Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (41 page)

But for those who did survive it – and another long ban when the harvests failed again between 1766 and 1773 – there were profits to be made from a smaller market with fewer players in it. Thomas Cooke’s distillery was producing 300,000 gallons of corn spirits a year by the mid-1760s, as well as keeping 3,000 hogs on spent wash.
^19
*
William Currie’s company took on a new partner when the ban ended, and enlarged its stock value to £36,000. The company’s profits soared. They could barely make spirits fast enough. A letter to one customer complained that ‘casks are extremely scarce with us at present, [we] therefore desire the favour of you to return them as soon as possible.’ Frantic messages were despatched to London in search of fresh stocks of yeast.
²⁰

Malt distilling had always been a game for the rich. As stills
grew ever larger, it became even harder to force a way into the industry. Back in 1747, Robert Campbell had reckoned a distiller needed up to £5,000 to start in business.
²¹
But when William Currie started his company with two partners in 1749, they set out with a joint stock of £17,000 and outgoings of over £18,000.
²²
The days of the back-street distiller were over. Gin was no longer a social problem; it was big business. Lobbying against the corn ban in 1757, a supporter listed the trades that depended on the London distillery: ‘coopers, backmakers, coppersmiths, wormmakers, smiths, bricklayers, plumbers … all concerned in the coal trade … all employed in ploughing, sowing, reaping, and thrashing five or six thousand quarters of corn per week, for six or seven months in the year; the labourers, farmers … landlords … those that carry it to the sea or waterside, the captains or masters … sailors or bargemen, who bring it to London … lightermen, cornfactors, cornporters, carmen, millers, and many others that are concerned in bringing spices, seeds, sugars &c. from abroad, besides those that are employed in making spirits.’
²³
From the government’s point of view, there were clear advantages in having the industry controlled by a small number of powerful players. Carteret had set out the vision in 1743, arguing as his Bill’s ‘principal advantage’ that it would ‘bring the trade under some regulation, by confining it to those, who have some credit, and live comfortably by their businesses.’

Sir Joseph Mawbey, elected MP for Southwark the year after the distillery ban was lifted, had no interest in drunken gin-wives lying in the gutter outside his distillery. So the Gin Act of 1760 did everything it could to push the industry into the right hands. First, subsidies were offered on all spirits exports. There was nothing wrong with gin tipped down foreign throats. William Currie’s firm went into the export market with a will. ‘The exportation of spirits is a branch we intend to cultivate,’ the partners agreed; ‘the intent
of the legislature & of the ministry is to encourage it as much as possible.’
²⁴
They kept at it, despite burning their fingers with unreliable shippers and bad debts from Portuguese merchants. In the following year, 1761, there were even more obvious measures to encourage industrial concerns. A minimum limit was set on the size of distilleries, ostensibly to help the Excise Office keep track of production. From now on, distillers had to have a capacity of 100 gallons. If they wanted to qualify for export subsidies, they needed even more – a low-wine still with a minimum capacity of 800 gallons.

There had been a growing tendency for malt distillers to buy up compounders. That was outlawed in the 1760 Act, but the measure was repealed after only a year. From the 1760s on, the industry would be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. When Parliament surveyed the malt distillers in 1803, it would find that just nine names owned ninety per cent of still capacity. And those names, by the 1760s, were starting to sound familiar. The Booth family had begun as brewers and vintners in the 1740s. By 1751 John Booth was selling gin; his Turnmill Street distillery opened soon afterwards. Robert Burnett was already in business by then, with a huge distillery on the waterfront in Vauxhall. At the end of his career, he would be knighted, and would become a Sheriff of the City of London. Alexander Gordon founded his distilling business in 1769. By the end of the century, Gordon’s and Booth’s would be sending out more than half a million gallons of gin a year.

Distilling had come a long way from the days of Dudley Bradstreet. There was no longer a still in every chandler’s shop. The ‘running, shabby fellows’ had been swept away. But for those who remained, there were ever-increasing profits to be made. By 1783, William Currie’s company would be valued at £80,000. Still thriving in 1845, the firm invested £30,000 in a Vine
Street compounding firm called Tanqueray’s. Soon afterwards they merged with Gordon’s.

But by then the wheel had come full circle. 1760 brought in an uneasy truce between drinkers and reformers. Gin didn’t go away. The papers in 1764 reported two gin-soaked builders at Gray’s Inn drunkenly lobbing bricks at each other; one was hit on the head and died.
²⁵
Pierce Egan described his Regency swells looking for low-life kicks in ‘All Max’, a gin-shop in Whitechapel: ‘Lascars, blacks, jack tars, coal-heavers, dustmen, women of colour, old and young, and a sprinkling of the remnants of once fine girls, &c., were all
jigging
together.
Heavy wet
was the cooling beverage, but frequently overtaken by
flashes of lightning
.’
²⁶
Panic about gin didn’t disappear either. In the 1790s, Hannah More would show all the old hatred of Madam Geneva in
The Gin-Shop; or, a peep into a prison
:

The state compels no man to drink,

Compels no man to game;

’Tis gin and gambling sink him down

To rags, and want, and shame.

Gin-drinking had been a response to insecurity. The Gin Craze had been born from a culture of risk and opportunity in a town that offered both in abundance. And as the population of London started to boom at the end of the eighteenth century, as industrialisation gathered pace, conditions in the slums could only worsen, and with them the lot of immigrants working long hours in squalid conditions.

