Abstract
This chapter explores the origins, purpose, evolution and reasons for the decline and revival of the coffee public-house movement. Christianity’s role, conflicting goals (sobriety versus total abstinence), class prejudices, condescension to working-class culture, rational recreation, an almost exclusive male clientele, widespread misunderstanding of the residuum’s income and tantalising cash—all contributed to the demise of a movement in which reformers had invested sizeable sums of money, estimated at £2,000,000.
In this chapter, I offer a new revisionist thesis in which I argue that promoters of coffee public houses recovered from the downturn of the market late in the 1870s and early 1880s, and remained a viable reform approach well past the century. Inability to overcome gender segregation, not achieving class integration, doomed these philanthropists, thwarting their aims of transforming mass leisure.
For the purposes of understanding the emergence of the mass food market in the City, coffee pubs contributed two figures—Ronald McDougall and Robert Lockhart—who would play a key role in linking northern temperance advocates with those of the south.
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Notes
- 1.
Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815–72, 2nd ed. (Keele University: Keele University Press, 1994), p. 296; [J.J. Manley], “The Temperance Refreshment House Movement,” British Almanac Companion 53 (1880): 47; “The Coffee Public-House Movement,” Chambers’s Journal 56 (1879): 144; Eve Lockington and Win Trickey, “The Coffee House Movement,” Loughton & District Historical Society 154 (Oct. 2002): 3.
- 2.
Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, pp. 302–04.
- 3.
Robert Thorne, “Places of Refreshment in the Nineteenth-Century City,” in Anthony D. King (ed.) Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 244; Malcolm Elliott, “The Leicester Coffee-House and Cocoa-House Movement,” Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society 47 (1971–1972): 56; H.J. Dyos, “Workmen’s Fares in South London, 1860–1914,” Journal of Transport History 1 (1953): 3–19.
- 4.
H.A. Shannon, “The Limited Companies of 1866–83,” Economic History Review 4 (1933): 308; Thorne, “Places of Refreshment,” p. 239; E.T. Bellhouse, “The Coffee-House Movement,” Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society (1880): 122–23.
- 5.
Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, p. 303.
- 6.
Mrs Hind Smith, “British Workman Public-Houses; or, Public-houses without the Drink,” Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1872), p. 591; see also Peter Roger Mountjoy, “Thomas Bywater Smithies, Editor of the British Workman,” Victorian Periodicals Review 18 (1985): 46–56.
- 7.
E. Hepple Hall, Coffee Taverns, Cocoa Houses and Coffee Places: Their Rise, Progress, and Prospects (London: S.W. Partridge, [1878]), pp. 15–16.
- 8.
Ibid., pp. 34–5, 38; National Temperance League 1881 Annual Report; Smith, “British Workman Public-Houses,” p. 591.
- 9.
The Northerner Blog, “Newcastle Latest City to Open ‘Dry Bar’”; Hind Smith, “British Workman Public-Houses,” p. 591; Hall, Coffee Houses and Coffee Palaces, p. 15.
- 10.
C.C. Smith’s untitled paper, National Temperance League Congress, Liverpool, June, 1884 (Liverpool: National Temperance Publication Depot, 1884).
- 11.
Hall, Coffee Taverns and Coffee Palaces, pp. 21–4, 39–40.
- 12.
See Chap. 1, n. 18, Table 1.2, and Chap. 5.
- 13.
W. Peskett, “Work in Liverpool,” Coffee Public-House News, 1 Aug. 1884.
- 14.
P.T. Winskill and Joseph Thomas, History of the Temperance Movement in Liverpool and District, from its Introduction in 1829 Down to the Year 1887 (Liverpool: Joseph Thomas, 1887), p. 214.
- 15.
Peskett, “Work in Liverpool”; “Representative Temperance Caterer, No. 2: Mr. W.H. Preskett,” Temperance Caterer, 3 Sept. 1887.
- 16.
