Booze: a troubled relationship

13/10/2009

Could a return to our puritanical roots be Scotland's best hope of beating bevvy culture?

by Adam Forrest

Try googling the phrase ‘drunken Scot’. Among the 8.6 million search results are folk songs and bad jokes, boozy Flickr photographs, despairing medical reports and news stories about Thomas Cook flights gone badly wrong. By way of comparison, ‘drunken Spaniard’ calls up only 117,000 entries; ‘drunken Frenchman’ a paltry 37,000. Even our nearest neighbour and kindred spirit, the drunken Irishman, manages just 78,000 results.

In an age in which crass national stereotypes are a diminished force, the legend of Scotland’s drunkenness is still gathering steam. It’s enough to make you feel sorry for anyone tasked with presenting a different face of Scotland to the world. As justice minister Kenny MacAskill told a recent SNP conference: “I don’t want them to see us as a nation of bevviers and swalliers. I don’t want our land and people constantly portrayed and seen almost as synonymous with drink and aggression.”

MacAskill’s efforts to “turn off the cheap drink tap” have been described by Scottish newspapers as a “one-man crusade” – as if he were the hapless Captain Waggett of Whisky Galore! fame, doomed to push against the inexorable force of the Gael’s affection for the bottle.

His predecessor, Labour’s justice minister Cathy Jamieson, chose to wage war on that west of Scotland favourite Buckfast, without much success. During one famous live TV news interview from her constituency, the poor woman was drowned out by youths chanting: “Don’t ban the Buckie.”

Lonely voices in a licentious world perhaps, but MacAskill and Jamieson represent another, less famous, Scottish archetype – the voice of austerity, dour and steadfast. A voice that says: “You’ll be sorry…” The whiff of booze is ever present in Scottish storytelling, but the flipside – a Calvinist spirit of temperance – is never far away.

It’s present in the demented puritanism of Robert Wringhim as he puts an end to the drunken carousing of his brother George in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It's there when Sergeant Howie refuses a drink (among other things) on the pagan Summerisle of The Wicker Man. It can even be traced through the country’s favourite cop drama, whenever Detective Inspector Mike Jardine (who took the reins after the death of dram-happy Jim Taggart), is ridiculed by colleagues for his teetotalism.

It is hard to remember a time when John Knox (founder of Presbyterianism) was better known than Rab C Nesbitt, but virtue and self-discipline once held considerable power in determining the national character. The evangelical revival of earnest Protestantism in the early Victorian age led to an ongoing anti-alcohol crusade, the influence of which was taken for granted in Scottish society until well into the 20th century.     

John Dunlop, a Scotsman, is credited with kick-starting the temperance movement in Britain. In 1829 the magistrate started temperance societies in Greenock, Gairbraid and Maryhill. Dunlop, rather like Kenny MacAskill, worried that Scotland was losing its standing among other European nations, and despaired that the working class seemed to be drinking itself to death.

Fellow Presbyterian William Collins, the teacher who went on to launch the dictionary publishers, helped print leaflets beseeching fellow Scots to “abstain from all kinds of intoxicating liquors, except for medicinal and sacramental purposes”. Collins and Dunlop found, on their lecture tours across the country, audiences ready and willing to denounce the social evils of cheap booze.

Taxes on spirits had been reduced in 1822 from 7s (35p) to 2s 6d (12.5p) per gallon, fuelling widespread consumption of whisky and gin. Beer and wine were considered less of a problem, but the rapid growth of temperance groups led to a change in focus – from promoting moderation to the goal of achieving total abstinence.    

Temperance societies were closely associated with the Church, but bodies like the Sons of Scotland Temperance Friendly Society and the Independent Order of Good Templars established halls where families might go for tea, coffee or wholesome entertainment such as magic lantern shows.

The Band of Hope movement, geared toward young people in particular, ran children’s clubs, held bazaars and pageants, produced books and sent qualified medical men to give lectures in schools. By the end of the 19th century more than three million kids in Britain were pledge-signing members. Writer and journalist Ian Jack recalls his mother’s memories of winning a prize from her local temperance society in Fife and printing “alcohol is a poison” on coloured cards.

