The State Management Scheme · 1973

Who bought Carlisle's pubs

For fifty-seven years the government owned nearly every pub in and around Carlisle. In the spring of 1973 it sold them. Three breweries took most of the city between them in four big groups, and the rest went one at a time: hotels to whoever bid highest, village locals to the people who already ran them.

How the sale worked

The Licensing (Abolition of State Management) Act received Royal Assent on 27 July 1971. Most of the licensed houses were then bundled into four groups and offered to the trade by tender, with tenders closing on 13 November 1972. The houses judged most valuable were held back and sold on their own, as were the offices, the maltings and the brewery.

The smallest pubs, those selling four barrels of beer a week or less, were offered first to the people running them. Forty country pubs went that way in late 1972, then a run of city ones. The first Carlisle pub bought by its own manager was the Woolpack on Milbourne Street. Many of the tenanted village houses went to their sitting tenants, and the list below gives what each fetched. H. B. Wilson's official history counts 37 small houses offered to the people in them, 23 tenants and 8 managers. The Local Advisory Committee asked for the offer to go to the 20 tenants of larger houses as well, as a reward for keeping their pubs profitable, and the Home Secretary refused. Away from the pubs, 74 houses and plots went to sitting tenants or by private treaty for £79,960, and 16 properties, some of them old pubs, to the local councils for £51,265.

The groups did not change hands all at once. Each was handed over a few houses a day so that the stock and fittings could be counted twice, once by the scheme's officials and once by the new owner. The first to go was the Arroyo at Harraby, on 2 April 1973, and the last group house was handed over on 24 May. The scheme's offices on Castle Street followed in November. Carlisle Brewery went last of all, in May 1974, to Theakston for £90,000: less than half what it had been valued at, when most of the pubs had sold for more than theirs. Among the odds and ends sold alongside the pubs was a urinal, which fetched £5.

The brewery took the longest because the first sale fell through. It stopped brewing in May 1973. The highest tender, £90,000, came from Peter Lewis, a local businessman whose firm, Peter Lewis Associates, had interests in the Midlands and South America; no relation to the city's MP. It was far below the official valuation of £190,000 but more than double the only other bid, and he meant to keep brewing, so the government took it, the minister noting 'I don't like the sound of this but I agree the absence of other tenders makes the risk just about worth taking'. Lewis was due to complete on 26 June 1973 and did not. His backers pulled out, he asked for a government loan, and by September it was plain he never would. In November Holland and Threlfall (Norden) Ltd, a building firm with club connections, offered the same £90,000, and when that deal ran into trouble too, Theakston of Masham took the contract over by assignment and bought the brewery on 28 May 1974. They were brewing in it by that September, with a Cumbria Premium Bitter sold in Greenall Whitley's houses.

The buyers

The trade expected the big national brewers to take the four groups. Greenall Whitley of Warrington, a relatively small company, won two of them: Group 2 for £1,036,202 and Group 4 for £1,172,206, forty-seven premises in all. It then paid £220,000 for the Central Hotel on the Viaduct as a lot of its own. Greenalls sold no real ale in its new houses, only its own Local bitter and mild, Festival keg and Grünhalle lager, and it sold all of its pubs in the area in 1999.

Scottish & Newcastle took Group 1 for £967,000, then bought the Citadel restaurant and wine stores on English Street for £250,000, the highest price paid for any single lot, and the Metal Bridge at Floriston for £50,000. By 1978 the Crown Inn at Stanwix was carrying a William Younger's sign, one of its brands.

John Smith's of Tadcaster took Group 3 for £995,309, the largest of the four by number of houses, with the Kings Head, the Howard Arms and the Beehive among them.

The rest went to a wider field. Whitbread bought the Red Lion Hotel and the Caledonian on Botchergate together for £175,100, and the Friars Tavern on Devonshire Street for £20,100. Eden Construction bought the Gretna Tavern with the Hope and Bendall off-licence and offices, and separately the Turf at the Swifts. Jennings of Cockermouth picked up three pubs out to the west, and private buyers took the Crown Hotel at Wetheral (£110,500, to Leonard Wood of Newcastle) and the Graham Arms at Longtown (£38,100, to Kenneth Holden of Bromley Cross, near Bolton).

Bigger money was on the table and was turned down. Slater Walker offered £4,761,000 for everything, all or nothing, well short of the best tenders lot by lot. Giving Greenall Whitley two groups and the Central Hotel left it with 49 of the 157 licensed premises, which the Department of Trade and Industry cleared as no monopoly, and holding it to one group would have cost about £257,000. Where bids tied, the government chose. For the Blue Bell on Scotch Street, Bass and a local property firm both bid £50,000, and the local firm got it. For the Kildare Hotel at Wigton, Scottish & Newcastle and Bass tied at £15,000 and Bass got it, for a spread of owners: 'otherwise they get nothing, yet they have bid lustily'.

