Abstract
Party political polarisation had been the leitmotif of the Drink question in the two decades before 1895. The prohibitionists had, to a large extent, been able to shape the discourse of the question by redefining local veto in terms of a broader ‘local option’. However, this had clouded the issue somewhat by masking the ideological divisions between prohibitionists and restrictionist reformers. The identification of temperance reform with local government reform had pushed the issue to the fore as ambitious politicians sought credit from taking up such an apparently popular cause. However, by 1895, the reform of English local government had come and gone. This meant that the liquor question could be viewed from a fresh perspective. Hitherto, the moderate restrictionist reformers had been frustrated both by technical complexities of the licensing issue and the obstreperousness of the interested parties on either side. Several factors after 1895 suggested the possibility of a new approach to the issue, based around moderate opinion.
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Notes
D. W. Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience. Chapel and Politics, 1870–1914 ( London: Allen and Unwin, 1982 ) p. 46.
Gerald Wayne Olsen, ‘“Physician heal thyself”: drink, temperance and the medical question in the Victorian and Edwardian Church of England, 1830–1914’, Addiction, 89, (1994), pp. 1167–76.
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There had always been those who, as a result of their own personal experience of the slums, had questioned the view that drinking caused men to become poor. In the 1880s, many sensational and widely publicised accounts of working-class life had stressed how the public house and drinking were often the only refuges from a miserable and debilitating existence. [A. Mearns et al.] The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, (originally published 1883), A. S. Wohl (ed.), (Leicester University Press,1970); G. Sims, How the Poor Live and Horrible London ( London: Chatto and Windus, 1889 ), essays originally published 1883);
Rev. D. Rice Jones, In the Slums. Pages from the Notebook of a London Diocesan Missionary (London: Nisbet, 1884).
For discussion on this point, see H. M. Lynd, England in the Eighteen-Eighties ( London: Oxford University Press, 1945 ) p. 85.
For the temperance question and poverty see J. B. Brown, ‘The Pig or the Stye: Drink and Poverty in late Victorian England’, International Review of Social History, 18, (1973), pp. 380–95.
T. S. and M. B. Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist ( London: Oxford University Press, 1960 ) p. 180.
Cf. J. A. Hobson: ‘we must learn to discriminate the two questions: “Drink as a cause of Poverty”, and “Drink as determining who shall be poor”’, Commonwealth, June 1896, p. 209, quoted
Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815–1872 ( London: Faber and Faber, 1971 ) p. 399.
Asa Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action. A study of the Work of Seebohm Rowntree, 1871–1954 ( London: Longman, 1961 ) p. 30, et seq; see also the reflection of these views in
A. Sherwell, Life in West London: a Study and a Contrast, 2nd edn ( London: Methuen, 1897 );
D. B. Foster, Leeds Slumdom (Leeds: priv. printed, 1897 );
Lady H. Bell, At the Works. A Study of a Manufacturing Town ( London: Edward Arnold, 1911 ).
John Burns, Labour and Drink (London, 1904).
J. B. Brown, ‘The Pig or the Stye’, loc. cit., pp. 389–94; James Kneale, ‘The Place of Drink: Temperance and the Public, 1856–1914’, Social and Cultural Geography, 2, no. 1 (2001), pp. 53–4.
Philip Snowden, Socialism and the Drink Question ( London: Independent Labour Party, 1908 ) pp. 93, 101, 167–9.
E. R. Pease, The Case for Municipal Drink Trade ( London: P. S. King, 1904 ) p. 13.
George W. E. Russell, Sir Wilfrid Lawson: a Memoir, ( London: Smith Elder, 1909 ) p. 229. See also: UKA, Annual Report, 1894–95, p. 6;
J. Whyte ‘The Prohibitionists in Politics’, in Guy Hayler (ed.), The Prohibition Movement: Papers and Proceedings of the National Convention for the Prohibition of the Liquor Traffic ( Newcastle: North of England Temperance League, 1897 ) pp. 275–9.
Jon Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp. 213–4.
Westminster Gazette, 13 August, 1895, pp. 1–2; David M. Fahey, ‘The Politics of Drink: Pressure Groups and the British Liberal Party, 1883–1908’, Social Science, 54, no. 2 (1979), pp. 78–9. The defeated member for Coventry claimed that the election had turned almost exclusively on local veto: the ‘Temperance Party, who boasted beforehand that they would fight like cats, did not fight at all...’ The sooner the party threw the measure overboard the better, The Times, 29 July, 1895, p. 10.
