Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Drunk Victorians: Moral Panic & Meat Wine

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Glass of meat wine, anyone? That's right, the Victorians loved a glass of meaty wine.They loved drinking so much that it became a moral panic, with whole movements of temperance cropping up around Britain.What was drinking culture really like in the Victorian and Edwardian Britain? Were women able to drink as much as men? And what exactly went into that meat wine?Helping Kate get to the bottom of this is Thora Hands, author of Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: Beyond the Spectre of the Drunkard.This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. How are you doing? I'm doing just fine. Thank you so much for asking. But to make sure that you're fine and I'm fine, and the producers are fine and the lawyers are fine,

and everybody is fine. I have to give you the fair dues warning. And here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. And now we have that little lot out of the way

I think we're allowed to continue. On with the show! It's fabulous to see you, butwixters. Come and sit with me at the bar. As you might have guessed, we are down the boozer in old Victorian London and there are some fabulous drinks on the menu. Well, there are some drinks on the menu.

I'm a regular, so I'll be doing the ordering. Hmm, for you. Let me see. I think you could do with a meat wine. Yes, meat. Meat, as in meat and potatoes, wine. What's not to love with that? There's meat to satisfy your appetite

and extracts of malt to help you digest it. Mmm, tasty. And for me, a glass of Buckfast wine made and sold by monks in 1885. We do actually talk about Buckfast in the show, and my producers being ever keen have sorted me out an actual bottle of Buckfast. Here it is right in front of me.

I think that you're always onto a winner when the ingredients just says red wine-based. And a high caffeine content. Right, okay, here we go. This is me genuinely not pretending, genuinely trying... Screw-top wines. Okay, here we go. All right, so that's...

I haven't tasted yet, but that smells like... That, um, napalm? All right, okay, here we go. Bottoms up. Have a swig. Oh, no. Oh, dear. God, that'll strip the enamel off your teeth, won't it?

It's got a medicinal equality to it. That's me being incredibly generous. There's something of the old leather boots. Something like pretending to be fruit. Well, anyway, that's my take on it. But the Victorians were absolutely mad for that. this stuff. It was sold with the slogan, three small glasses a day for good health and lively blood. Yeah, well, that will bloody well do it. So here's to good health, I suppose. You enjoy your

meat wine and I will enjoy this red wine based aperitif. Let's get further into the drinking world of those drunken Victorians. What do you look for a man? Oh, many, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect coppins of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the fun. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. So and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society.

With me, Kate Lister. Drinking was so much a part of everyday life in Victorian and Edwardian times that a moral panic arose around it. The idea of the quote-unquote drunkard became a nationwide worry, because if there's one thing that those Victorians held dear, it was social order and meat, wine. But anything that might threaten to upset that order needed to be kept in tight control.

What social movements were triggered to try and curb the nation's drinking habits? How wildly out of control were they? And what was the favourite tipple of the time? Joining me today is Thora Hans, author of Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain beyond the spectre of the drunkard to take us back in time to Boosy Britain. Tankards at the ready, betwixters, let's do this. Hello and welcome to betwixtor sheets. It's only Thora Hans. How are you doing?

Oh, good, thanks. How are you? I'm thrilled to be talking to you because you, well, you write about a lot of things, but you are the author of Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain beyond the spectre of the drunkard. That is fascinating. My first question to you would be, what brought you to research the history

of drink and drunkards and alcohol in Victorian and Edwardian Britain? Well, it's a fascinating topic. And I suppose really my starting point was to think more about our present-day attitudes towards alcohol, sale and consumption and where our current attitudes come from

in terms of how we think about, you know, consuming alcohol, our attitudes towards drunkenness in particular and also where we've got to today in terms of alcohol, regulation, control and so on. But also the fact that, you know, there's arguments around whether or not most people do drink responsibly and they do drink moderately and, you know, where, how we can trace our sort of understanding of alcohol as an addictive substance as well. And it was really going back to that point of the rise of the industrial revolution and thinking about how our attitudes change towards alcohol at that time.