Thomas Hogben, “The Coffee Public-House Movement,” A Hand-Book of Temperance History (London: National Temperance Publications Depot, 1882), pp. 119–20.
- 17.
John N. Tarn, Five Per Cent Philanthropy: An Account of Housing in Urban Areas between 1840 and 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); National Temperance Congress: Liverpool, June, 1884 (Liverpool: National Temperance Publication Depot, 1884), p. 195.
- 18.
Bellhouse, “Coffee-House Movement,” p. 123.
- 19.
Coffee Public-House News, 1 Apr. 1884; W.R. Lambert, Drink and Sobriety in Victorian Wales, c. 1820–c.1895 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1983), p. 105.
- 20.
Coffee Public-House News, 1 Jan. 1885.
- 21.
“The Coffee-Shop,” Punch 82 (1882): 84.
- 22.
Bellhouse, “Coffee-House Movement,” p. 121.
- 23.
Ibid., pp. 121–2; Coffee Public-House News, 2 Dec. 1878.
- 24.
Hall, Coffee Taverns and Coffee Palaces, pp. 54, 58; James Freeman Clarke, Coffee Houses and Coffee Palaces in England (Boston: George H. Ellis, 1882), pp. 17–20; P.T. Winskill (ed.), The Temperance Movement and its Workers: A Record of Social, Moral, Religious, Political Progress (London: Blackie & Son, 1891), 3: 175; “Dr. Barnardo Turned a Gin Palace into a Coffee House,” Look & Learn 666 (9 Nov. 1974).
- 25.
J. Jepson, “The Coffee House Movement in London,” Coffee Public-House News, 1 May 1884.
- 26.
John Burnett, Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 84–6; John Burnett, Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day (1966; rev. ed.: London: Methuen & Co., 1983), p. 263; J. Othick, “The Cocoa and Chocolate Industry in the Nineteenth Century,” in Derek Oddy and Derek Miller (eds.), The Making of the Modern British Diet (London: Croom Helm, 1976), pp. 77–8, 86–7; Coffee Public-House News, 1 Nov. 1886; Anon. to Editor, 16 Oct. 1886, Coffee Public-House News, 16 Oct. 1886.
- 27.
Practical Hints for the Management of Coffee Taverns (London: Coffee Tavern Company [1878]), p. 8.
- 28.
Norman Longmate, The Waterdrinkers: A History of Temperance (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968), p. 209.
- 29.
Joseph Bentley, “Temperance Restaurants and Coffee Houses in Britain,” in John Newton Stearns (ed.), Temperance in All Nations: History of the Cause in All Countries of the Globe (New York: National Temperance Society & Publication House, 1893), 2: 382; H. Birch, “About Coffee Houses—How to Manage Them,” Coffee Public-House News, 2 Jan. 1882.
- 30.
“Coffee Public-House Movement,” p. 144; Elliott, “Leicester Coffee-House Movement,” p. 57.
- 31.
“British Workman Public-Houses and Other Aids to Temperance,” in P.T. Winskill (ed.), Temperance Movement, 3: 213; Coffee Public-House News, 1 July 1881 and 1 Nov. 1882.
- 32.
Bellhouse, “Coffee-House Movement,” p. 122; National Temperance League, 1881 Annual Report.
- 33.
Andrew Davison, “‘Try the Alternative’: The Built Heritage of the Temperance Movement,” Journal of the Brewery History Society 123 (summer, 2006): 103–04.
- 34.
Hogben, “Coffee Public-House Movement,” p. 123; J. Jepson, “Coffee House Movement in London”; P.T. Winskill and Joseph Thomas, History of the Temperance Movement in Liverpool and District, from its Introduction in 1829 Down to the Year 1887 (Liverpool: Joseph Thomas, 1887), 3: 175.
- 35.
Bellhouse, “Coffee-House Movement,” pp. 119–20.
- 36.
