In Our Time - The Gin Craze

Episode Date: December 15, 2016

In a programme first broadcast in December 2016, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the craze for gin in Britain in the mid-18th century and the attempts to control it. With the arrival of William of Orange, it became an act of loyalty to drink Protestant, Dutch gin rather than Catholic brandy, and changes in tariffs made everyday beer less affordable. Within a short time, production increased and large sections of the population that had rarely or never drunk spirits before were consuming two pints of gin a week. As Hogarth indicated in his print 'Beer Street and Gin Lane' (1751) in support of the Gin Act, the damage was severe, and addiction to gin was blamed for much of the crime in cities such as London. With Angela McShane Research Fellow in History at the Victoria and Albert Museum and University of SheffieldJudith Hawley Professor of 18th century literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonEmma Major Senior Lecturer in English at the University of YorkProducer: Simon Tillotson

Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, the gin craze gripped Britain in the 18th century, when the government feared that poor people were drinking far too much cheap gin, damaging their own health and the safety and well-being of all. The roots of the craze were traced to William of Orange,

whose Dutch gin became a loyal Protestant drink, and his new laws made beer expensive, and let anyone distill and sell gin very cheaply at home. Soon you could drink for a penny and get drunk for tombs. Hogarth later highlighted the horrors of alcohol in his gin lane, made as tougher and tougher laws of being imposed to end what were seen as a dangerous over-consumption by the masses. When we're to discuss the gin craze are Angela McShane,

research fellow in history at the Victorian Albert Museum and University of Sheffield, Judith Hawley, Professor of 18th century literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Emma Major, Senior Lecture in English at the University of York. Judith Hawley, how entrenched was the drinking of strong alcohol and spirits in late 17th century Britain? Well, everybody drank. I mean, there were some abstemious puritans. Men and women, adults and children.

Children would have some... What do we talking about, children, eight onwards, 13 onwards? Young kids would have a glass of beer for breakfast, small beer, so it's weaker than what we might drink now. but everybody drank. They drank throughout the day. Water was very bad, and there were lots and lots of brewed beverages.

Spirits weren't drunk so much, but you'd find people from every age, both genders and every class, drinking quite a range of alcoholic drinks. There are lots of things which we don't have really drink very much anymore, various kinds of punches and cordals and mixed drinks. But drinking was quite socially stratified.

So there'd be alehouses where, which were run for the poor by the poor where you'd drink beer or ale and then in the middle there'd be taverns which served wine and they're mostly frequented by the gentry and then inns which served wine and a wide range of drinks

and also food. The drinks might be cordials they might be, there might be spirits but really strong spirits weren't really drunk regularly in Britain until William of our brings them in. And where did gin come into that?

Gin is not quite there at the end of the 17th century, isn't it? It comes in with William of Orange in 1688. He starts bringing it in. And the British had also drunk some gin and also brandy. Brandy is sort of a confusing term, but it comes from the Dutch for burnt wine, brandy wine. So it means any distilled spirit. And there are a range of spirits which had all sorts of different flavourings. Anna seed was a very popular one.

and there were various names like Aqua Vita Aquafortes. So people were drinking spirits, but not in very large quantities because they weren't made in large quantities. Was there impression in, let's call it Europe, for the sake of ease, that this island was a sort of rocking boat of drunkenness? Yes, but also the British referred to the Dutch as drunks. I mean, everybody called everybody else a drunk. There was certainly a hard drinking culture.

So it wasn't just that everybody drank at low levels throughout the day, but that gentlemen and people associated with the two main political groups, the Whigs and the Tories or the successes of the Puritans, would drink to toast their particular heroes. And there are stories of returning cavaliers, dragging people off their horses and forcing them to drink a toast to the king, and if they didn't, then they would be ducked and beaten up. So there's a real hard-drinking culture.

People would deliberately get drunk. drunk very often through toasting, feasting, club making. Before we go much further, can you tell us what you mean by people? By people I mean all classes. Is this properly researched? There's a lot of people in all classes were at the booze from breakfast onwards. Yes. Right.

Quite definitely. Was it anything, was there any idea that beer could be better for you than water because water was like W.C. Fields, you never know where it's been. But apart from that, it was. polluted and was that a knowledge of that? There was a knowledge of that. There isn't a real knowledge of infection but the water might well be, because running water was very hard to come by so the water might be standing and you could tell that it was yucky. It was pretty unpleasant stuff. And I think there also there was a sense that beer had health-giving properties

so that it was good for you in itself. Right. Angela McShane, how did William Orange changed the drinking? He came in in the glorious revolution of 60s. one of the most glorious things it seemed to have been was bringing gin. Absolutely. Well, I think there's three ways, really, that William changed drinking culture in Britain. And the first most obvious thing was that in 1690, so he's here for two years, he's already been at war, and is at war, in any case, in his own European wars. And he brings in an act to encourage the distilling of liquors in Britain,

and in England especially, but deliberately to counteract the fact that he's pretty much banning French brandy from coming in. So he's opened the door to any distillers who would like to set up. And the problem with that act was that it didn't have any regulation involved in the act.