“It was a very common thing among what you might call the respectable working class,” he says. “My great grandfather was a terrible drinker, he died of chronic alcoholism, so his family reacted against that and became very keen on the idea of not drinking. It wasn’t a ridiculous thing, because drink did harm people.” 

In the mining community of Hill of Beath Jack’s parents once lived in the shadow of something known locally as the White Elephant – an imposing, austere tavern based on the gospel of the ‘Gothenburg system’. An idea imported from Sweden, these alternative public houses retained five per cent of their profits and used the rest for what would now be referred to as community projects. Liquor, entertainment or even comfortable seats were not encouraged.

The influence of the temperance movement also spread to trade unions and areas of heavy industry, where the demon drink was often though to corrupt the cause of the working man. In the First World War there were worries the drunkenness of munitions workers was hampering productivity.

In 1913 the abstinence campaigners, known mockingly as “pussyfoots”, achieved their greatest triumph. The Temperance (Scotland) Act allowed each district to hold a majority-wins poll on banning the sale of alcohol. Much to their disappointment, only 40 districts voted to go “dry” (leaving more than 500 “wet” areas).

Pub-free areas included the well-to-do suburbs of Glasgow, such as Langside, Kelvinside, Pollokshields and Cathcart, and small industrial towns like Kilsyth, Kirkintilloch and Airdrie. Stromness in the Orkneys was dry from 1920 to 1947, only repealing the ban because the islanders felt they were scaring off rowdy sailors and their cash from the town.

In 1922 Winston Churchill, then a Liberal MP for Dundee, even lost his seat in parliament to prohibitionist candidate Ernest “Neddy” Scrymgeour, who made his name denouncing the city’s predominately female workers, who were thought to be doing a bit too much cavorting and carousing when not hard at work in the jute factories.

Puritanical attitudes to alcohol did not survive the depression and Second World War. Jack remembers how quaint licensing restrictions, which meant only hotels served alcohol on a Sunday, seemed by the 1960s. “Where I was in North Queensferry, you could only drink on a Sunday if you were a bone fida traveller,” he recalls. “You had to show you had come three miles and were in search of refreshment, so buses would put on special trips.”

The 1976 Licensing Act saw longer drinking hours and the beginning of off-licenses. “The general feeling was Scotland was moving smoothly toward a European way of life, in which people would sit outside, in the rain, drinking orange juice and coffee and little glasses of wine with their children,” laughs Jack. “Relaxed licensing was seen to be social progress – we were leaving Victorian attitudes behind.” 

You know the rest. Happy hours, alcopops - police called to A&E wards. General mayhem. Thirty years on, continental sophistication seems an impossible dream as Scots continue to binge on 50 million litres of alcohol a year. Misuse of booze is thought to cost our economy £2.25bn annually, and rates of liver disease are among the fastest-growing in the world.

Government ministers and medical experts have been forced to pick up the mantle of Presbyterian do-gooders in the hope Scotland might moderate its excessive habits. Dr Peter Rice, a consultant specialising in alcohol addiction,  believes moral outrage could be the country’s most powerful weapon.

“The temperance movement called it the evils of drink,” he says. “Today we call it the seriously harmful effects of abuse. The mood is the same, with the public and the medical profession pushing society toward more control on liberal drink laws.”

Jack suggests a return to 19th century social attitudes is not altogether unlikely. “It’s scientifically rather than spiritually driven nowadays, but history moves back and forwards, and it wouldn’t completely surprise me if something like the Band of Hope could happen again,” he suggests.

Could the Calvinist spirit prevail once more? It is a resilient strain in the national psyche. Even the (hiccupping) narrator of Whisky Galore! is compelled to moralise, pointing out at the end of the film that “…they all lived unhappily ever after… Oh, except for Sergeant Odd and Miss Peggy, for they were not whisky drinkers. And if that isn’t a moral story, what is?”