In Our Time - The Temperance Movement

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the momentum behind teetotalism in 19th Century Britain, when calls for moderation gave way to complete abstinence in pursuit of a better life. Although arguments for temperance had been made throughout the British Isles beforehand, the story of the organised movement in Britain is often said to have started in 1832 in Preston, when Joseph Livesey and seven others gave a pledge to abstain. The movement grew quickly, with Temperance Halls appearing as new social centres in towns in place of pubs, and political parties being drawn into taking sides either to support abstinence or impose it or reject it. The image above, which appeared in The Teetotal Progressionist in 1852, is an example of the way in which images contained many points of temperance teaching, and is © Copyright Livesey Collection at the University of Central Lancashire. WithAnnemarie McAllister Senior Research Fellow in History at the University of Central LancashireJames Kneale Associate Professor in Geography at University College LondonAndDavid Beckingham Associate Professor in Cultural and Historical Geography at the University of NottinghamProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Before you get stuck into this episode, I want to tell you about some changes we're making to where you can find this podcast. From next month, you can hear in our time 28 days before anyone else for free on BBC Sounds. If you haven't already, you can download the BBC Sounds app

to listen to in our time first. It's easy. Once you're there, you'll find even more podcasts that are available on sounds before anywhere else. Live BBC Radio and exclusive music. music mixes. Just search for in our time, subscribe, and if you want, we'll send you a notification every time a new episode is ready. I told you it was easy. Now, let's get back to the podcast. Hello, in 1832 in Preston, Lancashire, seven men signed a pledge to abstain from all

liquors of an intoxicating quality, whether ale, porter, wine or ardent spirits, except as medicines. This became known as the site of the temperance movement in Britain, supporting by millions of mainly working-class people with no vote as a means to get on in life. It was a challenge to those in power who, it was said, wanted workers too drunk to organise politically, but not too drunk to operate machines effectively in their factories.

With me to discuss the temperance movement in Britain-Arle, David Beckingham, Associate Professor in Cultural and Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham, James Neal, Associate in Geography at University College London, and Anne-Marie McAllister, Senior Associate Research Fellow in History at the University of Central Lancashire. Anne-Marie, Joseph Livesey was the man behind that pledge. What do we need to know about him?

Well, he's a very interesting example of 19th century self-improvement. It's a rags to riches story with Livesey. He was born into poverty and orphaned at seven, taken in by his uncle, and started earning his living as a handloom weaver. but was so entrepreneurial that he discovered by selling cheese, by saving up and buying a cheese and selling it, that he could begin to make a profit. And so by his 20s, he was a successful cheese merchant.

However, as well as being entrepreneurial, he was radical and had a very strong social conscience. He taught at Sunday school and founded a temperance society for the young people in his Sunday school quite early on. This led him to consider the whole issue of temperance, and it's as the father of temperance that he is probably best known. What can you tell us about Preston at the time? Why did it start in Preston this?

Because he started this movement. We'll develop that in a few moments. But what was it about Preston that seems to have attracted the idea of making this into a movement? Well, Preston was a market town historically. It's on the route from Scotland to London. But it increased its population sixfold between... 1800 and 1850. And cotton mills, weaving sheds sprang up, operatives poured in, so you've got the typical industrial situation of a high concentration of people who were on

minimal wages. But there's also a big tradition of radicalism in Preston linked to religion. There were lots of non-conformists and also Catholics who of course at this period counted as rather dangerous radicals. In 1830, for a... example, the electors of Preston, and Preston was unusual in having given the franchise to all men who paid rates, they elected Henry Hunt, really cocking a snoot at the local landowners, the Stanley family, the Earls of Derby. So if any radical movement was going to arise, Preston was quite a good location for it. So how did he set about it? Why did, was he attracted to the idea of total abstinence rather than in moderation?

Well, he, along with some other local business people, had founded the Preston Temperance Society at the beginning of 1832. And there were many temperance societies around the British Isles then. Temperance meaning moderation, of course, which is its original meaning, had really taken hold in the 1820s. But it advised that people should abstain. from what they called ardent spirits, as you mentioned in your introduction, in other words, stronger drinks, and also should be moderate in the use of beer or wine. Now, Livesey began to feel that this was not a valid solution. He said that he could abstain and use alcohol in moderation,

but he wanted to totally abstain for my brother who cannot. And I think we've seen subsequently that alcohol, is quite addictive and difficult sometimes for some people to be moderate with. So in August 1832, Joseph Livesey and John King both signed a total abstinence pledge. It's what I often call the packet of biscuit syndrome. It's very hard to eat one biscuit and then leave the rest of the packet. And it's similar with alcohol, really. Livesey felt it was safer to just leave it alone.