So there was no regulating of that trade. And it was very cheap to set up a distillery. You could set up a distillery, there were no costs on licensing, so really freedom hall for distilling. This resulted in a lot of front rooms run by enterprising women turning into gin dens. You get, well, eventually you're going to get, there are, I mean, by the 1730s, 1,500 distillers in London, of whom 1,200 have a little still or make compound liquors,

that is to say, put in those flavours that Judith was talking about. And only, you know, a hundred of them have really big stills. They're producing the hard liquor. And he introduced it to the forces, so they went to battle on gin with what was called, I'm sorry, Dutch culture, wasn't it? Yes, well, this is the second thing. Dutch courage, absolutely, or Protestant courage, in fact. So the second thing that he does, absolutely, is he brings into the country a vast number of Dutch sailors and recruits masses of sailors. And of course, what sailors do is they drink.

And so he's imported a lot of people who are accustomed to drinking gin and other kinds of brandies or spiritous liquors. And then also there's this liquor being produced. And sailors like to drink this stuff because it's hard drinking because it's a maticling thing to do, but also because it's much easier to drink on board ship. It's seen as something that is quick to drink. It's good for your courage.

It's good for your health because it's warming and so on. So he's introduced that. And then the third kind of indirect effect of this is that with the growing of these distilleries and so on, and you bring a lot of men into London, and women will soon follow. And that is exactly what happens. London is sucking in all these young women from the country.

They're coming to be servants. They're coming to meet men, particularly sailors, who couldn't love a sailor. And so they also become drawn in to this drinking culture, which becomes a really cool thing to do. Did his policy abduing this in order to damage the French economy work? Well, I'm not sure that French brandy ceases to be made. I mean, it doesn't, and there's lots of smuggling still going on.

What about French wine? French wine, again, whether it damages the French economy, the French economy can recover if it's not selling to Britain, but it wants to continue to sell to Britain eventually. It certainly has an impact on wine drinking, and there's an interesting political sort of like set off to that. But what Britain is doing is importing Portuguese wine. So they become the big new thing to drink wine-wise.

Can you just develop the idea of being a Protestant drink? Well, it's Protestant because when William comes in, he is the great Protestant deliverer. He has delivered Britain from the threat of a Catholic monarch. The Dutch who come with him are very much seen as kind of part of his, in popular culture anyway, as part of his kind of like Protestant delivery. And of course they're going to go to war,

both in Ireland, against James II and the Catholics in Ireland, and against Catholics in Europe, or at least that's how it can be portrayed. Of course, it's a much more complicated picture than that, really. And so you could be thinking about gin as a Protestant drink in that it's feeding your armies, it's deliberately anti-French. That's not a bad place to start.

And we haven't at this stage in the discussion got round to the fact that it could just be harming a lot of people, but we will come to that. Okay, Emma Major. Was there a sense in which we've talked about his Protestantism? It went even further than that. It quickly became that Gin was part of Britain's identity. Yes, it's rather fascinating. Gin develops this personality and becomes characterised as Madam Geneva. Geneva is the Dutch word for juniper, and juniper is the berry associated with gin.

And it becomes eventually abbreviated to gin. That's where we get our British gin from. She appears as this person who will fire up the sailors and soldiers who are fighting for the Protestant cause around Europe and who will be the agent of providence almost and prove that God has chosen Britain as his favourite nation. by providing them with gin. It's funny that gin's a woman, isn't it, like Britannia? Yes. Well, I was absolutely fascinated to see the ways in which

she acquires this very strong cultural presence during the gin craze years. She almost becomes an alcoholic, demotic Britannia mirroring the more proper one that's associated with the Church of England and who actually comes with William in many ways as well. She's portrayed as this boozy old lady who forgets to look after her baby in the famous Hogarth print

but she's also regarded with a great deal of affection so when the act to effectively ended gin drinking 1736 came round there were actually funerals held was she called Mother Geneva She was Mother Jennifer She was Queen Geneva. Did they toast her?

Yeah, they toasted her. And the funerals were apparently quite wonderful. There were prints of them. People gathered in anticipation of the act to toast her. The act being trying to get rid of. Yes. We're on that, we're nearly there. It's great, isn't it?

Right. It was, before we got on, because the story is how harmful it was. But it was also thought, as to could be very beneficial. Can you give us some of the ways in which this was argued? Well, when the Act 1736 comes around, all the kind of ideas that had been associated with gin and the benefits of Protestant drink

came kind of to our head in these wonderful ballads and poems that were published in praise of gin. And there's a sense that these are affirming the importance of gin over wine, which is a foreign drink, of course, or brandy, which is also a foreign drink, both Catholic drinks, and there's this great sense that it must be good for you because it counters the evil effects of too much tea drinking. So if you drink too much tea and you're made ill by your tea addiction,

you can turn to gin to make you better. So it's sold as a medicine, and one of the ways in which gin sellers got round the implications of the act was to sell it as a medicine, as a cordial, as Judith was saying. so that you were drinking it for the health benefits and this is the way that middle class women and upper class women justified their drinking. Because it went right up, right?