When I think about the Victorians, and you might disabuse me of this, you might say, okay, oh, that's complete crap. I think of them as being quite boozy. Like I remember reading that Charles Dickens would have a bottle of champagne for lunch and then he'd be drinking more before he went on stage and you read about what Queen Victoria was drinking. And alcohol seems to have been really present in their lives in a way today that would make you go, I'm sorry, you've had what for lunch?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I found was pretty much everyone in Victorian Britain accepted alcohol as a drink that most people would consume. So right across the social class spectrum, so just like you're saying, Dickens, for example, and those among his social class, it was very common to drink alcohol. Alcohol was an integral part of their lifestyle in terms of socialising, dinner parties and so on, all the way down to the kind of culture of what would become the working classes and the very sort of, you know, beneath that, the kind of, you know, the poorer end of society as well, most people drive.

alcohol, you know, it was much more common to drink alcohol than not drink alcohol. It's not to say there weren't certain exceptions to that, for example, attitudes towards half of the population, in other words, women. It was slightly different in terms of, you know, the sort of way that ideas about drinking and, you know, the sort of permissive aspects of drinking were for women. But for the most part, pretty much everyone would accept that most people drank alcohol. So when do we start getting this concern, kind of moral panic popping up about, all right, everyone's drinking, but who's drinking too much?

Yeah, I suppose an interesting place to start would be if you go a wee bit further back in times, so further back than the 19th century, to look at what would become known as the gin craze of the sort of Georgian era, so the 18th century, when, you know, for various reasons, there was a sort of push towards important gin from Holland, so Dutch gin that really took off with Londoners in particular. It was cheap, it was very strong, and it kind of took off in a big way. And at this point in time, you begin to see, you know, the state, if you would think of it in that way, the government beginning to think what should be done about tackling problems of drunkenness. So you've got, you know, very kind of infamously William Hogarth's patents of Beer Street and, you know,

gin lane. It's these two different depictions of how Algon. alcohol affects people, but not only people as individuals, but society. So in Gin Lane, you've got these scenes of debauchery and, you know, people lying about drunk and social ruin and so on. Whereas conversely, with Beer Street, you've got this image of these relatively healthy looking plump, almost, well-fed, jolly people that are having a drink, but they're not fall down dead drunk. So this is the kind of division. between attitudes in terms of, you know, what can particular types of alcohol do to people?

What should the state do in response to that? How should the state legislate for this? So you've got a whole series of acts that were passed in the 18th century, the gin acts that put various restrictions on the sale and consumption of gin, because it was thought to be essentially a social ruin. And then if you kind of go forward in time and we get to the point of the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, so the kind of 1820s period onwards, you've got the expansion of major towns and cities in Britain. Along with that, you've got the expansion of various drinking

venues, so pubs and all sorts of different drinking venues. And again, there's a point that is reached where the state has to begin to think about what should be done in terms of, you know, controlling, if not restricting, maybe at this point, but be controlling the sort of. a sale and consumption of alcohol because essentially the industrial revolution needs a relatively sober and productive and fit workforce yeah but there's tensions there between you know the needs of the state to be able to provide that you've got the rights of the alcohol industry it's the drink trade at that time to produce and sell a commodity just like any other commodity but also the rights of the individual to have the right to drink you know a man's right to have his

beer, in other words, how would the state respond to these different sort of tensions kind of began to play out in the 19th century? And what I found was it was sort of focused around what I called the 3Ds. So the types of drinker, who were they, the place of drinking, what type of drinking establishment was it, and the type of drink that was sold and consumed. And you see that going back to Hogarth and, you know, the difference between gin and beer, what could the type of drink do to the individual in terms of

how it would affect them? That's fascinating. It's so mad to think of how social attitude to specific drinks change. The idea that in the 18th century, beer was this almost like a health drink. It's like, everyone's really happy when they're pissed up on

lager, but gin, no. Now gin's having this sort of renaissance, isn't it? Where it's quite sophisticated again, a gin, a gin and tonic. Yeah, and there's all different types of gin as well, that are really, some of them are really nice. Gym kind of went in and out of fashion, so it definitely went out of fashion with the whole gin craze.

