p d in e and ales late ighteenth w · pdf filepaul jennings lectures in history at the...

Jennings: Policing Drunkenness in England and Wales. 69

polIcInG drunkenness In enGlAnd And WAles froM the lAte eIGhteenth

century to the fIrst World WAr1

pAul JennInGs

Paul Jennings lectures in history at the University of Bradford, UK.SHAD (Winter 2012): 69-92

Abstract. This article investigates one of the most common offenders to be dealt with by the nineteenth-century criminal justice system in Eng-land and Wales – the drunk. It shows how one of the key aims of policing as it developed from the later eighteenth century was the achievement of a more orderly society, in which the suppression of drunkenness was an essential element. But it demonstrates too how that aim was necessarily tempered by the practicalities of policing, from the day to day dealing with drunks to the wide range of sometimes conflicting pressures under which the police worked. The drunken offenders themselves are also analysed: the overall total, their sex and social makeup. Over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is argued that despite all the problems there are in making this assessment, it is clear that English society did experience a decline of drunkenness,and one part of that was the fall in the rate of prosecutions for the offence.

IntroductIon

In nineteenth and early twentieth-century England and Wales, drunkenness was a major concern of the criminal justice system. Dealing with tens of thou-sands of drunken men and women each year, provided staple custom for the police, magistrates’ courts and prisons. In the peak years for proceedings – the mid-1870s and the Edwardian period – there were annually over 200,000 for offences of drunkenness. They represented a large proportion of all offences dealt with summarily. Over the period 1857 to 1913, when the annual judicial statistics provide figures for the whole of England and Wales, typically around a fifth to a quarter of all offences dealt with by magistrates were for drunk-enness, reaching as high as just over thirty per cent in the period from1873 to 1877. This rate may even be higher, since it does not include offences in which drink was implicated, particularly assault, but where the drunkenness was not proceeded against.2 They filled the prisons. To take just one example, at the Wakefield House of Correction between 1867 and 1873 the committals for drunkenness more than doubled, from a fifth to 31 per cent of the total imprisoned. In 1912, at the end of the period examined here, 35.7 per cent of those sent to prison had been convicted of drunkenness, or 56,090 of 156,913

Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 26, No. 1 (Winter 2012)70

individuals.3 They, not the more serious offenders who have usually received the attention of historians, were the bread and butter of the criminal justice system; as Chris Williams noted a decade ago, such a mass of offenders merits study.4

This article seeks to provide such a study. It begins with early law on the offence and looks at the extent to which that law was enforced in the late eigh-teenth and early nineteenth centuries by the system of policing based on parish constables. Those years also saw efforts to improve that system, culminating in the eventual establishment, over a period of just over twenty-five years from the creation of the metropolitan police in London in 1829 to the County and Borough Police Act of 1856, of professional police forces covering the whole of England and Wales. Those improvements are linked fundamentally to the question of public order and its maintenance, a relationship which is then explored. The article then examines the period from the late 1850s to the First World War and focuses on the practicalities of policing drunkenness, taking in changes to the law, police procedures and practices, the relationship between the police and both the drinking and wider publics and the role of the magistracy. I turn then to the drunken offenders themselves, assessing the significance of statistics of the offence and their relationship to actual levels of drunkenness, before analysing them by sex and social class.

drunkenness And the hIstorIcAl deVelopMent of polIcInG

Historically, drunkenness was punishable by both ecclesiastical and local courts,5 but an offence was created by an act of 1606 “for repressing the odi-ous and loathsome Sin of Drunkenness,” one of a number of contemporary statutes aimed at drinking and drinking places. The offence was simply that a person, or persons, “shall be drunk” and of drunkenness “shall be lawfully convicted” and thus liable for a fine of five shillings, or in default to be placed in the stocks for six hours.6 A further act, which made this temporary measure permanent, permitted conviction on the word of one witness, or on a confes-sion, and before a single justice of the peace.7

If we look at the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, at what one might term the “traditional” system of policing based on parish constables, the offence was one with which magistrates rarely dealt. The evidence for this consists of justices’ notebooks, various types of deposition and examination books, petty sessions’ minute books and records of summary convictions.8 A few examples must suffice here. William Hunt, a “conscientious and reason-able” justice in rural Wiltshire, in his notebook covering the years 1744 to 1748, although recording a variety of other drink-related offences, cited not one for drunkenness.9 Henry Norris, an active magistrate in the mid-eighteenth century in Hackney, then a mixed area of farms, market and nursery gardens, mansions but also some industry east of London, recorded only four cases of drunkenness in his notebook between 1730 and 1741, whilst the petty ses-sions book for this and the succeeding decade lists only one.10 Edmund Tew, a


clerical justice for an area including south Tyneside and Wearside in the north of England, then rapidly growing and with a fluctuating seafaring population, similarly recorded few drunkenness cases in his notebook of 1750 to 1764.11 Finally, another active justice, Samuel Whitbread in Bedfordshire, heard just seven cases of drunkenness, according to his notebooks covering December 1810 to December 1811 and September 1813 to December 1814.12 Records of summary convictions show the same rarity. A register for the North Riding of Yorkshire, covering the periods from May 1781 to February 1800 and August 1814 to November 1815, includes just one, of a labourer, in 1799.13 Similarly in the more rural parts of Gloucestershire, outside that is Bristol (but includ-ing some of its outer parishes), Gloucester and Tewkesbury, in the long period 1781 to 1837 a mere seventeen convictions for drunkenness were recorded, eight of which were in the years after 1831.14

