The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  At White’s Club, as at most similar establishments in St James’s and elsewhere, a betting-book was kept in which were recorded wagers as to the duration of wars, the numbers of children various members’ wives would have, whether or not Mr Cavendish would succeed in killing ‘the blue bottle before he goes to bed’, the ages at which people would die: ‘Ld. Lincoln bets Ld. Winchilsea One Hundred Guineas that the Dutchess Dowager of Marlborough does not survive the Dutchess Dowager of Cleveland’. This was a comparatively modest wager: one wet day Lord Arlington bet £3000 upon which of two raindrops would first reach the bottom of a window-pane; and in 1755 Sir John Bland, Member of Parliament for Ludgershall, who squandered his entire fortune playing hazard and at one stage of play found himself £32,000 down, shot himself after being ruined at the club. Suicides were not at all uncommon. In the year of Bland’s death, Lord Mountford, having lost enormous sums, shot himself; and a few years later Lord Milton’s eldest son did the same at the Bedford Arms in Covent Garden at the age of twenty-three. ‘I tremble to think,’ Lord Lyttelton wrote, ‘that the rattling of a dice box at White’s may one day or another (if my son should be a member of that noble academy) shake down all our fine oaks.’ A typical night at White’s, another member said, might involve ‘dinner say at seven o’clock, play all night, one man unable to sit in his chair at three o’clock, break up at six the next morning and the winner going away drunk with a thousand guineas’.25

  Charles James Fox, who once lost £13,000 at a single sitting to the Earl of Carlisle, was one of those who would willingly sit up all night playing cards; and once he gambled continuously for twenty-four hours, losing money at the rate of £10 a minute. His fellow-players sat intently round the table, wearing loose frieze great-coats – sometimes worn inside out to bring them luck – their laced ruffles protected by pieces of leather such as those worn by footmen when cleaning knives.

  Play was carried on as assiduously and for quite as high stakes at Almack’s, Brooks’s Club and elsewhere as it was at White’s:

  The gaming at Almack’s which has taken the pas of White’s [Walpole told Sir Horace Mann in February 1770], is worthy of the decline of our empire … The young men of the age lose ten, fifteen, twenty thousand pounds in an evening there. Lord Stavordale, not one and twenty, lost 11,0001. there last Tuesday, but recovered it by one great hand at hazard. He swore a great oath – ‘Now if I had been playing deep I might have won millions.’26

  Gambling was not confined either to the rich or to gentlemen. Ladies also gambled for high stakes, and several, like Lady Mornington, Lady Cassilis and Lady Archer kept gaming establishments or faro tables. Mrs Lybbe Powys described the gambling that went on at an evening party at Eastbury in 1777:

  They danced in the Saloon. No minuets that night; would have been difficult without a master of the ceremonies among so many people of rank. Two card-rooms, the drawing-room and eating-room. The latter looked so elegant lighted up; two tables at loo, one quinze, one vingt-une, many whist. At one of the former large sums pass’d. I saw one lady of quality borrow ten pieces within half an hour after she set down to vingt-une, and a countess at loo who ow’d to every soul round the table before half the night was over. They wanted Powys and I to play at ‘low loo’ as they term’d it, but we rather chose to keep our features less agitated than those we saw around us.27

  There were said to be almost as many hazard tables at Newmarket and the fashionable spas as there were in London; and it was the gambling facilities of Bath that first drew there that arbiter of taste Richard ‘Beau’ Nash who, as master of ceremonies, took large commissions on winnings at the gaming tables in the Assembly Rooms and was a partner in Wiltshire’s as well as in other gaming-houses in the city.