But then it had a kind of, you know, a comeback, if you like, in the kind of 1820s with the rise of the gin palaces as they became. Wow. So these glitzy sort of ornate, gaslit drinking venues that sprang up in cities around the country where they were designed for, what became known as perpendicular drinking. So you don't go in, you don't sit down with your pals and have a drink. You're standing at the bar and you're having shots of gin. So for people

coming and going through big busy cities, going into gin, gin, was really a, I know, no mixers then. None of your wee gin and torments really live. So later on. Yeah, I wouldn't have been the best of gin either so yeah strong stomachs back in the day what kind of drinks were they drinking I mean gym seems to have been quite popular in the 19th century but were people just drinking like how was bare viewed how are hard spirits was wine quite common or is that just for the for the upper classes yeah I mean it really again it depends on the type of drinker in other words who they were what their social identity was in terms of social class and also gender so for the working classes as they became, you know, the common go-to drink was beer.

Beer was cheap, it was widely available, and as you go through the 19th century, newer types of beer were produced. So new technology in terms of like how beer was produced and refrigeration and so on, there was much more sort of fashionable types of beer that took off like laggers and light ales and so on, that were a contrast from the kind of darker heavy beers.

They were popular across the social spectrum, but particularly within that kind of, you know, working class group. Spirits again, you know, were drunk across all social classes towards the higher end of the social spectrum, your middle classes, your upper classes, you know, less about gin and more about just as you say, you know, things like, you know, whiskey or Scotch as it became. So Scotch or Scottish whiskey became really popular in the late 19th century. It was highly desirable drink, drunk by the upper classes.

Sherry, you know, a state. drink of the upper classes and of course champagne was very desirable along with your whole range of fine wines the spirit drinking yes among the working classes in england it would have been gin that was the kind of common you know drink of the working classes really cheap really plentiful up in scotland it was really cheap whiskey that was often very nasty but cheap and plentiful and yes drunk in abundance in Scotland not your fine scotland not your fine scotty that you're kind of industrially produced really cheap whiskey. Strip the enamel off your teeth, that stuff?

Yes, that sort of thing, yes. You can clean your pots in it. Was drinking at this time a very gendered thing because it still is today, we still have this weird thing where we, even if we don't consciously recognize it, of boy drinks and girl drinks, like men drink pints of lager and whiskey

and girls drink cups. I used to be a bartender for years and years, and you'd be amazed at the resistance that guys would have to ordering a quote-unquote girly drink. They'd rather not have anything at all than have like a vodka and cram juice. Did you see that in the 19th century? It was drinking a gendered thing then as well. Yeah, well drinking was gendered in terms of for the most part, it was frowned upon for particular groups of women to drink at all.

So your middle classes, it was very frowned upon for middle class women to be seen to be drinking. out with the sort of confines of, say, hosting a dinner party or so on. But the idea of women just drinking purely for the pleasure of it, like amongst other women, was very much, you know, frowned upon. Wow. And for working class women, for women, you know, lower down from that, you know, just ordinary, poor women, they would drink and they would drink things like beer and spirits and so on. Again, gin, England, whiskey up in Scotland.

in terms of like gendered drinks, it wasn't until later on in the 19th century where you begin to get to see the beginnings of marketing alcohol. So, you know, advertising and pitching drinks towards particular social groups that you start to see that, you know, promotion of particular types of drinks to, you know, certain groups of people. And for women, often if alcohol was being marketed, it was being marketed as some sort of health goods. properties. So, you know, this sort of stout, drunken pregnancy and after giving birth, because it's got, or it's thought to have nutritious properties like calidific so that you could put on a bit of weight after having your child or while still pregnant with your child. And, you know, there was that kind of get around the sort of social norms concerning women in alcohol to try and market alcohol in that ways these health-given properties for women.

