Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (40 page)

THE DEVIL’S PACT

I
t wasn’t anything to do with Thomas Wilson, or Henry Fielding, or any of the reformers. In 1757, Britain faced a crisis more serious even than the Seven Years War. In 1757, after forty years of generally cheap corn, after ten years in the 1740s which were ‘as good … as ever were known in succession,’
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the harvest failed.

In London, Parliament wasted no time in banning exports of corn and malt. On 11 March, they followed with an Act ‘To prohibit … the making of low wines and spirits, from wheat, barley, malt, or any other sort of grain.’ It was a temporary measure, passed ‘for a limited time.’ But in May the ban was extended until the end of the year, and when the next harvest proved no better, it was extended again. The distillers lobbied for all they were worth, but this time their pleas fell on deaf ears. Parliament was scared of the distillers, but it was more scared of a hungry mob who couldn’t afford bread. In the end, the ban on distilling corn would stay in place for four years. The sun started to shine again only in 1760. That year the corn grew, and the arguments started in earnest.

Parliament faced a quandary. The trouble was that three years of prohibition had whetted the appetites of reformers for more. They had seen the effects of a ban for themselves. ‘Certain it is,’ wrote one campaigner, ‘that the prohibition of Gin put an end to drunkenness.’
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Spirits could still be made from imported molasses and sugar, but it was a trickle compared with what the distillers had made before. In 1760, they would produce barely a quarter of the amount they had made in 1751. And, most important of all for the reformers, higher prices put spirits beyond reach of the poor. ‘On stopping the use of this intoxicating poison,’ the same writer went on, ‘it was almost incredible to see what a change there soon appeared among the same order of people, how they again at once became sober, industrious, vigorous, hardy, brave and governable.’ It was a good time to make the case. Sober soldiers and gin-less sailors had just won Britain her
annus mirabilis
, with stunning victories over the French in North America and Europe. Freed from the tyranny of Madam Geneva, the poor seemed eagerly to have embraced middle-class virtues. ‘The very poor themselves,’ the writer went on ecstatically, ‘talk’d with gladness and thankfulness of their deliverance from rottenness and rags.’ It seemed impossible – unthinkable – that any government could contemplate letting the distillers charge their stills again. ‘Is it already to be forgot,’ he finished, ‘how the infection of gin-drinking spread even among our women and children, and how, by the universality of it, our streets were pestered with scenes of horror and distress? … In the reign of Gin … was there a manufacturer, or indeed a housekeeper, that could manage or depend on their servants or workmen?’

But the ban had only ever been a temporary measure. Now the price of corn was falling again, and the distillers wanted their trade back. In 1760, Sir Joseph Mawbey, one of the biggest malt distillers in London, put pen to paper and published a detailed list of
Queries in Defence of the Malt-Distillery
. He didn’t deny the
‘reformation amongst the manners of the people, since the stoppage of the malt distillery.’ But Sir Joseph could find reasons for it besides the ban on distilling. In 1748, peace and the return of the troops had caused a crime wave. Remobilisation in 1756 had had the opposite effect. Yesterday’s drunkards were now toiling across a plain somewhere in India. And any change in behaviour at home could be ascribed to the Act of 1751. ‘[Was not] the quantity of malt spirits, made before the [ban],’ he asked, ‘inconsiderable, in comparison of what were formerly made; and … did not [that Act] reduce the consumption more than a third and consequently remove great part of the evils of dram-drinking?’

Among reformers, Sir Joseph’s arguments provoked instant outrage. Two sets of
Answers
were published, one (‘intended to save millions’) ‘shewing it to be both a religious and political sin to distil spirits from corn.’ One paper in particular, the
Monitor
, took up the reform case. In a series of articles, widely reprinted, it tore headlong into the distilling industry. Desperate to revive memories of the bad old days, it even exhumed Judith Defour (‘How shocking is it to remember that wretched mother, who murdered her own child, threw it into a ditch, and stripped it of cloaths, just put on by a charitable person, to pawn them for nine pennyworth of gin’
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). The more frightening statistics from the physicians’ evidence from 1751 were repeated, as was the memory of a time when ‘7,000 out of 12,000 quarters of wheat, sold in the London markets per week, were converted into spirituous liquors.’ It was zealotry at its most zealous. The
Monitor
would return to the subject no fewer than eleven times in the course of spring 1760. It would dig up all the old chestnuts about distillers adulterating spirits. It would threaten the end of British liberties. The extreme case was pushed to its limits. ‘Reason and sound policy,’ the paper thundered, ‘religion and self-interest, our duty to God, our
neighbour, and to ourselves, enforce the expediency, and necessity of continuing the prohibition.’