Hall, Coffee Taverns, p. 39; [Manley], “Temperance Refreshment House Movement,” p. 49; Hogben, “Coffee Public-House Movement,” p. 123.
- 37.
Clarke, Coffee Houses, p. 22.
- 38.
Coffee Public-House News, 1 May 1884; Bellhouse, “Coffee-House Movement,” p. 123; Thorne, “Places of Refreshment,” p. 245.
- 39.
Bellhouse, “Coffee-House Movement,” p. 123; Hogben, “Coffee Public-House Movement,” pp. 119, 125.
- 40.
Mark Girouard, “Pubs with No Beer: The Victorian Coffee Public House,” Country Life, 9 Oct. 1975, pp. 926–28.
- 41.
Bentley, “Temperance Coffee Houses,” 2: 378–79.
- 42.
Girouard, “Pubs with No Beer,” p. 928; C.C.Smith’s paper at the National Temperance Congress, June, 1884, p. 195.
- 43.
“Coffee Public-House Movement,” p. 144; also see Coffee Public-House News, 2 Oct. 1882 and 1 May 1884; Hogben, “Coffee Public-House Movement,” p. 125.
- 44.
Coffee Public-House News, 1 July 1882.
- 45.
Stephen Bourne, “The Social Influence of the Coffee-House Movement,” Coffee Public-House News, 1 Sept. 1881.
- 46.
Coffee Public-House News, 1 March 1883.
- 47.
Ibid., 1 July 1882.
- 48.
Peter Haydon attributed the movement’s failure to the withdrawal of financing by wealthy supporters, though he provided no evidence of this. This view was reiterated in a later study. Another study focused more on the defects of day-to-day business operations, citing poor locations, inept managers and high rents as the most important factors (Peter Haydon, The English Pub: A History (London: Robert Hale, 1994), p. 241; Michael Flynn, Caroline Ritchie and Andrew Roberts, Public House and Beverage Management: Key Principles and Issues (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000), unpaginated; D.J. Richardson, “J. Lyons & Co. Ltd.: Caterers & Food Manufacturers, 1894 to 1939,” in Derek Oddy and Derek Miller (eds.), The Making of the Modern British Diet (London: Croom Helm, 1976), p.163).
- 49.
Bentley, “Temperance Coffee Houses,” 2: 379.
- 50.
Bellhouse, “Coffee-House Movement,” pp. 119–20; Bentley, “Temperance Coffee Houses,” 2: 382; Bob Osborn, The History of Yeovil’s Pubs (n.p., n.d.); Caroline Oldcorn Reid, “Middle Class Values and Working Class Culture in Nineteenth Century Sheffield” (Unpublished University of Sheffield, Ph.D., 1976), p. 477. The pace of decline varied considerably. Nottingham had five coffee houses in 1881, four of them still doing business in 1895. By 1900, however, only one appeared in Kelly’s Directory. Leicester coffee public houses, in contrast, flourished until 1900. Beverley’s two establishments endured until the turn of the century, with one shedding its temperance ethos and becoming a commercial proposition (Terry Fry, “The Pleasures of Tea and Coffee: An Account of Tea Gardens and Coffee Houses in and Around Nottingham in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” Nottinghamshire Historian 57 (Autumn/Winter, 1996): 10; Davison, “Built Heritage of the Temperance Movement,” p. 106; Brad Beven, Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men in Britain, 1850–1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 68; Paul Gibson, A Toast to the Town: A History of Beverley’s Public Houses (Kingston upon Hull: n.p., 2001)).
- 51.
Coffee Public-House News, 1 May 1884. See also Elizabeth R. Cotton [Lady Hope]: Our Coffee-Room (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1878); More about Our Coffee-Room (London: J. Nisbet & Co., 1878); Lines on a Dark Ground (n.p., 1879).
- 52.
Birch, “Coffee Houses”; [Mamley], “Temperance Refreshment House Movement,” pp. 46, 51–2; Antony Clayton, London’s Coffee Houses: A Stimulating Story (London: Historical Publications, 2003), p. 126.
