by Iain Gately
The miseries endured by postwar English beer drinkers were slight in comparison to the torments suffered by Scottish whisky lovers. Most production was diverted to the export market to earn foreign currency for reconstruction, and whisky for home consumption was rationed until 1960. The anguish that afflicted scotch aficionados deprived of their daily drams was caricatured in the movie Whisky Galore! (1949). Set on a small island in the Hebrides during the Second World War, and based on a true incident, Whisky Galore! depicts the attempts of whisky-starved islanders to salvage the cargo of a ship that has run aground with fifty thousand cases of the water of life on board and which is protected by the British home guard. The movie provides an affectionate view of drinking, indeed proposes that life without whisky is not worth living. “Some men are born a couple of drams short of par,” opines the local doctor of the tight little island, as he makes up the natural shortfall with a glass of scotch.
As the economic climate improved in the late 1950s, British drinking underwent a revival. Beer consumption returned to prewar levels in the middle of the decade, and home consumption of whisky did the same in 1961. The fifties also witnessed the appearance of a novelty in the British beer market—lager. This cold, fizzy substance, the antithesis of bitter, had first been brewed in Britain on a commercial scale in 1949. The market leader, Skol, was targeted at younger drinkers who were thought to find the powerful taste of bitter off-putting. Despite having a market share of only 1 percent in 1960, lager was heavily promoted, attracting 19 percent of all the advertising spent on beer in the same year. Since lager had no traditional associations in the mind of the British drinker, these had to be invented. Its comparative lack of flavor was turned to its advantage. Ads focused on its refreshing qualities rather than its taste and depicted it as perfectly suited to the exciting new era of television and rock ’n’ roll that Britain, belatedly, had joined.
Notwithstanding the recovery in consumption, the British were still drinking less than a third of the amount of booze on a per capita basis as their counterparts in France—the equivalent of a mere seven and a half liters of pure alcohol per annum against twenty-five. Despite such comparative abstinence, they nonetheless perceived of themselves as being heavy drinkers, a perception that was reflected in the plays, fiction, and films of the period. The movie Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), for instance, which chronicles the life of a young factory worker in Britain in the fifties, presents alcohol as an anesthetic against the pain and boredom of a futile existence. Drunkenness allows its hero a temporary refuge in oblivion, and the condition is his principal aim when drinking. Such a mentality was the polar opposite of that which prevailed in France, where people drank for taste first and stimulation second.
A kinder picture of British tippling was presented in Coronation Street, the longest-running soap opera on British television, first broadcast in December 1960. The show is set in a terrace of houses in a northern town and features a neighborhood pub, the Rover’s Return, where its characters socialize en masse. In addition to drinking and gossiping they play darts and other traditional pub games. The Rover’s Return serves them as a home away from home—a kind of community center very much in the style of the village alehouse. On the rare occasions when one of its clientele has one too many, a motive, other than the mere desire to see double, is provided. People drink to compensate for disappointment, or to celebrate success, and alcohol, by offering consolation, or enhancing merriment, is presented as serving a useful role in society.
While overall consumption patterns in Great Britain in the 1950s were closer to those portrayed in Coronation Street than Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, there were exceptions, notably in Soho, London, where the rising stars of literature and painting met to drink deep. The epicenter of their boozing was the Colony Room, run by the formidable Muriel Belcher, who encouraged her customers to be as rude to each other as possible when in their cups, and who led by example. The Colony’s clientele included the painter Francis Bacon, who was provided with free drinks in return for introducing new customers. Among the other heavy-drinking artists he brought to the club were Frank Auerbach, Lucien Freud, and Patrick Caulfield. Indeed, painters, whether figurative or abstract, seem to have taken to the bottle with the same abandon as writers during the middle decades of the twentieth century: The consumption of the principal British artists of the period was matched and perhaps exceeded by America’s Abstract Impressionists—Rothko, Pollock, and De Kooning were all alcoholics.
The binge drinking practiced in Soho was also a feature of Britain’s institutions of higher learning, where the competitive forms of consumption that had been typical of the eighteenth century were revived and improved. Although the average Briton may have been sober compared to his or her continental counterpart, British students drank in defiance of the trend. Their teachers, too, were fond of their sauce, as is illustrated in the first British campus novel—Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. Set in a red brick university at the turn of the 1950s, the novel follows the fortunes of Jim Dixon, a young lecturer who, in contrast to the older members of his faculty, prefers pop songs to English classical music and who would rather spend time drinking pints in a pub than sipping sherry in a drawing room. The novel employs inebriation both as a deus ex machina to manage the plot and as a device to permit Jim to speak his mind. It also features one of the most memorable descriptions of a hangover in literature, as Jim awakes to find he has set his bed on fire: “Not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.”
