and two gills of whisky; on the next hill, with everyone out to ease the horse, one of them knocked Shannon down by the roadside and took £8 in gold with 'Give me your blooming money.' Shannon shouted after them, 'I know you Bant; I will see you to-morrow', walked back to the Wham Inn and stayed the night. The two were sent for trial at the Assizes.

In 1900 John Bainbridge of the Wham Inn, Aiket Gate, was advertising his annual picnic for Whit Wednesday, with a hound trail and other sports. The scheme took and converted the house, probably in 1916, the date on its file, and it was still listed in 1930.

Photograph

Old Ordnance Survey field map with a red circle round a small group of buildings at a road bend labelled W'ham Inn, a red label reading Wham Inn (the Sportsman), and the hamlet of Aiketgate to the south-east
The Wham Inn at the bend of the road west of Aiketgate, on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map of about 1900 National Library of Scotland, CC BY 4.0

Sources

Open question

An unsolved mystery

Were the Sportsman and the Wham Inn one house? The newspapers use both names for an inn at Aiket Gate and never mention the two together, and the maps mark only one inn there, the Wham Inn, but Mike Tuer's directory lists a Sportsman at Aiket Gate from 1847 to 1925 and a separate 'Wham' from 1894 to 1910.

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