Preston’s Monument to its Trailblazing Temperance Campaigners By Margaret Brecknell The reference in the Preston pledge to “all liquor” is significant, reflecting a change in stance on the part of the seven signatories. Many of the earlier temperance campaigners had tended to focus on the need to reduce the amount of alcohol consumed rather than abstaining from it completely. Others had campaigned on one particular social problem such as the issues caused by excessive beer drinking in working class men. Now “the seven men of Preston”, as they came to be known, were signing what was effectively the first teetotal pledge of its kind anywhere in the world. So new was this concept that the word “teetotal” didn’t even exist at the time the pledge was signed. The story goes that the word was coined the following year when at a meeting of the Preston Temperance Society a speaker called Richard Turner struggled over the word “total” because of a speech impediment. Those seven early trailblazers were soon joined by many more. By March 1834 the Preston Chronicle was reporting that the Preston Temperance Society’s membership had risen to nearly three thousand people, of whom some six hundred had pledged to abstain totally “from all intoxicating fluids” for the next twelve months. The concept of teetotalism was already spreading further afield by this juncture too. Above: Preston Abstinence Memorial - Source: Tony Worrall Photography
In Preston Cemetery there stands an impressive Gothic monument, which commemorates the achievements of the Preston men who founded the Temperance Movement. The inscription on it reads “Erected 1859 to commemorate the origin in Preston of total abstinence from all intoxicating liquor”. The story of this intriguing relic of the Victorian age and the movement which it commemorates is still worth recalling today.
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he Preston Temperance Movement dates back to September 1832 when seven men signed a pledge “to refrain from all liquor of an intoxicating quality, whether they be ale, porter, wine or ardent spirits, except as medicine” at a meeting held at the old Cockpit on Stoneygate in the town. A Temperance Society had been established in Preston earlier that same year. Part of a social movement which had originated in the United States during the 1820s, these societies, whose original aim was to encourage people to moderate their consumption of alcohol, were becoming increasingly popular in the UK too.
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The Preston group’s prime mover was Joseph Livesey, a charismatic local man with a gift for public speaking. Born in March 1794 at Walton-le-Dale near Preston, Livesey spent his early working life as a weaver. He moved to Preston following his marriage in 1815. The next year he is said to have realised the money to be made in the cheese trade after being advised by a doctor to eat a little cheese to help with an ailment from which he was suffering. He borrowed a sovereign from a family friend to purchase his first cheese and began what soon proved to be a highly successful business. Livesey was quite a wealthy individual by the time he became involved with the temperance movement, but as a self-made man from a working-class background he was seemingly able to connect with the poorer members of society, whom earlier campaigners had tended to bypass. His charitable work was not merely confined to the temperance movement. He was also instrumental in the establishment in 1828 of a new educational facility in Preston, the impressively named Institute for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. This later became known as the Harris Institute and now forms part of the University of Central Lancashire. For over fifty years, right up to his death in September 1884, Livesey toured the country giving lectures on the subject of teetotalism. He was also a prodigious writer. He owned his own printing press and over the course of his lifetime must have circulated millions of magazines www.lancmag.com