Francis Place campaigned against drink all his life, but even he could understand ‘the sickening aversion which at times steals over the working man, and utterly disables him for a longer or a shorter period, from following his usual occupation, and compels
him to indulge in idleness.’ Maybe it would have been helpful if someone back in 1736 had stopped to wonder what made the poor turn to drink in the first place. ‘It is not easy,’ Place went on, ‘for any one who has not himself been a working man, accurately to estimate the agreeable sensations produced by the stimulus of strong liquor … yet so constant are these effects, that he who has scarcely any other means of excitement producing enjoyment, will in almost all cases … endeavour to produce them as often as he has the power, and dares venture to use it.’
²⁷

Soon into the nineteenth century, London’s population burst a million. Newly anonymous, newly insecure, slums sucked in migrants to a world of hard work and ill health; a new world of risk. Maybe that would have been enough by itself to ignite a second Gin Craze. But in 1825, as if they were determined to recreate the conditions of the early eighteenth century, the government decided to throw fuel on the flames. They declared free trade in spirits.

Free trade was the call on every side – beer was liberalised at the same time. Old restrictions were to be swept aside; the economy would boom. Eighty years of pragmatic control over gin were ended. The cost of a spirit licence was more than halved, and spirit duties slashed. The result was dramatic. In 1826, spirit production more than doubled, hitting a level that hadn’t been seen since 1743. By the end of the decade more than 45,000 licences were being issued every year.

‘Everybody is drunk,’ Sydney Smith wrote to John Murray. ‘Those who are not singing are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state.’
²⁸
They soon had new places to be beastly in. In the gin debate back in 1743, Lord Talbot had given the House of Lords a dire vision of what London could expect if Madam Geneva was allowed to settle down in the city. ‘We may expect to see a long catalogue of drams wrote in gold letters upon every sign-post,’ he had warned, ‘and those that enter will certainly find … casks or
vessels piled up a-top of one another, with a luscious description of its contents in capital letters upon every one. Nay … these casks [will be] exposed to the view of every [passer-by], and the shop or public room always full of customers … These, and many more allurements than I can think of, will certainly be made use of by those that are to be licensed to sell spirituous liquors.’ In 1834, giving evidence to the House of Commons select committee on Drunkenness, a Tothill Street grocer described the new Gin Palace which had just opened across the road from his shop: ‘It was converted into the very opposite of what it had been, [from] a low dirty public house with only one doorway, into a splendid edifice, the front ornamental with pilasters, supporting a handsome cornice and entablature and balustrades, and the whole elevation remarkably striking and handsome … the doors and windows glazed with very large squares of plate glass, and the gas fittings of the most costly description … When this edifice was completed, notice was given by placards taken round the parish; a band of music was stationed in front … the street became almost impassable from the number of people collected; and when the doors were opened the rush was tremendous; it was instantly filled with customers and continued so till midnight.’

Gin Palaces arrived in the late 1820s, and soon they were everywhere. The Select Committee on Drunkenness (which could do nothing to stem the tide) heard that ‘there is a company formed in London for the purpose of buying any old free public house that can be met with, and they are then fitted up in the palace-like style in which they are now seen.’ In Lambeth’s New Cut, one witness told them, ‘I suppose there are £25,000 being spent in building gin-shops. I should think they must cost £7,000 or £8,000 each house.’

It was a new Gin Craze, and the new Gin Panic soon followed. The phrase was coined by Henry Fearon, pioneer of the Gin Palace,
in a newspaper article in 1830. Anti-spirits societies appeared in Glasgow and Ulster in 1829, and spread to Blackburn in 1830. On 1 September 1832, in Preston, Lancashire, seven pioneers signed the pledge of total abstinence, and for the next forty years, through interminable feuds, mergers and divisions, children’s rallies and temperance tracts, marches and fund-raising events, campaigns in Parliament and thunderous sermons from the pulpit, through rows between prohibitionists and moral suasionists, through Bands of Hope and anguished confessions from penitents, the panic about drink would run uncontrolled.

There were more sober voices as well. In the early 1830s a young journalist called Charles Dickens visited one of the new Gin Palaces. He found gilt-labelled barrels, plate glass, polished mahogany and despair. He was shocked by the drunkenness and the tawdry splendour, shocked by the ‘throng of men, women and children,’ who, as the evening ended, dwindled ‘to two or three occasional stragglers – cold, wretched-looking creatures, in the last stage of emaciation and disease.’ But he withheld judgement. ‘Gin drinking is a great vice in England,’ Dickens wrote in conclusion, ‘but wretchedness and dirt are greater and until you improve the homes of the poor, or persuade a half-famished wretch not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his own misery, with the pittance, which, divided among his family would furnish a morsel of bread for each, ginshops will increase in number and splendour.’
²⁹

EPILOGUE

The bill now before us may indeed, Sir, very properly be called an experiment: It is, I believe, one of the boldest experiments in politics that was ever made in a free country
.

William Pulteney, House of Commons prohibition debate, 16 February 1736

Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose
.

Herbert Hoover, Presidential Election Campaign, 1928

O
n 16 January 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the necessary three-quarters of the States, and America faced prohibition.

It was the culmination of a long campaign by reformers to save America from itself. Prohibition came in at a time of dizzying economic growth and frightening social change; a time of risk. The great cities were swelled by hordes of immigrants. They were fuelled by speculation, given over to wild hedonism. Prohibition was the attempt of small-town America to hold back the tide. Change had got out of hand. America no longer seemed a land of certainties, of
farmers tilling their own ground and praying in church on Sunday. Suddenly it was a country of strange languages and overnight millionaires, of saloons and nightclubs, dancing girls and jazz music. Prohibition dragged America back to safe ground.