Why do you think it was that women were subject to more stigma around drinking than men were? Because, because they were. There was, even in the 19th centuries, there was this kind of like, you know, lads, lads, lads, we're going to go out and have a pint, but women, it's very, you know, like, don't do that. Well, I think underpinning it as kind of moral arguments around that, whether women should be, seem to be drunk. So to some extent, it's about whether they should consume alcohol at all.

I'll get to that. but it's about the kind of visible aspects of being drunk where for a lot of the time it was accepted that men, you know, hard working men would go out, work hard and you've got the separation between working leisure. So you work hard, then your leisure time might well be spent having a drink and, you know, doing whatever, gambling, whatever else. For women, there wasn't that kind of distinction between working hard and having a leisure time and that kind of factored into, but also just because of women's reproductive capacities in terms of having to produce

healthy offspring, this idea of women being mothers of the empire having to uphold the sort of fitness of future generations for the British Empire as it was at that time. So there was medical concerns and also moral concerns

about women's alcohol consumption and that began to kind of take off in the 19th century. What about pubs? Because I was thinking about this the other day when I knew I was going to talk to you. Like even in the 90s, when I went into a pub and ordered a pint of beer, I remember there being eyebrows raised by the old guys propping up the bar. I remember distinctly it was like a young woman in here ordering a pint of beer, my God. So it was still a bit of a there's a woman in here in the 90s. Were women going into pubs in the 19th century?

Some women did go out your pubs. Yeah. So again, Then with your kind of working class and lower class people for women, yes, they could go into pubs. They may not have stayed in pubs, so it might have been going round to the pub to fetch a jug of beer to take back home and drink at dinner. Or it could be sitting in the pub or standing in the pub if it was one of your gin palace type situations and having a drink. Or indeed, some women would drink out in the streets. There was one really good story that I found of a group of mothers. in London around the turn of the century, so like in a late 19th century, who would club together their money on a Monday and they would all sort of club together buy whatever booze they could get

and then they would have like send the kids off, you know, to wherever and they would just have like a wee day of drinking and dancing in the street that became known as Mother's Day. And it's just this really ordinary but remarkable as well sort of case of women get. together as we do and just putting the world to write and having a drink and this was a kind of common thing for women to do in this particular area so you know we know that women did drink and sometimes they drank visibly and wasn't a case of a woman walking into a pub and getting a pint as it kind of was in the 90s and still sometimes you do get that stigma attached to it and it's quite nice and refreshing to go in and do that and just ask for a sort of masculine drink yeah to see gauge the reaction

And pubs were, for the most part, I mean, they were geared up, there were masculine spaces more than not. So, I mean, even right through the 20th century, you would still get what we would call in Glasgow old man's pubs. No offence to old men. But you would go into these pubs and there wouldn't be a female toilet. So telling you that it was so uncommon for women to drink in pubs that they hadn't even bothered by whatever point, 1980s. of putting in toilets and the pubs. So there was that kind of lingering, you know, pubs were social spaces for men,

and it wasn't until we pushed towards the end of the century and into the 20th century that we start to see pubs being reinvented as more inclusive spaces for women. So if you were like a middle-class to upper-class lady on your own, it would be very unusual for you to just wander into a pub and start playing dominoes and ordering drinks, that would be really weird, would it?

Yeah, it wouldn't happen, I don't think. I mean, what avenues were open for middle-class women began to take off. Yeah, where did they get that dream? Yeah, so from the 1860s, there was a kind of growth in what we would call off-licenses or licensed grocers that enabled middle-class women who would be responsible for the, you know, the sort of household budget and buying in all the sort of groceries for the household to go to the local grocers and then get them to, like, stick in. a bottle of sherry, but charge it as a pound of butter.

