"We have always been drunks"

10 April 2012

It has suddenly become a cliche to say that a drunken, yobbish culture takes over our town and city centres on Friday and Saturday nights.

Youths stagger, sing, shout and vomit over their boots, yelling obscenities at passers-by with a fine lack of interest in who they are, but preferring it if they are young women - in general behaving like typical plebeians (to use another word that has just become fashionable) under the influence of strong liquor.

So far so good - and true enough. What is surprising is the surprise - the notion that all this is something new to this country.

That is quite wrong. In fact, the beginnings that we are now seeing of a New Puritanism towards drunken behaviour resemble nothing so much as the Temperance Movement of the middle of the 19th century - that agitation on the part of the great and the good that managed with some success to stamp out the rumbustious and violent mob culture of 18th-century England and to create what we think of as "Victorian values".

In 1872, it was made illegal to sell spirits in licensed premises to children under 16; in 1886, pub sales of alcohol to under-13s were outlawed, though it wasn't until 1923 that the present age limit of 18 was introduced.

Not that they ever did stamp out heavy drinking, of course. That is something that we - along with most of northern Europe - have always gone in for.

Nor was a love of the bottle especially plebeian. In my college at Cambridge the fellows cherish a set of betting books going back to just before the French Revolution.

As well as learned bets ("Dr Snodgrass bets Mr Carruthers that a Bath Oliver biscuit dropped from a height of six feet will break into five pieces on the Combination Room floor"), these old books record all wine presented and drunk by fellows.

In 1806, when the news arrived of the Battle of Trafalgar, the seven fellows present "presented 24 bottles of port". In 1815, the days after the Battle of Waterloo are a complete blank, suggesting that the fellows at that time had drunk themselves into insensibility.

Eighteenth-century England was notorious for abandoned drunkenness on the part of all classes. The artist and cartoonist Hogarth famously depicted the scene in Gin Lane with the working class inebriated sprawled in every posture, and a semi-undressed mother letting her baby drop over a railing.

But, as one observer wrote: "A three-bottle man was not an unusual guest at a fashionable table and a perpetual thirst seemed to come over people, both men and women, as soon as they had tasted their soups."

Pitt, the Prime Minister, and Sheridan, the playwright, drank six bottles a day, and a certain Dr John Campbell - a physician, no less - got through 13 bottles of port.

A French visitor noted that: "The drinking is sometimes quite alarming... the conversation could hardly be freer on indecent matters, for one is allowed to speak of everything."

Manners were coarse in another way as well: "The sideboard is garnished also with chamber-pots in line with the common practice of going over to the sideboard to pee, while the others are drinking. Nothing is hidden."

We may all remember the minor scandal that arose when a disapproving woman Labour MP po-facedly - but accurately - accused the late Alan Clark of being drunk when he was reading out a Government statement at the dispatch box.

But how would the great 18th-century statesman, Charles James Fox, have survived modern scrutiny with his astonishing debauches? According to a contemporary, for the whole of the night before an important debate he sat up gambling and drinking, took part in the debate, then went to dinner and on to Whites where he drank until seven the next morning, then went and gambled, winning £6,000 (at least £100,000 in modern money).

Fox and his friends in Brooks's might bet on who it was who had defecated in Fox's trousers.

Victorian complaints about the behaviour of the hard-drinking plebs strangely mirror-what we hear today. A traveller complained that his first-class carriage was invaded by people from the third class, when "we were annoyed by having to listen to a succession of obscene and vulgar songs, interspersed with language of the lowest and most objectionable description". He went on to lament the fact that the police took no notice.

But let us not be too drearily puritanical. Drunkenness is not always uncivilised. As a young Cambridge fellow, I once asked an immensely eminent senior colleague - a true Edwardian, who had served in the Great War - if he had even been completely drunk: "Just once, dear boy - it was at the battle of Vimy Ridge. Three-quarters of our chaps were casualties that day. We all went into Abbeville and drank champagne for the whole evening, I can't remember a thing after that. I don't know how my horse got me back to the barracks."

Dr John Casey is a fellow of Caius College, Cambridge

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"We have always been drunks"

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