An essential reason for this rarity lies in the nature of this system of polic-ing, as David Philips and Robert Storch characterized it in their study of the policing of provincial England, the “basic passivity” inherent in the nature of the office of constable – part-time, unpaid (but for expenses) and subject to the pressures of the local community.15 It is perhaps suggestive that where the complainant was noted in the Gloucestershire convictions, only once was this a (high) constable; in three cases it was in fact the magistrate who heard the case. These part-time constables were not infrequently publicans, despite repeated efforts to prevent the practice16, and one might presume therefore not likely to act against their customers, or were in other ways connected to the drink trade, and might share the prevailing drink culture. John Carrington, for example, was a Hertfordshire farmer who acted as head constable along with several other local offices. He owned two public houses, his son was landlord at a third and, as the diary he kept from 1798 to 1810 reveals, when aged in his seventies and eighties was not unusually “fuddled” or “merry.” Nowhere does he record dealing with drunkenness in his official capacity.17 Similarly in the market village of South Cave, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, in the 1830s constable Obediah Martin, a butcher by trade, was on good terms with the local publicans and often himself the worse for drink. The diarist who informs us of this, Robert Sharp, was a schoolmaster who also at times served as deputy constable. His journal also confirms that unless the circumstances were exceptional, as when another constable was assaulted by five “lads” dur-ing the heavy drinking associated with the annual hiring fair, then drunken-ness was not something with which the traditional system of policing was routinely concerned.18

By the 1830s, however, concern about drunkenness had been growing for half a century, one element in a broader anxiety over the problem of order and how it was to be preserved. This is a complex question, which is linked to the ongoing process of industrialization and changing standards of behav-iour, what contemporaries called “manners,” which included drinking hab-its.19 It seems clear that, to use Clive Emsley’s words: “men of property in


England appear to have developed a new threshold for order maintenance… and sought improved policing to achieve this.”20 Specifically in relation to drinking, there was concern in the 1820s over an apparent rise in the consump-tion of spirits and in the following decade similarly about a perceived surge of drunkenness attributed to the Beer Act of 1830, which had freed up the trade in beer, ironically in part to counter gin drinking, leading to the establishment of thousands of beerhouses.21 The growing concern over drunkenness and disorderly behaviour fuelled calls for improved policing and, when improve-ments were made, such behaviour immediately became its target. This point applies equally to the many cumulative and piecemeal improvements as to the “landmark” reforms of 1829, 1835, 1839/40 or 1856.22 The City of London offers an early example: a system of patrols, instituted progressively from 1784, targeted drinking places and disorderly drunks.23 Some later examples from the West Riding of Yorkshire further illustrate this point. In Leeds, the force under the pre-reformed corporation of nine day men and a nightly watch of between six and ten times that number according to season, raised its total of persons brought before the justices for being drunk from 639 in the three years to October 1830 (the month the Beer Act came into force) to 2,023 in the succeeding period down to May 1833.24 In the neighbouring market and spa towns of Knaresborough and Harrogate, local Improvement Acts in respec-tively 1823 and 1841 authorised the appointment of local police, eventually under the supervision of a salaried superintendent constable. The Knaresbor-ough petty sessions, as reported in the local paper, certainly show these small forces dealing with drunkenness, the “Drunkard’s List” as the paper liked to call it.25 Similarly in the industrial town of Keighley, a small force of watch-men, also appointed under a local Improvement Act, concerned themselves particularly with drunkenness and disorder, as the diary of one of them, James “Pie” Leach, shows. Between November 1848 and October 1853, he recorded 145 incidents of drunkenness, or 38 per cent of the total noted; the second highest being fighting/disorder with 74 incidents and 19 per cent. Of these drunkenness/disorderly incidents, 34 were subsequently successfully pros-ecuted at the Keighley petty sessions.26

The “landmark” reforms, in which full-time, paid, uniformed, professional forces were created for London in 1829, municipal boroughs in 1835, coun-ties permissively in 1839/40 and compulsorily (together with the remaining boroughs) in 1856, simply continued such work. In 1831, for example, the new London police service brought 31,353 charges of drunkenness, which represents a rate of 207.40 per 10,000 of the population. If one includes those charged with disorderly conduct, in which drink might reasonably be assumed to be a factor, then the rate rises to 276.08.27 In Liverpool, where the police force was created under the direction of a watch committee as a result of the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, the year 1841-2 saw a proceedings rate of 256.82 per 10,000.28 These are very high rates indeed, whether compared with figures later in the century, as we shall see, or with those for modern


times.29

This essential point, that new policing arrangements processed more drunks as part of a wider assault on problems of public order is amply demonstrated in the many studies of individual police forces which have now appeared.30 At the same time, interpretations of this fact have offered differing emphases. Robert Storch, in two influential articles published in the mid-1970s, set out his view of the new police as “a professional, bureaucratically organized lever of urban discipline [introduced] into the heart of working-class communities,” with the policeman serving as a “domestic missionary” into darkest indus-trial England.31 In contrast, R. E. Foster, in a study of the Hampshire county force established under the 1839 act, found “no evidence that the Hampshire authorities sought deliberately to use the constables as social missionaries to instil a new moral code into the local population,” whilst conceding, however, that they were “more zealous” than the pre-reform constables in enforcing “minor rules and regulations.” This rural force, in the first eleven years of its existence arrested on average 242 persons each year for drunkenness or drunk and disorderly behaviour.32 Similarly Stephen Inwood, in a study of the capital, felt that the new police “lacked not only the power, but also the desire, to act as agents of ‘respectable’ morality” in working-class areas. He concluded rather, that their aim was “to establish minimum standards of pub-lic order, but not to provoke social conflict by aspiring to unattainable ideals.” Whilst acknowledging the existence of “an urge to control,” it was, he argued, “tempered by weakness, fear, realism, tolerance, familiarity and humanitari-anism,” resulting in “a practical compromise between middle-class ideals and working-class realities.”33 Storch, however, fully acknowledged these “seri-ous problems in the discharge of their moral reform mission,” many of which “proved utterly intractable, leading some police authorities to quickly gauge the real limits of their effectiveness in these areas.” This, one presumes, is one of the subtleties of Storch’s argument which Inwood concedes in levelling his criticism rather at crude use of the “social control” model “fashionable” at the time. In my focus here on drunkenness and its policing, I hope to explore some of these points in more detail, but it seems to me that, whilst one might cavil at an emphasis imparted by the use of a language of “missionary” or “agent of respectable morality,” there seems little doubt that the enforcement of higher standards of public behaviour was indeed a central part of the pur-pose of the new police.