The Queen Anne was a great June drink, doesn't she? The Royal June drinking women. But it's more than that, isn't it? Because they talk about, can you talk? Because I've read your notes, I'm just going to repeat your notes, right? What other benefits are supposed to flow? Well, it goes right through the entire

division of labour. So you have poor market women fired up in the mornings with their 6am tipple, confronting the grimness of their days by taking gin and suddenly making everything bearable. I mean, poor people's lives were really grim. They needed something to make them bearable, many ways.

But it also had something, I'm going to say, because you're not saying it, it was supposed to sort revive the basic experience. It's sexual spirit in marriage. We've got it out. Right. There we go. Sorry, I was skirting around it.

You were skirting round. I saw the skirting, but there you go. Well, yes, it was supposed to revive marital bliss in the home by firing up tired husbands and rendering aged, fed up wives into young teenage, desirous and desirable. beings. We also know it fires people up to fight each other more than the wood of course. It fires people up. So that's plenty of the good effects.

We'll now have the rest of the programmes, so how dreadfully it was. Judas. Let's relate that, the rise of... How did farming fit into this and why was farming economically significant? Yes. So as well as wanting to try to tackle the import of French drinks, as a deliberate policy of William III to improve the British farm. farming industry and to provide a greater market for British grain. And the chief grains being

produced were wheat, barley and rye. And if you wanted to produce wheat, and wheat was absolutely crucial for bread, and bread was the staple diet of the poor, you had to have bread at a reasonable price. And to keep the wheat coming, you had to rotate your crops, and barley was one of the chief grains used to clear the land between sowings of wheat. But, but barley wasn't really all that popular. It wasn't a great grain for human consumption. So in order to have wheat, you always produce the surplus of barley. But barley is great for brewing spirits.

So producing spirits in large quantities was a way of keeping farming going to keep the wheat producing. It also then proved very important for keeping landowners on side. So the landowners in the area around, in the sort of the home counties and out to East Anglia, were encouraged to plant more and more barley. They turned over land which hadn't been used productively before to the production of barley. And then they provide a very powerful lobby to keep the distilling industry going.

So there's this fantastic, sort of vicious and virtuous circle of supporting farming, supporting distilling, and supporting the politicians in power. Are there any analogues with sugar and tobacco? Absolutely. Tobacco, which was this, a crop produced in the American plantations and then is linked with both the transportation of criminals from England

and with the triangular trade in slavery, sugar which is produced in Jamaica, and that produces rum. So the Navy eventually goes over to rum after gin is quashed. And then in our own lifetimes, the overproduction of maize, corn in America, which leads to the production of corn syrup, which then gets put into all sorts of foods. So there's a way in which the government finds it, very beneficial to overproduce these addictive substances

because later on they'll get revenue from it, but they have landowners who make a huge profit from it. Angela McShane, we hear of people drinking pints of gin. What sort of gin were they drinking? Well, when you went, if you go to a gin shop or if you go to a Chandler's shop, then there's a good chance you're going to be getting a nice flavoured gin and you can choose from a whole range of things.

Now, it's impossible for you. for us to know this because until the 19th century there's no means by which you can measure the proof of drink. So it's just, we've had this long discussions with people that really study this and there's a particular scholar called James Sumner gets very cross if you try to guess. So we just don't know what proof it was. Well, one of you said it was 80% then and it's 40% now. So where did you get that from? No, no, you just cannot know this. And it's quite interesting that in fact if you look at the literature of the time, there are often criticisms of gin because it's,

so poor because its proof isn't high enough. So at the time, people can tell if it's really strong. But most people are actually drinking a gin that has been watered down, it's flavoured, and when they go and order gin, they order it in quarters, which means a quarter of a pint. It will almost certainly include water. It will certainly include a flavour to make up that quarter pints. It will, if you look at the court records of people ordering these things, it's also going to be shared between a number of people in the normal drinking. I'm talking about a normal run of drinking. And I did some calculations on how much is that then.

And that is about three doubles, three of our modern doubles. So it's not actually that much. And interestingly... Well, it depends how many quaterns you order. That must be the first round. But when you look... I mean, part of the problem with studying this is that when you look at court records, you're always looking at something that is excessive,

if it's to do with drinking. But if you look at court records where gin is incidental, people drink quite a lot and they do get fabulously drunk. there's no question about that. There's no question that gin is a cool new drink that people want to drink and they get drunk on it. No doubt of it be about that. Cool new drink is that's one way.

It's a desperate new drink as well, isn't it? The fact is we're talking about a gin craze where the masses are... Are we on up a gum tree here? Well, I think that it's true that it becomes a drink that everyone wants to drink, but it's almost as if we're trying to say that people were all sober before then. No, they weren't. You know, people were always drinking

and they were always spectacular drinking. If you come at this from the 17th century, you know, you don't see stories that you haven't seen before. What's really fabulous about this drinking is it attracts women. First of all, it attracts women into the trade. Secondly, it attracts women to drink. And if you look at the drinking of gin, it's so much more girly. You get this lovely little glass to drink from.