And then they could have a drink. So as you see from the kind of 1860s, 1870s, this moral panic emerges about middle class women's secret drinking where they would be going to these unscrupulous licensed grocers, getting their alcohol from them, putting it through on the bill as something else so that their husbands don't see it. and then that gave them the ability to drink alcohol for their own pleasure. So there was a kind of a growing panic that women were secretly on the piss and they were just managing to hide it from everybody.

Yep. And there was a few really good stories about, you know, various investigations into it. And in one case, it was a medical doctor who got involved in the case of this woman who was obviously drunk a lot of the time. You know, it was a middle class family. They wanted to know where she was getting her drink from. and they found upon examiner that she had sort of secret stashes of drink strapped her legs so that she could get like a wee nip of whatever it was she was drinking sherry presumably something like that so that's your literal secret drinking much more common just for women to get alcohol that way through

the sort of licensed grocer so you don't have to walk into a pub and say can I have it's you know it's much more respectable to go to a grocer and order that way and then drink. That is, isn't it? And private. I'll be back with Thorough after the short break. When I look at the Victorians, a lot of the stuff that they get in a moral panic about, they seem to get an idea and it's like the excess of it is the problem. Because I've just been looking into the concept of nymphomania recently, as you do.

And they seem to be like, sexual desire is fine, but there's a line in the sand and too much of it is now this. It's now this awful condition. Is drinking a bit like that, as in it's all right to do it, but there's a line, and then when you've crossed it, now you've become this drunkard figure. And where was that line? There was a really blurry line because, you know, there was relatively little understanding of how drink acts upon your body in terms of causing addiction, right? So we now know that, right?

It's rooted in science. But, you know, for much of the 19th century, it was attitudes towards drinking being a moral failing or a disease of the will if you even want to put a medical spin on it. So in other words, some people just don't have the inbuilt ability to stop beyond a certain point.

They just keep going. Their will, their ability to control their alcohol consumption is not there. It's eroded and it's a disease. The temperance movement had a huge amount to play

in terms of defining what is and what isn't acceptable drinking. So there was various factions of the temperance. movement, which was all roughly, you know, campaigning against drunkenness. But, you know, you had your various factions from your teetotalers who wanted total abstinence from alcohol to your moderationists who were saying, well, most people can consume moderately. The state should

play a role in ensuring moderate alcohol consumption. You know, and types of drunkenness were kind of blurry as well. So in the various parliamentary inquiries across the 19th century, This is something you tried to grapple with, classifying types of drunkenness. So you had your fall down drunks, you had your intoxicated, you had your semi-drunks, all these different states of drunkenness.

What's a semi-drunk? I have no idea what I'm sorry-drunk is. Someone that's still walking. I like that. I'm just semi-drunk. Semi-drunk. So, you know, there was this sort of, they were really trying to figure it out.

where is the line and you know when do you cross it and the state were nervous about being the line makers if you like by drawing that line to say that you know there was no appetite at all for prohibition at all right so it's very much you know the rights of the individual to choose for themselves but an understanding as the century goes on that the state should play some role in regulating the sale and consumption of alcohol but not prohibit it. And I suppose we're still, we're left with that legacy today really. The drink trade is massive, right? So the alcohol industry brings in money to the country and it is a trade like any other. So should the state play a role in eradicating it? And in the Victorian period, there was no real appetite for that politically. Wow. The temperance movement is

fascinating. It was, well, you tell me, it seems to have been very influential. Like you get temperance meetings and temperance societies all over the place and you find references to they have their weekly meetings. And I always think, what do you do when you go there? Does someone just stand up and say, stop drinking, lads? And then they all go home again. But they seem to have been a really big thing throughout the 19th century. They were a completely radical movement. I mean, if you take it as read that most people accepted that alcohol was around, and very many people drank it, to be visibly, publicly opposed to that was really radical. It was like a radical, you know, somewhat revolutionary movement.

