‘S3828 Cavendish Hotel, Dalton Road’. c.1910. Edward Sankey

© Sankey Family Photography Collection.

rCavendish Hotel, Dalton Road, Barrow-in-Furness

(the Hotel is three storey building with lamp over door way, on the right hand side of image)

c.1910

Written by Jean McSorley

This photograph was found in the Sankey Family Photography Collection as is believed to have been distributed by by Kingway Postcards, part of WH Smith, suggesting that Edward Sankey took the photograph and sold it to WH Smith.

The Cavendish Hotel, a licensed inn, was built on the corner of Dalton Road and Cavendish Street in 1871. At the time Barrow’s population was rapidly expanding, and people, desperate for places to stay, crammed into any available lodging. The census of the hotel’s residents, taken on 2nd April 1871, exemplifies the problem.

The 61 people recorded at the hotel (owned by businessman T Mullineuax), included the ‘head’ of the house, a blacksmith called William Parker, and his wife, Lucy. The youngest residents, children of the few families in the hotel, were two girls aged four. The eldest registered were a plasterer, and a baker, aged 56. Of the nine women lodgers only one registered an occupation: Mary Campbell, a forty year old widow with a son and daughter, was listed as a servant. The male lodgers were mainly itinerant workers: carpenters and joiners, tailors, musicians, labourers, stokers, plasterers, and bricklayers and stone masons. The places of birth recorded showed they hailed come from all corners of the British Isles, with the exception of George Penards, a 21-year-old labourer who’d been born on the Isle of France in the West Indies.

The hotel, like some other local haunts, gained a reputation as a house of ill repute in the late Victorian period, before returning to respectability as a popular venue known for evening singalongs.   Sadly, town planners allowed this historic building to be demolished in 1963. A furniture store was built on the site (most recently Poundland occupied it).