You've got this massive great pewter thing, you know. You have a lovely little glass to drink from. You can stand about and show off your new fashions. And everybody is keen to show themselves off. And by that, I mean, you know, including people who we think of as poor, the working poor. Right. Emma Major, we nevertheless have great concern. Several acts of parliaments are about to be passed from those in charge,

having first of all driven the sale of it, government-sponsored, government-promoting something, that the poorer people drinking too much and people concerned, the dissenters were particularly concerned from a Christian point of view and a sober work point of view, but the government itself got rather concerned. Can you give us some reasons why you think they were concerned? Well, there were various problems. People became unruly. Jim was associated with an increase in crime.

If you look at the old Bailey records online, you can see that a lot of the cases that are brought are associated with gin take place near places where Jim was sold or after drinking a lot of gin. They also were concerned that gin reduced productivity amongst workers and fascinatingly. There was an argument that gin stopped you from eating healthily.

So it reduced the consumption of beef. Reduce your appetite, actually. Yeah. So it reduced the consumption of that patriotic British beef that supposedly produced healthy. workers and was associated with beer and that kind of more rural image of Britain as a land of plenty and sober work. But he also increasingly was identified with children who were sick and worries about the next generation being somehow enfeebled. The worry about women was partly

the worry about children, wasn't it? Because obviously they were the ones who looked after the children. Judith. There were some really ghastly stories about what happened to either pregnant mothers who drank gin. People claimed that their babies would be born deformed or blackened or wizened

and also the kind of neglect, mothers and nurses neglecting their children. I don't know if this is a good moment for it, but there's some ghastly stories. There's one of a nursemaid at a christening who got so drunk

that she mistook the baby she's meant to be looking after for a log and put it on the fire. So these stories were used... You asked about whether or not the gin craze was real. I think gin was really a huge social problem. It was a fashionable thing and people liked it. It was a huge social problem.

We can't get a very accurate sense of quite what it was like because we only know about it from the polemical accounts for the people who are for or against it. But I think there's no doubt that the poor were really suffering because of gin drinking. Well, one of the things I think it's really important

that we get some balance though. I mean, I agree that there's clearly, you know, that there was a lot of drinking. It was unregulated. And I think what's important to remember about that, the making of gin was unregulated, as were other drinks. So you could be drinking something seriously dire when your drink is, exactly.

So that's not to be forgotten. But when we talk about beef, for example, oh, it's reducing your appetite for beef, What actually, Jekyll says, is that it's reducing the appetite for awful, which then has to be given to the dogs. Because the real concern here for so many of these writers was that the poor were becoming luxurious in their eating and drinking and their leisure. The anxiety was that the poor were becoming less deferential,

that they were working less, that they were becoming idle, that they were enjoying luxuries. How dare they? And literally, that is said. That's not an interpretation. They say absolutely, don't they, Am I? Yeah, no, absolutely. They're actually...

They actually say things that we would like them to say, like they get above themselves. The poor get above themselves. They imagine they're on equal footing with a king. That's right. And part of the concern that you asked me about earlier with the government is that it is associated with mob rule, with people gathering together and protesting at the existing social order.

And it's also very much associated with urban life. Yes. So at first it's really a drink of London. So it's to do with these new people moving into London, finding life very difficult, finding gin a very sustaining thing to do. But all that kind of social mobility, the dislocation, the move away from the country.

So there's that fear of novelty and change associated with gin. Just a second. Judith, we're moving towards a time when acts were brought in, a number, seven or eight, in the early first half of the 18th century. How did that start and why did it start? Yes, around about the 17-20, people started to realize that Jin was having an effect,

and there were campaigning movements, movements such as Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, there were several societies for the Reformation of Manners. You mentioned the dissenters. that sort of people, they're starting to worry about it. And also, there are economic arguments about the dangers of gin and population. So people start to petition Parliament. And from 1729 to 1751, there are eight separate legal instruments to try to control gin.

Act or additions to other legislation to try to control it. And they don't have a great deal of success for a number of reasons. One is that the government, in the early years of this period, it was Robert Wolper. Poles with government and he was so much in control. This is so much the dominant player here. So he would, he realized that the landed interest would not like this sort of reduction of their profits through selling the barley. And there's a very powerful lobby from the distillers. There are

there are only a few distillers who make the main spirit and this is a little aside but I think we need to know this that so there's the people who sold gin from back rooms or market ladies and so on would buy in spirit made by the main distillers and then they would redistill it or compound it to make the gin and those are the people, the small operators, are the ones that the acts usually went for because you could get to them because they were poor.

