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

by Dillon, Patrick

  Prohibition had failed. The reformers’ attempt to outlaw it had succeeded only in worsening the problem; along the way they had managed to undermine the contract between the American government and the society they governed. And for politicians, there were still worse problems to wrestle with. For as long as booze was being sold under the counter, they made no money from it. And by 1932, politicians needed all the revenue they could get. The Wall Street Crash had brought a frenzy of speculative growth to a close. The costs of the New Deal lay ahead.

  The cold winds of Depression had their effect in other ways as well. In the 1750s, falling standards of living had played their part in reducing gin-drinking. For out-of-work Americans in 1930, there was no longer money to spend at the bar. An Age of Risk – of transformation and change, opportunity and calamity – had come to an end. A time of vanishing social hierarchies and increasing individualism was replaced by one which offered new visions of social responsibility (a vision which would be reinforced a decade later, when the Second World War created a role for America as global superpower).

  And so America made its pact with the devil. The politicians had their drink revenues; reformers comforted themselves with the end of the crime wave; and for companies like Seagram’s (founded by Samuel Bronfman, who had once been Canada’s biggest bootlegger), the profits began to pile up. John Barleycorn was allowed to stay in America.

  On 21 December 1970, President Richard Nixon met Elvis Presley in the Oval Office. They didn’t talk about rock’n’roll; they talked about drugs. Both President and King were worried about what was happening to young people in America. Elvis wanted to help. He wondered if he could be become an honorary agent at large to help fight drugs. Nixon wanted all the support he could get. The corruptions and cover-ups of the Watergate affair were still two years away. In 1970, narcotics, and what was wrong with American young people, were foremost on the President’s mind. The war on drugs was about to be declared.

  During the 1960s, a whole pharmacopia of drugs had suddenly appeared on the streets of western cities. Heroin and cannabis had a long history in some parts of the world, but had never been used in the west on any large scale; alongside them emerged new synthetic chemicals like LSD. The novelty of drugs was a large part of their threat. Alcohol was hallowed by time and custom. Every western culture had embedded drink in a web of traditions and habits, in traditional drinking places like the English pub or German wine cellar. Narcotics were different. They were taken in new ways, by new people. Their effects seemed different and terrible.

  They weren’t the only thing about the 1960s that was new. Drugs burst on the world in a decade of unsettling social and economic change. Old manners and customs were swept away. The Old World’s foundations were rocked by a sexual revolution, a revolution in classes and generations, a revolution of manners. Suddenly, cities like New York, London and San Francisco seemed to offer unprecedented possibilities. People no longer needed to follow a single path from factory to grave. They could transform their clothes, their accent, their music. They could transform themselves. And waves of speculation over the next four decades provided new ways for people to become rich – from media moguls to Wall Street traders, Loadsamoney to dotcom millionaires – and poor again.

  There were endless new ways to spend money as well. Social change whipped up a fashion firestorm. The consumer society was (re-)born. A 1950s salary might have gone into a nest-egg for a rainy day. Now it would disappear in new clothes, household goods, music, and the exploding business of leisure. With the arrival of television, there was a huge and brash new medium to broadcast the changes of the new age. Not even the retired colonel living down a leafy lane in Kent could escape what was happening on Carnaby Street. Advertising reached everyone, everywhere.

  But it didn’t mean that everyone had to like it. The changes of the 1960s brought unprecedented opportunities, but also frightening uncertainties. It was a new Age of Risk, febrile and exhilarating, narcissistic and neurotic. Beyond the bright lights, the sports cars to covet and the celebrities to emulate, beyond the freedoms of air travel or contraceptive pill, the new age seethed with old spectres. Crime soared, and so did the fear of crime. Families broke down; old communities were eroded; violence filled cinema screens. Squalid urban slums mushroomed behind the advertising hoardings.

  Drugs were soon singled out as a focus for society’s fears about its own transformation. As in the early eighteenth century, Drug Craze and Drug Panic were joined at the neck. The problems were familiar, and so were the fears. Drugs produced crime. It wasn’t just heroin addicts committing robbery to pay for their addiction; the drug-user was uncontrolled, more likely to attack strangers, a menace. Drugs broke down families. A whole generation was growing up unable to fulfil their useful role in the economy. Soon there would be fears that NATO security was at risk because American servicemen were debilitated by drugs. Prisons were said to be overrun with heroin. New spectres began to stalk the nightmares of city-dwellers. The crack addict wove along the pavement contemplating attacks on strangers; in the basement crack den, addicts lay stupefied in half-darkness; ‘crack babies’ were born to addict mothers who abused social security to fund their habit. Judith Defour was back on the streets.

  Before 1970, there had been little government attention paid to drugs. The change, when it came, was dramatic. In Britain, the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act classified and outlawed harmful substances. In America, Richard Nixon declared war on the scourge of the age. Drugs prohibition had arrived.