  Several efforts were made to suppress gambling; but they had little success, and gaming-houses continued to flourish. The St James’s Evening Post printed a list of officials and servants that one of these establishments employed: there was a director; an ‘operator’ who dealt the cards at faro; two croupiers; two ‘puffs’ who had money given them to decoy others to play; a ‘clerk’ who kept an eye on the ‘puffs’; a ‘flasher’ who went about telling the customers how often the bank had lost; a ‘dunner’ who saw to it that losses were promptly paid; a ‘captain’ who fought any gentleman who was ‘peevish for losing his money’; a waiter ‘to fill out wine, snuff, candles and attend in the gaming room’; an usher who showed and lit the way upstairs from the street; a porter; an ‘orderly man’ who walked up and down outside and gave prompt notice of the approach of constables; and a ‘runner’ who was employed ‘to get intelligence of the justices’ meetings’.28

  Powerless to prevent gambling, the government took a profit from it by authorizing lotteries and, by an Act of 1778, compelling keepers of lottery offices to take out licences. In London these cost £50, elsewhere £10; and these high sums ensured that few licences were taken out. Whereas there were known to be as many as 400 lottery offices in London alone before 1778, no more than fifty-one offices took out licences in the whole of England as required by the Act. It was calculated that in 1796 well over 9500 men were employed in one capacity or another by licensed and unlicensed offices, both of which were frequently as crowded with poor gamblers as the fashionable gambling rooms were with the rich. An elderly tradesman told Francis Place that he had been in a lottery office one evening ‘with a large number of others’ when, ‘all their money being gone’, he ‘had pulled off his waistcoat and buttoned up his coat. The other men did the same; women pulled off their petticoats and even their stockings to make a lot for the pawnbroker to raise money.’29

  Just as men would sit up all night to gamble, so they would sit up all night to drink. Bolingbroke would go to his office in the morning straight from the dining-table with a wet napkin round his head; and, according to Gilbert Eliot, ‘men of all ages [drank] abominably’, Fox a ‘great deal’, Sheridan ‘excessively’, Pitt ‘as much as either’, and Grey ‘more than any of them’. But none was a match for Dr John Campbell who – while Pitt and Sheridan were content to drink six bottles a day – was said to get through thirteen, and they were of port. Drunkenness was common in all classes: Samuel Johnson recalled that when he was young ‘all the decent people in Lichfield got drunk every night, and were not the worse thought of’. In Herefordshire, so Henry Gunning wrote in his Reminiscences, country gentlemen regularly drank, ‘in addition to their wine, a copious draught of the real Steyre cider, a huge tankard of which was always placed at each end of the table’. Drunkenness was not only viewed with indulgence, it was often considered an excuse for criminal behaviour.

  At a Christening at Beddington in Surrey [the Gentlemen’s Magazine reported in 1748] the nurse was so intoxicated that after she had undressed the child, instead of laying it in the cradle she put it behind a large fire, which burnt it to death in a few minutes. She was examined before a magistrate, and said she was quite stupid and senseless, so that she took the child for a log of wood; on which she was discharged.30

  It was quite usual to see magistrates and Members of Parliament drunk on their benches; and when the Mutiny Act was being framed it was thought advisable to include a clause providing for court martials to take place only at times of the day when its members were more likely to be sober.31

  Both towns and villages were well supplied with alehouses and had been so for many years. In the early years of the seventeenth century one observer complained that every street in London was ‘replenished’ with them; and Thomas Dekker confirmed that some streets were but one ‘continued alehouse’. In the county of Durham it was said that there were so many of them that it was impossible to count their numbers.32 A government survey made in 1577 had suggested that there were then about 24,000 alehouse-keepers in England, that is to say one for every 142 inhabitants of the country.33 There seems to have been a slight slowing down in the growth of their numbers at the beginning of the eighteenth century and a noticeable decline in proportion to the increas
ing population at the beginning of the nineteenth; yet, even so, in about 1700 Bristol had an alehouse for every fifty-six inhabitants, Oxford one for every sixty-two. In Kent in 1753 there was a public house for every 104 or so people, in Chester one for every ninety-two; and the numbers in other counties were comparable with these. In the 1780s John Howard, the prison reformer, wrote of ‘the great and increasing number of alehouses’ that he saw on his travels throughout the kingdom.

  In nearly all of them great quantities of ale and small beer were consumed or were carried away in jugs, barrels and pails to be drunk at home or at work. It seems from excise records that by the late seventeenth century consumption for the whole country was as much as three quarts a week a head; and Peter Clark, who has made a detailed study of the alehouse in England, thinks that the real figure may have been nearly twice as high.34

  Certainly, foreigners were astonished by the amount of beer that the English drank.