And the total abstinence movement was born. Thank you. James Neal. there'd been an act of Parliament promoting beer, the 1830 Beer Act. What did it intended to affect the temperance movement? The main thing, I think, was responding to an earlier relaxation in tariffs on spirits. So there were more spirits consumed, probably, in Britain in the 1820s. So it was partly a response because there was a long-standing belief, which I think is probably still in the British psyche,

that beer is a less harmful way of intoxicating yourself than those ardent spirits. so that it was perhaps also a more British and improving form of beverage. We're coming out of a big age of gin, aren't we? We are. I think some of those earlier troubles in the 18th century were effectively a hangover, if I can go so far as to suggest that, for people, anyone tackling the spirit question and drinking question in the early 19th century. But it was also the 1830 beer act was also, I think, designed to bring in free trade principles to the licensing question.

So here was a very powerful argument which had been advanced obviously elsewhere. But people started to say, well, perhaps part of the problem is that there are a very small number of pubs that are available to sell any alcoholic drinks and that they are controlled by a small number of magistrates who are often effectively cronies of powerful landowners. Some of those landowners might be magistrates. There is effectively patronage going on there. So there's a strong liberal and radical argument against that kind of local control. over the licensing system. So the Beer House Act is designed to give anyone who can pay a small fee to the excise control over somewhere which just sells beer.

So it could be seen as effectively a temperance measure in that it's encouraging the drinking of this less dangerous form of alcohol. But it was also supposed to, I think, draw the support of those who supported free trade, even within Wellington's Conservative Party. There were an enormous number of beerhouses sprung up almost the next day, isn't they? Yes, I think the number doubled. from around 50,000 in 1832, I think it was nearly 100,000 by the end of the decade. So these could be a small front room with two barrels on a ramp, and the lady of the house sitting in front of a fire, a few men coming in and having each a pint a half-pite,

and that was the way forward. Exactly, and in some ways that sounds like a quite appealing prospect, if you are worried about excessive drinking, because that sounds much more domesticated than something like a gin shop, which is what they were responding to, and some of the first complaints about gin palaces and gin shops come from the 1820s when people start to see this very kind of rapid drinking where people come in, drink a shot of whiskey or something else gin, and move on.

And there's no kind of settling, there's no relaxation, there's nothing sociable about it. It's pure intoxication. So I think the Beer Act was supposed to encourage those kinds of beerhouses, but in the end, beerhouses acquired a very bad reputation on the whole for being less under the control of the local magistrates and therefore perhaps more of a problem for the police. Were they meeting a need or creating one? That's a very good question.

I think the Victorian struggle with that question for the whole rest of the century, really, especially the question of need. It proved very difficult to establish what a district needed, whether there were too many or too few drinking places. But I think part of the reasoning behind the Beer Act was to increase the number of places,

there was now a problem in the great cities that had grown very, very quickly, that that had outstripped the provision of drinking places. So for some of its proponents, the Beer Act was meant to catch up. I mean, that was the point of free trade, that the market would decide how many was enough. That was the way you established that answer to that question. David, what from the beginning did the Templin's movement offer the new growing class of and aspiring class of working men?

I think Anne-Marie hit the nail on the head. It's that point about self-improvement. It's that chance to get on and get up in life, as it were. And it ties into a whole series of reforms in that period. So Anne-Marie touched on the position of Catholics. We've not long had Catholic emancipation. 1829, absolutely. And also we've got the Reform Act of 1832, Newport Law and 1834.

There's a whole sort of suite of changes or policies that are really trying to assess kinds of questions around the state of society. And I think you can see temperance, in a way, is connected to all of these things, that people had this opportunity through the temperance movement at self-improvement. I think the question for people who looked on and wondered what the heck this was all about was what happened when self-improvement became something a little bit more collective, when you start to have groups coming together and what did that mean?

And that was met with an element of curiosity, but it was also met with a degree of caution as well. We have these pubs, licensed pubs, and then we have these holes in the wall or what could be called porthouses, or could be called snugs. How did the temperance movement attack that? What did they offer?

It had to offer alternatives. It had to offer a whole alternative infrastructure, a whole alternative social culture that would come through events such as the pledge that Anne-Marie's mentioned and in time would come through temperance bans, through processions, through occupying the city in a very different kind of way,

moving through the city in a different kind of way. But right at the beginning, actually, in 1834, there's a fascinating select committee. First off, they assert a very early on a role for the state in creating the conditions where the temperance movement in a sense could throw, to promote alternatives to drink by reducing taxes on revenues, juices on things like tea and coffee and sugar, so promoting the idea of temperance beverages.

And then really remarkably promoting counterattractions. So here, crucially, things like parks and reading rooms, and to turn back to Amory's point about self-improvement, here this is allied to an idea of rational recreation that's really about recreation. It's an opportunity for people to think about themselves and their futures. And the question is, what was the reception to the idea of a group of people organising and mobilising in that way in this heady political period of the 1830s? And then we very quickly had the growth of temperance halls, especially all over the north.