polIcInG drunkenness In prActIce

Turning then to the practicalities of policing drunkenness, the first point once again concerns the law. As we saw, the original seventeenth-century statute created an offence simply of being drunk, making no attempt to define this term. The penalty was a fine or in default to be placed in the stocks. The latter punishment continued to be inflicted, albeit with declining frequency well into the nineteenth century. Its use in Bradford, an industrial town in


the West Riding of Yorkshire, in 1840 was described as “a rare occurrence” and its employment in 1872, out of magistrates’ desire to spare wives and children the suffering caused when their husbands were imprisoned, attracted crowds from its oddity.34 Local acts then added to the existing law. The Met-ropolitan Police Act of 1829 conferred a power on the new force to “to ap-prehend all loose, idle and disorderly persons disturbing the Public Peace” or those at night found “lying in any Highway.” A further Metropolitan Police Act of 1839 specified being “drunk in any street or public thoroughfare” and “while drunk… guilty of any riotous or indecent behaviour,” increased the fine and provided for imprisonment for default. Elsewhere local legislation introduced similar provisions but those of the 1839 act were incorporated into the Town Police Clauses Act of 1847, which it was open for local authorities to adopt. These newer statutes, where the offence was more clearly speci-fied, were more easily used. As one teetotal Middlesex magistrate noted of the seventeenth-century law: “it was a very inconvenient Act to be executed,” one which he had great difficulty in working out.35 These provisions then were reproduced in an important general Licensing Act of 1872: to be drunk in any highway or public place, or drunk and committing riotous or disorderly behaviour. It also codified various “drunk in charge” provisions, including of horses, carriages, steam engines and loaded firearms. The act also introduced more limited opening hours, which the House of Lords Select Committee on Intemperance, reporting later that decade, felt had led to increased apprehen-sions for drunkenness as drunks were turned out earlier from the public houses on to the streets.36 The effect of legislation on proceedings was again evident in the Licensing Act of 1902, which conferred a power of arrest on anyone found “drunk and incapable.” According to the editor of the judicial statistics for 1903, although prosecutions for drunkenness had tended to increase over the previous decade, “the greater part of the growth in 1903 is attributable to the large powers given to the police by the Act.”37

The procedures adopted by the police were another important influence on the rates of drunkenness charges. It was the policy of the metropolitan police, according to commissioner Rowan, not to “interfere with any person who is capable of getting home,” only dealing with those who were “dead drunk” or disorderly. This seems to have been a modification of their initial policy of generally taking drunks into custody, but if there were nothing else against them, to discharge them the following day. In the short period during which this policy operated, from 1831 to 1833, of 93,869 taken into custody, no fewer than 67,976 cases were dismissed in this way by the superintendents. In the year following an instruction from the Home Secretary that all persons taken into custody should be brought before a magistrate, the numbers appre-hended fell by over 10,000, since the police now only took, as Rowan’s com-ments indicate, only those whose apprehension was absolutely necessary to keep the peace, and whom the magistrates were likely to convict.38 The police could still release drunks on their own recognizance or bail to appear before a


magistrate the next morning, even if they had not sobered up, providing their sureties took them home. The legality of this was questioned in 1880, result-ing in procedural changes which also had the effect of reducing the number of proceedings.39 In Liverpool, the police also operated for a time a policy of not pressing charges. Major Greig, the head constable there from 1852, explained to the House of Lords Committee on Intemperance that the “old and discreet officer” in charge at the bridewell (lockup) might exercise his discretion to release either when a man brought in drunk by a young officer was deemed to be able to find his own way home or whose wife had come to collect him. This practice, however, incurred the displeasure of the watch committee, resulting in a stricter definition of what constituted being drunk, enforced by the fact that constables apprehending unjustifiably were “treated severely” both by Greig and the watch committee.40

Looking at another provincial force, the instructions from the watch com-mittee to the new Bradford borough police of 1847 exemplify the approach adopted generally by police forces. Under the section headed “Keeping Or-der in the Streets” (itself of course indicative of the new force’s central role) directed at “women of the town” and “drunken and quarrelsome men,” if a drunken person was disorderly a constable was supposed to persuade him, and indeed help him if it was near enough, to go home. Only if he was “riot-ous” and would not do so, was he to be taken into custody. A person “stupidly drunk” was to be treated in the same way, only to be taken into custody if un-able to give an address.41 The bureaucratic tone of the instructions belies the often messy and sad reality. At an inquest into the death of Joseph Parkinson, aged 41, in 1849, it was stated that he had been found drunk at the bottom of some cellar steps. He was taken on a hand cart to the borough police station and placed in a cell, where he was “allowed to vomit freely” and then left “lying on an inclined board, – a place usually assigned to drunken men.” In the morning he was found to be dying and efforts to save him proved futile. The jury expressed dissatisfaction at his summary treatment, although agree-ing that it was the fall which led to his subsequent death, a point which the coroner felt was a difficult one, “the officers having to deal so frequently with such cases of drunkenness.”42 Although it is impossible to be precise as to how common such treatment was, it does feature in newspaper reports. In neighbouring Leeds in 1866, Elizabeth Lanigan was so helplessly drunk that two officers had to “paddle” her to the station. She was with her seven-week old son, who was put in the cell with his mother because of his crying and suffocated during the night. The coroner’s jury recommended that in future children should be separated from intoxicated parents until they were sober.43 The metropolitan police were from time to time criticised for their handling of drunks. In April 1872, for example, a magistrate found “very strange” and meriting investigation the circumstances surrounding the death of Mary Me-lia. She had been taken as drunk and incapable to a police station, where a doctor was called, following procedure, who attempted to rouse her using the


