Carlisle South End Constitutional Club

History

Opened Founded 1936

Club founded

1936, when it took the building

Building was

The Golden Fleece Inn, a pub by 1858

State-run

October 1916 to 1936

Incorporated

1952

In 1936 the Carlisle South End Constitutional Club, a Conservative-aligned members' club, took over the old Golden Fleece Inn on St Nicholas Street from the State Management Scheme, and the bar has been going ever since. A government drink-control scheme handing a city pub to a political club is worth pausing on, and so is the old name: the Golden Fleece, a fitting one for a wool and textile town, with more history than the club's own.

The Golden Fleece is first recorded as a pub in 1858. The Maryport Brewery owned it from 1894, and the state took it in the scheme's first months, in October 1916 by one record and August by Historic England's gazetteer; it appears on the 1920 roll as the Golden Fleece, St Nicholas Street. It did not last as a separate house. The gazetteer has it folded into its neighbour, the White Ox, and the combined pub closed in 1935; the Cumberland News of 16 April 1992 puts the pub's life at about three-quarters of a century, closing about 1934. The club moved in the following year.

Constitutional Clubs were part of a national movement of Conservative-aligned members' clubs that spread from the 1880s, set up around the franchise reforms of that decade to give newly enfranchised Conservative-leaning voters somewhere to belong. Most survivors, this one included, now run simply as community social clubs. The political association is historical rather than active.

It is described as an old-world working men's club of the kind a previous generation would recognise, and one of the last of its type in Carlisle. That is the real point of recording it: the working men's club was a cornerstone of British community life and their numbers have collapsed, so a surviving one is worth writing down. Large bar, snooker, function facilities, no real ale. On getting in, accounts of visits are of being signed in by a member rather than walking off the street, so it is worth knowing someone before you make the trip.