Lost pub · Corporation Road
The White Ox
- Gone
- Last in the directories in 1861; a daughter was still its innkeeper in May 1862
- There now
- Not established
- Where exactly
- On Corporation Road, which ran south-west from the foot of Rickergate. The house number isn't known, so the pin marks the street, not the building.
For a few years either side of 1860 a beerhouse on Corporation Road gave its neighbours no peace. The directories call it the White Cow; the newspapers of 1859 call it the White Ox. Its landlady was Mary Kelly, born in Ireland about 1795, and by the end of 1859 she had been before the city bench six times.
One Sunday in June 1858 she was charged with having company drinking in her house during illegal hours. Her two witnesses were Henry Cule and Thomas Hughes, who had been lodging in the town for three weeks and passing themselves off as quack doctors. Within the month they were in the dock themselves, for picking the purses of two women at a sale held in a barn at Cargo. About twenty people chased them, and when they were caught near St Ann's Hill they had swapped caps. The Carlisle Examiner, reporting it, remarked that 'altho' all quack-doctors are thieves, all thieves are not quack-doctors!' Mary Kelly's own case was remanded for a week.
That August she asked the brewster sessions for a spirit licence, which would have let her sell more than beer. Five other beer-house keepers asked too, among them an Isaac Graham, very probably the Isaac Graham of the Duke's Head on the same road. All six were refused on account of deficient stabling.
In December 1859 the Mayor gave her leave to hold a dance on the Monday night, with a caution that it was not to go on beyond eleven o'clock. At eleven the dancing stopped. The company stayed, and at three on the Tuesday morning police called out by the neighbours found a large party of men and women in the house, singing and very noisy. In court she said the Mayor had only told her the dancing was to finish at eleven; he had not said she was not to have company in her house after that. The court laughed. Two neighbours, James Smith and Matthew Metcalf, said they were often disturbed at midnight, and Metcalf called her customers 'about as low a kind of people as he could mention'.
It was her sixth time before the bench on similar charges, and she was fined 40 shillings. A few days later she was back with a testimonial of character signed by several of her other neighbours, who said they were surprised and sorry the penalty was so severe. The complainants, she said, had acted through spite or in passion. The Mayor said the bench had no power to reduce a fine once it was imposed. 'If I cannot pay it all at once how must I do?' she asked. 'You can pay it at twice,' said the Mayor. Given six weeks, she promised a sovereign in three weeks and another in six.
Stolen goods found their way there too. On the afternoon of 19 March 1860 Elizabeth Crane, a little, shabbily dressed woman of 45, brought two carpets, a hearth-rug, a bucket and a mat to the house and sold them to Mrs Kelly's unmarried daughter Sarah for five shillings, saying a family leaving Stanwix had given them to their servants. The carpets had been laid out to be shaken in White Hart Lane, and two mats taken from the doors of the Crown Inn at Stanwix were sold there as well. A constable collected the lot from the beerhouse the next day, Crane was arrested in Rickergate, and at the April sessions she got two months with hard labour for each offence.
The 1861 census still has Mary Kelly, then 66, as beerhouse keeper, and that is the last year the house is in the directories. On 31 May 1862, at the Catholic chapel in the city, Miss Mary Jane Kelly, innkeeper, Corporation Road, married George McGuinness. She was very likely another daughter, and it seems the house was in her hands by then. By December 1863 Mary Kelly of Corporation Road was a pawnbroker, taking a stolen petticoat in pledge for half a crown from a Scotswoman who, the bench was told, had been seventeen times in gaol at Liverpool. Nothing says whether the beerhouse was still open by then.
Carlisle had several White Oxes and White Cows. This one is not the White Cow, or White Ox, on Blackfriars Street, which went on to become the Masons Arms and then the Queen, nor the White Cow on Cobden Street, nor the White Ox on St Nicholas Street.
Sources 11
- Carlisle Encyclopaedia, "W-Z" page
- CARLISLE_PUBS_Ver_3.xls (Mike Tuer's pub database)
- Carlisle Examiner, 8 July 1858, p. 3: 'Picking pockets at Cargo', with Mary Kelly, Corporation Road (via British Newspaper Archive)
- Carlisle Examiner, 31 August 1858, p. 2: 'Applications for licenses' (via British Newspaper Archive)
- Carlisle Patriot, 10 December 1859, p. 8: 'An unpleasant neighbour' (via British Newspaper Archive)
- Carlisle Examiner, 10 December 1859, p. 2: 'Disorderly house' (via British Newspaper Archive)
- Carlisle Journal, 13 December 1859, p. 4: 'Application for mitigation of penalty' (via British Newspaper Archive)
- Carlisle Patriot, 31 March 1860, p. 4: 'Stealing door mats, etc.' (via British Newspaper Archive)
- Carlisle Examiner, 7 April 1860, p. 2: city sessions, 'Stealing mats' (via British Newspaper Archive)
- Carlisle Journal, 6 June 1862, p. 5: marriages, George McGuinness and Mary Jane Kelly (via British Newspaper Archive)
- Carlisle Examiner, 24 December 1863, p. 2: 'A voluble Scotchwoman' (via British Newspaper Archive)
Open question
A date we can't pin down
When did the White Ox on Corporation Road stop selling beer, and which house on the road was it? Mary Jane Kelly was still called its innkeeper when she married in May 1862; by December 1863 Mary Kelly of Corporation Road was a pawnbroker.
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.
Also lost on Corporation Road
44 other lost pubs stood within 250 m of here. See them on the map