  There was optimism to start with. ‘We have turned the corner on drug addiction,’ the President announced in 1973. A Drug Enforcement Agency report in 1978 declared that ‘heroin availability continues to shrink.’ The truth was simpler. A whole sector of society had simply opted out of the law. In 1970, only fifteen per cent of Britons had tried an illegal drug. Twenty-five years later, that figure had risen to forty-five per cent. In 1991, twenty-six million Americans experimented with drugs.11

  Society feared crime, and it feared a subversive counter-culture. Prohibition fuelled both. The entire drugs industry, one of the world’s fastest-growing, was handed over to criminals, and the costs of illegal heroin addiction soon created a crime wave. A 1994 West Yorkshire survey reported that nearly all young offenders in their sample were regular drug-users. About half of the murders in the United States every year were reckoned to be drugs-related.12

  By opting for prohibition, governments had ruled out every other control they might have had over drugs. They couldn’t draw revenues from them. They couldn’t control where drugs were manufactured, sold or consumed. They had no influence over the industries which grew the raw materials for drugs, processed, transported, marketed and distributed them – nor over the profits they made. They had created a global criminal industry, and alongside it, a smuggling problem to dwarf the brandy-runners of the eighteenth century and Rum-Rows of Prohibition-era America.

  The law was ignored, and with disregard came disrespect. Drug-use created a subversive counter-culture with its own language and its own customs. Prohibition also had a terrible effect on the health of drug-users. In the back-streets of St Giles’s, gin-drinkers had been sold dilute spirits contaminated with alum and sulphuric acid. Impure heroin, cut with bleach or cleaning fluid, would have an even more devastating effect on modern drug-users. It would kill 15,000 a year, according to one American estimate, while contaminated needles spread the modern plague of AIDS.

  But there would be no change in the law. By the 1980s, drugs policy was no longer about the social causes of drug abuse, nor about the safety of users. It was about enforcement. In 1982, Vice-President George Bush launched the South Florida Task Force, the most ambitious attempt so far to stamp out drugs. In office as President, he would spend $40bn on the war on drugs. His initiatives had only one measurable effect: they filled up the jails. By 1990, over half of federal inmates were drug offenders. At more than 25,000, they outnumbered the entire federal prison population
a decade earlier.

  And all along, there was never any sign that the war on drugs could be won. On 24 March 1743, after six and half years of prohibition, William Pulteney told the House of Lords, ‘It is well known, that punch and drams of all sorts, even common gin not excepted, are now sold openly and avowedly at all public houses, and many private shops and bye-corners; and it is likewise known, that they are now sold as cheap as they were before the present law was enacted.’13 In December 1999, Barry Shaw, chief constable of Cleveland police, reported that ‘there is overwhelming evidence to show that the prohibition-based policy in this country since 1971 has not been effective in controlling the availability or use of proscribed drugs. If there is indeed a war against drugs, it is not being won … Illegal drugs are freely available, their price is dropping and their use is growing. It seems fair to say that violation of the law is endemic, and the problem seems to be getting worse despite our best efforts.’14

  In 1743, a British ministry, undemocratic, amateurish, unsupported by statistics, Civil Service or analytical tools, still managed to grasp the reality that the battle against Madam Geneva was lost, and that its costs in social disunity and crime were far worse than gin. Western governments of the late twentieth century held out against such a moment of truth. For modern politicians, as for 1730s reformers, drugs were too closely linked with all the evils of the new Age of Risk: with the loss of traditional values, with family breakdown and crime. No one could compromise on drugs without seeming to condone those changes.

  What few of them noticed was that Drug Craze and Drug Panic might be Siamese twins; that it might be the very same forces of fear and uncertainty which drove young people to drugs and conservatives to family values. Just as in early eighteenth-century London, or America in the Roaring Twenties, a new age has offered intoxicating transformations, a heady cocktail of opportunities and risks. In every metropolis, dealers reckon up their odds on the trading floors, and corner shops are littered with discarded scratch-cards. Televisions flash out their images of cars and holidays to those who will never be able to afford afford them; while in the shopping streets, plate-glass windows display clothes and cosmetics which promise to transform secretaries into supermodels.

  The consequences should surprise no one. Somewhere a new Henry Fielding is shaking his head over the frivolity of the age, a Thomas Wilson is carving his career out of family values, and a Dr Stephen Hales is throwing up his hands in honest dismay. And somewhere, out of sight in the back-streets, Madam Geneva is still loitering along the gutter, barefoot in a ripped party dress, dispensing her gifts of comfort and misery, ecstasy and death.

  NOTES

  BL British Library

  Ch(H) Cholmendeley (Houghton) Papers, CUL

  CJ Commons Journals

  CLRO City of London Records Office

  CUL Cambridge University Library

  CWAC City of Westminster Archive Centre

  GL Guildhall Library

  LMA London Metropolitan Archive

  OBPP Old Bailey Printed Proceedings

  PH Parliamentary History

  PRO Public Record Office

  UDV United Distillers and Vintners Archive

  INTRODUCTION: The Alchemists

  1 William Phillip, A Book of Secrets, translated out of the Dutch, 1596

  2 de Mayerne, The Distiller of London, p96

  3 Morwyng, The Treasure of Euonymus, p161

  4 Morwyng, The Treasure of Euonymus, p127

  5 Morwyng, The Treasure of Euonymus, p83

  6 Forbes, Short History of the Art of Distillation, p106

  7 Forbes, Short History of the Art of Distillation, p97; Tlusty, ‘Water of Life, Water of Death: The Controversy over Brandy and Gin in Early Modern Augsburg’, p20