- 53.
Bentley, “Temperance Coffee Houses,” p. 381.
- 54.
Coffee Public-House News, 1 Aug. 1884; Clarke, Coffee Houses, pp. 15–16.
- 55.
Bourne, “Social Influence of the Coffee-House Movement”; also see Hogben, “Causes of Failure in London.”
- 56.
Bentley, “Temperance Coffee Houses,” 2: 381–82; Hogben, “Causes of Failure in London”; Hall, Coffee Taverns, p. 40.
- 57.
Oldcorn Reid, “Middle Class Values,” p. 477.
- 58.
Bourne, “Social Influence of the Coffee-House Movement”; Coffee Public-House News, 1 Jan. 1885.
- 59.
Birch, “Coffee Houses”; Bellhouse, “Coffee-House Movement,” p. 126.
- 60.
Coffee Public-House News, 1 Apr. 1884.
- 61.
Birch, “Coffee Houses”; also see Frederick Gore, “The Causes of Success and Failure in the Coffee House Movement,” Coffee Public-House News, 16 July 1885.
- 62.
Coffee Public-House News, 1 Feb. and 1 Aug. 1881, 1 Apr. 1884, and 16 July 1885; Hall, Coffee Taverns, p. 36.
- 63.
Coffee Public-House News, 1 May 1884; Bentley, “Temperance Coffee Houses,” 2: 379–80; Practical Hints, p. 1. See below n. 75 for sources on rational recreation.
- 64.
Coffee Public-House News, 1 March 1879.
- 65.
Gore, “Causes of Success and Failure”; Coffee Public-House News, 2 Aug. 1880.
- 66.
Oldcorn Reid, “Middle Class Values,” p. 471.
- 67.
Thorne, “Places of Refreshment,” p. 245; Gore, “Causes of Success and Failure”.
- 68.
Coffee Public-House News, 1 May 1884. Both the Hull People’s Public-House Company and Liverpool’s British Workman coffee public houses charged ½d. per cup of coffee (Ibid., 2 Dec. 1878; “British Workman Public Houses,” p. 213).
- 69.
Cotton, Our Coffee-Room, p. 70. Many coffee public houses charged 4d. per cup for cocoa (Antony Clayton, London’s Coffee Houses: A Stimulating Story (London: Historical Publications, 2003), p. 130).
- 70.
“Coffee House Movement,” p. 144; Anon. to Editor, Coffee Public-House News, 16 Oct. 1886.
- 71.
Elliott, “Leicester Coffee –House and Cocoa-House Movement,” p. 59.
- 72.
Anon. to Editor, Church of England Temperance Chronicle, 1 Jan. 1882.
- 73.
Elliott, “Leicester Coffee-House Movement,” p. 59; Coffee Public-House News, 1 Jan. 1880, 1 Sept. 1881, 1 May 1883 and 1 Apr. and 1 May 1884.
- 74.
Coffee Public-House News, 1 Jan. 1880 and 1 May 1883; Clarke, Coffee Houses, pp. 29–30; National Temperance League, 1881 Annual Report.
- 75.
Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 124–28. The standard source on rational recreation is Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–85 (1978, reprint ed.: New York: Methuen & Co., 1987). See also J.M. Golby and A.W. Purdue, The Civilisation of the Crowd: Popular Culture in England, 1750–1900 (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), pp. 88–114; and Catriona M. Parratt, “Making Leisure Work: Women’s Rational Recreation in Late Victorian and Edwardian England,” Journal of Sport History 26 (1999): 471–87.
- 76.
Liverpool Mercury, 17 Nov. 1879.
- 77.