  Would you believe it, though water is to be had in abundance in London and of fairly good quality, absolutely none is drunk? [wrote César de Saussure]. The lower classes, even the paupers, do not know what it is to quench their thirst with water. In this country nothing but beer is drunk, and it is made in several qualities. Small beer is what everyone drinks when thirsty; it is used even in the best houses, and costs only a penny the pot. Another kind of beer is called porter, meaning carrier, because the greater quantity of this beer is consumed by the working classes. It is a thick and strong beverage, and the effect it produces, if drunk in excess, is the same as that of wine; this porter costs threepence the pot. In London there are a number of alehouses, where nothing but this sort of beer is sold. There are again other clear beers, called ale, some of these being as transparent as fine old wine, foreigners often mistaking them at first sight for the latter … It is said that more grain is consumed in England for making beer than for making bread.35

  Some alehouses were, as William Vaughan said, no more than ‘paltry cottages’. Others were large establishments with their own cellars and brewhouses, with rooms partitioned off into drinking cubicles, pewter tankards instead of the stone and earthenware pots still in use in the poorer places, tables and chairs as well as stools, and, perhaps, with looking-glasses, prints and maps upon the walls and several beds for the convenience of travellers. Many offered games, like ninepins and bowls, as well as drink; a few had bowling-alleys; most had benches outside the front door where customers could sit in fine weather and where the alehouse-keeper would often stand to encourage business while his children ran off to whistle at workers to remind them of the pleasures their father offered. Among these pleasures might be a pretty wife, like Mrs Walker of William Walker’s alehouse which Conand Barton frequented more to see her ‘than for the ale’. Or there might be a girl on the premises, a servant or a lodger perhaps, who would allow customers to take her to bed. A Worcestershire victualler arranged for one Elizabeth Hodges to entertain customers ‘upon his own bed … and his wife put her apron before the window to shadow them’. Barnaby Rich said that a man might have ‘his pot of ale, his pipe of tobacco and his pocksy whore and all for his 3d’.36

  By the middle of the eighteenth century the number of disreputable tippling establishments appears to have decreased. Alehouses were becoming more like taverns and were often referred to – as taverns and smaller inns were referred to – as public houses. The old ale-stakes were replaced by inn signs; food was more widely available; cakes and pies as well as bread and cheese and even roast meat were sold; tobacco and snuff were also to be had; newspapers were provided; women were more often seen as customers; and instead of being asked to share a room or a bed, travellers were more likely to be offered a choice of rooms in which they could enjoy a meal by a blazing fire. In Smollett’s The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, which was published about 1760, there is a country alehouse whose kitchen was ‘paved with red bricks, remarkably clean, furnished with three or four Windsor chairs, adorned with shining plates of pewter and copper sauce-pans nicely scoured, while a cheerful fire of sea-coal blazed in the chimney’.37

  Yet while alehouses were becoming more decent and respectable, most gin-shops and brandy-shops were certainly not. These proliferated at an extraordinary rate after 1700, there being, so William Maitland estimated in 1737, no less than 8659 of them in London alone. Many of them were in cellars where the customers drank standing up or took their spirits away with them. They were generally kept, the Middlesex justices protested, not by licensed victuallers and vintners but by ‘chandlers, weavers, tobacconists, shoemakers, carpenters, barbers, tailors, dyers, labourers, and others’.38 There were less of them in the provinces, but there spirits, frequently smuggled, were sold in most alehouses.