“galvanic battery” and emetics. Showing no signs of regaining consciousness, she was sent to hospital from where a house surgeon returned her to the station to sleep it off. She died shortly afterwards in her cell. In another incident in June 1875, a Member of Parliament and several passers by remonstrated with an officer they had seen swinging Jane Talent around and dragging her along the ground. The magistrate, believing the M. P. over the officers, subsequently discharged her, opining that a second constable should have helped the officer overcome her without such violence. Similarly in January 1876, four “gentle-men” made a complaint that an officer had taken Mary Ann Vauter by the throat and “used considerably more violence than was necessary” in arresting her for drunk and disorderly conduct, resulting in the magistrate’s request for an investigation by the commissioner of police.44 Some years later, however, the Royal Commission on the Metropolitan Police, which reported in 1908, did investigate police methods in dealing with drunkenness, but stressed the difficulties involved and concluded that they dealt with it with “efficiency and discretion.”45

Law and procedure were then important influences upon the levels of pro-ceedings. But there were other practical considerations of time and conve-nience, revealed in the policing of the offence in the capital. With incapables, as we have just seen, there was the need to fetch medical help and keep a watch on the individual.46 Night duty policemen might decide not to arrest, as they disliked attending court early next morning with the resultant loss of sleep. Distance from the police station was another factor, with officers reluc-tant to arrest if more than a mile away, as was the case with Peckham, in south London, in 1900. Superiors did not care for their men spending too much time in court prosecuting what might be seen as relatively trivial offences.47 Mistakes might make the police cautious. A fall in proceedings in 1874 was attributed to the controversy the previous year over the wrongful arrest of a barrister and an army officer. Other duties might make calls upon officers’ time. A reduction in proceedings in 1866 and 1867 was attributed to the tying up of men by meetings and disturbances in the one year and by public fear of Fenians in the other.48 And behind this of course was the actual availability of officers, which was always in the end limited. At certain times of the day in the later nineteenth century there were just 800 officers policing the whole of London. But it was as true also in sparsely populated districts. In 1870, to take the large rural county of Norfolk, not much over 300 men were available.49 This point about the actual availability of officers is illustrated by a comment from the chief constable of Bradford in his 1903 report, on the recent increase of proceedings: almost all of it was accounted for by offences committed within a mile of the Town Hall, more than half of whom were residents from beyond that area, able to congregate in the town centre “in consequence no doubt of the greatly increased facilities of travelling offered by the tramways,” and who when drunk were “invariably noticed by the police, as the number on duty in the centre of the City is greater than on the outskirts.”50


The individual constable had further practical considerations. In rural areas, summons was commonly preferred over arrest, it being often the desire of a lone constable to avoid contact “with a rough drunken man.”51 This was un-derstandable; assault was a real threat. In mid-Victorian Middlesbrough, for example, in the ten years 1859 to 1868, 483 men and 46 women were pros-ecuted for assaults on the police. In London, between 1903 and 1906, it was reported that on average 1,672 officers were assaulted each year by “drunken persons,” although the great majority were not actually put on the sick list.52 Officers were further at risk from relatives and friends of the accused and onlookers. In Bradford, in an incident such as one can find frequently in local newspapers, on a Sunday morning in 1874 three constables were attacked by a crowd with stones and bricks when attempting to make an arrest during a raid on an illegal drinking house in the poor Bolton Road district of the city. Den-nis Kirwan, whose rescue the crowd was trying to effect, was subsequently convicted of being drunk and riotous and apparently, in a nice use of the pre-vailing Victorian discourse, “presented the appearance of an almost perfect specimen of the genus ‘rough’.” Julia Delaney was fined for using obscene language and exciting the crowd to rescue him from the police.53 As one Lon-don officer noted of a great crowd in Battersea Park Road one Saturday night in 1888 and his colleague’s efforts to take into custody a drunk and disorderly husband in the face of the rescue attempts of his drunken wife: “no persons assisted the constable, just the reverse.”54

If these were very much tangible influences upon a constable, there were others less so, but equally important. As former Home Secretary Henry Bruce (now Lord Aberdare), who had been responsible for the 1872 Licensing Act, put it in a question during the House of Lords inquiry into intemperance: “I suppose from the fact of there being no accurate and universal definition of drunkenness the action of the police depends a good deal upon the almost insensible influence of public opinion.” James Davis, the legal advisor to the commissioners of the metropolitan police to whom he addressed this com-ment, concurred that public opinion had had an “immense effect… because even although the constable who actually arrests has not had his mind so influ-enced by it, yet he is under the orders of sergeants and superintendents whose minds have been influenced by public opinion with regard to the amount of vigilance to be used, and they, in turn, act under general instructions from the centre.”55 Nor was the influence of public opinion merely “insensible”; at times it was vigorously expressed by local pressure groups, like the Liverpool Vigilance Committee, formed in 1875.56

But there were other public opinions than the one favouring better stan-dards of, particularly working-class, behaviour, to which the police had to be responsive if the necessary consent and acceptance, upon which their effec-tiveness and legitimacy depended, was to be forthcoming. There was an opin-ion which was suspicious of police powers. For example, the chief constable of Birmingham, Edwin Bond, was condemned in the press for his “un-Eng-


lish” three-month policy of having officers follow drunks to issue summonses. Bond was further asked by the intemperance committee whether it was right that a man should be liable to punishment simply for the immoral act of be-ing drunk.57 This in turn points to a further aspect of public opinion, namely what exactly constituted being drunk. For many people, drunk very definitely meant drunk and quite incapable. This comes across in court cases where a publican was accused of permitting drunkenness on his or her premises. The landlady of the Blue Bell at Beverley, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, defined drunkenness in 1864 as the inability to stand up, referring to a customer who had been drinking on Christmas Eve from ten in the morning until seven in the evening, with nice distinction, as “merry, and quite jolly, but not lushy”.58 Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the prohibitionist M. P., from his experience on the bench in Cumberland, similarly cited a barmaid’s opinion for the defence to that effect and quoted the “well-known lines”:

Not drunk is he, who from the floorCan rise again and ask for more:But drunk is he who prostrate lies,Without the power to speak or rise.59

In this view, only such a degree of intoxication could possibly justify police attention. And this in practice was what the police chose to deal with. As Su-perintendent Turner of K Division, covering the East End of London, put it to the intemperance committee, if a man was staggering but could go home, they let him go, only if he was disorderly and could not be got rid of, or was “help-lessly drunk,” was he taken into custody.60 In fact, only in the Licensing Act of 1902 was “incapable” specified. Prior to that, the offence, as I described above, was to be drunk in a public place or drunk and disorderly. One further point here is that the police too might share that perception of what it was to be drunk. The persistent problems which forces faced with officers’ drinking are well documented. Disciplinary offences were “invariably related to drink.”61 Police authorities accordingly made great efforts to separate the men from the popular culture of drinking. The act creating the Metropolitan Police includ-ed a penalty for publicans convicted of harbouring or entertaining an officer on duty, a provision widely adopted and incorporated in the 1872 Licensing Act. The instructions to the Bradford police, typically, forbade drinking (and smoking) on duty, prohibited officers from entering public houses except in the discharge of their duty and from lodging in them.

Finally, one must reiterate the important point of the willingness of magis-trates to convict. This was seen above in the case of London, when in 1833 the police were required to bring all cases before a magistrate and an immediate consideration was the likelihood of conviction. The head constable of Liver-pool, Greig, acknowledged this in 1877 in stating that his officers were more likely to apprehend where a magistrate was known to take a stricter line with drunkenness.62 The trend overall was to an increased likelihood of conviction: from two-thirds of total proceedings in 1860-64, to 87 per cent in 1870-74 and staying at just above this level before rising again in the new century to


95 per cent in 1910-14.63 This fact, together with the preceding discussion of policing, reinforces the point that although it was a central aim of the police to work towards a more peaceable and orderly society, what they actually did and achieved was the result of a complex mix of often conflicting pressures and always tempered by essentially practical considerations.

the offenders

I turn now to my third area of investigation – the offenders – taking first the total numbers of those proceeded against. Although there are no statistics for England and Wales as a whole before 1857, there are figures for particular localities. Some of these show comparatively high levels of proceedings, as we saw earlier in the rates for London and Liverpool in the 1830s. There are also figures for the whole country for towns and cities with populations of 10,000 and above. In 1851 the rate per 10,000 population in those towns and cities was 112.93.64 This rate is higher than the national rate in the figures from 1857, although one is not of course comparing like with like. One must note too that the figures also reveal what continued to be significant – the very large differences between individual towns and cities. Some which appear to have had very similar characteristics, the textile towns of Bradford and Bolton, for example, had proceedings rates per 10,000 of 10.50 and 144.35 respectively. In others the proceedings rate seemed to bear little relation to the character of the town: in Hampshire, the cathedral city of Winchester had a rate of 61.30 whilst Portsmouth, with its floating population of sailors and what one might reasonably assume to be a rather more drunken and disorderly character, the rate was just 22.05 per 10,000. Differences such as these serve to emphasize the significance of the kinds of variables examined above and the great cau-tion always required in interpreting the statistics.

What then of those statistics from 1857? To the many and varied influences on them should be added changes made, from 1893, to the way in which they were actually compiled. For example, from that year new procedures required that persons tried for two offences should appear as just one person tried for statistical purposes. Prior to this date, there had been no uniform practice amongst forces, with some counting them as two persons tried. For that rea-son, the editor of the judicial statistics for 1912 included year by year figures for summary proceedings only from that year to date. The 1899 statistics, in contrast, had provided an overview of drunkenness proceedings back to 1857, noting that it was rather the 1872 Licensing Act, by creating new offences, which made comparisons with earlier years of “doubtful value.”65

Bearing these points in mind, what do the statistics reveal? Figure 1 first of all shows the total number of proceedings for drunkenness and drunk and dis-orderly behaviour. This indicates a steady rise to a first peak in the mid-1870s, with 1876 the highest year at 205,567 proceedings. With fluctuations, falls in the late 1870s, mid-1880s and early 1890s, the total then remained high until a second peak in the late 1890s and early Edwardian period, before falling again


and then rising to 1913. Whatever other influences were at work, the striking thing is that proceedings are essentially in line with the figures for total beer production (to focus on the great staple drink), which in turn is in line with the state of the economy. The peak year for beer production, following a long period of growth, was 1876. This was not exceeded for another twenty years, but recovery then was marked from 1896 to another peak in 1899.66 Contem-poraries certainly perceived the apparent connection between the economy and the statistics of proceedings. The editor of the judicial statistics for 1899 put it succinctly: “A year of great prosperity, 1899 was also a year of great drunkenness.” He noted too in retrospect the similar effect on proceedings of the “great prosperity” of the mid-1870s.67 This “general correspondence” was also demonstrated in a detailed study of the whole question by temper-ance campaigner George B. Wilson, relating proceedings and convictions for drunkenness to alcohol consumption and employment.68

To get a fuller picture, however, as Wilson also did, one must look at the rate of proceedings. This is presented in Figure 2. There is again the rise to the mid-1870s, with the peak year slightly earlier in 1875 at 84.84 proceedings per 10,000 people. Thereafter the fluctuations are comparable to those for total proceedings. But the striking facts are that, although on the one hand the rate remained high (at least in comparison to the years of the commencement of the statistics), there is then a long-term decline down to the First World War. This is in fact the same trend that one sees in per capita beer consumption. Again the peak years were the 1870s. The annual averages of beer drunk for