Campus drinking rituals, especially at Oxford and Cambridge, were matters of fascination to foreign visitors. An Australian studying at University College, Oxford, for instance, recorded his bemusement when ordered to drink a “sconce” of two and a half pints of beer as a penalty for appearing at dinner without a gown. He did so, in the then-world record time of eleven seconds. Bob Hawke, the drinker in question, prime minister of Australia between 1983 and 1992, later acknowledged that “this feat was to endear me to some of my fellow Australians more than anything else I ever achieved.”
Hawke had honed his speed-drinking skills as an undergraduate in his native Australia, which, at the close of World War II, had one of the most restrictive liquor licensing regimes in the world. Public houses throughout the nation closed their doors at 6:00 P.M. Rather, however, than persuading Australians to drink less, it caused them to drink faster, resulting in the notorious “six o’clock swill,” when workers would try to fit a full evening’s drinking into the hour between finishing work and closing time. The public bars of Australian hotels were designed to accommodate rapid, perpendicular drinking. Few had any furniture or interior fixtures at all, beyond a shelf around the wall where customers might rest their glasses in between drafts. Beer was dispensed from a device resembling a gasoline pump. The floors and the walls were tiled so that they might be hosed down after each session. Perpendicular speed drinking led to horizontal drinkers: “When the pubs closed, the streets filled with wild cries and the gutters ran with chunder.”67 This “unedifying spectacle” and an epidemic of automobile accidents involving drunks, led to the appointment of a royal commission, which reported in 1954 that “there are evils associated with six o’clock closing which ought not to be tolerated in a civilized community.” New South Wales civilized its licensing laws in 1956, but Victoria and South Australia did not follow suit until 1966 and 1967 respectively.
Despite the persistence of restrictive laws in much of the country, Australian per capita beer consumption rose steadily, if not spectacularly, throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Wher
eas it had been a mere twelve gallons per person per annum immediately prior to World War II, by 1953 it had risen to more than twenty and, by the mid ’60s, was nudging thirty gallons. While beer was considered the national beverage, wine consumption was also on the up over the same period. This increase resulted in part from changing demographics: In the decade following the war more than a million continental European immigrants arrived in Australia, many of whom came from wine-drinking cultures. Their presence revitalized Australian wine production. Prior to 1957, Australia produced more fortified wine than table wine. The switch from empire standards such as Australian port and sherry to lighter styles was driven by demand from non-Anglo-Saxon Australians, and by an increase in the number of Australian women who drank. The latter had been notable by their absence in the ritual of the six o’clock swill, except behind the bar; indeed, midcentury Australian drinking was by and large an all-male ritual, in which mates took turns to “shout” each other rounds of beer before crawling home. However, a fashion for pearl or perle wines in the 1950 converted many Australian women to the pleasures of the grape. These were produced using temperature- and pressure-controlled fermentation, resulting in a light, naturally effervescent drink reminiscent of weak champagne. The brand leader was Barossa Pearl, introduced by Gramps in 1957. Barossa Pearl was drinkable rather than beautiful—“a sort of feminine substitute for beer,” according to an observer of the period.
Although Pearl wines were representative of the general standard of Australian winemaking at the time, some producers were setting their sights far higher. Foremost among these was Max Schubert of Penfolds in Southern Australia. Schubert believed that Australia was capable of producing a truly great wine that might rival the premier crus of Bordeaux. The idea had taken seed in 1950, when Schubert had visited the major growing regions of Europe and had tasted some forty- and fifty-year-old Bordeaux wines that still retained “magnificent bouquet and flavor.” On his return to South Australia, Schubert decided to use Shiraz grapes and fermentation techniques he had learned in France to produce a “big, full-bodied wine, containing maximum extraction of all the components in the grape material used.” Nineteen fifty-one was the year of his first vintage, which was matured in untreated oak hogsheads for eighteen months, then bottled and stored. The process was repeated each year until 1956 when the directors of Penfold, curious to know what kind of wine was filling up its cellars, called for a tasting. Various Australian wine luminaries were invited to Adelaide and all the vintages produced to date were sampled. No one liked any of them. One taster described Grange Hermitage, as the new wine had been named, as “A concoction of wild fruits and sundry berries with crushed ants predominating”; while another remarked to its creator, “Schubert, I congratulate you. A very good, dry port, which no one in their right mind will buy—let alone drink.”
Schubert was instructed to cease production. He disobeyed orders and continued to make smaller quantities clandestinely between 1957 and 1959. Happily, by 1960, the first vintages were beginning to settle down, becoming “less aggressive and more refined,” and official production resumed again in 1960. In 1962 the ’55 vintage won its first gold medal. It collected another fifty-four gold medals in various contests over the next fifteen years, indeed, was only withdrawn from contests so that other vintages of Grange Hermitage could win gold instead. A single bottle of the ’51 now sells for forty-five thousand Australian dollars, and the wine has realized its creator’s dream of making an Australian wine to rival the best of Bordeaux.
33 FLASHBACKS
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.