But again, there was whole different factions and there was different elements to the movement where you had, you know, your band of hopes and what have you. And it was all about sort of instilling temperance values and new generation so that they would hopefully grow up to be sober and turn their backs on, alcohol and what have you. you know, it was rooted in working class politics as well. It was also rooted in religious and moral ideas too, but it was, you know, a substantial movement and it did have influence on social political policy making,

but not to the extent where, you know, there really was the political will to do what America did in terms of pushing forward prohibition. There was certainly discussions of it, but, you know, never the sort of political, motivation to do it. I don't think it would have gone over at all well in Britain. Did you imagine

I really don't think that would have gone over well? So when you've got some like the temperance movement, it sounds a little bit from recent, is this middle class people telling working class people, stop drinking? Like what is, it sounds like this is quite a class-based thing as a lot of stuff was

in the Victorian period. Where there are different attitudes to, you know, if you're Lord Farquart, then you can be as pissed as you like, but if you're a working class person, no drink for you. Yeah, well, it's much easier for upper class people to get pissed in private, really, isn't it? Oh, that's true. Yes. You know, if you think about where other classes can drink, you've got middle class people who can drink within their own homes, dining, entertaining and so on. Your middle class women nipping off to the licensed grocers and getting their

booze that way. Working classes are public, visible in pubs on the streets. Your upper classes are tucked away, hidden from view. You know, Men would drink in private members clubs, some of the most notable being the London clubs around the kind of West End St James region of London. I did some research in the Reform Club in the Atheneum looking at their drinks records from the Victorian period and can say there was a lot of drinking going on. Wow. Yes.

A lot. It was typical for men who were club members to host, you know, sort of dinner parties within the club. and massive amounts of alcohol were consumed that had that been further down the social spectrum going on, saying a working men's club, which is essentially the same thing, but, you know, for working men, then that was completely frowned upon and viewed as, you know, just immoral drunkenness. It goes on within a private gentleman's club, then it's completely fine. And again, it's partly about who they were in terms of their status. but also about what they were drinking.

So these guys are drinking fine wines, champagne, scotch, all the really good stuff, in abundance, but still, you know, heavy amounts of drinking. What about something like sexual morality? I'm fascinated what you said at the beginning about how this subject really interests you because of how it connects to things going on today. We've still got alcohol being brought in issues of like sexual assaults or cases where women, if a woman is drunk, that somehow in and of itself can be used as some kind of defence against a sexual assault. We've seen that so many times.

So there seems to be a link between women drinking to excess and their own sexual morality. Do you see that in the Victorian and Edwardian period? Yeah, I mean, the most common sort of links between sexual morality or immorality and drinking was through prostitution. Right. So, you know, there was a lot of political and moral focus, and part of that came from the temperance movement on women's drinking link to not just prostitution as a crime, but other crimes as well.

And in particular areas where brothels would spring up, most notably where there's a demand for it, for a demand for sex work. So, you know, big sort of port cities like Glasgow, Liverpool, London and so on where you've got lots of coming and going around the sort of port areas that would lead to the expansion of pubs and also brothels, then, you know, women drinking and drinking in pubs and, you know, their sexual behaviour came into focus. And most often these women were branded as prostitutes. And you see in the very late 1890, so in 1898, a bit of

legislation was passed called the inebriates Act. So inebriety means drunk. or habitual drunkenness. And this act was passed to enable local authorities to take measures against, you know, crimes that were related to what they would class as chronic drunkenness. So in other words, it allowed local authorities to set up these institutions where people who had been convicted of drink-related crimes could be sentenced to serve three years in an inebriate reformatory to enable the state or the local authority to essentially, you know, sober them up and also morally reform them. When these acts were passed, they weren't passed with the deliberate intention of focusing on women, but in effect, when the magistrates were faced with using

