London’s Gin Craze

With the current fad for gin-drinking taking an ever greater hold, and not being averse to the odd drop of the stuff myself, I decided to find out more about the origins of the spirit and why it became known as ‘Mother’s Ruin’!

Before the arrival of gin-drinking, a habit introduced from Holland under William III, beer was the

William III

drink of choice of most Englishmen. Gin soon found favour, however, as it was not taxed and so could be sold without a licence. It was freely available in even the poorest parishes and could be bought at barber’s shops, grocers’, tobacconists’, shoemakers’ and other tradesmen’s shops, as well as from street barrows and dram shops.

Before long, the spirit was being made in London from the relatively poor grain that the brewers had no other use for. And whereas Dutch jenever was only 30% alcohol by volume, the home-made spirit was much stronger.  Adulteration was also common – turps and sulphuric acid were common additives - and fatalities occurred as a result.

18th century liquor-seller

Between 1727 and 1735 the amount of gin being consumed in London rose from 3.5 to 6.5 million gallons, marking the thirty-year period in the capital known as the ‘Gin Craze’. The paralytically drunk littered the streets of Bethnal Green, Westminster and St Giles (the rookery depicted in Hogarth’s painting below).

Abuse of the spirit become so widespread that in 1736 the Middlesex magistrates petitioned Parliament to restrict its sale. A tax of £1 a gallon was imposed and purveyors were obliged to buy a £50 licence to sell it. But this measure proved ineffective and gin drinking continued. Sales simply went underground and a whole range of pseudonyms were used to ‘disguise’ the bootleg liquor, including ‘Ladies’ Delight’ and ‘Cuckold’s Comfort’.

Enforcement of this law proved impossible. By the 1740s two pints of gin a week were drunk by every man, woman and child in London. It was said that every fifth house in the parish of St Giles sold or made gin. Women played a significant role in the gin trade – almost a quarter of distillers were female.

Warnings about the social impact of the new fashion for gin-drinking came early, when death rates began to outstrip birth rates. The writer Henry Fielding issued a grim warning: “should the drinking of this poison be continued in its present height during the next twenty years, there will be by that time few of the common people left to drink it”.

Compounding the problem, many commentators thought, was the low price: “Gin is sold very cheap, so that People may get muddled with it for three half pence and for three pence made quite Drunk even to Madness.”

Before long, a social crisis had developed. Men were rendered unfit for any kind of work or military service, large numbers of illegitimate children were conceived and unborn children disabled by their alcoholic mothers. There was mayhem in the streets, with a sharp rise in violence and robberies. Gin, reported the Westminster justices, [was] “the principal cause of the increase of the poor and of all the vice and debauchery among the inferior sort of people, as well as of the felonies and other disorders committed about this town”.

People were even pawning their clothes and furniture to buy drink. A perfect storm was created by the combination of free availability of the liquor and the amount of time many poor people had on their hands at this time due to the feast or famine nature of many casual workers such as dockers and tailors.

For the working classes gin became much more than just a drink – not only did it ward off boredom, it also sated hunger pangs and offered relief from the cold. Women were particularly drawn to the consumption of gin and often purchased it from the chemist’s as a medicinal drink. Mixed with warm water it was said to ‘soothe the nerves’, hence its nickname ‘Mother’s Ruin’. Women had never been great beer drinkers – taverns were, after all, a male domain – and gin came with no rules –anyone could drink it anywhere. And, like the men’s beer, it was served in pints. Gin was also a great way to silence noisy children!

Hogarth's 'Gin Lane' 1751

In 1751, Hogarth published his famous Gin Lane and Beer Street etchings showing the depths of degradation plumbed by gin drinkers, compared to the innocuous effects of beer which, though generally viewed as health-giving, was strictly controlled by licencing laws and relatively expensive. Seen as a telling social document of the time, Gin Lane, was shocking in its effect. It shows a baby dangling from a railing after falling from its drunken mother’s arms, a starving beggar and a dog fighting over a bone, and a corpse being stripped of its valuables by a pawnbroker.

Detail from 'Gin Lane'

 With the middle classes increasingly horrified by what was happening in the streets around them, the government was forced to take more decisive action, despite the fact that gin sales made up a quarter of its tax revenues. The 1751 Gin Act set the cost of a licence to trade at £2, and strict controls were introduced, overseen by magistrates. But it was actually another factor that was to disrupt the gin trade even more effectively than legislation. A series of poor harvests led to a rise in food prices (with regular bans on much-needed grain being used for distillation) and a decline in wages. No longer able to afford their tipple, gin fell out of fashion and the ‘craze’, as it had become known, petered out. For the rest of the 18^th century, tea was to become the liquor of choice.

References:

Georgian London: Into the Streets Lucy Inglis

London: a Social History Roy Porter

Website: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/53jj7z/how-a-gin-craze-nearly-destroyed-18th-century-london

Website: https://londonist.com/2016/09/london-s-first-gin-boom

Website: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/53jj7z/how-a-gin-craze-nearly-destroyed-18th-century-london

Website: https://londonist.com/london/drink/gin-craze-history