But one problem with taxing them, with making them pay for licences by putting subsidies on the spirits is that they can't pay for it. So people, widely evaded the axe or there's quite a complex story here but it wasn't until the government

started to go after the big distillers that there was any kind of control over drinking. I'm right, I'm glad to come in. Oh yes they became very creative about dodging the legislation so because gin was described as associated

with juniper, they just removed the juniper and sold the spirit without the juniper and with other flavour. rings, you know, Aniseed, as you were mentioning. But my favourite dodge is the Puss and Mew machine, which is the first vending machine, which was invented as a kind of secret way of selling gin. So this model of a cat was set up. A life-size model?

I think larger than life. Larger than life. And its tail was a pipe. So you would go up to the cat and say, Puss, I'd like some gin. And it would, if the seller had some gin, it would say, mew, you'd put your money in to the mouth of a cat and some gin would come out of the tail. It could go directly into your mouth.

It could go, well, I was speculating about this. You know, whether you just sit there with your open mouth and drink it in or you'd take along your little fashionable object. Were there any arguments about the fact that this was affecting the poor very much? And the bridge, according to you, at the very beginning of the programme, Richard, were drinking just as much, if not more, but they're doing it in their houses, not in public, and they weren't getting sense.

They were immune from this legislation. Didn't that set off riots among the poor, and in certain poems that you quote and so on? What happened there? Yes, I mean, you've got really problematic riots, part of that mob culture that they're also afraid of. They're just so afraid of London, as Judith is saying, that it's become this en masse place.

It's like half a million to three-quarters of a million over the period. We're looking at this first. 50 years. It's a big city in the world. A big city is it's sucking people up. They know that there's more people dying than are being born. They don't know why. They're blaming gin. And they blame gin for all this disorder.

And it is certainly true that after the 1736 Act, which literally raises the price of a licence to £50, totally beyond the capacity of anyone at all, really other than the big distillers who aren't interested in paying that kind of money. And they use informers to tell people. And so what you have then over the next few years is informers being beaten up, people being led off, juries refusing to convict. And essentially, by 1738, it's a dead letter that acts. They can't get anybody to act on it.

The justices won't do it. They're afraid of what might happen. People are let off. Robert Allen is a very famous case. So really it becomes a problem where government cannot rule. So there's a sort of not only, it's rather like the first poll tax, isn't it? People just would not pay it and they're not going to do this again. There were street riots and one of the cries which came out again and again was no gin, no king, no gin, no king.

Because the English man and woman reserved the right to be drunk if they wanted to. Yes, that's right. We talked about the relationship with English identity as part of British liberty. It's a sign that we're not French. We can get completely intoxicated when we want to. Absolutely. The reformers try to spin that and say, no, this is not liberty. You're not really free if you're addicted to gin.

And the true British liberty is abstinence, which of course is much duller. Yes. And didn't catch on. Didn't catch on, oddly. But again, I think that the problem is that we're just assuming if you took a drink of gin, then you got drunk. I think we forget the poor were not, that all the poor do not have a miserable life every day. You know, there is a pleasure in this. pleasure in the sociability of it, a pleasure in the materiality of it. So that we forget that.

And the reason we forget it is because we look at a picture like Gin Lane and often people see it as a photograph of what was going on, which of course it absolutely is not, that we see the court cases because it's true you can look at gin cases. But if you just put the word whining, you will also find lots of cases of people. If you put beer in. Let's go to Gin Lane, the most famous Hogarthed Gin Lane is engraving.

That gives jing. Jin a very bad name. Slums, a baby, a neglected mother, a baby rolling from a lap down some steps, and it's where you don't want to go. Now, how accurate do you think that was? Well, so Jude was telling us about, you know, all the fears and the horrible stories and terrible stories of people. And what Hogarth does in Gin Lane, and incidentally, and really importantly, this is a two-part dialogue. Beer Street and Gin Lane. Beer Street, you're supposed to look at first, and then Gin Lane. Let's stick to June Lane. Beer Street's where, it's another engraving. Everybody's happy. Everybody's right and everyone's cross-wash.

Now we go to gin. Gin Lane. So in Jin Lane, it's literally a gathering together of all those terrible stories. There's suicide. There's madness. There's women who are busy, you know, kind of like so busy with their luxuries that they are avoiding their children. The dying man is wearing a soldier's coat. This is what's going to happen to our troops and so on. So that's what's being said. But I think that one of the things worth looking at in that Hogarth print is the fact that the woman who maybe Judith Defour, who's this woman, who's this woman. who murders her child. She murders her child in order to get a two-year-old child because she can get 16 pence for the child's new clothes.