the inebriates acts, they were very reluctant to use it against men because men were often the breadwinners. So you take a man away from his family for three years, stick him in an institution, that family will go to ruin. So what we see is that the Inebrates Act was predominantly used against women. And many of these women were thought to be or had been prosecuted for prostitution. So in that kind of, you know, early part of the 20th century, these institutions sprang up around the country. And women could be, you know, prosecuted sent there for three years

and subjected to three years, yeah. and subjected to, you know, a regime of moral reform, much like the kind of Magdalene Holmes, but also early medical experimentation and trying to wean them off of, yeah, very nasty. Lots of purgatives, lots of vomiting, yeah. Trying to wean them off of alcohol. But, you know, it was a gendered bit of legislation

as it was used against women, yeah. I remember the victims of the serial killing and as Jack the Ripper, alcohol seems to have played a big part in how they were portrayed in the press of like, well, they were drunk. It's almost this kind of, well, so who cares, kind of attitude. Yeah, well, it's those sort of attitudes where women were thought to have, and maybe still are to certain extent, thought to have a lesser capability of being able to control themselves when intoxicated, that there's arguments about culpability as well. Should you drink? Should you be, you know, putting yourself at risk in that way?

there was maybe less of that in the sort of Victorian period and more just arguments around moral culpability should you be drinking as a moral you know if you drink it can lead to moral ruin not per se it can lead to you being taken advantage of sexually but you shouldn't be doing it in the first place it's morally wrong yeah what about something like medicinal drinking obviously we don't do that now you wouldn't get that on the NHS

but I have heard like lots of references to people drinking, what's it, like gin and milk or whiskey and milk. I hear that read about that quite a lot. What was that just people getting pissed and going, it's good for my health? What was that? Yeah, probably there was a lot of that. Yes, there was a massive industry

in mixing various substances with alcohol and then marketing it as a healthy, health-giving cure off a range of things. So you've got things like regular wine mixed with meat, sounds disgusting. With meat? Meat? Malt. Meat extract. Like Bovro type thing? Malt. Yuck. Koka. So like cocaine. Cannabis. Opium. Quinnine was really popular as well. So you chuck these substances in with some alcohol

and then market it as having these health-given properties. Coker champagne was incredibly popular for a while. It was a mixture of champagne and cocaine that was prescribed by doctors to wealthy patients for a whole range of things. It was very, yeah, sounds great. It was

really popular. But again, at the other end of the social spectrum you had, like, for a while, laudanum, that was a mix of alcohol and opium, was this kind of go-to cure all for anything that was wrong with you. And your mixes of malt and

meat extract going into wine would have been marketed towards women as given them health-giving properties through their reproductive cycles. That's an alcoholic gravy. Yeah, yeah. There's actually still a brand of it that survives. No, there isn't. There is. And when I was doing my research, I tracked it down and got a bottle.

But I was really disappointed, slightly relieved slash disappointed to find out that the additions to it that they had in the Victorian period had been removed. So the stuff that they put in, like meat and malt and so on, because I wanted to know what it tasted like, surely really vile, but that had been taken out, so it was just basic wine. So it's, missold it. What did it taste like? It was horrible anyway. It was just tasted like really horrible, cheap sherry, but wow, okay, so there's a whole industry of like this alcohol is really good for you. And I suppose that if people were secretly drinking, that gives you an out, doesn't it? Of just like, no, no, no, this is for my health.

Yeah. And doctors prescribed it. I mean, alcohol, before you had things like paracetamol or aspirin, all the things that we go to now, if you've got a headache or you've got something wrong with you, you've got a pain somewhere, they go to sort of drug for a long time is alcohol, because alcohol did have certain medicinal properties to it. and if you mix it with things like quinine, which we've seen as being this wonder drug

in terms of cune and stomach upsets and diarrhoea and so on, you mix alcohol in with that. You've got kind of win-win where, you know, you've got a bit kind of hit from the alcohol plus the effects of whatever drug. And then, of course, if you mix with things like cocaine and opium, then off you pop, you're just like as high as a kite and probably quite happy.

