by Wright, Ben;
Gin anaesthetised the urban poor with devastating effect, especially in London. For a city of 700,000 people, there were 9,000 gin shops by the 1730s. In addition, 15,000 of the city’s 96,000 homes had a room set aside for people to buy and drink gin.2 Wheelbarrows sloshing with the drink were carted around for people too drunk or desperate to walk to a shop. In 1700 consumption of gin was less than half a gallon per person a year.3 But by 1729, a colossal five million gallons of gin were being drunk every year, enough for every man, woman and child in London to drain a pint of gin a week. The drunkenness, despair and social rot that had begun to calcify in London’s poorer streets was soon the focus of heated debate.
In 1726 Daniel Defoe wrote that self-destructive gin drinking was the responsibility of the drinker, not the fault of the market: ‘The people will destroy themselves by their own excess … ’tis the magistrates’ business to help that, not the distillers.’ To Defoe, the distilleries were merely providing a drink that people bored with beer wanted to buy.4 He didn’t think it was the job of the distillers or the state to meddle. But other voices, in the Church and in Parliament, began to argue that direct intervention was needed to prevent people drinking themselves to death. Throughout the following two centuries the same arguments have flared up at regular intervals. And they frame today’s debate about the government’s role in policing alcohol consumption.
Defoe soon changed his mind about the virtues of an unregulated gin market. Eventually so did Parliament, which in 1729 passed the first of many Acts it hoped would calm the gin drinking mania. A licence was introduced for the first time and a new duty was placed on every gallon of compound spirits. Unsurprisingly, distillers produced a raw spirit instead, popularly known as ‘Parliamentary Brandy’, which got round the law.
The Act did nothing to dent the epidemic of drunkenness. Gin drinking continued to rise and in 1733 the measure was repealed.5 Three years later, however, against a backdrop of vigorous public argument about drink, Parliament had another go. The 1736 Gin Act placed very high duties on the sale and production of the spirit and new £50 licences were slapped on sellers in what effectively amounted to prohibition. The Act stated that gin drinking had become ‘very common especially amongst the people of lower and inferior rank … rendering them unfit for useful labour and business, debauching their morals, and inciting them to all manner of vices’.
It was the raucous gin-dependent proletariat that frightened the frequently sozzled upper classes of Georgian England. They saw the foundations of London rotting from the bottom up, corrupting women and their unborn children in particular. Those fears are most famously captured in William Hogarth’s 1751 engraving ‘Gin Lane’.
Hogarth sets his portrait of desperation and death within the parish of St Giles in Holborn. Beggars share a bone with a dog; people crowd around the pawnbrokers with their kettles and tools, selling the means of earning their livelihoods so they can buy another drink. One corpse is placed in a coffin while her child cries on the ground; another hangs in the window of a crumbling house. A drunken mob fights outside the distillery while a mother pours gin into the mouth of her baby. And at the centre of the scene, a ragged, drink-broken woman sits slumped on the steps as her baby falls to her death. It’s a hellish depiction of Madame Gin’s dangers and a dramatic contrast to Hogarth’s companion engraving ‘Beer Street’, full of hearty, jolly chaps enjoying foaming pints of beer while women make a living from their abundant baskets of fish.
Who does Hogarth hold responsible for the misery in Gin Lane? Is it the distillers who make the addictive drink? Is it the weak-willed poor of London who’ve capitulated to the booze? Or is it the country’s failure to care about the inhabitants of Gin Lane that has driven them to suicidal drinking? Hogarth doesn’t provide an answer, but he does reflect the anxieties of the age. And similar questions were asked 250 years later as Britain staggered through another era of binge drinking. Photographs of inebriated late-night revellers regularly filled the tabloid newspapers in the early 2000s, particularly pictures of young women in miniskirts, legs buckled, sprawling on the street. There was a Hogarthian reflection in the images and a Georgian echo in the commentary. Newspapers wrung their hands about young women drinking, the anti-social behaviour of the mob and the evidence that public morals were on the slide.
