In a previous blog (“American the Beer-tiful Part 2” https://www.londonbiermeister.co.uk/blog/america-the-beer-tiful-part-2-may-2021), I looked at the malign influence in the USA of the Prohibition movement.
To repeat myself, I am not promoting the excessive consumption of any kind of alcohol. But there is a history of opponents of alcohol taking a wrong road into fantasy and extremism. As in the USA, so in Britain. I am indebted for much of what follows to the work of the social historian Pete Brown, who has spent more time studying the history of pubs and drinking than anyone really should.
First let us talk about Lady Nancy Astor. The first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons as an MP, having been elected for Plymouth Sutton in 1919. So you cannot doubt her place in history, and her personal charm and energy are also well documented. But she brought to Parliament an obsession with the evils of booze that flowed from her Virginian upbringing, and never slackened in her determination to follow it through.
It is Lady Astor that we can thank for the “Intoxicating Liquor (Sales to Under 18s) Act”, which raised the legal drinking age from 14 to 18 (and of course, even to this day, landlords of the more dubious pubs have to pretend that they believe their customers to be 18, as opposed to the less mentally onerous task of believing them to be 14). Actually this was a sign of her having moderated her Prohibitionist approach and tried to make progress more gradually. It didn’t last. In 1931 she inspired widespread ridicule by blaming alcohol for Australia’s victory over England at cricket (she was, fortunately, long dead when the nation witnessed Freddie Flintoff’s celebrations in 2005). And as the Second World War approached, she and her supporters started to sound ever more away with the fairies as they fulminated against drink as a much greater threat to the nation then Germany.
Although… that may partly have been because she didn’t perceive Nazi Germany as a particular threat, or indeed as a very bad thing. An admiring account of her 1919 campaign was written by a young supporter of hers called Oswald Mosley, who of course went on to form the British Union of Fascists. Some rather embarrassing Astor comments about how Jews brought it all on themselves by killing Jesus can also be found. And she was a leading light of Appeasement.
When the war broke out, Lady Astor swung into line behind the war effort, but focused on the overriding need to stop us drinking beer. She famously asked a Government Minister if he understood how frightened the mothers of England were at the thought of their sons enlisting in the army and becoming exposed to the perils of... beer drinking.
(This was part of a broader sense that the Temperance Movement had let their ideas get slightly out of proportion. The Rev Mr J Norton spoke confidently of how Hitler had given the Luftwaffe a comprehensive map of all pubs and breweries in England so that these could be left intact - “Hitler knows that if Britons go on drinking at the present rate we shall lose the war”. A reminder that “interesting” theories about the world existed before Twitter)
We have all heard the story about how British licensing laws were tightened up during World War 1 to stop munitions workers getting drunk. So the Temperance Movement thought they could dust off the same playbook. But this time they were up against a Prime Minister who famously proclaimed that “I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me”. Churchill was resolute in his determination to ensure that the people of Britain - military and civilian - continued to receive their supplies of beer. A key moment came when his agriculture Minister Quintin Hogg pronounced in no uncertain terms in Parliament that:
“The national emergency is not a moment to introduce temperance propaganda under the cloak of national necessity. Beer is the innocent pleasure of many millions”
It is believed to have been Lady Astor who, in her exasperation, told Churchill that “if I was your wife I would put poison in your drink", yielding the reply “Madam, if you were my wife I would drink it”.
Some sources also name her as the woman who, on telling him that he was drunk, received the reply: “but you are ugly and in the morning I will be sober” - but that honour actually goes to the Labour MP Bessie Braddock.
While researching Lady Astor, I came across a passing reference to the fact that one of the MPs who voted against her underage drinking bill was one Edwyn Scrimgeour of the Scottish Prohibition Party, who thought it did not go far enough. Scrimgeour had proposed his own bill which would have stipulated five years in prison for anyone selling alcohol.
Material on the history of the Scottish Prohibition Party is scarce. We have the testimony of the party’s co-founder Bob Stewart, who left in 1909 commenting scathingly about Scrimgeour’s “mandate from God” and saying that he “could no longer stomach the religious prattlings” of Scrimgeour and his adherents.
(Stewart went on to found something called the Communist Party of Great Britain. They continued to argue against drink, but over time this seems to have become less important than urging common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.)
There is also an interesting article by Donald Southgate on the Scrimgeour Clan website, which describes how Scrimgeour was the unwitting beneficiary of a strange mixture of political forces. It is alleged that the Dundee brewing trade supported him because they thought his Prohibitionism was doomed to fail and easier to oppose than local options for restricting licences. He also seems to have benefited from the mutual hatred between the Labour and Liberal candidates for Dundee - voters had two votes for two MPs and he seemed to be a convenient "none of the above" candidate. It may have been to his surprise that he won election in 1922. The defeated Liberal candidate was one Winston Churchill. It's a small world.
Let me make a shamelessly opportunistic leap from Scottish prohibitionism to sing the praises of Scottish brewing. The great old names of the past have now gone - many of them consolidated into Scottish and Newcastle, which then became the less evocative Heineken UK. One of the highest profile names now has to be Brewdog, famed for their “punk” attitude and their imaginative approach to employee relations as well as some excellent beers. (I hold Brewdog shares. It felt like a good idea at the time). I have had some good experiences with Fierce Beer of Aberdeen. But my personal favourite is the Harviestoun brewery from the Stirling area, with their excellent Schiehallion pilsner and - above all- the “Ola Dubh” dark ale matured in whisky barrels.