That's right. And there's other cases of women pawning their children's clothes, but for all sorts of reasons. So it is true that happens. But when you look at that picture, I think a key thing to look at is what is she doing? She's taking snuff from a box. And the reason I think that's important,

and when you look at Beer Street, you've got a man smoking a pipe, is that the emphasis here is, how dare the poor have luxury? That this is the poor who are out of place, out of the place they ought to be in, and they're sowing in, you know, desires of their luxuries,

that they're ignoring the things they ought to be doing, which is producing children to fill the factories to work and to make the army strong. You've talked from, I'll come back to the moment, talk from the beginning about it going right across the way. We know the Queen, Queen Anne, and we know Henry Fielding gone in bought. So on the Henry Fielding side, Henry Fielding of Tom Jones,

he and the Bow Street runners were to clean out the area of St. Giles, which were supposed to be a lot of gin-affected crime and so on and so forth. But why did those who are not the poor get away with the fact that they were swilling it back like mad, and nobody was legislating against them, criticizing their mom, doing engravings about them? Twas effort thus. Well, that'll do, let's move on. They were the ones in power. The poor had absolutely no power and no say in it at all.

There was a pearl. Just a second. Hold on. We've got two lines of a poem coming off. Oh, no, I can't remember the two lines of the poem. Oh, well. I'm so sorry. The first line was something like the rich, the rich eat what they want and drink what they please. The poor are denied even their chirping of gin.

The chirping glass is such a lovely line. Well, you remember that. Such a lovely phrase, yes. No, and they say it's only the song says it's only the poor that are treated like drunken swine. They're never convicted for being drunk. The rich can sit at home, drink gin from the bottles they keep secretly in their closets and they deny actually partaking in the gin craze. And there's a sense as well that there's a whole snobbery around what kind of gin you actually drink.

So the posh people drink Dutch gin. and actually, you know, by implication, less patriotic for doing that, when English gin is supposedly so fine. So at home, you're wealthy, you sit there, you drink from your posh bottle of Dutch gin, and you hide it away in your closet. What effect did the coffeehouses, the rise of the coffee houses and tea have on, the drinking of gin?

Was that a chance publicly to switch? Was it considered to be better, more stronger, I mean stronger and whatever? It's a kind of different kind of sociability. There are different groups of people gathering to drink and talk, whether it's coffee houses or tea tables at home. That's quite gendered because it tends to be men who are associated with coffee houses and women who are associated with the tea tables. Tees tend to be drunk at home because it's easier to make them coffee.

Coffee needs more of a process. Sorry, Judith. You could actually drink alcohol in coffee shops. Yes, you can. So you could buy gin and coffee shops. And one of the poems that I came across had actually Tom's coffee house written along the top and some people's names.

So you have this image of a group of people talking about how awful it is or how good it is that gin should be banned while drinking coffee in a coffee house. And you also put it in your coffee? And you put it in your coffee, of course. We actually have cups that say in them, temperance cups that say, do not put gin in me.

actually included you know, in the bottom. How could you see the bottom of the cover? You've got tea in it. The point is to stop you, stop you doing it in the first place. Before you point the tea. It suggests they did their gin first before they did tea. And do we see, just a second.

Do we see with these acts, do we see a dying away of what we've been calling the gin crows? We're talking about the middle of the 18th century now. 1751 is the first act that makes a real difference. And this, the Hocarth's, pictures that we talked about earlier, a part of a concerted campaign,

Henry Fielding's inquiry into the court is the late increase of robbers. There's a perceived crime wave after 1748 when soldiers returning from the war of Austrian succession without any money, without any employment, get more involved in crime. And then you get this several-pronged attempt to get to grips with the social problems.

So this is the first time when it's not just trying to close down the cheap retailers of gin, but to think, what is causing crime in the country. And you get a much greater survey of the links between the production and consumption, the links between the poor her drinking it and why they're doing it.

So the 1751 Act makes several changes, which, for one thing, it basically wipes out all the little sellers, the chandler shops, the market ladies, and so on, and says that you have to retail gin from licensed premises, and these premises are the alehouses taverns. and inns that I mentioned earlier.

They have to have a licence. The licence is brought into a more affordable realm so that there was actually an incentive for, let's say, respectable retailers to say it. Sorry, interrupt for this. We've talked about poverty and that, again, it's being directed to gin, but at that time, where other causes produced, these also might be the cause of poverty.

Reducing the, I mean, it's worth bearing in mind that gin drinking was already reducing from, 1743, which was the peak and then after that it's falling already. So in one sense the Gin Act has done nothing in it's already reducing. The reason it's reducing is because of poverty. A series of poor harvests

exactly as Judith is saying, soldiers coming back, they've got no money. So they're very poor. So you've actually had a situation where there were a range of a good harvest during the earlier part of the century. People actually do have disposable income. They also work in a

seasonal way. So they have leisure time. This has shifted considerably by 1750. There is poverty because there is less production because there is less food because it is much harder to make a living. So it reduces the popularity or lead the availability, the money to be able to go and drink. There are also other drinks. There are also other things that you might drink. Beer has also reduced by now a bit in price. Porter is a new drink. Is tea and tea making a stab? Tea is getting more affordable. the 1750s, certainly by the 60s, it's becoming much more affordable.

But the big difference is caused by failures of harvests at the end of the 1750s, which means that the government simply has to ban distilling from grain altogether. So there's four or five years when there's no distilling whatsoever, no official distilling whatsoever, and gin just is removed for the market. You had your hand up, no? Yeah, so it was in reference to your mention of tea. Tea is like gin a sign of consumption, a sign of luxury and participating in things that poor people shouldn't really be participating in.

