Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze

by Dillon, Patrick

  Sir Joseph Mawbey, elected MP for Southwark the year after the distillery ban was lifted, had no interest in drunken gin-wives lying in the gutter outside his distillery. So the Gin Act of 1760 did everything it could to push the industry into the right hands. First, subsidies were offered on all spirits exports. There was nothing wrong with gin tipped down foreign throats. William Currie’s firm went into the export market with a will. ‘The exportation of spirits is a branch we intend to cultivate,’ the partners agreed; ‘the intent of the legislature & of the ministry is to encourage it as much as possible.’24 They kept at it, despite burning their fingers with unreliable shippers and bad debts from Portuguese merchants. In the following year, 1761, there were even more obvious measures to encourage industrial concerns. A minimum limit was set on the size of distilleries, ostensibly to help the Excise Office keep track of production. From now on, distillers had to have a capacity of 100 gallons. If they wanted to qualify for export subsidies, they needed even more – a low-wine still with a minimum capacity of 800 gallons.

  There had been a growing tendency for malt distillers to buy up compounders. That was outlawed in the 1760 Act, but the measure was repealed after only a year. From the 1760s on, the industry would be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. When Parliament surveyed the malt distillers in 1803, it would find that just nine names owned ninety per cent of still capacity. And those names, by the 1760s, were starting to sound familiar. The Booth family had begun as brewers and vintners in the 1740s. By 1751 John Booth was selling gin; his Turnmill Street distillery opened soon afterwards. Robert Burnett was already in business by then, with a huge distillery on the waterfront in Vauxhall. At the end of his career, he would be knighted, and would become a Sheriff of the City of London. Alexander Gordon founded his distilling business in 1769. By the end of the century, Gordon’s and Booth’s would be sending out more than half a million gallons of gin a year.

  Distilling had come a long way from the days of Dudley Bradstreet. There was no longer a still in every chandler’s shop. The ‘running, shabby fellows’ had been swept away. But for those who remained, there were ever-increasing profits to be made. By 1783, William Currie’s company would be valued at £80,000. Still thriving in 1845, the firm invested £30,000 in a Vine Street compounding firm called Tanqueray’s. Soon afterwards they merged with Gordon’s.

  But by then the wheel had come full circle. 1760 brought in an uneasy truce between drinkers and reformers. Gin didn’t go away. The papers in 1764 reported two gin-soaked builders at Gray’s Inn drunkenly lobbing bricks at each other; one was hit on the head and died.25 Pierce Egan described his Regency swells looking for low-life kicks in ‘All Max’, a gin-shop in Whitechapel: ‘Lascars, blacks, jack tars, coal-heavers, dustmen, women of colour, old and young, and a sprinkling of the remnants of once fine girls, &c., were all jigging together. Heavy wet was the cooling beverage, but frequently overtaken by flashes of lightning.’26 Panic about gin didn’t disappear either. In the 1790s, Hannah More would show all the old hatred of Madam Geneva in The Gin-Shop; or, a peep into a prison:

  The state compels no man to drink,

  Compels no man to game;

  ’Tis gin and gambling sink him down

  To rags, and want, and shame.

  Gin-drinking had been a response to insecurity. The Gin Craze had been born from a culture of risk and opportunity in a town that offered both in abundance. And as the population of London started to boom at the end of the eighteenth century, as industrialisation gathered pace, conditions in the slums could only worsen, and with them the lot of immigrants working long hours in squalid conditions.

  Francis Place campaigned against drink all his life, but even he could understand ‘the sickening aversion which at times steals over the working man, and utterly disables him for a longer or a shorter period, from following his usual occupation, and compels him to indulge in idleness.’ Maybe it would have been helpful if someone back in 1736 had stopped to wonder what made the poor turn to drink in the first place. ‘It is not easy,’ Place went on, ‘for any one who has not himself been a working man, accurately to estimate the agreeable sensations produced by the stimulus of strong liquor … yet so constant are these effects, that he who has scarcely any other means of excitement producing enjoyment, will in almost all cases … endeavour to produce them as often as he has the power, and dares venture to use it.’27

  Soon into the nineteenth century, London’s population burst a million. Newly anonymous, newly insecure, slums sucked in migrants to a world of hard work and ill health; a new world of risk. Maybe that would have been enough by itself to ignite a second Gin Craze. But in 1825, as if they were determined to recreate the conditions of the early eighteenth century, the government decided to throw fuel on the flames. They declared free trade in spirits.