‘Gin Lane’ was published in 1751, fifteen years after the drink was meant to have been prohibited. That’s because the 1736 Gin Act had been another epic failure. The huge unlicensed gin trade was run by backroom hawkers, grocers and from street stalls and consumption continued to increase. As Jenny Uglow has written, gin made the miserable lives of London’s poor feel a little better: ‘To the desperate and destitute gin was cheap and warming … It tasted vile, more like rubbing alcohol than subtle juniper berries, and it was horribly potent, leaving drinking dens and gutters littered with collapsed bodies.’6
A further Gin Act in 1743 repriced annual licences at a much cheaper twenty shillings and restricted them to existing tavern and alehouse keepers. Levels of gin drinking fell but the arguments in the press, among politicians and from the pulpit still raged, leading to the final Gin Act of the era, in 1751, shortly after Hogarth’s engravings were printed. Licensing restrictions were tightened further, taxes on spirits were increased and a minimum rent had to be paid by sellers. At the same time the cost of grain began to rise and gin production fell, hastening the end of a fifty-year drinking frenzy. However in 1835, Charles Dickens was still shocked by what he found on a walk through the squalid streets of St Giles:
Gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but wretchedness and dirt are a greater; and until you improve the homes of the poor, or persuade a half-famished wretch not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his own misery, with the pittance which, divided among his family, would furnish a morsel of bread for each, gin-shops will increase in number and splendour.7
The Gin Craze showed the difficulty of finding an effective political response to the social problems thrown up by drink. The competing arguments between state restriction of the alcohol trade and a belief in liberalisation went back and forth through the nineteenth century. For instance, the 1830 Beer Act tore up the system of magistrate-approved licensing in an attempt to bring more competition to the beer trade and break the stranglehold of big breweries with their tied alehouses and pubs. Under the Act, anyone could sell beer so long as they paid a small tax and within a year of it being passed 24,000 beer shops had opened.8
There were two main consequences. People got plastered on the widely available beer and the British temperance movement began to mobilise. In 1834 a House of Commons select committee held an inquiry into drunkenness, concluding that the 1830 Act had been a mistake. Among the committee’s witnesses was Joseph Livesey, a cheese-maker from Preston who had set up the first temperance society in the town years earlier. Livesey was convinced that much of the misery endured by the poor stemmed from alcohol abuse and only teetotalism could break the dependency. Many thought the zealous, evangelical advocates of temperance dotty and ignored their warnings about the dangers of even moderate drinking.
But by the late 1840s every large town in England had a local temperance society and the drink question sparked into life again.9 In 1853 the societies organised themselves into a powerful political pressure group, the UK Alliance, and found fertile ground in many working-class communities. Magistrates’ control over licensing was revived in 1849, but the argument over drink remained polarised between liberal free-trade disciples and those who believed the government’s duty was to dragoon the public into sobriety. Belief in individual liberty clashed with demands for moral progress. As James Nicholls writes, for John Stuart Mill and like-minded liberals,
the job of the State was to allow individuals to make their own choices and their own mistakes so long as those choices and mistakes did not actively restrict the opportunity of others to do the same. For prohibitionists, the role of the State was actively to create the conditions i
n which individuals would be able to apprehend moral truths – and since that required sobriety, the State had a responsibility to outlaw the drinks trade.10
The Victorian struggle with alcohol culminated in the 1872 Licensing Act, which reduced the number of licences and restricted pub opening hours, forcing pubs in London to close by midnight and by 11 p.m. everywhere else and not to reopen until six in the morning. The Act also introduced the offence of being drunk and disorderly in the street, which still exists today, and it remains illegal to be drunk in charge of a carriage, horse, cow or steam engine, or whilst carrying a loaded firearm.11 The brewers and publicans were furious at the Gladstone government’s original 1871 Bill, while temperance campaigners thought it was a wishy-washy fudge. A compromise Act was eventually pushed through Parliament the following year with sizeable Tory support. Despite that, and both parties’ wariness about getting too close either to the brewers or the temperance zealots, the Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli successfully painted the Liberals as a party that planned to snatch voters’ beer away. After losing the general election in 1874 Gladstone wrote to his brother Robert, rather melodramatically, ‘we have been borne down in a torrent of gin and beer.’