Sir U. Kay-Shuttleworth to Spencer, 23 July, 1895; Peter Stansky, Ambitions and Strategies: The Struggle for the Leadership of the Liberal Party in the 1890s (Oxford University Press, 1964) p. 179.
Licensed Victuallers, Official Annual, 1896, quoted Joseph Rowntree and Arthur Sherwell, The Temperance Problem and Social Reform ( 7th enlarged edn, 1899), (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1899 ) pp. 100–1.
James E. G. De Montmorency, Francis William Fox ( London: Oxford University Press, 1923 ) pp. 27–9; Westlake, Minutes of Evidence Royal Commission on Licensing, PP, 1899, (C.9075), xxxiv, qs.67,107, 67,170; Harcourt to Caine, 28 November, 1892, Harcourt Papers /144.
J. Mann, Minutes of Evidence Royal Commission on Liquor Licensing, PP, 1899, (C.9075), xxxiv, qs. 70, 642–6; D. Lewis, Temperance Reformers and the Threefold Option (Glasgow, 1897 );
J. Hunter, The Threefold Option Criticised (Glasgow, [1897]).
David M. Fahey, ‘Drink and the Meaning of Reform in late Victorian and Edwardian England’, Cithara, 13, no. 2 (1974), p. 51.
Frank Bealey, J. Blondel and W. P. McCann, Constituency Politics: a Study of Newcastle-under-Lyme ( London: Faber and Faber, 1965 ) pp. 64–5.
George Ratcliffe, Sixty Years of it: being the Story of my Life and Public Career ( London: A. Brown, 1935 ) p. 95.
Manchester Guardian, 24 November, 1897, p. 7; Leeds Mercury, 8 January, 1898, p. 7. See also Sir Charles Mallet, Herbert Gladstone: a Memoir ( London: Hutchinson, 1932 ) p. 161.
For a full account, see David M. Fahey, ‘Temperance and the Liberal Party — Lord Peel’s Report, 1899’, Journal of British Studies, 10 (1971), pp. 132–59.
Campbell-Bannerman to Spencer, 12 December, 1899, Spencer Papers, 1899 A-R, quoted, D. A. Hamer, Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery: A Study in Leadership and Policy (Oxford University Press, 1972 ) p. 21, n.1.
For his father, see Thomas Whittaker, Life’s Battles in Temperance Armour, ( London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1884 ). For his early contributions, see for example, Alliance News, 25 October, 1879, p. 676; 28 October, 1892, p. 709; Dublin Review, (July 1879), pp. 1–32.
David W. Gutzke, ‘Gentrifying the British Public House, 1896–1914’, International Labor and Working Class History (1994), no. 45, pp. 29–43.
Ibid. Rowntree’s reflections in 1892 were published as Joseph Rowntree, A Neglected Aspect of the Temperance Question, (York, 1892 ).
Anne Vernon, A Quaker Businessman ( London: Allen and Unwin, 1958 ) p. 134;
H. V. Emy, Liberals, Radicals and Social Politics, (Cambridge University Press, 1973 ) p. 130.
Lady Carlisle to Whyte, 25 November, 1903, UKA Minute Books, 2 December, 1903. For divisions within the BWTA, see K. Fitzpatrick, Lady Helen Somerset ( London: Cape, 1923 ) pp. 165–8; Lady Carlisle to Whyte, 28 November, 1903, UKA Minute Books, 2 December, 1903.
The Times, 13 December, 1907, p. 17. See also Arthur Sherwell, Licensing Reform. Address… at the National Liberal Club on 2 December, 1907 ( London: Political Committee of National Liberal Club, 1907 ).
Whittaker interviewed in Tribune, 30 August, 1906, repr. Temperance Reform, a Policy of Inclusion (TLL pamphlets, 1906), no.6, p. 5. See also TLL, The Place and Scope of Local Veto in Temperance Reform, Pamphlet, B. Series, no.2, [c.1911], passim; T. P. Whittaker, ‘Practical Temperance Reform’, Twentieth Century Quarterly, no. 2, (August 1906), pp. 48–51.
David E. Wright and Cathy Chorniawry, ‘Women and Drink in Edwardian Britain’, in Historical Papers/Communications Historiques, 1985, pp. 123–5.
David M. Fahey, ‘The Politics of Drink in Britain: Anglo-American Perspectives’, Proceedings of the Ohio Academy of History (Ohio, 2000) p. 3, also available on website of Alcohol and Temperance History Group, www.athg.org
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© 2003 John Greenaway
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Greenaway, J. (2003). New Departures and Old Orthodoxies, 1895–1902. In: Drink and British Politics since 1830. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510364_4
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