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Lost pub · St Nicholas Street

The White Ox

Gone 1919

Gone
Out of the trade by April 1919, when the Board put the premises up for sale
There now
Carlisle South End Constitutional Club
Address
St Nicholas Street, Carlisle
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4066455158, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: recreational (South End Constitutional Club).

A Maryport Brewery house on St Nicholas Street, taken by the scheme in August 1916. Historic England's gazetteer has it absorbing its neighbour, the Golden Fleece, with the combined house closing in 1935 and the building going the next year to the South End Constitutional Club, which is still there. The Board's own sale notice points another way.

On 30 April 1919 it put 'formerly the White Ox Inn premises' in St Nicholas Street up for auction at the Victoria Hotel, through the auctioneer Fred Telford: a corner shop and dwelling house with a cottage adjoining, 'the whole property forming a most complete and valuable corner block, suitable for any class of trade'. So the White Ox had stopped trading by 1919, and the house that went on into the 1930s and ended as the club was most likely the Golden Fleece alone.

Co-Curate puts the White Ox at 61 St Nicholas Street, on the corner of Woodroufe Terrace, where a mural by Kate Norris recalls it. In 1897 it was a beerhouse, owned by the Old Brewery Company, and its tenant of six years, Tom Watson, applied that September for a full licence with a petition of 250 names. His customers, he said, came mostly from Upperby way, and there was no fully licensed house between the White Ox and Upperby.

The man before him, John Bowran, told the bench that one of the objectors had himself come in one night and asked for half a pint of spirit, saying it was a great shame the house had no full licence. The Chief Constable put the Golden Fleece only 45 yards away and reported disturbances at the White Ox at night, and Cowans, Sheldon and Co., whose St Nicholas ironworks employed four hundred men nearby, opposed it on the ground that some of them were bibulous.

The licence was refused. It changed hands in February 1877. 'All that well accustomed beerhouse, known by the sign of the White Ox', freehold, 'in excellent repair', with Mrs Sirey as tenant, was auctioned at the Grapes Hotel, English Street, on Tuesday 27 February at seven: the beerhouse and cottage let at £70 a year and an adjoining house at £15. It opened at £700 and went for £1,105 to T. Elsworth, a spirit merchant of Lowther Street.

In September 1893 the White Ox beerhouse passed from Sarah Graham to Thomas Tiffen. At half past seven on 6 October 1897 Inspector Shiach and eight or nine constables raided it for betting at the same moment as the raid on the Quarter of Mutton, and took fifteen or sixteen people to the police station in cabs. Tom Watson was fined £50 and costs. Watson and his stepson, John Bowring, were arrested in the 1897 raid with about a dozen men, a constable on each of the four doors; the stepson is probably the John Bowran who had kept the house before him.

In September 1898 the magistrates refused to renew the licence as unnecessary and disorderly, and the White Ox appealed to the Cumberland Quarter Sessions that October with the Quarter of Mutton. The Quarter of Mutton lost; the White Ox was still trading when the scheme took it in 1916.

Sources

Also lost on St Nicholas Street

6 other lost pubs stood within 250 m of here. See them on the map

Still serving, near where it stood

All the lost pubs