And it's part of that general anxiety during this period about the growth of cities, about the increased consumption, and the sense that instead of Britain becoming a great empire, it might be just rotting. It might be becoming corrupt and fall like the Roman Empire. Why then, you've qualified on one another, and just fine. Why did they fix on gin?

Why was there a gene craze? What, Judith, can you start off by telling us why it was like that? Good question. I find that actually hard to answer, given that there's so many other things. I think so much of it was to do with this fear of the new phenomena at the metropolis and the unstable life that went on there, the way in which people were transforming their lives,

country girls coming up to town and hoping to better themselves and ending up as prostitutes. People thinking that while they were drunk, they were king, they could do anything. So that sense of the transformative powers of gin. But in some ways it's arbitrary to seize

on that particular intoxicant. Sorry, can I go out this way? Angel, what's your view? Why was there such fear and panic about gin? Because it wasn't in other European countries, does it? No, that's right. I think that Jude is absolutely right, that it's to do with this growth of this city, this monster that's growing. Henry Fielding's a very interesting character

because he is really a backward-looking character. He isn't looking forward. His concern is to get these people under control and go right back to where we were before. And so he's just trying to stop people from having luxuries, stop people from doing. What is actually happening? Being able to buy new things, life having changed,

exactly all these people coming into the city. What about you, Emma? And of course it was just rented more visible, because 80% of gin consumption took place in London. So it was a very focused. It was a very focal point, really, for those anxieties. And sadly, we have got time to go to the gin palaces. All those mirrors and candles and massive places.

We must visit them until later time. Perhaps 11 o'clock this morning. Right, okay. Thanks to Judith Hawley, Angela McShane and Emma Major. Next week we'll be discussing T.S. Eliot's last great poem or poems, the four quartets. Thank you. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

And so what did we miss out? Gin Palaces you wanted to. Hold on. Before you get to Jim Palaces, there's a fantastic picture. And it's done by, I'll just check as they make sure I don't forget, but see Bowls in 1765. It's a wonderful picture of a gin shop. So this is post-1751 because we've got to remember that we're still looking at 3.4 million gallons of gin. marrying on right through the 18th century. There's no, gin doesn't go away.

And this picture is so brilliant because it's the gin cellar. So it's a fantastic picture of a shop. None of the panic, you know, of that picture. And she's being diddled by her customers. And it's a lovely picture because you see this fashionable woman. She's drinking her little glass. A little boy has come in and is stealing the money. You've got, and they're all women.

And I think that the women part of this story is a huge part. the panic. Why didn't you bring it out more in the programme then? Oh no. I tried. I tried. There wasn't time.

We did try. I tried. I tried. We actually got a little. I mean, sorry. Most beer drinking was done in ale houses and taverns, which are very much male spaces.

So the gin shop is a place that could be run by a woman. It's a novelty drink, so there are no associations behind it. So, oh, look, here's this new drink. Let's all join in the fashion. So women got involved. And there was more moral panic

because women were getting drunk. And you mentioned quite rightly the fear about children being either, you know, damaged in the womb or being neglected, that sense of the future generations being spoiled by gin. So there's a lot of that, but also prostitution. I mean, people would turn tricks in order to get their little dram of gin. And the sermons that come out about gin are really fascinating, because they often kind of combine religion with, you know, recent scientific research

to say, you know, you're polluting your baby through feeding it, milk that's tainted with your gin drinking and that the devil is actually gin. It's wonderful sermon. Yes, no, he is the servant that goes about

seeking whom he may devour in the 18th century. But there was a real coalition between the religious, the sociopolitical and the natural philosophers Stephen Hales, who's a very important natural philosopher, wrote a sort of a, I can't know the title is something about a polite admonition. A friendly, a friendly admonition.

And he was then taken up by Wilson, by Gonson, by all of the people who were campaigning against June. And he provided a scientific underpinning. That's right, because he actually uses an earlier pamphlet by George Cheney, who's a classic, a sort of 17th century story, really, because he's a reformed drunkard who writes a pamphlet telling you about all the terrible things that'll happen to you

if you get drunk and particularly if you get drunk on spirits. Daniel DeFoe started off as he switched, didn't he? Shameless, journalist. But they're all shameless journalists. When you tell the listeners what the switch was of Daniel DePoe? Well, he wrote in support of gin

and then he wrote against gin. He was as simple as that. He wrote for the distillers. It's partly I think that he wrote, he did that all the time. He wrote four and against the government. It depended to who paid him. But I think also perhaps he had a realisation that the tide was turning. Either there's a new bandwagon to climb on, or he was actually a social commentator

and maybe thought this is now a problem that I want to address. I don't know, to speak up for a phone. No, absolutely. He does tend to characterize the benefits send the dangers of gin drinking through women as examples. She's afraid. She's interesting. Is it Colonel Jack who talks about marrying a bit? Yes.