I mean, I come from a small town in the north-west of England, just north of the leg district, 5,000 people. We had school halls and church halls. The three halls in the town were the market hall, the big Victorian market hall, the drill hall later, the soldiers and church halls, and the temperance hall.

The Cubs met there, and the Labour Party meant there, and all socials they had there. So that was, that's surprising because this was a proper hall. It's a big place, good floor, room for people to make cups of tea and stuff. Tea's really important. They were known for having to have.

temperance soirees, tea parties but I think that point you make there about the visibility of temperance is very important. Now, first of all,

that needed funding and that would be a challenge to the temperance movement. But once you planted that, I think you can appeal to people that curiosity would be piqued.

And the hall becomes that alternative social space. It had to also counter the fact that pubs were seldom closed in this period. We're not really talking

about restrictions on licensing. hours. So temperance has to in a way, not just replace the pub for the hour that you were there. You have to replace the pub as a community hub, really. Anne-Marie, what argument did the temperance movement put forward for abstinence? Presumably, we talked about the banners, the marches, but what are the main arguments? How are they convincing people that this is a good idea? Well, Livesey himself was quite a showman.

And when they initially went out from Preston, first of all through Lancashire and then through the contrary. A couple of years later, they were in London and Birmingham. One of his set pieces was to give what was called the malt liquor lecture because many people disputed that beer contained alcohol. It was a nourishing healthy drink after all. So Livesee used to have a shillingsworth of various spirits plus quite a lot more of beer that was a shillingsworth and distill it while he was giving a temperance lecture and then put aside the amount of the distillate that was nourished. which was a very small amount, and set fire to the rest.

So you had flames all over the platform as all the spurious liquors, including the remnants of beer, went up in flames. So it was a very lively movement. They had reformed droncords, almost like a revivalist meeting, giving testimonies of how their lives had changed. But of course, that initial excitement couldn't be sustained.

So the arguments for temperance settled down into three main ones. There's first of all your wealth. In other words, if you spend money on drink, you can't spend it on yourself, or more importantly, your children. There were a lot of emotive appeals about children going hungry or shoeless while their father or their mother drank the money away. And of course, many operatives were paid in pubs, which were sometimes owned by the people who owned the factories they worked in. So the money would go straight back over the counter. The second argument was health, which is probably the argument we would still use today.

The body isn't designed to have alcohol continuously poured in it, and so from a very early stage coinciding with the rise of popular interest in science, many of the temperance speakers showed gruesome diagrams of what alcohol does to your liver or your stomach or various other organs. You also had the moral argument, many temperance reformers, although not all the, came from a religious background and they felt that God had placed humans above the animals and humans had reason and therefore they should

use their reason and their free will to not drink. In times of war there was another argument which was patriotism. In the First World War for example it was very much a patriotic duty it was presented as not to drink. Did anybody bring up Christ's first miracle

at the wedding where he turned water into wine? Oh yes. There were many debates. There were whole conferences devoted to debates about whether Christ has actually turned the water into alcoholic wine or non-alcoholic wine. And if you look in the very many temperance periodicals and the guides and the hotel guides and everything else, you'll see advertisements for non-alcoholic wines suitable for communion. So many of the churches were divided into those who felt, that Christ approved of wine and indeed those who felt that Christ couldn't possibly approve of wine because it was bad. Therefore, it was non-alcoholic when he changed it. James Neal, what was the understanding at that time of why people drank so much? I think there were a range of reasons that people put forward to explain the popularity of drink or certainly the way that temperance activists struggle to work out why people drank. I think there was some element, as Amory was saying, of the kind of moral arguments

sometimes religiously derived, which made the problem one of the individual, but this was a flaw of the self, I mean, particularly early on, I think, with the movement against spirits rather than all alcohol before teetotalism, there is an argument that some people are just going to make life difficult for themselves. They're going to be drunks because they're not trying hard enough effectively. And of course that... It's a weakness of character. That's right, yes.

And of course that ties into some of things David was saying about the self-improvement, that clearly self-improvement has to be set against the alternative. And of course, there are some who believe that you had to be tested. You had to be tempted by drink and refuse it to be making a rational choice. So the pledge early on could be seen as that sort of public affirmation of a rational decision, as Anne-Marie was saying. But I think others were more sympathetic in the sense that they knew that drink was ubiquitous. So John Dunlop, an early anti-spirits campaign who became a kind of general supporter of the movement, he itemised hundreds of cases of workplace drinking culture

in trades all across the country in England, Scotland in particular, where he makes a case really for the fact that people's working environments were sodden in alcohol, often spirit. So every minor event could be celebrated by drink. And I think it clearly spoke to a sort of collective working male culture where men drank together and worked together. Things like if you were spotted out with a, you know, walking out with a new, girlfriend. You might have to buy a bottle of spirits for the workshop and then everybody would

stop and drink. So this kind of constant sense that you should be celebrating all these sorts of things makes it clear that it would have been quite difficult for people to avoid drink without avoiding social interaction. They'd be cutting themselves off from workplace and possibly neighbourhood sociability. People like Engels, of course, very sympathetic in the sense that for him working-class drinkers in Manchester had very little else to do. And then as time goes on, you get increasingly environmental arguments saying that really if people are surrounded by the opportunity to drink, then it's very difficult for them to turn it down. And that's why prohibition and the reduction of licensing outlets becomes so important in the middle of the century.

