Pubs and Patriots: The Drink Crisis in Britain during World War One

In the midst of the First World War concern arose as to the virtues of pursuing intoxication at a time of national emergency. As the military front was supposedly let down by drinkers and shirkers at home, attention quickly turned to British drinking practices. Britain, it seemed, was under the duress of a widespread addiction to boozing. When prohibition was deemed too extreme to contemplate, and nationalisation too impractical, the government created an organisation known as the Central Control Board (CCB). This body soon set about reforming the drinking habits of a nation. Loved by a few, but disliked by most, this group was responsible for the most radical and unique experiment in alcohol control ever conducted in Britain. The story of the CCB, how and why it was formed, its history and its legacy upon the British war effort are told within Pubs and Patriots: The Drink Crisis in Britain during World War One.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction 1. A Tale of Temperance and Drink 1870–1914 2. Vodka, Absinthe and Drunkenness on Britain’s Streets in 1914: A Tale of Fear and Exaggeration? 3. Best Laid Plans? Lloyd George and the Drink Question 4. Restrictive or Constructive? The Early Stages of the Central Control Board 5. The Carlisle Experiment: Lord D’Abernon’s ‘Model Farm’ 6. ‘Helping our weaker sisters to go straight’: Women and Drink during the War 7. Reforming the Working Man 8. State Purchase and the Waning of the Central Control Board Conclusion: The End of the Central Control Board Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Robert Duncan is an independent scholar, with a PhD from the University of St Andrews.

Review :
A timely study of an important subject. A well-written, interesting and authoritative account, based upon some strong historical research ... [that] adds to our understanding both of the drink question in the twentieth century and of our knowledge of the First World War. The First World War 'drink crisis' is an illuminating moment in British social and political history and Pubs and Patriots provides a detailed guide for experts and lay readers alike. In February 1915 the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, delivered a speech at Bangor, North Wales, in which he sought to focus the war effort onto the need for efficiency in the industrial production of ships, bullets and shells. The address was wide-ranging but Lloyd George paid particular attention to a peril at the heart of British cultural life. 'I hear of workmen in armament works who refuse to work a full week for the nation's need', he told his audience. 'What is the reason? Sometimes it is one thing, sometimes it is another, but let us be perfectly candid. It is mostly the lure of drink ... Drink is doing more damage in the war than all the German submarines put together.' Lloyd George's so-called Bangor Speech marked a watershed in political attitudes to alcohol. While he was derided in some quarters for both hyperbole and obfuscation, his words tapped into a more general sense that, so long as military victory over Germany was uncertain, alcohol could not maintain its customary position in society. Within months George V had 'taken the pledge' and Lloyd George had, after flirting with prohibition and the nationalisation of the drinks trade, established a Central Control Board (CCB) for the regulation of the liquor traffic. The CCB would go on to slash pub opening hours, ban the buying of rounds and even purchase and manage the entire drinks trade in and around Carlisle. In Pubs and Patriots Robert Duncan provides the first full-length study of this extraordinary period. He describes the controversies around the CCB's establishment, its successes and failures and how, once hostilities ceased, it rapidly came to be seen as an illiberal body whose raison d'etre had passed. In his 2003 study Alcohol and British Politics Since 1830, John Greenaway argued that the moral framing of Victorian temperance mutated into a discourse on industrial efficiency once the Great War broke out. Here Duncan puts considerable flesh on the bones of that important observation, while showing 'efficiency' and morality were never entirely separate concepts. Ostensibly, the task of the CCB was not to effect moral regeneration but to show that, by reducing consumption, harmful consequences - violence and loss of productivity in particular - could be reduced. Inevitably it struggled to resist the lure of encouraging wider social reform. The CCB was definitely radical, but to many the state control of private brewing interests was perilously close to socialism. However, under Lord D'Abernon's charismatic leadership and comprising members from temperance and trade bodies, the CCB displayed a genius for consensus-building and got things done. By 1918 both alcohol policy and drinking behaviours had changed enormously. Lloyd George's speech involved a degree of class scapegoating and Duncan's central thesis is that by promoting temperance the CCB was engaged in an unwarranted attack on working-class culture. This underplays the social diversity of the temperance movement and the strong socialist wing of temperance agitation; it also takes rather readily the repeated claims by middle-class brewers that in protecting their lucrative trade they were merely defending the working man in the face of snobbish reformist zeal. Nevertheless Pubs and Patriots shows convincingly that, while alcohol policy during the First World War focused on efficiency, it also articulated complex problems of class, identity and consumption that had dogged Victorian debates on alcohol (and which still frame questions about drink today). The First World War 'drink crisis' is an illuminating moment in British social and political history and Pubs and Patriots provides a detailed guide for experts and lay readers alike. On 19 May 1915 the Central Control Board (Liquor Traffic) came into being under the wartime provisions of the Defence of the Realm Act. Thus began what Rob Duncan, author of Pubs and Patriots, fairly describes as 'the most radical experiment in drink control ever attempted in Britain'. Operating under the chairmanship of the charismatic diplomat Lord D'Abernon, the C.C.B. introduced strict closing hours (only fully repealed under the 2003 Licensing Act), restrictions on the buying of rounds and limits to the sale of alcohol on Sundays. It also took direct control of the drinks trade in a number of areas, most notably the entire region around Carlisle and Gretna. Here it bought up pubs and breweries, and embarked on a form of state management that drew on the 'Gothenburg System' experiments of the late 19th century, while also establishing 'pub improvement' principles that would be developed by brewers such as Whitbread in the interwar years. In detailing the work of the Central Control Board during World War I, Pubs and Patriots fills a hitherto glaring gap in the literature on the history of drinking and alcohol policy in the U.K. While many general histories of