  Free trade was the call on every side – beer was liberalised at the same time. Old restrictions were to be swept aside; the economy would boom. Eighty years of pragmatic control over gin were ended. The cost of a spirit licence was more than halved, and spirit duties slashed. The result was dramatic. In 1826, spirit production more than doubled, hitting a level that hadn’t been seen since 1743. By the end of the decade more than 45,000 licences were being issued every year.

  ‘Everybody is drunk,’ Sydney Smith wrote to John Murray. ‘Those who are not singing are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state.’28 They soon had new places to be beastly in. In the gin debate back in 1743, Lord Talbot had given the House of Lords a dire vision of what London could expect if Madam Geneva was allowed to settle down in the city. ‘We may expect to see a long catalogue of drams wrote in gold letters upon every sign-post,’ he had warned, ‘and those that enter will certainly find … casks or vessels piled up a-top of one another, with a luscious description of its contents in capital letters upon every one. Nay … these casks [will be] exposed to the view of every [passer-by], and the shop or public room always full of customers … These, and many more allurements than I can think of, will certainly be made use of by those that are to be licensed to sell spirituous liquors.’ In 1834, giving evidence to the House of Commons select committee on Drunkenness, a Tothill Street grocer described the new Gin Palace which had just opened across the road from his shop: ‘It was converted into the very opposite of what it had been, [from] a low dirty public house with only one doorway, into a splendid edifice, the front ornamental with pilasters, supporting a handsome cornice and entablature and balustrades, and the whole elevation remarkably striking and handsome … the doors and windows glazed with very large squares of plate glass, and the gas fittings of the most costly description … When this edifice was completed, notice was given by placards taken round the parish; a band of music was stationed in front … the street became almost impassable from the number of people collected; and when the doors were opened the rush was tremendous; it was instantly filled with customers and continued so till midnight.’

  Gin Palaces arrived in the late 1820s, and soon they were everywhere. The Select Committee on Drunkenness (which could do nothing to stem the tide) heard that ‘there is a company formed in London for the purpose of buying any old free public house that can be met with, and they are then fitted up in the palace-like style in which they are now seen.’ In Lambeth’s New Cut, one witness told them, ‘I suppose there are £25,000 being spent in building gin-shops. I should think they must cost £7,000 or £8,000 each house.’

  It was a new Gin Craze, and the new Gin Panic soon followed. The phrase was coined by Henry Fearon, pioneer of the Gin Palace, in a newspaper article in 1830. Anti-spirits societies appeared in Glasgow and Ulster in 1829, and spread to Blackburn in 1830. On 1 September 1832, in Preston, Lancashire, seven pioneers signed the pledge of total abstinence, and for the next forty years, through interminable feuds, mergers and divisions, children’s rallies and temperance tracts, marches and fund-raising events, campaigns in Parliament and thunderous sermons from the pulpit, through rows betwee
n prohibitionists and moral suasionists, through Bands of Hope and anguished confessions from penitents, the panic about drink would run uncontrolled.

  There were more sober voices as well. In the early 1830s a young journalist called Charles Dickens visited one of the new Gin Palaces. He found gilt-labelled barrels, plate glass, polished mahogany and despair. He was shocked by the drunkenness and the tawdry splendour, shocked by the ‘throng of men, women and children,’ who, as the evening ended, dwindled ‘to two or three occasional stragglers – cold, wretched-looking creatures, in the last stage of emaciation and disease.’ But he withheld judgement. ‘Gin drinking is a great vice in England,’ Dickens wrote in conclusion, ‘but wretchedness and dirt are 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, ginshops will increase in number and splendour.’29

  EPILOGUE

  The bill now before us may indeed, Sir, very properly be called an experiment: It is, I believe, one of the boldest experiments in politics that was ever made in a free country.