Thank you. David, David, Buckingham. So this persuasion is one tactic. And then this prohibition was another, which was tied later on in America. Can you discuss, in the light of that, the United Kingdom Alliance? Yeah, it forms in the 1850s, early 1850s in Manchester. So it's interesting that James makes a comment about Engels. We think about the Industrial Revolution and I guess that gap between the promise and the reality of the Industrial Revolution,

but also increasingly questions about the role of the state. And what's interesting is that it takes the example of North America, really to make prohibition seem a viable, policy option. And the UKA was formed with a deliberate, explicit attempt to suppress the liquor traffic. They felt that the state was wrong to support harmful industry, the drink trade, against the interests of citizens. And they looked to the example of the US state of Maine, which had passed a prohibition law. And very quickly, the UKA had to realize that prohibition in the UK probably wasn't really a viable policy option.

So it'd been formed in 1853 officially. In 1854 there'd been an attempt to pass what would later look, I think, quite a modest piece of legislation for an element of Sunday closing of public houses. But the people had come out onto the streets. Partly there's a broader issue there around that kind of moral agenda around Sundays, but the people came out onto the streets and the government backtracked from that. and the UKA had to change tack there and it had to get to prohibition via another route.

It couldn't just be delivered in one fell swoop, as it were. So the UKA under parliamentary kind of leadership of Sir Wilfred Lawson hatched a plan to deliver prohibition incrementally. Lawson's permissive bill planned to change local control and put it in the hands of rate payers. So in essence, if two-thirds of rate payers so chose, they could vote for their areas to go dry, and that would deliver prohibition in a local, incremental way.

How far did that get? He did eventually, into the 1880s, managed to get the House to approve some measure of local option. In the 1890s, the Liberals actually took it up as a platform policy, and this idea of local option, James has hit the nail on the head with his point about the number of pubs to people and this point about need that you raised earlier, Melvin.

That's what this is. getting at, how many pubs did we need, who should decide, and local option was one way? Anne-Marie, how was the temperance movement changing the way of life of those who were part of it? Can we see evidence in the cities and the towns and the effects of this? Very much so, yes. I mean, James and David have both mentioned about the changes that went on in the geography of the towns. You've mentioned temperance halls, the first one, and again opened just outside Preston in Garstang in 1834. By about 1850 there was a temperance hall on the streets of every town.

And some of them were absolutely huge. You got them as temperance palaces. The one that Thomas Cook, the travel agent Thomas Cook, was involved in building in the 1850s in Leicester, hosted Charles Dickens and Phineas T. Barnum when they came lecturing, for example, and became one of the first temperance music halls. So these places were visibly giving the message of the alternative world. But you've also got temperance hotels.

Again, that was the first thing Lipsy started. He wanted a hotel for travellers, doing so much travelling and lecturing himself. Eventually, you could not go to somewhere like Bristol or Manchester without having a choice of five or six temperance hotels. And guides became quite a practicable publishing opportunity. And then, of course, there were the huge. number of coffee houses, coffee taverns, coffee palaces. One of the temperance newspapers, the British workmen, decided it was going to sponsor British workmen public houses.

And this proved so popular from the 1860s onwards that by the 1890s, Liverpool alone had more than 50 branded public houses that didn't sell any beer. They were really a combination of reading rooms, of a place to meet socially, where you could get refreshments and again aimed at working people who could come in and have a lunch without being tempted by a drink. So James has mentioned, I think, the processions and all the visible evidence of people on the streets. But even when there weren't temperance people on the streets, you had these buildings. Now, there was concern about this. In 1858, there was an article in the Saturday Review saying that there were separatist and it was possible to see a temperance dentist

and a temperance solicitor and never go outside the movement, which of course is exaggerated for humorous effect. There was an element of separatism in it, but it was a way of advertising, let's face it. And as you said yourself, Melvin, when you're growing up and there's a temperance hall there, you're certainly aware of the temperance movement. James, we mentioned the parliamentary election

through the Liberals and Wolframson, again Northern, MP for Carlisle. Is there anything more to say about that? The UKAA was really, as David was suggesting, was moving towards trying to find a parliamentary solution for this, for prohibition. But despite the fact it had a very efficient, effectively party machinery, which it had learnt its tactics with the campaign against the slave trade. But what they didn't really have was much support in the Liberal Party at first, partly because the Liberal Party was still split between a more radical, often provincial set of MPs. and more patrician moderate MPs who were less likely to support T-Total politics and prohibition in particular. So I think from the 1870s onwards, the Liberal Party is starting to realise it saddled itself with something which would prove to be quite a difficult job to achieve.