pubs, brewing or drinking culture discuss the C.C.B., sometimes in detail, it has not enjoyed the kind of focussed analysis afforded to the Georgian 'gin craze', the Victorian temperance movement, interwar pub improvement or, indeed, the Beer Orders of 1990. This book, then, is a welcome contribution to our understanding of that period, and provides a wealth of documentary detail not previously collected in one place. Duncan's study benefits from meticulous research into parliamentary papers, contemporary news reports and official documentation produced by the Central Control Board itself. Following a broad introductory chapter on alcohol debates in the early 20th century, it covers the period from 1915 to the Board's final meeting in late 1921. Individual chapters explore themes including the impact of the outbreak of War on debates around drink, the politics of the C.C.B.'s formal establishment, the 'Carlisle Experiment', women and drink during the War, and the changing post-War conditions that led to the Board's demise. Duncan's analysis, however, makes no claims to neutrality. Far from it. Indeed, his stated goal is to rehabilitate the reputation of the drinking community who were condescendingly believed to be unable to control their drinking habits, [and his core argument is that] the political and social controversy surrounding the drinks issue [in this period] was merely a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the socially malevolent predictions of temperance ideology crystallised around perceived failures in the execution of total war. It is, of course, entirely reasonable to challenge the notion that the work of the CCB was motivated purely by a tangible threat to the war effort posed by feckless drinking among the working class - indeed, John Greenaway has demonstrated previously that the 'threat' of industrial inefficiency was as much an issue of policy framing as a response to a new risk. Robert Duncan does very well here to support that position, demonstrating the extent to which Lloyd George used the figure of the drunken shipyard worker as a means of deflecting attention from a stalling war effort. He also provides excellent documentary evidence of the extent to which Lloyd George's famous 'Bangor Speech' - and his near-obsession with the drink question more broadly - were seen in many quarters as, to quote Lord Rosebery, nothing more than 'humbug and hypocrisy'. Pubs and Patriots also presents useful data on the decline in consumption leading up to the outbreak of war, further supporting the argument that political clamour for action on alcohol was motivated by interests other than an immediate threat to efficiency (though, of course, even a reduced consumption level could be a threat to productivity under war conditions). Duncan also provides an excellent overview of the tension between the C.C.B.'s programme of state purchase and the Ministry of Food's policy of restricted supply following the food crisis of 1917 - and lends weight to the argument that the decline in consumption at this time was driven by the taps being shut of at the supply side as much as changes to the demand culture in the wake of the C.C.B.'s new licensing regulations. However, it is also the case that in putting the argument this starkly Duncan relies on a disappointingly uncritical acceptance of the conventional view that temperance was merely a middle-class crusade dominated by moral puritans and pious finger-waggers. Few historians of temperance would accept this caricature and much of the research in the field (most recently Annemarie Mcallister's 'Temperance and the working class' project) has directly challenged it. Duncan's depiction of temperance as a monolithic attack on working class culture and freedom is all the more surprising given the prominent role that Phillip Snowden (author of Socialism and the Drink Question [1908]) played in the C.C.B. Socialist temperance, Duncan suggests, was simply another expression of the nannying desire to control people rather than, as was argued by Snowden, John Burns and others, a belief that the drinks industry was an especially pervasive (and oppressive) arm of capitalism more broadly. Expressed in classically Marxist terms, socialist temperance asserted that the pubgoers and landlords may have been working class but - critically - the owners of the means of production (i.e. the brewers) were not: so the freedom to drink, while pleasurable, was just another way of maintaining the economic status quo. From this perspective, the constant attacks on the C.C.B. emanating from Lord Beaverbrook's newspapers were not, as Duncan tends to suggest, authentic expressions of popular opinion but rather the defence of one capitalist interest by another. The complex pre-war debates over the relative value of state control, municipalisation, local veto and prohibition are underplayed here, and the decision to adopt such a stridently critical position on temperance leaves the intellectual backstory to C.C.B. looking excessively black and white. Duncan's assertion that the C.C.B.'s project of trade municipalisation in Carlisle 'could have come out of any of the many temperance journals prior to and during the war', for instance, overlooks the vehement opposition to state control (and the legitimation of the trade which it implied) from prohibitionists such as the United Kingdom Alliance. It is also striking that control campaigners are routinely described as 'vituperative', 'duplicitous' and 'hypocritical' opportunists engaged in 'tirades' against 'supposed' or 'alleged' social problems; while throughout the book workingclass drunkenness is described, somewhat rosily, as 'over-exuberance'. Pubs and Patriots provides a strong contribution to the literature on alcohol policy during World War I, and it contains excellent archival material - not least some wonderful posters, cartoons and photographs. It presents the findings of extensive documentary research and, for that, is a valuable addition to the literature. As is, sadly, the case with too many university presses, this book is prohibitively expensive (and suffers from some minor, but distracting, copyediting oversights that the publishers - charging as much as they do - have a responsibility to iron out). None of that is the author's fault though, and this reviewer has complete sympathy on that front. However, it is the sometimes Manichean perspective on the politics of alcohol control which casts a bigger shadow over what is, in other respects, is an important and well-researched study. Pubs and Patriots provides a strong contribution to the literature on alcohol policy during World War I, and it contains excellent archival material - not least some wonderful posters, cartoons and photographs. It presents the findings of extensive documentary research and, for that, is a valuable addition to the literature. ... is an important and well-researched study. One feels certain that comprehensive, richly detailed, and tightly focused works such as Duncan's Pubs and Patriots will one day enable somebody to accomplish that long awaited feat.