Pragmatists were caught in the middle. While the reformers ranted on one side, distillers were clamouring for the return of their ‘property’ on the other. In the background, meanwhile, landowners were wondering what to do with all their surplus barley.

To some eyes, though, that offered an opportunity. Three years of prohibition had softened the distillers up to accept duties which they would normally have fought tooth and nail. Desperate to be seen as responsible, they were even making the case for higher duties themselves. One supporter of Sir Joseph Mawbey went into print arguing for ‘the laying such a farther duty on all spirits, as, though it may prevent excess in the use of them, may still not be so great, as to debar the poor, on necessary occasions, the proper use of them.’
⁴
They would accept anything if it would only get the stills working again. But the opportunity wouldn’t be there forever. If, as one pragmatist argued, ‘the prohibition were to be continued till greater plenty shall come, the clamor would be so great to have it opened, that the distillery would not readily submit to the high duties exacted at present; therefore this seems to be the critical juncture, at which we can make the best terms in favour of the regulations necessary to be enforced, for the safety of the people.’
⁵

In print, the distillers may have produced honeyed words (‘Gin being dear has produced sobriety,’ was one demure line, ‘gin being kept as dear will secure sobriety’
⁶
). Behind the scenes their lobbying was as ruthless as ever. A Bill was introduced to restore corn distilling – with increased duties – in March 1760. Egged on by the reform camp, the City had voted for a petition against it ‘by a great majority.’ But letters soon appeared in the papers urging them to change sides. By the time the Bill reached the Lords, a second petition was voted down by the City by 43–42.
⁷

Other cracks started to appear in the prohibitionist position.
There were, after all, those who profited from the ban on distilling corn. West Indian sugar planters were rumoured to have increased rum imports from 650,000 gallons to well over a million gallons. Their aim, according to Sir Joseph Mawbey and his followers, was obviously ‘to procure the temporary prohibition to become a permanent law. The true motive of [the reformers] is undoubtedly their interest.’
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When the
Monitor
’s righteous indignation began to look less than impartial, support for prohibition fell away. The
Gentleman’s Magazine
had started out advocating prohibition, but the scales soon fell from its eyes. ‘[People] now find how much they have been abused,’ it wrote sorrowfully, ‘by the interested relations of sugar-planters, West India factors, brandy-merchants, sugar-bakers, brokers, and brewers; all of whom have very good reasons for espousing the sugar distillery in opposition to the malt distillery.’
⁹

And so, once again, the pragmatists triumphed. ‘The price of British-made spirits,’ one commentator wrote after the new Act went through, ‘which after the prohibition could only be made from molasses, rose considerably, and it was found that the consumption diminished in proportion. This hint could not escape the eye of government. The determination was, by some means or other to keep the price of spirituous liquors at that height to which they had risen upon the prohibition. This was about £21 17s. 6d per ton above what they had been before.’
¹⁰

Either by good luck or good judgement, the compromise which Carteret had introduced back in 1743 had turned into a consistent policy. The 1746 and 1751 Gin Acts had ratcheted up spirit duties. Since then there had been an extra pound added to spirit licence fees by way of stamp duty (the war was on its way; there was a £2m loan to finance, and by now governments knew exactly where to turn for cash). When it came to enforcement, Acts in 1753 and 1754 had closed loopholes in the 1751 Act, clamped
down on unlicensed retailers and limited spirit imports. Now an extra fivepence a gallon went on low wines made from corn, and a full one and threepence extra on corn-based spirits, more than doubling the spirit duty.