David, David Beckham, how did the opponents of temperance fight back in Parliament and on the ground? It's this consistent point that they would make, that people have the right to employment, that they as responsible and legitimate businessmen and there were business women in some instances too as licences, they had the right to be treated fairly by the state. Didn't somebody say the Englishman has the right to be drunk? There's a famous bishop of Peterborough who says, I don't have the quote exactly right,

but he effectively says he'd rather have people drunk than people be made compulsorily sober. And the trade really just asked for fair play in a way. And they could do this. They learned to organise. I think one of the points of the temperance movement, and James is talking about its tactics, is it does encourage the trade to get a bit more serious about organising.

And there's a test case in the 1890s that brings the need for licensing reform to a head. It's another Cumbrian example, actually, in the village of Kentmere in Westmoreland. There was a licensee who had her license cancelled, Susanna Sharp. And this was done. They hadn't necessarily done anything wrong.

It was a long way away from where the Kendall bench was based. They felt it was surplus to requirements. They wanted it gone, really. And this was appealed all the way up to the House of Lords. And what happened there was the House of Lords ruling stated that indeed magistrates did have this discretion. They could make these kinds of decisions. They could shape the licence landscape here. And by this point, they've got back control the magistrates of beerhouses that we talked about from the 1830s.

And they could basically decide on. need, should they so choose. But this had to be legal and regular. It had to be fair. That was the ruling. And the trade would appeal to this and repeatedly assert its rights as a legitimate business. Did the Kent Mayor pub stay open? No, because the magistrates had their unfettered discretion, provided they offered it in a judicious manner. And this ultimately led to the need for licensing reform. I think everyone knew something had to happen. and the parties were batting this backwards and forwards to a Royal Commission, which was supposed to solve all of this

in the final years of the 19th century, but famously split. You had a minority report signed by the chair, who moved from a kind of apparently ambivalent position towards a temperance position and decided that he wanted to set a kind of maximum number of pubs per head of population. And there was a majority report signed by brewers

and brewing interests in Parliament who'd been on the community. committee. And that helped, I think, make the argument that Pobbs were legitimate businesses, and if the state wanted to go about restricting the trade, it probably had to compensate them. And that's what eventually would happen with the unionist administration in 1904. The trade would see in law its rights written down that if the state wanted to take away its licenses, they'd be compensated for it. James, do you want to add a little bit to that? Is there anything you cannot? The Peel Commission was, in some ways, I think looking at it now, it sat for so long that it really considered every single possible solution to the liquor question.

It's an amazing repository of ideas. As David said, they had been careful to pick representatives of both the trade and the temperance interest as well as some neutral parties. But they'd also tried to make sure that all the different flavours of temperance were represented, as well as. as all the different trade arguments. So it was inevitable that it was going to be a compendious collection of ideas, but also that it was going to come to no real serious outcome. They couldn't possibly all agree. Anne-Marie, can we just go back for a moment to the spread of the temperance inside the community? Temple's women, did these halls provide for women and children?

Any significant extent? Yes, they did. They certainly provided for families rather than women and children as separate groups. women were involved in the temperance movement from an early stage but they didn't actually have a separate organisation until after the middle of the 1870s and I think this is because they were invisible in a way they were just assumed to be helping out but they were a very active part of the temperance movement and children were a subject of great concern as you can imagine

because many child workers were paid in pumps and we have reports in newspapers of the children being paid last and adults feeding them drinks so that they're amusing antics as they get drunker and drunker provide some entertainment. And of course the parents will be taking the pay anyway. So the image of the poor abandoned child is joined by the poor drunken child

and there was a great deal of concern about child welfare. Of course, temperance groups were quite overlapping, Many of the people who were involved in temperance were also active in anti-slavery, child protection, and therefore the concern about the child was quite predominant. And one of the areas where legislation was a little bit more successful was in protecting children and raising the age at which children were allowed to be sold drink and even age at which children were allowed to be given drink to take to adults In the early years of the 20th century, for example,

it was only just made law that children had to have alcohol in sealed and corked containers when they bought it at an off licence. Otherwise, they would have been free to drink it as soon as they left. David, how did the First World War affect the Temperance Movement? I think the First World War is seen as a remarkable opportunity for temperance to break out of some of the kind of constraints that we've seen, party-based or sectarian-based, all those myriad of options that were on the table.

And Lloyd George at the start of the war said that they felt that they were fighting Germany, Austria and drink, and the greatest of those foes was drink. So it seemed the time had come for the temperance movement. And yet the ultimate response from the state was to go back to all of those different options that are on the table that James was describing and pluck one out that would have seemed really remarkable, probably even just 10 years earlier and that was state purchase, state control.

