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 Our taverns, inns and pubs have witnessed some of our most talented figures in a ‘beastly state’ |
Stellar drinkers of England
From writers to royalty, politicians to sailors, the great and good of
the nation have always enjoyed a ‘tipple’ during our rich history of boozing, writes Illtyd Harrington
FERGUS Linnane has written a sharp, funny and interesting history of this great public pleasure of the English – drinking.
We live in joyless times. Our doctors cast an inquisitorial eye and chant the fashionable mantras of the day: Do you smoke? How many units of alcohol do you drink a week? A unit? Translated, that is a small, very dry sherry.
Linnane offers no ominous warning. He starts with 29 words and phrases for the condition of being inebriated. Today, the government sanctions gambling, throws its hands up at drug-taking, but gives carte blanche to 24-hour drinking – and 24 explanations for binge drinking.
Our first licensing laws were passed in 1552 and, essentially, have not changed – even when tut-tutting at what they called “tippling houses”.
Then there were alehouses for most of the population as well as upmarket taverns and inns. Four pints of weak beer cost a farm labourer a third of his weekly wages.
Puritan hypocrisy during Cromwell’s Commonwealth rule (1649-1660) cast a gloom over the whole of public life – little wonder that the Restoration of Charles II heralded a permissive society.
More corn was used to produce beer than bread.
After Charles and his brother James II came William of Orange – a stern-faced Dutchman who hypocritically carved out a monopoly for himself in the gin trade. An explicit sign outside the gin houses read: “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for 2 pence and clean straw for nothing.”
Of course, gambling, sex and drink became synonymous and all of this culminated in the Regency of the future George IV, who invented Brighton. This was the age of the six-bottles-a-day men – prime minister William Pitt was reputed to drink more than three bottles of port a day.
After pleasure came the pain, and by 1839 the Beer Bill attempted to regulate consumption. But a move to break the control of the big brewers, a measure giving anybody the right to sell beer in exchange for a two guinea excise duty, resulted in “beer mania”.
The wit Sydney Smith (1771-1845) wrote: “The new Beer Bill has begun its operations. Everybody is drunk. Those who are not singing are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state.”
Free houses were a haven as well as an explosive venue for rascals, pimps, prostitutes and toffs – rich men looking for a fight or a whore. They were places where you really took your life in your hands.
In spite of a growing sense of social responsibility and the dampening presence of Queen Victoria, sobriety was still not common practice among either the ruling or the working class.
Victoria’s son, Edward VII, ate, drank, smoked and copulated on a heroic scale. A 30-course breakfast was the first of four substantial meals every day – and that’s quite apart from snacks in between.
Meanwhile an affluent, intellectual middle class gravitated towards the Café Royal in central London for wit, excessive wine and displays of vomiting.
Oscar Wilde, the painter Whistler and the monstrous devil-worshipper Aleister Crowley headed the drinking class. This was the Age of the Bohemians. There was the Gargoyle Club in Soho, Rosa Lewis and her high-class brothel, the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street in contrast to the Fitzroy Tavern at the corner of Charlotte Street and Windmill Street. Later a haunt for poets (Dylan Thomas) painters (Augustus John), noisy and full of prostitutes and sailors, it attracted persistent and unnecessary attention from the Met during one of its righteous periods.
Which brings us to the Colony Room, a drinking club in Dean Street – the last vestige of historic Soho, presided over by Muriel Belcher.
On a good day, you might rub shoulders with two of the greatest painters of the 20th century, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, or be roundly abused by Ms Belcher for parsimony.
She turned on me once, in my youth, for some indiscretion – a terrifying experience.
Her successor was Ian Board, a man with a bulbous nose fuelled by overgenerous quantities of vodka.
He finally met the Grim Reaper, and those around the deathbed swear that as he expired, his great nose shrank – truly a passing of the spirits.
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