He married this beauty and within a paragraph, she's turned from this beautiful Bucks and Beauty into this kind of drug-addled old Harrodin who dies of gin as a sort of cautionary tale, he inserts out into one of his novels. I was trying to think when I was reading this, of any civilization I could think of where they didn't have some kind of drug

going on whether it was drinking or eating or whatever drug it was chewing the end of some root or whatever the heck it was but difficult to distinguish them we did a thing on this actually and an archaeologist was doing the deep

time of alcohol and they were using fermented fruits and so on even pre-humans hominids would use it it's always a shamanic and important thing it takes you out of yourself and so on.

So I think there isn't a culture that doesn't have some sort of fermentation that takes you from one thing to another. Even animals get drunk. Yeah, there's a fantastic. There's a brilliant film you can get on YouTube. For all these called drunk animals. That's right. No, no, no.

It's of these monkeys, monkeys on St Kitts, and they've been used for studying fetal alcoholism, alcohol syndrome because they drink and they're able to test the effects of alcohol. But you know, all of these people are smoking. I mean, this is the thing that, one of the problems of only looking at gym is that you're forgetting that. You know, the amount of beer being drunk is actually rising. I did a little calculation. And it's on top of the beer.

Yeah, they're all smoking. And smoking is seen as good for you. It's really encouraged. But one thing is seen as good for you. All this sort of ale was. really. The major ills, let's call it gin and ill for the moment, that sugar, tobacco and

all massively supported by the government because the landowners are making money and they wanted to protect their money. And they need the money for war. If you don't bring it under government control, you hand it over to the criminals. Yeah, that's right. And that's what happened with gin. And the lesson of gin is that nothing the government could do

changed it, but what they could do is regulate it, tax it properly, bring it indoors so that you could, you know, so that you were drinking in a place that had some licence and so on. And that did bring gin into the same sphere as ale and beer and wine and all the others. They did persist in being identified with particularly poor people and women, I mean, into the 19th century. So the Jim Palaces that you mention are the kind of glam side of 19th century drinking. And Jim still was predominantly drunk by.

the very poor in dram shops where they only had one room and the family who owned the business lived in the other room. When I was a kid in Wickham in the early 40s, morning 39, without being silly because I'm analysed it,

at that time, it's far more like Victorian age than England in the 60s certainly. There were quite a few pot houses. I remember them. Generally speaking for me, but I was a kid, it seemed like an old lady seeing that in front room with a couple of barrels

and they were three or four customers and they were very cosy little places in the house. It persisted and I'm sure it persisted all the other people. Dram shops could be quite homely. I mean they could also be the kind of the logical

almost hell sellers to the reality of poverty because they are associated with pawn brokers I mean that you know in the in the Hougarth print you can see it's associated with porn brokers. I couldn't drink my own time I started a pub, but in the village was there,

you could go to places, you could go to places like that. And one of the reasons you went, of course, because there was a fire. When we had a pub, the biggest, one of the, my father's became a very good landlord. We never drank in his own pub, I hasten to say. But the fire, because people were, their cottages almost, it was like the centre of this time. It was a slum was pulled down. And people went to damp places, cold places, and in the pubs there was supposed to be. and that was a big fire.

And that is very early... The end tag to the phrase that you quoted about, drunk for a penny, dead drunk for two pence, is clean straw for free. So, you know, you could go somewhere where there would be clean straw and you could lie down on the straw instead of just in the street to sleep.

That notice was never really put on a shop so it was important to remember that. But the thing is that people have to go to alehouses to drink. I mean, exactly as you're saying, in the early modern period, you don't have running water, at home. You don't have drink at home. You have to go and pick all this stuff up. So again, we've got to remember that these things are not terrible places to go.

These are absolutely essential places. And one of the interesting things about the drum shop is that, especially if you look at those nice little prints where they're not trying to say what a terrible place is, they look rather nice little places where a woman would feel very safe to go. But also, I think that is the beginning of the bar. So the bar that we are so familiar with and that becomes standard in a pub in the 19th century, especially the gin palaces, where it's absolutely part of its structure. The drum shop is the first real beginning of that because before that the bar is the back room where the barrels are.

In some of Dickens' novels, he goes into a woman who's running the place and she's sitting there, isn't she? There's one specific, very good example. I can't remember. Come. Anyway, we don't know. Oh, no, can I just add one thing? Please, one wonderful thing. Well, the producers, pacing at the door. He's got to deliver the big BBC message

and then the World Service is coming here. Spontaneous combustion. to have spontaneous combustion. Okay, well, during the 18th century, part of the anti-women drinking gin campaign featured cautionary tales of women who drank so much gin, they spontaneously combusted. Oh, you can bring that up in the programme?

Oh, I'm sorry, well, I did bring the person you up. Honestly, honestly. You should be offered to your coffee, but is it too early for gin? Gin? Oh, I'd have it. There are many more history and discussion programmes from Radio 4 to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.com.uk

slash radio 4.