Figure 1. Persons proceeded against for drunkenness in England and Wales, 1857-1913

0

25000

50000

75000

100000

125000

150000

175000

200000

225000

250000

1857 1864 1871 1878 1885 1892 1899 1906 1913

MaleFemaleTotal

Source: Judicial Statistics for England and Wales, 1857-1913


the years 1870-74 and 1875-9 were respectively 38.2 and 40.5 gallons per head. The trend thereafter was downwards, falling to an annual average of 29.4 gallons in 1910-13.69

The key questions, as Gourvish and Wilson, historians of the modern brew-ing industry, argue, are: why did already high levels of consumption increase sharply between the late 1850s and the late 1870s and why did they not re-cover thereafter when living standards continued to rise? These are complex questions but part of the answer lies in the link with working-class living standards, as suggested by A. E. Dingle. Put simply, the earlier increase may be attributed to the fact that economic growth provided some of the working-classes with greater purchasing power, which in the absence of alternative spending opportunities went towards the traditional pleasure of drinking. Af-ter the late 1870s, real wages advanced because prices generally (although significantly not that of alcoholic drink) fell and therefore working-class liv-ing standards rose. But now there was available an ever expanding range of cheap mass-produced goods: packaged foodstuffs, clothing, shoes and furni-ture and a similarly growing range of opportunities for leisure spending: from newspapers and magazines to visits to the music hall, sporting events or day trips to the seaside.70 These spending patterns reflect, of course, changing pat-terns of behaviour, towards a more home-centred lifestyle and incorporating a

Figure 2. Persons proceeded against for drunkenness per 10,000 persons in Eng-land and Wales, 1860-1913

Source: G. B. Wilson, Alcohol and the Nation, Table 34

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

1860 1867 1874 1881 1888 1895 1902 1909

MaleFemaleTotal


greater diversity of leisure pursuits, which collectively could produce greater sobriety.

What can the figures for proceedings for drunkenness tell us about the question – was England becoming a more sober, less drunken nation? It per-haps does not need pointing out that we are dealing here with drunks who transgressed the law, a different thing altogether from those who were merely drunk. Contemporaries were well aware of this, as the editor of the first judi-cial statistics commented, figures for the offences were “a distant indication only of the extent of this vice.”71 Brian Harrison doubted whether the statis-tics for the period up to the 1870s peak reliably indicated changing levels of drunkenness. He pointed to the sharp fluctuations in the number of pro-ceedings from year to year in some places and the equally striking variations between different localities with similar characteristics, as was noted above. He concluded that: “The impressive rise in the number of proceedings for drunkenness between 1857 and 1876 is at least as likely to reflect increasing concern about the drink problem in those years as any increase in consump-tion.”72 That concern was, as we saw, carried into effect by new police forces. The point is given greater significance when one looks at the opinion of in-formed contemporaries about trends in drinking habits. Henry Bruce, Home Secretary and former magistrate, looked at the rising statistics of drunkenness in 1872 and found “that nothing was more puzzling… for if he was to judge by his own observation and by what others had told him of their experience, he would say that in the last fifty years there had been a marked improve-ment in this respect and in the general conduct of the people.”73 The House of Lords committee inquiring into intemperance, of which Bruce (by then Lord Aberdare) was a member, came to similar conclusions. The police statistics, the committee felt, were “inconclusive” but not without some significance in making estimations of the extent of drunkenness in different localities. But overall it concluded that drunkenness was in fact “less common than formerly among the more respectable portion of the working classes, and that the in-crease has taken place chiefly, either in the lowest grades of society, or among those whose advance in education has not kept pace with the increase of their wages.” Drunkenness had not increased in rural England and although large towns and mining districts in particular had seen a rise in the five or six years of prosperity from 1868, there was “no evidence to prove that the country is, in this respect, in a worse condition than it was 30 years ago.”74 If that was true for the 1870s, then it certainly suggests a real fall in the incidence of drunken-ness in succeeding decades. For the police continued to take action against drunks, as we can see in the high numbers of individuals prosecuted, but the rate of prosecutions declined. Not only that, but per capita consumption of beer also declined.

Some historians, however, have argued that no such inference is possible. F. M. L. Thompson, for example, charting The Rise of Respectable Society, was emphatic that “It was overwhelmingly a matter of police zeal, not of growth


and fluctuation in the actual extent of drunken behaviour, which could not be objectively defined let alone measured.” Yet elsewhere in the book, he does argue that drunkenness in fact declined.75 Others are more cautious. Following the approach of Harrison, V. A. C. Gatrell, in his discussion of the subject in relation to a broader decline of violence, felt that whether there indeed was this real decline in drunkenness, or whether prosecution of the offence was merely allowed to decline in the last quarter of the century was “at present an open question,” speculating that this could be explained by relaxed anxieties over drunkenness.76 As we saw above, public opinion could have an important influence on the level of prosecutions. On the one hand, the extent to which anxiety over drunkenness declined is questionable, although it did take new forms, as we will see,77 and on the other, whilst the rate of proceedings fell, the actual numbers remained high. If, therefore, anxiety remained and police activity continued to reflect it, then the fall in the rate of proceedings could indeed reflect a real decline in levels of public drunkenness. The Royal Com-mission on Liquor Licensing Laws, itself exemplifying that continued anxi-ety over the drink question, which examined the whole subject in exhaustive detail in the second half of the 1890s, whilst asserting that a “gigantic evil” remained, concluded that: “Most persons who have studied the question are of opinion that actual drunkenness has materially diminished in all classes of society in the last 25 or 30 years.”78