Altogether the tenders came to £5,627,115, against valuations of about £3.6 million and £3.8 million, and after the costs of sale, £131,750, the Carlisle properties made just over £6 million. Ron Lewis, the Member for Carlisle, had scorned the government's estimate in the Second Reading debate and said the real figure would be nearer £6 million, which Wilson calls a remarkably accurate forecast. The listed offices on Castle Street went to local solicitors for £51,150, and one licensed property in Carlisle to the Cumberland Probation service for £21,000. Most of the staff's notices took effect on 31 May 1973, the day the Post Office franked a commemorative envelope 'Carlisle Cumberland 31 May 1973 The End of 57 Years'. Trading ended on 31 August, and five of the breweries now trading in the district kept up the scheme's charity grant between them, £700 a year.

After the sale

For Carlisle's drinkers the first years were lean. Greenall Whitley, with almost half of the city's pubs, sold no real ale in any of them, only its own keg bitter and mild, Festival and Grünhalle lager, and when the newly founded local branch of CAMRA pressed it, it answered with a run of excuses, from "there's no demand in Carlisle" to "real ale doesn't travel". That branch was founded in February 1976 at the Woolpack, the first pub in the city bought by its own manager and sold straight on to Jennings. At that first meeting only two pubs in Carlisle still sold real ale: the Woolpack, and the Crown on Botchergate, where the manager, Jack Bell, is said to have insisted on it. The Crown & Mitre made three within the year. The branch checked whether Greenalls had a monopoly and found it held 21% of the city's licensed premises, short of the 25% that would have counted, so it turned to stunts instead, selling a cask of real Greenalls Bitter at the Crown & Thistle in Stanwix in under twenty minutes.

The turn came from the old state brewery. Theakston had bought it in 1974 and was brewing there with nowhere in the city to sell, until in November 1977 the licensees of the Turf, which had gone to a local builder in the sale, put Theakston Best Bitter on, the city's fourth real ale bar. The first Carlisle Beer Festival, in the Market Hall that October, drew about two hundred people and made a small loss. In the spring of 1978 the manager of the Crown Inn at Stanwix talked Scottish & Newcastle into bringing back Younger's cask beer, and that May the second Carlisle Beer Festival, opened by the scheme's former head brewer Bill Monk, sold out early on the Saturday. By 1982 the city had sixteen real ale pubs, and half of Scottish & Newcastle's houses sold it. Matthew Brown of Blackburn bought Theakston in 1984, announced the closure of the old state brewery in 1986 despite a CAMRA protest march, and ended brewing there in 1987. The building is flats now.

Where they went

Every building on the list that has an entry on this site, coloured by who bought it. Tap a pin for the details.

Yellow: Greenall Whitley. Blue: Scottish & Newcastle. Pink: John Smith's. Rings: everyone else, from Whitbread down to the sitting tenants.

The whole list

Every property on the handover list: the four groups in the order they changed hands, then the single lots and the village houses. Tap a column heading to sort by it. The four groups were sold for one price each, so their houses have no price of their own. "Now" is what stands there today.

155 properties on the list, 92 of them with an entry on this site.

Where this comes from

• H. B. Wilson, History of the Carlisle State Management Scheme 1916-1974 (Home Office, about 1975), and its annex for official eyes only, both published by the State Management Story. The small houses, the brewery's two failed sales, the rival bids and the totals are from these.
• Mike Tuer, Handover of Carlisle and District State Management Scheme pubs 1973: groups, individual lots and prices paid, and his four-part series State Management Scheme: 40 Years On (2013 and 2014), all on Solway CAMRA's pub history page. The groups, the handover days, the buyers and the prices are his.
• Ale Tales, the Solway CAMRA magazine, 2013 to 2026: George Miller's and Alan Welsh's looks back at the branch's early newsletters, and the 2026 history of brewing in Carlisle, all at solway.camra.org.uk/magazine.
• Mike Tuer's Carlisle pub database, on the same page, which gives 28 or 29 May for eight of the Group 4 houses the handover list has changing hands on 21 and 22 May. The handover list is the day-by-day record, so the dates here are its; where an entry on this site gives a date for one of those pubs, it gives both.

Know what one of these became, or who bought a house the list leaves unnamed? Let us know.