It all meant a big change for London drinkers. Back in 1745, spirits had sold at £23 a ton. After the Act of 1760, the spirit duty alone would come to more than that. The whole point of gin was that it had been cheap, but it was cheap no longer. Slowly, by dribs and drabs, drinkers started to wander across the page from Gin Lane back into Beer Street.

Porter had been around for almost forty years, but at threepence a pot it had never been able to compete with Mother Gin. ‘For a halfpenny a man may get a dram of Geneva,’ the
Daily Post
had commented in the bad old days of 1736, ‘tho’ he has not always three halfpence to purchase a pint of porter.’
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With three halfpence in his pocket, a gin-drinker could be nearing dead drunk and on his way to the free straw. All that changed with the distillery ban. ‘Gin is now so dear, or else so very bad,’ wrote Henry Fielding’s half-brother John in 1758, ‘that good porter gains the pre-eminence, and I doubt not, but at year’s end, there will be found a considerable increase in the consumption of that commodity.’
¹²
Confirmation came from
An Essay on Bread
published in the same year. ‘Porter is almost become the universal cordial of the populace,’ the author claimed, ‘especially since the necessary period of prohibiting the corn-distillery; the suppression presently advanc’d the price of that common poison Gin, to near three times its former price, and the consumption of beer has kept pace with such advance.’
¹³

The price of a pot of porter went up to threepence halfpenny in 1760, but it still looked attractive alongside expensive gin. Maybe porter suited the new mood of the times as well. It was an aspirational drink, a middle-class drink. Porter, as one commentator put it, was designed ‘for the suppers of such people who are too
poor to drink wine, and too rich to drink table-beer.’
¹⁴
Whatever the reason, spirit production didn’t recover from the distillery ban between 1757 and 1760. Between the 1751 Act and the onset of the ban, it averaged four and a half million gallons a year; the two decades after 1760 saw it level out below two and a half million gallons.

The Gin Craze was over; the panic which accompanied it could subside. But Madam Geneva hadn’t been outlawed. 1743, the turning-point, had been a pact with the devil, and so were the Acts which followed it – 1760 most of all. The authorities got tax revenues, control of the industry and, in the end, a declining drink problem. In return, Madam Geneva got to move out of the back-streets into smart new accommodation.

In 1790, Thomas Pennant made a tour of London, publishing a book to describe what he saw. One day he took a boat across the river to Lambeth, and there he halted in amazement. He found himself looking at ‘the vast distilleries, till of late the property of Sir Joseph Mawbey.’

Two hundred years later, that site would be the Beefeater Gin Distillery. In 1790, there weren’t just stills and vats on the site. For years, distillers had been profiting from sidelines as well. Pennant commented that ‘there are seldom less than two thousand hogs grunting at this place; which are kept entirely on the grains.’
¹⁵
Distillers’ hogs victualled the navy which was spreading British empire overseas. Reformers threw up their hands in horror at the idea of ‘a still, that can daily work one hundred and forty quarters of corn … or more corn in a week than grows in a whole county.’
¹⁶
But that was the other side of the devil’s pact. With 1760, the industrialisation of gin arrived in earnest.

It was happening to beer as well. The previous two decades had seen the emergence of the great names who would dominate
London brewing for the next two centuries: Samuel Whitbread, Felix and Sir William Calvert, Benjamin Truman, Parsons, Hope. By 1748, a dozen breweries were producing more than a third of the strong beer in London. Samuel Whitbread’s huge Chiswell Street brewery went up in 1750. (Thomas Pennant thought ‘the sight of a great London brewhouse exhibits a magnificence unspeakable.’)

Among distillers, the ban of the late 1750s did much to weed out the smaller players. It was tough even for well-financed companies. William Currie’s house saw profits of £2,000–£3,000 a year slump until they were barely breaking even.
¹⁷
Without corn mash in the vats, the number of hogs they could raise was virtually halved. According to one later author, only twelve of London’s ‘capital’ houses weathered the storm of the late 1750s.
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