The Act failed to slow Britain’s headlong march towards intoxication, the second great industrial epidemic of alcohol consumption. In the 1870s, an average of 40.5 gallons of beer was being drunk per capita per year, a colossal amount.12 Urban drinking was on the rise in the factory towns and cities of the Midlands and northern England and there was a boom in brewer-backed pub building to assuage the thirst of working-class drinkers. At this time taxes on booze brought in a quarter of the state’s revenue, which meant that governments were wary of staunching such a valuable income stream even if the social effects of mass drunkenness were clear.
This kept the temperance movement at the centre of the debate about drink. It was just as busy lobbying as the brewers, another echo of today’s struggle between groups such as Alcohol Concern and the drinks industry. At the close of the century a Royal Commission was set up to examine the drink question, but it was not until 1908 that the new Liberal government resolved to rein in the pubs. The plan was to restrict the number of licences to one per 1,000 people in cities and to compensate pubs that lost their licences using money raised from a levy on all public houses. The plan envisaged that a third of the pubs in England and Wales would eventually close. In an attempt to end the Monday morning hangover, the Bill also squeezed Sunday opening hours and proposed a ban on women working in pubs. The aim of the latter measure was twofold: both to protect female bar staff from the unwanted attentions of drunken men and to make pubs less inviting by prohibiting women servers. ‘The nation ought not to allow the natural attractions of a young girl to be used for trading purposes,’ mused a supportive Bishop of Southwark.13
But the Bill managed to unite suffragettes, brewers and the nation’s drinkers in opposition to it. At its Second Reading in the House of Commons, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith spelt out the government’s ambition to break the brewers’ control over 90 per cent of licences through tied pubs: ‘The second great and governing purpose … is the recovery for the State of complete and unfettered control of this monopoly.’ Many saw the proposal as an attack on property.
The drinks trade, more closely aligned to the Conservative Party since it had helped scupper the 1872 Licensing Act, mobilised against the plans with unprecedented force. A national campaign reached its zenith in September 1908 when a quarter of a million people poured into London to demonstrate against the Bill in Hyde Park, many ferried to the capital on charter trains laid on by Midland and northern breweries. Protesters pinned sprigs of hops to their buttonholes and wore badges that proclaimed ‘Honesty and Liberty’. Publicans and their customers, bar staff and brewers wanted to defend a working man’s freedom to drink – and the brewers’ freedom to profit handsomely from it. The dynamic Irish suffragette, social activist and poet Eva Gore-Booth led the fight against the proposed ban on barmaids. With her lover and fellow suffragette, Esther Roper, she launched the Barmaids Political Defence League to champion the rights of women to work, in and beyond the nation’s pubs. In April 1908 the two women contributed to an extraordinary by-election upset when they helped unseat Winston Churchill as Liberal MP in Manchester North-West. Asquith had just promoted young Churchill to the post of President of the Board of Trade. But at that time newly appointed Cabinet ministers were obliged to stand for re-election in their constituencies first. It was a convention for such by-elections to go unopposed but, in backing the barmaid ban, Churchill became the target of suffragette campaigners. Eva Gore-Booth, together with her sister Countess Markievicz, whipped up support for the Conservative candidate by denouncing Churchill and the government’s pub plans at packed public rallies. The women did not yet have the right to vote but their enthusiastic campaign scuppered Churchill’s re-election hopes. Following defeat, the future Prime Minister had to scout for another seat and re-entered the Commons as MP for Dundee at a by-election later in the year. While Churchill went on to be Number 10’s heavyweight drinker, his belief that the removal of women from behind the bar in pubs would make booze less tempting to susceptible working men derailed his career, if only briefly.
