Introduction: Historical and cultural perspectives

Introduction

Historical and cultural perpectives

The sale of alcohol has been regulated for over 500 years. The system of licensing and control introduced by the Licensing Act 2003 is the latest attempt to regulate the sale and consumption of alcohol for the apparent benefit of society.

The current concerns about binge drinking in town centres and of cheap alcohol consumed by young, unemployed males, as being a major cause of alcohol-fuelled crime and disorder is nothing new. The British love of drink is one of the great historical truisms. As early as the 8th century, the missionary Saint Boniface was writing to Cuthbert, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to complain, “In your dioceses the vice of drunkenness is too frequent. This is an evil peculiar to pagans and to our race. Neither the Franks nor the Gauls nor the Lombards nor the Romans nor the Greeks commit it.”

Early legal regulation of alcohol

It took approximately 700 years for this concern to be recognised by legal regulation! In 1495 Henry VII enacted the first statute governing the conduct of alehouses. This statute empowered local justices to take financial sureties from the keepers of alehouses as a guarantee of their good conduct. Judges of Assize were given the power to suppress alehouses that were, in their view, unnecessary. Just over half a century later, in 1552, a proper system was created for licensing alehouses for the first time. Licensees were required to recognise their responsibility for running an orderly house, unlawful games were prohibited and drunkenness was outlawed.

Similarly, fear over the effects of excessive drinking is woven into our cultural fabric. In the 18th century the great moral panic was gin. In 1742 a population barely a tenth the size of today’s consumed 19 million gallons of gin - ten times as much as is drunk today. William Hogarth graphically depicted these concerns in his 1751 engraving ‘Gin Lane’, with its allegorical litany of drunken rioting, collapsing family bonds and endemic poverty. Gin Lane was of course located in London and the dangers of heavy drinking have traditionally been linked in the public consciousness with urban culture.

The industrialisation of early 19th century Britain created rapid urbanisation, causing an influx of thousands of country people into London and the growing cities of northern England. Instant escape from the misery of grinding poverty and exploitation was to be found in the bottle! The gin palaces of 18th and early 19th century Britain resembled factory assembly lines with an equally industrial attitude to drinking. There was little furniture and no food, just a long bar surrounded by gin barrels. These establishments are easily recognisable as the forerunners of today’s superpubs, geared up for mass-volume, vertical drinkers.

The government’s response was to champion the virtue of beer as a more wholesome refreshment. Hogarth’s engraving ‘Beer Street’ celebrated its healthy effects. In 1830, nearly 80 years later, the government passed the Beer Act that allowed any householder with a two-guinea licence to sell ale and porter - but not wine or spirits. The number of beer shops exploded and the pub began to take its place as a central part of working class culture. By the mid-1870s alcohol consumption reached a peak with 344 gallons of beer consumed per individual, per year.

The rise of Victorian moralism

The 19th century saw the first political expressions of middle class conscience. Humanitarianism was the ‘big idea’ of the 19th century - the abolition of slavery, the suffragettes and new laws governing child labour - were all examples of how the Victorian merchant class sought to build the civic framework of the new Jerusalem. The temperance movement was also a product of this era. Imported from America, at first to Ireland and then to Scotland, the temperance movement, with its evangelical denunciations of the evils of the ‘demon drink’, began to make its presence felt in Lancashire and Yorkshire during the 1840s.

Luminaries of the Temperance Society, such as George Cruikshank, graphically illustrated the Victorian disapproval of alcohol in his engraving ‘The Worship of Bacchus’ depicting ‘The Drinking Customs of Society - showing how universally the intoxicating liquors are used on every social occasion from the cradle to the grave’. The painting from which this engraving originated in 1869 is still in the possession of the Whitbread brewing family and is a masterpiece of protest against the perceived evils of drink.

Victorian capitalism needed its workers sober! Social alternatives to drinking, from tea parties to snooker clubs, were enthusiastically proffered while public pressure on brewers started to edge pubs out of city centres and into working class suburbs. Thomas Cook, the temperance campaigner and former Baptist preacher, went one stage further by taking the Victorian city’s wayward classes on uplifting rural excursions.

Gin Lane by William Hogarth

Beer Street by William Hogarth

Modern times

Current news media stories lamenting the city centre binge drinking culture and its connection with crime and disorder is therefore nothing new. The Licensing Act 2003 does however propose some departures from the past. The emphasis of the Act is on partnership between all the stakeholders - licensees, local residents, businesses and the police.

This handbook is designed to help personal licence holders understand the framework of law, regulation and social responsibility that surrounds their occupation at a time of unprecedented social change. Town and city centre licensing provides some of the most difficult challenges with deregulation of drinking hours and a youth culture where the consumption of other, illegal, stimulants seemingly a permanent cultural change. The modern drinking culture is embedded in a much more complex society than that experienced by Saint Boniface in the 8th century and our ability to make it socially acceptable will depend on our willingness to work together.