  In London spirits Were sold not only in shops but ‘even in the streets and highways’, so a committee of justices reported in 1726, ‘on bulks set up for that purpose, in wheelbarrows and privately in garrets, cellars, backrooms and other places … Such who sell fruit or herbs in stalls sell geneva, and many inferior tradesmen begin now to keep it in their shops for their customers, whereby it is scarce possible for soldiers, seamen, servants or others of their rank, to go anywhere, without being drawn in … In the hamlet of Bethnal Green above forty weavers sell it. And if we may judge what will happen in other workhouses now erecting, by what has already happened in that of St Giles in the Fields, we have reason to fear the violent fondness and desire of this liquor, which unaccountably possesses all our poor, may prevent in great measure the good effects proposed by them.’39

  By 1743 over 8 million gallons of gin were being sold in London a year.40 It was sold in factories, as well as workhouses, in barbers’ shops, in brothels and in prisons; in the King’s Bench Prison, 120 gallons of gin were sold every week ‘besides other spirits in proportion’. It was sold in common lodging-houses where men and women ‘often strangers to each other, lie promiscuously, the price of a double bed being no more than threepence as an encouragement to lie together. But as these places are thus adapted to whoredom, so are they no less provided for drunkenness, gin being sold in them at a penny a quartern, so that the smallest sum of money serves for intoxication.’ The bodies of men, women and children could be seen lying dead drunk where they had fallen, in the middle of the day, as well as at night in many of the streets of the slum quarters of St Giles, Whetstone Park and Spitalfields. In the gin cellars rows of bodies sat on the straw, propped up against the walls until the effects of the spirit wore off and they could start drinking again.

  In Hogarth’s admonitory Gin Lane, the scene is the slum of St Giles and in the background can be seen the spire of Hawksmoor’s recently finished church of St George’s Bloomsbury, emphasizing by its ornate elaboration the degradation and ugliness below. The central figure is a bedraggled woman who sprawls half naked at the top of a flight of steps, staring in front of her with an expression on her drunken face of senseless and grotesque amusement as she reaches for a pinch of snuff. A baby till lately sucking at her breast falls unregarded on to the cobblestones beneath. By her scabrous legs sits a corpse-like ballad-seller leaning back exhausted against a wooden rail. ‘Buy my ballads,’ the poor wretch who served Hogarth as a model for this character used to croak, ‘and I will give you a glass of gin for nothing.’ Above him in the street are men brawling in front of a distillery, women selling their kitchenware to a pawnbroker, little charity girls sipping, a baby choking, a starving man gnawing at a dog’s bone. A young woman is laid into her coffin; in a garret dangles a man who has hanged himself; a nearby house is toppling into ruins. The sordid gin cellar bears over the doorway the celebrated legend:

  Drunk for a penny

  Dead drunk for two pennies

  Clean straw for nothing.

  It was scarcely an exaggerated picture: a man set to watch the door of a gin shop on Holborn Hill between the hours of seven and ten in the evening counted 1411 persons going in and out, excluding children, the children from seven to fourt
een years of age as intoxicated as their parents.41 In letters, pamphlets and sermons, in the reports of parliamentary committees and in charges to juries, the evil consequences of the excessive drinking of gin were constantly deplored.

  These accursed spirituous liquors which to the shame of our Government are to be so easily had and in such quantities drunk have changed the very nature of our people [one writer protested], and they will if continued to be drunk, destroy the very race … There is not only no safety of living in this town [London] but scarcely any in the country now, robbery and murder have grown so frequent. Our people have become what they never were before; cruel and inhuman.42

  There were cases enough to support his words. When in 1734 Judith Dufour, a dipsomaniac ‘never in her right mind but always roving’, collected her baby from a workhouse where it had been ‘new clothed’, she strangled it and left the naked body in a ditch. She sold the new clothes for is 4d and spent the money on gin. A few years later, so the Gentleman’s Magazine reported, ‘There were executed at Tyburn, July 6, Elizabeth Banks for stripping a child; Catherine Conway, for forging a seaman’s ticket; and Margaret Harvey for robbing her master. They were all drunk.’

  Should the drinking of this poison be continued in its present height, during the next twenty years [wrote the Bow Street magistrate, Henry Fielding], there will by that time be few of the common people left to drink it … Gin is the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than a hundred thousand people in the metropolis … The intoxicating draught itself disqualifies them from any honest means to acquire it, at the same time that it removes sense of fear and shame and emboldens them to commit every wicked and desparate enterprise.43