After scraping through the Commons, the Licensing Bill was vetoed by the Tory-dominated House of Lords in November 1908. To the ears of peers, the angry complaints of drinkers and brewers made a more powerful appeal than the pious temperance campaigners. Many Conservatives shared the concerns of the Liberal Party (and businesses) about the country’s drunken intemperance, but they flinched at the radicalism of the Licensing Bill. But in killing off the Bill the House of Lords quickened its own demise. A year later peers blocked Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ and by 1911 the Asquith government’s exasperation with the Lords tipped into constitutional crisis. The Parliament Act was passed, ensuring that the Lords could never again veto the will of the Commons.
It was not decades of debate, temperance pressure for prohibition, parliamentary battles or a decisive shift in public opinion that finally shunted Edwardian Britain into sobriety. It was war. The government called time on intemperance with several sweeping interventions to sober Britain up for the fight. The 1914 Defence of the Realm Act brought the axe down on day-long drinking and the following year direct state control over the supply and sale of alcohol in some areas was established through the Central Control Board. In towns where drunken munitions workers would have damaged the war effort, pubs were effectively nationalised and in 1916 the government took over the management of the entire drinks industry in the Carlisle area, an experiment that would continue until 1974. Taxes on alcohol were increased, while beer and spirits were diluted in strength. This unprecedented move to limit the country’s drinking had a dramatic effect on alcohol consumption and on levels of recorded drunkenness. By 1918 beer intake per head was half what it had been before the war and it was only in the late 1970s that alcohol consumption in Britain returned to levels last seen at the start of the twentieth century. Since then it has been a boom in the drinking of wine and spirits that has continued the rise.14
In comparison, France pursued a quite different approach to alcohol after the First World War. The state embarked on an extraordinary campaign of encouraging its citizens to drink as much wine as possible. Sales were hit by the disappearance of many wine-buying aristocratic families. Prohibition in the United States depressed demand further and good wine harvests were producing gallons of surplus wine. In 1931 the government launched a campaign urging patriotic Frenchmen to knock back more of the national drink. Advertisements stressed the health benefits of wine; billboards were placed at railway stations and neon signs around Paris. It was suggested that wine should be given to children during their lunch breaks, while a series tracing the country’s history through drink, run on French state radio, posited the view that Louis XIV’s pre-Revolution reign was so abysmal partly because he diluted his wine with water, w
hich stopped him thinking deeply enough.15
In Britain, though, the government gradually began to grapple with the problem of drink again. Victorian questions about the morality of excessive drinking and the nature of liberty were eclipsed by more practical concerns. How should drivers be deterred and punished if they were drunk behind the wheel of a car? The first drink driving limits and breathalyser tests were introduced in 1967. How should responsible drinking be encouraged? By setting safe drinking limits. The idea of units was first proposed in the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ report, ‘Alcohol and Alcoholism’, published in 1979. It suggested that safe drinking limits should be set at what now seems an extraordinary four pints of beer, four doubles of spirits or one bottle of wine a day.16 The report argued for government intervention to stop Britain’s alcohol consumption rising any further and concluded bluntly: ‘When price goes up, consumption falls. When prices go down, consumption rises.’ Thirty-five years later, that assertion still prompts fierce disagreement between politicians, the alcohol industry and public health campaigners.
Barcelona Comes to Britain
On the eve of the 2001 general election, the Labour Party sent out a text message to young voters which read, ‘cdnt give a xxxx 4 lst orders? Thn vte Lbr on Thursday 4 extra time.’ The technology had evolved but William Hogarth would have recognised the tactic of seducing the electorate with drink. Labour was not talking about an extra hour in the Royal Oak to finish a pint of bitter. Instead, it was promising to tear up licensing rules and free Britain to enjoy a continental culture of round-the-clock drinking.
The boulevards of Reading would be lined with café tables in the early hours of a balmy morning, humming with convivial wine-sipping conversation. Freed from the pressure to binge drink until 11 p.m., the salons of Newcastle would see a gentle ebb and flow of custom through the evening and into the night. Of course, some people might still have a little too much to drink, but the end of last orders would put an end to the closing time punch-up.