So under the defence of the Realm Act, you saw decreasing strengths of beer, increasing duties on alcohol, and the creation by the state of something called the Central Control Board, which operated across a series of scheduled areas and remarkably in a very limited number of places, such as around the Cromerty Firth in Scotland,

where there were naval operations, Enfield in London, which was munitions. And again, back to Carlisle and Gretna where there was a very significant national factory producing cordite for shells, the state effectively took on, as in took into its ownership, the licensed trade. It's remarkable. They decreased the numbers of pubs. They changed their layout and decor. They promoted the sale of food. They even added counterattractions like bowls and billiards and such things.

and it really helped, I think, confirm, even in war, that the pub had a kind of place. And it was a remarkable experiment as an alternative form of temperance policy. A lot of the people in Carlisle, because I'd just live, turning out of myself of Carlisle, would get out of the town at weekends as fast as they could and go to nearby towns where there were pubs right up and down the street. But that's a frivolous footnote. No, but as a result, the Central Control Board extends its remit out of Carlisle and Gretton's. originally, all the way down towards the Solway Firth on both sides.

So it really wanted to stop that. It was a geographically sensitive policy. For example, in Motherwell, the magistrates there decided to ban the sale of whiskey. And the people who worked in the very large metalworking factories there got on the trams and went across to Hamilton. So that story would be seen in other places as well. And so it had to be very careful aboard and operate again judiciously and sensibly. And I think the media are hugely important.

In the First World War, for example, you had the discourse that the government was trying to deny ordinary working people, including soldiers, their drink. But on the other hand, you had the public campaign follow the king's lead because the king and the queen and all the royal households signed the pledge in 1915. and so this was used in terms of propaganda effectively. James, can you briefly tell us, did Britain try to apply these ideas of temperance in its colonies? Yes, it did, but again they were drawing on a range of different possibilities. So there was prohibition was something that was agreed or there was an attempted agreement between European powers

that were effectively dividing up Africa between them in the Scramble for Africa. there was an agreement that alcohol wouldn't be used as a trade good, however that was defined, because there was a fear that it was still part of an ongoing slave trade in African colony. So Britain would put lots of pressure on its European rivals, effectively, to do this. So there was a strong prohibition element, but at the same time they were also moving towards using alcohol as a source of revenue in India, some of those African colonies, by operating under the Gothamian. of the things that was suggested late in the 19th century was taken up by Roundtree of York and other temperance reformers who saw that prohibition wasn't going to fly. And it was also very

similar in many ways to some of the pubs that were operating in Carlisle under the state control later. But effectively this was a state, a municipally owned local pub. All the profits went to the development of the local area. So in East Africa and Southern Africa, housing was built through the revenue from drink. So essentially it was a way of making alcohol a key part of local revenue, local state control. Australia has Gothenburg pubs. Many of the Dominions experimented with this. Can you just spell that out of a little bit more, Göttenberg pubs, meaning? So the town in Sweden of Gothenburg experimented with municipal control and what they would eventually call disinterested management with the idea that if the local bar was run by an employee of the state

and they had a salary, then they wouldn't be interested in pushing beer, as they used to call it, they wouldn't promote it because there was no incentive in it for them. It also meant that they could control the facility. So these were often very bare and Spartan places, often without chairs, effectively. Effectively like saying if you need alcohol, you can get it, but you won't enjoy it. It's just, you know, a bit like perhaps safe drug rooms now, I don't know. We're coming to the end now. David Beggingham, how did the temperance movement change Britain? It changed Britain in a number of ways.

I think first of all, it should have warned the government never to touch alcohol, but that's a flipping point. I think it changed Britain in a way because some of the issues that we've been speaking about lasted well into the 20th century. So Carl Isle was part of that disinterested management system until 71, I think. And parts of Scotland, which was the only part, all the temperance movement that clung to local option had to show was a local option bill passed for Scotland.

and parts of Scottish towns such as Wicks stay dry into the 20th century as well. But I think come back to some of the points that Anne-Marie's been making, those kind of moral concerns, I think, really are the legacy of the temperance movement after things like Prohibition and after Parliament got fed up of dealing with the drink question. And I'm left wondering really about whether we're left with a kind of divisive way of thinking about drinking versus not drinking, an all too binary way of thinking about drinking, which the temperance movement in a way helped reinforce

so we think about binging or purging. We discriminate between public and private drinking practices and inevitably we discriminate about men's and women's drinking practices, for example. And I think that's one of those ways in which the temperance movement had a legacy well into the 20th century, and maybe beyond it. Could I add something there? I think the temperance movement, had a huge legacy on education

because when the Band of Hope started the Children's Movement in 1847, we still obviously didn't have state education and Sunday schools had been providing for generations of children to learn to read and write and the Band of Hope movement continued and expanded that and it was the biggest of the temperance groups from starting out with 300 children in a meeting in 47

By the turn of the century, it was over 3 million. It was over half the children. We're going in the evenings to Band of Hope lessons and learning to read, to write, to recite, to take responsibility. It was very much about children's own potential. And of course, as everyone said, the children didn't have to go, so it had to be entertaining. And if you look at comparative teaching techniques,

which I have in the board schools, the second half of the 19th century and in the Band of Hope, all these voluntary workers who were trained intensively were getting children involved, were encouraging the children to take charge in the lessons, which was not happening in the state system. So I think possibly our progressive attitudes to education come from the Band of Hope.