Othick, “Cocoa and Chocolate Industry,” p. 78; A.E. Dingle, “Drink and Working-Class Living Standards in Britain, 1870–1914,” in Oddy and Miller (eds.), Modern British Diet, pp. 125, 127–29; Wray Vamplew, “The Sport of Kings and Commoners: The Commercialization of British Horse-Racing in the Nineteenth Century,” in Richard Cashman and Michael McKernan (eds.), Sport in History: The Making of Modern Sporting History (St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1979), pp. 314–15; Jepson, “Coffee House Movement in London,” Coffee Public-House News.
- 78.
“Coffee-House Movement,” p. 144.
- 79.
Ibid; Clarke, Coffee Houses, pp. 24–5; Hogben, “Coffee Public-House Movement,” p. 126; Daily News, 30 March 1878. One official thought “a fair proportion of those engaged in directing the movement now provide sleeping accommodation in connection with their taverns” (Bentley, “Temperance Coffee Houses,” p. 381).
- 80.
Bentley, “Temperance Coffee Houses,” p. 379.
- 81.
“Coffee-Houses in Great Britain,” in Charles E. Bolton (ed.), A Model Village of Homes, and Other Papers (Boston: L.C. Page & Co., 1901), pp. 63, 65–6; London Directory for 1901, quoted in A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to London: Its Public Buildings, Leading Thoroughfares, and Principal Objects of Interest (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1902), p. 21.
- 82.
One indication of the movement’s recovery in the early 1880s was that advertisements in the Coffee Public-House News suggested more people wanted managers’ jobs than were available for applicants (Lockington and Trickey, “Coffee House Movement,” p. 4).
- 83.
Rev. Charles Garrett, “The History of the British Workmen Public-House Company in Liverpool,” National Temperance League Conference, Chester, 1895 (London: National Temperance League Publication Depot, [n.d.]), pp. 255–56.
- 84.
Raymond Calkins, Substitutes for the Saloon: An Investigation Made for the Committee of Fifty Under the Direction of Francis G. Peabody, Elgin R.L. Gould and William M. Sloane (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1901), p. 244; Rev. Charles Garrett, “The History of the British Workman Public-House Company in Liverpool,” National Temperance Conference, Chester, 1895 (London: National Temperance League Publication Depot, [1895]), p. 256.
- 85.
Descriptive Guide to London, p. 21; “Coffee-Houses in Great Britain,” in Bolton (ed.), A Model Village of Homes, p. 63.
- 86.
Coffee Public-House News, 2 Oct. 1882 and 1 Jan. 1885.
- 87.
Ibid., 1 May 1884.
- 88.
“No Intoxicants Sold,” Leisure Hour 31 (1882): 117.
- 89.
Coffee Public-House News, 1 May 1884.
- 90.
Hall, Coffee Taverns, pp. 66, 103.
- 91.
“Coffee Public-House Movement,” Chambers’s Journal, p. 144; David W. Gutzke, Women Drinking Out in Britain since the Early Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 16–17.
- 92.
Hall, Coffee Taverns, pp. 66, 103.
- 93.
Coffee Public-House News, 1 Sept. 1883.
- 94.
Bellhouse, “Coffee-House Movement,” p. 122.
- 95.
Kelley’s Directory of Suffolk, 1896; Elliott, “Leicester Coffee-House and Cocoa House Movement,” p. 59; “Coffee-Houses in Great Britain,” p. 66.
- 96.
Lockington and Trickey, “Coffee-house Movement,” p. 3; Bentley, “Temperance Coffee Houses,” p. 379; H.A. Page, “Coffee Palaces,” Good Words 18 (1877): 680.
- 97.
Bellhouse, “Coffee-House Movement,” p. 125.
- 98.
Benjamin Clarke, “Temptations to Temperance,” in Rev. Benjamin Waugh (ed.), Sunday Magazine (London: Isbister & Co., 1887), pp. 42–3.
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Gutzke, D.W. (2019). Pubs without Beer. In: John Pearce and the Rise of the Mass Food Market in London, 1870–1930. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27095-7_2
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