  William Pulteney, House of Commons prohibition debate, 16 February 1736

  Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.

  Herbert Hoover, Presidential Election Campaign, 1928

  On 16 January 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the necessary three-quarters of the States, and America faced prohibition.

  It was the culmination of a long campaign by reformers to save America from itself. Prohibition came in at a time of dizzying economic growth and frightening social change; a time of risk. The great cities were swelled by hordes of immigrants. They were fuelled by speculation, given over to wild hedonism. Prohibition was the attempt of small-town America to hold back the tide. Change had got out of hand. America no longer seemed a land of certainties, of farmers tilling their own ground and praying in church on Sunday. Suddenly it was a country of strange languages and overnight millionaires, of saloons and nightclubs, dancing girls and jazz music. Prohibition dragged America back to safe ground.

  America had always been suspicious of the town. ‘Those who labour in the earth,’ wrote Thomas Jefferson, ‘are the chosen people of God.’1 The Constitution had avoided a metropolitan capital. State assemblies would meet not in the big towns, but in rural centres like Albany. America was to be a land of godly farmers governed by wise and independent country gentlemen.

  By the end of the nineteenth century it had all gone wrong. The Civil War had been followed by rapid industrialisation and economic growth. Immigrants had flooded in. By the turn of the century, America was no longer a land of villages. It was no longer a land of whites, or Protestants, or even of Anglo-Saxons. In the cities, migrants huddled in anonymous slum dwellings. And the cities themselves were changed beyond recognition. New grids of streets cut across farmland; unimaginable new buildings rose up into the sky. New York and Chicago became places of transformation. Vast fortunes were made by men who had never held a plough. The Jazz Age celebrated modernity and high spending. It was a time of neurotic hedonism. Nightclubs and cinemas gave New Yorkers the same risky pleasures that Londoners had once found in the theatre and masquerade. Silent movies lingered endlessly on the lives of the decadent rich: their silks, their cocktails, their extravagance.

  ‘It was borrowed time anyhow,’ wrote F Scott Fitzgerald of the age he characterised, ‘the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.’2 Walter Lippmann, surveying Prohibition in 1927, saw exactly what it all meant to conservatives. ‘The evil which the old-fashioned preachers ascribe to the Pope, to Babylon, to atheists, and to the devil,’ he wrote, ‘is simply the new urban civilisation, with its irresistible scientific and economic and mass power. The Pope, the devil, jazz, the bootleggers, are a mythology which expresses symbolically the impact of a vast and dreaded social change.’3

  Alcohol was the conservatives’ scapegoat. Just as gin had in the 1720s, it became a focus for all the evils of the age. Drink threatened America’s security and damaged its economy. ‘King Alcohol,’ fumed the National Temperance Almanac in 1876, ‘has … filled our prisons, our alms-houses and lunatic asylums, and erected the gibbet before our eyes. He has destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of our citizens annually … He has turned … hundreds of thousands … to idleness and vice, infused into them the spirit of demons, and degraded them below the level of brutes. He has made thousand of widows and orphans … He has introduced among us hereditary diseases, both physical and mental, thereby tending to deteriorate the human race.’4

  If booze was responsible for all the evils of the age, then Prohibition, as in 1736, became the panacea. That was the reformers’ message; its eventual triumph was achieved through Christian fervour allied to impressive powers of organisation. In 1736 it was Thomas Wilson who navigated the bandwagon towards prohibition. Two centuries later it was Wayne B Wheeler, working behind the scenes, who organised the propaganda and made the connections.* The drinks companies in America were powerful, just as the London malt distillers were powerful, but the reformers outmanoeuvred them at every turn. On 16 January 1920, the Volstead Act came into force, and America turned dry.

  The authorities had been expecting trouble on the night Prohibition came in, but in the end it was a damp squib. There were mock-funerals for John Barleycorn at Maxim’s and the Golden Glades. The Hotel Vanderbilt gave away free whisky. At Reisenweber’s, ladies were handed compacts in the shape of coffins. The protests, though, were only symbolic. ‘The big farewell,’ as the New York Evening Post put it, ‘failed to materialise.’ Maybe the authorities assumed $1,000 fines and six-month jail sentences would be enough to deter anybody. The truth was rather different. There were no riots because there would be no Prohibition. In the great towns and cities, the Volstead Act was a dead letter from the start.