Finally, James, would you like to add your summing up? I think temperance did also manage to persuade people of the medical dangers of alcohol, as Anne-Marie's already said, but at first they were derided. It was seen as a very dangerous thing to stay off alcohol. I think that the doctors who early on started to argue that perhaps workhouse patients in infirmary shouldn't be given a beer ration, perhaps public schoolboys shouldn't be drinking, beer provided by the school,

perhaps asylums shouldn't be providing beer, perhaps hospitals shouldn't be providing beer. I think all of those arguments sounded ridiculous at first, and it's strange for us to think that that was well. medical and common understandings of health were. But within, I don't know, by the end of the century, certainly after the 1870s and 1880s, a lot of medical authorities are slowly coming around. So I think temperance doggedly stuck to its guns on that

and was proved right in the end. And while there are still arguments about how dangerous alcohol is, we certainly wouldn't give it out at schools anymore, I don't think. So we established some sort of basic understanding of the health dangers. Is it temperance movement around at the moment? Is it something that people can? It is very much so. Many of the large groups, because we talk about it as a movement,

but it was so many different groupings and different interests. It's an umbrella term. The independent order of Reckabites, for example, who James has written about, they were called Reckavites because the sons of Reckab in the Bible would not drink wine. Again, very soaked in the Bible, these early refurb. That started in 1835 in a coffee shop in Salford and it's still going now.

It's the international order and also their financial arm because it was a friendly society for working people is now called Healthy Investment. The Band of Hope that I referred to earlier changed its name in 1995 to Hope UK and still works in alcohol and drug education in schools. and for example the women's group which started out as the British Women's Temperance Association. It had various splits but it came back together in the 1930s and is now the White Ribbon Association since the 1990s. So there are still movements but they tend to concentrate on education and they tend to concentrate on anti-intoxicants, in other words, drugs as well as alcohol. Well, thank you very much. Thanks, Anne-Marie McAllister, and James Neal and David Beckingham, and to our studio engineer Tim Heffer. Next week, it's Walter Benjamin, the philosopher and critic, and his influential ideas on the impact that film and photography have on art and culture.

Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Was there anything that should have been said that wasn't said? I was just going to reply to Anne-Marie's last point actually and emphasise one of the legacies of the temperance movement and the British Women's Temperance Association Women involved in that I think we maybe didn't give enough to the middle-class purchase of temperance

and the value that women found in temperance to find a political voice and temperance allied itself with the questions of health and education which, according to the separate spheres or gender ideology of the day, were understood to be legitimate arenas in which women could campaign. But given that they had that investment in children, Anne-Marie's documented, you find women becoming very vocal within groups, the Church of England Temperance Society, for example.

And that, we shouldn't rush them along the path to suffrage. But I think that is a place where, if we're thinking about training for citizenship, if we're thinking about techniques, if we're thinking about learning to speak to politics, if we're thinking about how to pull people at a grassroots level into an organisation, there are interesting connections to draw out there

with respect to suffrage that would follow in the 20th century. Well, very much so. And the other thing I didn't get time to talk about was the split in the women's movement because, as you know, David, we got a president of the British Women's Temperance Association, Lady Isabella Somerset, who came very much under the influence of the women's Christian temperance union in America

that was just founded a couple of years before. And they had a much more do-it-all attitude, the famous remark of Francis Willard, who was one of their big leaders. And she felt that you had to do it all. You had to campaign on all fronts. You had to campaign for women's suffrage. You had to campaign for decriminalisation of prostitution. You had to campaign for temperance as part of a whole platform.

Many of the more traditional members didn't like that. And so, of course, there was the big split in the early 1890s. And you had two women's movements, which I think with hindsight was quite destructive, really, because you didn't get women working together, as you did, for example, in America, it was through women working together using that local option scheme that you were talking about, that they got prohibition in America.