Probably absolutely fine by that point I would have thought. Did they have an understanding of what alcohol did to your body? I mean, now we have a much better understanding, and it seems to be improving all the time. But did they know, for example, that it's very bad for your liver? You said earlier that they didn't have an understanding of it as an addiction as a disease. It was more of a moral failing.

But did they have an understanding of what alcohol could do to you? That sort of understanding began to develop. So you've got the professionalisation of medicine happening in the 19th century anyway, and as part of that sort of branch of medicine, like it was the beginnings of what we would now call addiction medicine. So there was groups of doctors up and down the country who were interested very much in the effects of alcohol on the body,

what it did, how it could be traced to, you know, diseases and so on. And they came together in 1884 to form the society for the study of inebriety, I think initially, but now we know it's a society for the study of addiction. So there was that beginnings of trying to understand how alcohol acted as an addictive substance, but what harm it could potentially do to the body as well. Bear in mind this is still happening as alcohol is being prescribed as a medicine. So it took a while, a long time for that situation to change to where we are now and understanding the harms, not just the social harms that alcohol can do,

but also the harm it can do to the body. Did they have an understanding of how much you'd have to drink in order to be an alcoholic? Because they seem like if they're drinking alcohol as medicine and as a breakfast to pick me up, do they have an idea of like, how much do you have to be drinking to be drinking too much at this point? They didn't know essentially how much was too much.

Again, it kind of links back to the visible manifestations of drunkenness. So are you fall down drunk? Are you semi-drunk? Are you in some other sort of state? What have you been drinking as well? So it was believed that especially when new technology was invented to sort of speed up the production process of spirits. So your patent still was invented, which meant that spirits could be distilled faster on a sort of mass scale, producing what was known as silent spirit. So it's essentially like raw alcohol. that you can then turn into any product you want. That was thought to have maddening effects. So there was experiments done on consuming amounts of silent spirit to see what the maddening effects were on the body and mind. So, you know, there was a sort of move towards trying to understand what you could drink relatively safely,

what types of drink wouldn't have maddening effects. But, you know, much like today, the Victorians knew that you could have weaker beer being consumed more responsibly, I suppose, and moderately, whereas with your ardent spirits, especially these new-produced spirits, they were much stronger. They had a very high alcohol content, and consuming more of that would be more harmful. Before I let you go, I want you to tell me about this research you're doing about Tenants Lovelies, because that sounds fascinating. What is a Tenants? lovely. Okay, so Tenant Slager, which was one of the sort of brewers that really took off in the Victorian

period, in the 20th century, they caught on to a style of marketing that involved essentially putting images of women onto the sides of cans of Lager, and these models became known as the Tenant Slager Lovelies. So they were producing these cans between the 1950s all the way up to the 1990s, A lot of people in England don't know about the tenant slagger lovelies. Pretty much everyone in Scotland knows about the cans because a lot of the older generation grew up with the models on the cans and have various thoughts about that. So you're talking about models wearing very little clothing

and highly sexualised poses. Okay. And the marketing went on for such a long period right through the period of the rise of the women's liberation movement, and so on when attitudes were changing towards women, tenants kept producing these cans of lager right up until the 90s when they pulled the plug on it. So it's fascinating in terms of, you know,

how alcohol marketing was used in that way, definitely marketed towards men, trying to sell men lager through promoting women as sexual objects, essentially. Thorough you have been unbelievably fascinating to talk to today. I've enjoyed every second of this. And if people want to know more about you and your research, where can they find you? They can just look me up on LinkedIn. If anyone does have any stories at all in relation to the Tenets Lager Lovelies, I would love to hear from them.

Oh, as would I actually. Thank you so much for talking to me today. You've been wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for listening. I thank you so much to Thora for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you would like us to explore a subject, if you'd like to say hello,

or maybe you just want to know where to get the meat, wine, from, you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. We have got episodes on everything from the history of gaiters to the history and myths of the menopause, all marching your way. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith, the senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex, scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit.

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