The Jovial Sailor

History

Opened Present building opened March 1904; first recorded 1837

First recorded

1837

Present building

Built 1904

Named for

The sailors of the Carlisle Canal, 1821-1853

Privatised

Sold to John Smith's, 7 May 1973

Carlisle had sailors once. This pub is most of what is left to prove it, and it stands on the corner of Caldcotes and Port Road, which is the other half of the evidence.

The Carlisle Canal ran eleven and a quarter miles from a basin off Port Road down to the Solway at Fisher's Cross, renamed Port Carlisle. Eight locks, all eighteen feet wide, were built to take sea-going vessels, which were towed up by horses, and for thirty years you could reach Carlisle from Liverpool inside a day.

The opening, on 12 March 1823, was the biggest day this end of town ever had. More than twenty thousand people turned out. Shops shut, the mills gave their workers the day off, and the employees of Dixon's works marched behind two flags and a band from Warwick Bridge to the Bush Inn on English Street, formed up into a column and went on to the canal to meet the ships. The Bush is in this site's lost pubs archive; the state bought it in 1916 and it was gone by 1918.

The pub is first recorded in 1837, right by the basin, and named for the men who worked it. It outlived the canal. The canal was formally closed on 1 August 1853 and a railway was laid along most of its bed the following year: Carlisle had been a seaport for thirty years and four months.

The original inn stood further down Caldcotes, to the right of the present building. The Carlisle Brewery Company bought it in 1902, knocked it down, and opened this one in 1904. CAMRA give 1884; the detailed scheme records point to 1904, so that's what's here. In September 1892 the licence passed from Mrs Ann Graham to William Jack.

It came under State Management in August 1916, from the Carlisle New Brewery, and its tenant did not go quietly. A Board memo of 1919 on compensation still unsettled records that Mr Forster refused £220 and gave up the keys only when threatened with an action for ejectment. The pub was altered and reopened in 1918.

The best detail of that alteration is a physical one. The exterior was barely touched during the state years, with one exception: the sills of the arched windows were raised, so that people passing in the street could no longer see in. That is the whole philosophy of the scheme in a single alteration. No temptation from the pavement, no display of drinking as entertainment. You can still see where the line falls. Half a century later the sign showed a jolly sailor dancing the hornpipe between a capstan and an anchor, a nod, the scheme's jubilee supplement thought, to the seamen who could well have found their way here from the canal.

It caught fire in January 1968. On 7 May 1973 it went back into private hands, sold to John Smith's, the same buyer and the same day as the Kings Head and the Border Rambler: three Carlisle pubs in one lot. It flooded in 2005, the same year Caldewgate's other two survivors, the Joiners Arms and Carlisle RFC, were also under water, and reopened that May under landlady Pat Crozier.

Then it nearly died. It closed in 2013 and reopened the following year with Theakston Best on, and the gaming licence granted in February 2014 marks the point it came back to life. A local landlord and his wife have run it since, and have got its darts and pool teams going again. A pigeon club meets there now, which is about as fitting as it gets for a pub in an old industrial district.

It sits close to the Cumberland Infirmary, ten minutes' walk from the centre, with a small bar and a larger lounge that keep a good deal of their Victorian fittings.