Not that I'm saying prohibition would have been a good idea because I think it's something that turns out to bite you in the tail, isn't it, as we see? But I think the women's movement is absolutely fascinating and it did give a platform to so many women to get involved in a range of social improvement, causes. I think that's right, including things like writing and publishing,

Amory, which is very much the centre of your research. Well, I'm writing at the moment about women editors and women writers in the temperance movement and how they were empowered to do that because of their commitment, yeah. Do you want to come in? One of the things that I'm interested in

myself, and I hope other people might be, is the contribution that something perhaps a little unlikely made to people's understanding again of the medical dangers of alcohol and that's life insurance, because life insurance was strangely a source of evidence that proved that teetotalers seem to live longer or certainly the ones who assured themselves with the insurance companies that I've been researching and it was said those who don't drink don't die so fast

that was the kind of catchphrase of one of the actuaries who was involved with this the largest of these companies and it was something started in 1840 that seemed like a ridiculous idea It started because a T-Total businessman couldn't get his life assured because he was seen to be putting his health at risk. So he decided to set up his own firm. And by the last decade of the 19th century, it was the eighth largest firm in the country. Their ideas had persuaded large firms like Prudential

to stop insuring publicans because it was seen to be too much of a risk. And this wasn't just sentiment and prejudice. It was also the evidence that these firms were collecting clearly showed because that's what life insurance companies are interested. in that the mortality of publicans was far ahead of others, and also groups like butchers who were associated with heavy drinking because it was hard labour, as we were hearing earlier. So certain groups suddenly appeared to be a risk because of their drinking,

and that evidence had never really been considered before. It was the first time statistical evidence had been used to show that alcohol could be dangerous. So alongside those other medical arguments, strangely, this turned out to be a place where people took a bet, I think, really, on persuading the establishment. in medicine that this was safe and they turned out to have persuaded everyone else by the end of the 19th century.

Could I say something about media and the way in which drinking and temperance was represented because I think that's quite important. I mean going right back to the aftermath of the Beer Act you got the Daily Telegraph which was around at the time calling Blackburn

the most drunken town in England because they sent a reporter up there on an anthropological expedition to the north and saw men stripped to the waist fighting and wrote this shock horror article about it. And similarly, temperance was presented as a sort of kill-joy stereotype. Then, of course, after the First World War,

the brewer was so worried by the fact that people had stopped drinking so much that you got a huge advertising campaign using wall adverts, using handouts, leaflets, pamphlets, as well as trying to get copy in the newspapers. Guinness is good for you. Guinness is good for you.

What I particularly like is they came up with the slogan, beer is best. And a few weeks later, a brilliant temperance activist had come up with the slogan, beer is best for cancer. And it listed all the cancers

that beer was supposed to be included in. So it was almost like a tennis match between them as they tried to seize control of public opinion by using the media. It's absolutely fascinating. There's a really important point there, Anne-Marie, isn't there, about patriotism and citizenship? You used that word in the discussion earlier.

And the different ways in which people thought about what brought them together. And so temperance, there are many different facets to it and many different groups. But in the end, there is a question, what do they have in common? And what was their relationship to each other and to the state? And I think when you think about temperance in that way, and you think about this point we made at the beginning about self-improvement and about a 19th century world that is an expanding world of a franchise and opportunity.

Temperance makes just a little bit more sense. It still feels strange to me after many years of working on it, but in that mode, I can begin to understand it a little bit more, I think. I think it was an exciting movement. I think it captured people's imaginations and I referred to it before as a sort of revivalist feeling.

People signed these pledges and after the first few years when they just signed their name. They had beautifully ornamented pledges with gorgeous illustrations, which they framed and hung on the wall. And as well as being a commemoration, almost like we'd frame a degree certificate,

it was also a daily reminder. So I think that that sort of pleasure that was obtained from temperance is perhaps forgotten. We didn't talk about lantern slides. Anne-Marie does a very good lantern slide show. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say this. The lantern slides in which were reserved for the Selbushanamis, as I remember.

Oh, they were big users. But no, the Band of Hope was the largest producer of magic lantern slides in the second half of the 19th century. Sorry, I've got my geeky hat on there. But what I will say is that it's technology and social improvement coming together because the lantern slide had been around since the 18th century. But suddenly it became cheaper and smaller to make a lantern slide projector, and they were more portable. And initially you had the Band of Hope sending people out

with packs of lantern slides, again, like anthropologists, to travel to the wild parts of the country and give the provincials a show. But pretty soon, all the local bands of Hope have their own projector and their own slides. And it was a huge business. And I think we underestimate how amazing these lantern slides

must have been, beautifully coloured, really exciting, dramatic with people flinging themselves off balconies and things. And it's the equivalent really of when the talkies started or even when cinema started, I think. Well, thank you all very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. My name's Jonathan Meyerson and I wrote and directed Nuremberg, the new scripted podcast from BBC Radio 4. My father was a lawyer and he worked with several of the

British prosecutors who'd been at Nuremberg. So I grew up taking this huge trial for granted, the trial of the major Nazi war criminals. With six million murdered and ten million enslaved, how could these men not have faced justice? But it wasn't until I started researching that I discovered. It very nearly didn't happen. In the end, verdicts were delivered and sentences were carried out. But was it justice or was it vengeance? Subscribe to Nuremberg on BBC Sounds, and you can make up your own mind.