Some further implications of what was happening will be explored as we now look more closely at the people who were proceeded against. Most of them were men but women always formed a significant minority. Figure 1 shows the total numbers prosecuted. The fluctuations are comparable for the two sexes, suggesting that the same underlying reasons apply, but the graph is less steep for women. Women’s share of total proceedings fell over the cen-tury. Figures for the metropolitan police district for 1831 to 1843 show that never less than 30 per cent of proceedings involved women, with a high in 1839 of 38.9 per cent. Similarly, in towns and cities with over 10,000 popula-tion, in 1841 35 per cent and in 1851 36.5 per cent of those proceeded against were women. When the national figures become available from 1857, that year’s level of 27.5 per cent was never thereafter exceeded. It did fluctuate around one quarter, but then definitely fell in the Edwardian period to a little over one fifth.79 Looked at another way, however, drunkenness became more especially a female crime. Drunkenness and drunk and disorderly conduct represented 21.7 per cent of total female convictions in 1857. This rose to a high in 1875 of 43.9 per cent and remained high thereafter. This represented a higher proportion than for men.80 Although, as Lucia Zedner suggested in her discussion of this aspect of female crime, female drunkenness always ex-cited especial disapproval, it became a particular focus of anxiety towards the end of the century. This was linked to contemporary racial discourse and consequent fears for the deterioration of the English race, to combat which a drive for “national efficiency” was seen as essential. The nation’s present and


potential mothers were of course central to such racial theorizing and natu-rally had a vital role to play in any quest for national efficiency.81 A flavour of this is to be obtained from a discussion in the newly inaugurated British Journal of Inebriety on “Inebriety in women and its influence on child-life.” One contributor, having analysed conviction statistics for Manchester to dem-onstrate that most of the women were in their child-bearing years, opined that they were “probably giving birth to neurotic, vicious children, tainted with alcoholism and disease, large numbers of whom… will grow up weak and rickety, to lower still further the standard of national efficiency by adding to the burden of pauperism and crime.”82 The effect of this climate of opinion is shown in a study of women brought before the courts in the South Wales coal-fields, which found that among female drunkards, mothers were dealt with most harshly by the courts and in the press.83

But the contemporary view that female drunkenness was increasing, and the concerns associated with that belief, are not reflected in proceedings. Their rate of proceedings was in fact declining and, as noted, they also represented a falling proportion of those proceeded against. Further, women were more likely than men to be repeat offenders. In 1910, it was shown that while wom-en accounted for only twenty per cent of those convicted of drunkenness, a mere fourteen per cent of those women accounted for 43 per cent of those with twenty or more convictions. The figures were skewed even further by the fact that a relatively few women amongst these habitual offenders received a massive number of convictions.84 Women such as Jane Cakebread, who by the age of 65 in 1895 had made a total of 278 court appearances, were a source of condemnation but also sometimes of jocular fascination. 85 As Thomas Hol-mes, a rescue worker with drunken and prostitute women, noted caustically in describing how the press caught on to some of these women: “England was in glee because demented women said strange things and behaved themselves unseemly before the magistrates.” He went on to say of Jane Cakebread: “Her quips and cranks, loquacity and sense of humour made her dear to reporters, and Jane became national property.”86 Among many reports of such inebri-ate women, one from The Times of Jane Cakebread who made her 221st ap-pearance in 1890 at the age of 60, conveys this gleefulness. A constable had seen her around midnight, surrounded by a mob and using very bad language. Taken into custody, she became violent and tried to bite him. In court, in “her usual plausible style” she claimed she was very weak and not used to liquor. To laughter in the court she alleged that whilst in her cell singing hymns the inspector let officers come in and “bang her about.” On receiving her sentence she blessed the magistrate.87 In South Wales, Emma Retallick, known in the press as Pontypridd’s own Jane Cakebread, made her 189th appearance in 1909.88 It was these habitual female drunkards who were to be the chief tar-gets of an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to “reform” such people in special inebriate reformatories.89 Finally, the older offender was not solely a female phenomenon. In the Manchester convictions for drunkenness for 1902, men-


tioned above, for both sexes a third of offenders were aged forty and over. But the bulk of those convicted were for both sexes in their twenties and thirties.90

What of the social class of those proceeded against? Two points must be made to begin with. The criminal justice system always dealt almost wholly with drunkenness among the labouring classes. Not that the better off did not get drunk. Indeed the prejudice on the part of the police in favour of the wealthier drunkard was a common enough complaint. The Chartist newspa-per the Northern Star in the 1830s was treating its readers to the spectacle of the rich drunken man escorted carefully home, whereas if “a poor man was found drunk in the streets the policeman would kick him in the gutter to pre-vent his falling and drag him before a magistrate the next day.”91 The concern over female drinking towards the end of the century also extended to that of the wealthy, those who “may tipple in secret for years without her own fam-ily being aware of the fact.”92 My interest here, however, is with those dealt with by the police. The second point is that raised by the House of Lords Committee on Intemperance that drunkenness was becoming confined more and more “among the lowest grades of society.” Although this opinion must carry some weight, and the proposition itself does seems likely given what we know about the growth of working-class respectability over the century, it is less easy to support as characterising a development over time without more precise evidence.

Evidence of the social class of offenders, particularly from the early period, is very limited. In the Gloucestershire cases referred to above, the occupation of the offender was given in twelve of the just seventeen cases. Three were labourers and one was a pauper (actually in the poorhouse) but the remainder were from a wider social cross section, comprising two watchmakers, a dealer, carpenter, coach driver, fishmonger and two farmers.93 Detailed examination of cases in the local Bradford newspaper in 1834-36 and 1849 reveals, where an occupation was given, almost all as working men in unskilled or relatively unskilled occupations: labourers, including railway labourers, delvers and woolcombers, then a low-paid, declining handcraft.94 Manchester evidence from mid-century shows a similar picture. Male offenders were poorly edu-cated labourers, factory hands and hawkers, but also joiners, sawyers, tailors, clerks and agents. Between one-third and a half at this time were Irish, a group widely perceived as especially prone to be drunk and disorderly. Female of-fenders comprised typically prostitutes or servants.95 Another piece of evi-dence, reinforcing this point, is of educational background. In a sample of 515 individuals arrested by Sheffield police during 1863-4, 228 had “none,” 276 were “imperfect” and only eleven had an education described as “good.” Only one whose occupation was listed was described as a “gentleman” and 77 were unemployed.96 The propensity of certain occupational groups towards drunk-enness was analysed by George B. Wilson in grouping towns and counties of a similar character. The rate overall of proceedings in seaports and mining counties was clearly significantly higher than that of manufacturing towns,


pleasure towns or the metropolis and all were higher than that for agricultural counties. At the same time, stressing the importance of other factors on the statistics he noted the lack of uniformity between individual towns in the same group.97

