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Lost pub · Durdar

The White Quey

Gone 2008

Built
Trading before 1916; reopened June 1976 after sixty years shut
Gone
Closed 1 November 2008
There now
The building was still standing in 2019. What it is now is not established
Address
Stoneraise
Where exactly
From CAMRA's recorded position for the pub. Not a survey

The one man who said no, and he was an Iredale tenant. When the State Management Scheme came in 1916 it bought out the trade wholesale, and the landlord of the White Quey would not sell. Rather than let his pub pass to the government he shut it himself, and then went further: he wrote into his will that the building was never to be used as a public house again. It held. For close on sixty years the White Quey stood at Stoneraise, out past Durdar on the Dalston road, not a pub because a dead man had said so.

In 1975 Eddie Gash and his wife bought the building and set about undoing it. There was a long legal fight, at the end of which the original owner's grandson was traced and agreed to rescind the restriction. The Gashes spent eighteen months on the renovation and it reopened in June 1976. The name is local. A quey is a heifer, a young cow that has not yet calved, and it is ordinary northern farming dialect, which is why it is said white why and not white key.

In dairy country that is exactly what a roadside pub would be called. It is remembered in the nineties as a family pub with a soft play barn and a play bus in the car park, which would put it in the Charlie Chalk era: Whitbread fitted those crèches into their Brewers Fayre houses from 1992. CAMRA records it as an independent pub rather than a chain house, so either it was leased to Whitbread for a spell or the memory has attached itself to the wrong pub.

Worth settling. It closed on 1 November 2008 and CAMRA marked it permanently closed the same day. A photograph from April 2019 shows the building still standing. So a pub that survived a sixty-year prohibition written into a will lasted thirty-two years after it was lifted. The Brewery History Society list it, spelled White Quay, among the houses of Iredale's High Brewery, which the scheme shut in 1916.

So the landlord who refused to sell was refusing on behalf of a brewery that was being closed down around him. The same list names a second White Quay on St Cuthbert's Street in the city, which is also in this archive.

Sources

Location from whatpub.com. That's the building standing over it, not the exact doorway.

Still serving, near where it stood

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