  8 Brennan, Public Drinking and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century Paris, p214

  9 Hales, A Friendly Admonition to the Drinkers of Brandy, and other Distilled Spirituous Liquors, p1

  10 A Dissertation upon Drunkenness, 1727, p14

  CHAPTER ONE: The Glorious Revolution

  1 Blunt, Geneva: a poem. Address’d to the Right Honourable Sir R — W —, 1729

  2 van der Zee, William and Mary, p283

  3 Defoe, Brief Case of the Distillers, 1726, p17

  4 P Clark, The English Alehouse, p211

  5 Defoe, Brief Case of the Distillers, 1726, p18ff

  6 Filby, A History of Food Adulteration and Analysis, p157

  7 Davenant, An Account of the Trade between Great-Britain, France, Holland etc, first report, 1711, p42

  8 Ward, London Spy, XI, p205

  9 Ch(H), P28/6

  10 Filby, A History of Food Adulteration and Analysis, p158

  11 Malcolm, Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century, p131

  12 Ward, London Spy, II, p32

  13 Ward, London Spy, IX, p165

  14 Davenant, Essay upon Ways and Means of Supplying the War, p133

  15 de Saussure, A Foreign View of England, 16 Decemeber 1725

  16 Defoe, Review, 9 & 19 May 1713

  17 Chamberlayne quoted in Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, p476

  18 Defoe, Brief Case of the Distillers, 1726, p18ff

  19 de Saussure, A Foreign View of England, October 1726

  20 de Saussure, A Foreign View of England, 7 February 1727

  21 Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, p477

  22 French, Nineteen Centuries of Drink in England, p294

  23 Porter, ‘The Drinking Man’s Disease’

  24 Lindsay, The Monster City, p37ff

  25 P Clark, The English Alehouse, p209

  26 A Dissertation upon Drunkenness, 1727

  27 Defoe, Brief Case of the Distillers, 1726

  28 Quoted on title-page of Blunt, Blunt to Walpole: a familiar epistle in behalf of the British Distillery, 1730

  29 Place, Drunkenness, notes, BM Add. MSS 27825

  30 PH, 22 March 1743

  31 A Dissertation upon Drunkenness, 1727, p14

  32 The Tavern Scuffle, 1726

  CHAPTER TWO: London

  1 Smollett, Humphrey Clinker, p117

  2 Inwood, History of London, p260ff

  3 Defoe, A Tour thro’ the whole Island of Great Britain, 1724–5

  4 Earle, A City Full of People, p50

  5 Defoe, Everybody’s Business is Nobody’s Business, 1725

  6 McKendrick, Brewer & Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, p52

  7 Low-life, or One Half of the World Knows not how the Other Half Live, p10

  8 Phillips, Mid-Georgian London, p45

  9 Ward, London Spy, VIII, p138

  10 Fielding, Tom Jones, p171

  11 Fielding, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, p26

  12 Inwood, History of London, p314

  13 Angliae Tutamen … Being an account of the banks, lotteries, mines, diving, draining, lifting, and other engines, and many pernicious projects now on foot, tending to the destruction of trade, 1696

  14 Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost, p81

  15 Davenant, The True Picture of a Modern Whig, 1701

  16 Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class, p151

  17 Andrew, Philanthropy and Police, p15

  18 Rudé, Hanoverian London, p71

  19 Fielding, Tom Jones, p416

  20 Fielding, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, p38

  21 Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, pp315 & 320

  22 Tom Brown, Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London, 1700

  23 Sherlock, A Letter from the Lord Bishop of London to the clergy and people of London and Westminster on occasion of the late earthquakes, 1750, p9

  24 A Trip through the Town, 1735

  25 de Saussure, A Foreign View of England, 16 December 1725

  26 Defoe, Complete English Tradesman, i, pp312–5

  27 Grosley, A Tour to London,
i, p55

  28 Earle, A City Full of People, p82

  29 Burke, The Streets of London, p59

  30 de Saussure, A Foreign View of England, 29 May 1727

  31 Egmont Diary, iii, p279

  32 Burrington, An Answer to Dr William Brackenridge’s Letter concerning the Number of Inhabitants within the London Bills of Mortality, 1757

  33 Wrigley and Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871, 1981

  34 Fielding, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, p83

  35 OBPP, 7–10 September 1720

  36 Earle, A City Full of People, p206

  CHAPTER THREE: South Sea Mountain

  1 20 February 1720, quoted in Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost, p64

  2 21 April & 24 June 1720, quoted in Cohen, The Edge of Chaos, pp201 & 214

  3 A Letter to the Patriots of Change Alley, 1720

  4 Mist’s Journal, 26 March 1720

  5 Mercure Historique et Politique, July 1720

  6 Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal, 5 August 1720

  7 Cohen, The Edge of Chaos, p207

  8 Cohen, The Edge of Chaos, p244

  9 Speck, Stability and Strife, p197ff

  10 Weekly Journal, 1 October 1720