  Reformers had feared crime and a subversive population. Prohibition gave them both. By criminalising one of America’s biggest industries, they handed it over to bootleggers like George Remus and Lucky Luciano. In Chicago, news reports were soon full of the feud between Big Jim Colosimo and Johnny Torrio. Al Capone was waiting in the wings.

  Worst of all, Prohibition – just as it had in 1736 – turned ordinary citizens into criminals themselves. Men and women who paid taxes and went to church found themselves law-breakers just by pouring a glass of beer. Prohibition drove a wedge into society. For many, it was a straightforward split between rich and poor. The Yale Club had bought up fourteen years’ supply of booze before the Volstead Act came into force. As a result, ‘the workers,’ as one Union leader put it, ‘who have no cellars … learn to hate their more fortunate fellow citizens more bitterly and uncompromisingly.’5 ‘Very few [working men],’ the Wickersham Commission reported towards the end of Prohibition, ‘have any respect for the Prohibition laws and do not hesitate to say so. They consider these laws discriminatory … and therefore have no compunction in violating them.’

  Alienation fuelled a cult of subversion. Some had seen it coming. ‘This law will be almost impossible of enforcement,’ Fiorello La Guardia, future mayor of New York, wrote to Andrew Volstead even while his Act was passing through Congress. ‘And if this law fails to be enforced … it will create contempt and disregard for the law all over the country.’6 Criminals became elevated, as Jack Sheppard or Dick Turpin had been, into popular heroes. The speakeasy and nightclub started to develop their own counter-culture. Eighteenth-century Londoners had drunk Blue Ruin, Bob Makeshift and South Sea Mountain. In their turn, Americans in the Roaring Twenties rolled under the table in the clutches of Old Horsey, Happy Sally, Soda Pop Moon, or Jersey Lightning.

  Some of them didn’t get up again. Eighteenth-century gin had been a deadly concoction of poisons, flavourings and
malt spirit. The ‘bathtub gin’ produced under Prohibition was no better. Industrial alcohol was poisoned by law to make it unpalatable. Bootleggers added glycerine and oil of juniper to make gin, caramel and creosote to make whisky. When New York authorities tested seizures in 1928, they found that nearly all the booze they tried still contained poisons. Some reckoned 50,000 Americans were killed, blinded or paralysed during Prohibition.

  Even so, Prohibition never stopped people drinking. But to the American authorities, just as to Robert Walpole and Thomas De Veil, that was soon no longer the point. ‘The issue is fast coming to be recognised,’ President Harding would proclaim, ‘not as a contention between those who want to drink and those who do not … but as one involving the great question whether the laws of this country can and will be enforced.’7 By the mid-Twenties, Prohibition was no longer about drink; it was about government authority. Faced with widespread disregard of the law, the authorities determined to force it through. Brigadier General Lincoln Andrews was appointed Prohibition ‘Czar’ on April Fool’s Day 1925. Draconian punishments were made still harsher.

  The only effect of the clamp-down, as in 1738, was to fill up the prisons. By 1929, federal convictions for liquor offences had doubled, and the government had started work on six new jails. Out at sea, meanwhile, as in the early eighteenth century, Prohibition had created an uncontrollable problem of smuggling, as schooners and speedboats queued up along the coast to deliver their illicit cargo. And the manner of the clamp-down only alienated even more of the population. ‘As a class,’ wrote Stanley Walker, city editor of the New York Times, ‘[prohibition agents] made themselves offensive beyond words, and their multifarious doings made them the pariahs of New York.’8 Ninety-two would be killed in the course of Prohibition.9 Agents’ $40-a-week pay made them as susceptible to corruption as Edward Parker had been two centuries earlier. The bootlegger George Remus claimed he only ever found two people who turned down a bribe. Magistrates of the 1730s had complained of constables who were gin-sellers themselves. In 1926, Mayor William E. Dever of Chicago told Congress that sixty per cent of his police force were in the liquor business.10