—Hunter S. Thompson
In the same year that Grange Hermitage won its first gold medal, America elected a glamorous young president, put the first man in space, and its population and economy were booming. The highway construction program instituted by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which had pledged twenty-five billion dollars to construct forty-one thousand miles of interstate roads over ten years, was close to completion, enabling Americans to explore their country with unprecedented ease. In this heady domestic atmosphere, where the watchword was optimism, the consumption of alcohol, which had paused for breath at the end of the 1950s, recommenced its upward trend. However, the debate on the pleasures and hazards of drinking was sidelined for much of the 1960s as the national passions for novelty and stimulation spilled over into the field of intoxicants. New rivals to drunkenness emerged as matters for celebration or demonization, besides which getting corned up seemed reassuringly quaint.
The quest for novelty had a prophet, Jack Kerouac, whose ground-breaking novel On the Road (1957) unrolls like an excited conversation in a bar. It is a poem to the continent—to freedom of movement—to turn the ignition key and go! It is also gloriously wet, a booze-soaked odyssey back and forth across the republic, a Sun Also Rises, grounded on American soil, that acknowledged the debt to Hemingway in the conversational exchanges of its characters. The book represents alcohol as the solvent of melting-pot America. All over the nation, red-necks, intellectuals, black bluesmen, and Mexicans swallow it together in the cauldron of integration. And not only is it the misfits who hum a different tune to mainstream America, but also the ordinary Joes who join in the bacchanalia: “Americans are always drinking in crossroads saloons on Sunday afternoon: They bring their kids; they gabble, and brawl over brews; everything’s fine. Come nightfall the kids start crying and their parents are drunk. They go weaving back to the house. Everywhere in America I’ve been in crossroads saloons drinking with whole families.”
In addition to spontaneity, Kerouac and his fellow Beat writers valued honesty. On the Road includes scenes which show that alcohol can debase as well as elevate: “I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet, where I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl and went to sleep. During the night at least a hundred seamen and civilians came in and cast their sentient debouchments on me until I was unrecognizably caked. What difference does it make after all? anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven.”
Not only did On the Road salute old-fashioned inebriation via alcohol, it also made a bow in the direction of a fast-growing rival—tea, i.e., marijuana. While smoking tea had long been a pastime of black urban American communities and had appeared sporadically on the drug lists of socialites, in the late 1950s and early ’60s the habit spread rapidly. Getting high became the new drunk. The experience, however, was qualitatively different. It was quicker: A single marijuana cigarette made its smoker stoned before they’d finished it, whereas a practiced drinker needed half an hour, an empty stomach, and several drinks to achieve the same sense of dislocation. It also had a lighter touch, making people happy, passive, and mildly neurotic. Marijuana lovers were more prone to fits of the giggles than to brawling, and Kerouac noted the differences in effect in his prose.
On the Road was a bridge over change. Hitherto, pace De Quincey, writers had relied primarily on drunkenness as a device to alter the mental states of their characters. However, from the sixties onward, other drugs were substituted for good old-fashioned John Barleycorn. Marijuana, in particular, received widespread coverage and its style of intoxication was presented as being more cerebral than the howling and primitive state brought on by a bottle of rye. The difference betweenthe two conditions, high or flayed, was emphasized in the movie Easy Rider (1969), which chronicles the adventures of two hippies, Billie and Captain America, as they travel to New Orleans on their customized Harley-Davidsons. Arrested in a small town on the specious charge of “parading without a permit,” they meet George, a local attorney, in the cells, who is sleeping off a whiskey binge. While George’s drinking is acceptable in his community, the hippies, despite their peaceful demeanor, are personae non grata on account of their long hair. George befriends them, gets them out of jail, and agrees to accompany them to New Orleans. He tries some weed on the first night on the road and launches into a charm
ing monologue of how he and his cousin saw forty-one UFOs flying in formation over Mexico, and how their alien occupants will bring peace and discipline to the world. Marijuana, it is implied, stimulates the brain in places that alcohol seldom reaches. 68
Easy Rider also features an acid trip. LSD was no longer just a drug for schizophrenics and chronic alcoholics—it had been adopted by hippies as the key to the doors of perception. The headquarters of recreational tripping was San Francisco, the western capital of the Beat empire. Its epicenter, where the hippies gathered, was Haight-Ashbury. Their curious dress and strange behavior drew a host of journalists, including Hunter S. Thompson, who noted their indifference to alcohol: “There are no hippy bars, for instance, and only one restaurant above the level of a diner or lunch counter. This is a reflection of the drug culture, which has no use for booze and regards food as a necessity to be acquired at the least possible expense.” Bemoaning their sobriety, Thompson observed that “prior to the hippy era there were three good Negro-run jazz bars on Haight Street, but they soon went out of style. Who needs jazz, or even beer, when you can sit down on a public curbstone, drop a pill in your mouth, and hear fantastic music for hours at a time in your own head? A cap of good acid costs $5, and for that you can hear the universal symphony, with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums.”