Within the labouring classes, certain occupations or groups provided a large proportion of those proceeded against. This tendency could be quite marked, as detailed local studies can demonstrate. One of the petty sessional district of Morpeth in Northumberland in the 1870s, then a mixed area comprising farm-ing communities, a market town, newly developing coalfields and fishing vil-lages, showed that proceedings predominated amongst the latter’s population. Newbiggin-By-The-Sea, with never more than seven per cent of the popula-tion, generated between 45 and 72 per cent of all the drink-related offences proceeded against. Six names contributed over 160 offences, or no fewer than 32 per cent of the total.98 Looking at a more wholly rural area towards the end of the period, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, we see a similar concentration. This evidence consists of a charge book of 1910 for the Hang division, which covered an area including the town of Bedale and village of Masham. There were a total of 66 charges involving drunkenness, around a third of the total charges, of which three-quarters were for being drunk and disorderly, a further twelve for being drunk in the highway or drunk and incapable and five cases of drunk in charge of a horse and cart. The latter comprised two labourers, a farmer, a horse breaker and a fish dealer. Of the remaining 61, no fewer than 40 were described as “tramping,” such as “tramping labourer,” and included just two women: Sarah King, a tramping charwoman and Margaret Dugan, tramping pedlar, who was also charged with begging, itself a common offence in the district. And of the remaining 21 individuals, sixteen were described as labourers. The average age of the 61 charged was 41. Their character was also given, which was mostly “unknown,” in nine cases was “good” and in fif-teen, about a quarter of the total, comprised having previous convictions and/or being “bad”, in the worst case with eight previous convictions – William Reynard, a labourer of Masham. This is clearly a picture of a rural police force processing for drunkenness those at the very bottom of the social structure and thus supports the opinion of those who believed that it was such people who represented the flesh and blood reality of the statistics.99 Further studies using such evidence will give us a fuller picture of just who the offenders were.

conclusIon

This article has investigated one of the most common offenders to be dealt with by the nineteenth-century criminal justice system – the drunk. It has shown how policing sought to achieve a more orderly society, in which the suppres-sion of drunkenness was an essential element, to which the tens of thousands of individuals prosecuted testify. But it has shown too how that aim was nec-essarily tempered by the practicalities of policing, from the day to day dealing with drunks to the wide range of sometimes conflicting pressures under which


they worked. In the end, I have argued, society did indeed become less drunk-en, allowing for all the problems involved in making that assessment, one part of the evidence for which is the fall in the rate of proceedings for drunken-ness. This overview ends at the First World War. The trend of a falling rate of proceedings for drunkenness accelerated during the war and was sustained in the inter-war years.100 By 1931 another Royal Commission on Licensing was able to conclude that “by almost universal consent, excessive drinking in this country has been greatly, even spectacularly diminished.”101 One might again then suggest that the continuing fall in proceedings, when due allowances are made for all the other influences on the statistics, did indeed reflect a real decline in the incidence of drunkenness. That decline was partly the result of the continuation of trends established in the previous century, for example the widening of leisure opportunities for many, but new circumstances, notably for some the prolonged depressed state of the economy, were also significant. With decline went reduced anxiety, which was not to revive until the develop-ment of new circumstances of consumption and behaviour in the second half of the twentieth century.102

University of [email protected]

endnotes1. Parts of this article were presented as a paper to the Second British Crime Historians Sym-

posium at the University of Sheffield, September 2-3, 2010; I should like also to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their comments.

2. Annual Judicial Statistics, England and Wales, 1857-1913, Parliamentary Papers; see for the latter point George B. Wilson, Alcohol and the Nation (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1940), 282-3.

3. James Burnley, West Riding Sketches (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1875), 101-2; Judi-cial Statistics, England and Wales, 1912, Parliamentary Papers 1914 (Cd 7282) C.1, 13.

4. Chris A. Williams, “Counting crimes or counting people: some implications of mid-nine-teenth century British police returns,” Crime, History & Societies 4 (2000): 77-93.

5. A.Lynn Martin, Alcohol, Violence, and Disorder in Traditional Europe (Kirksville, Mis-souri: Truman State University, 2009), 207-9 for this general point. There are many studies which reveal the workings of these courts, for example, J. A. Sharpe, “Crime and Delinquency in an Essex Parish 1600-1640,” in Crime in England 1550-1800 ed. J. S. Cockburn, 90-109 (London: Methuen, 1977); John Addy, Sin and Society in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1989); Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

6. 4 James 1, c.5.7. 21 James 1, c.7.8. For a discussion of these sources see Peter King, “The summary courts and social relations

in eighteenth-century England,” Past and Present 183 (2004): 125-72.9. Elizabeth Crittall, ed., The Justicing Notebook of William Hunt 1744-1749 (Devizes: Wilt-

shire Record Society, 1982).10. Ruth Paley, ed., Justice in Eighteenth-Century Hackney: The justicing notebook of Henry

Norris and the Hackney petty sessions book (London: London Record Society, 1991).11. Gwen Morgan and Peter Rushton, eds., The Justicing Notebook (1750-64) of Edmund Tew,


Rector of Boldon (Woodbridge: Surtees Society and The Boydell Press, 2000); see also Mor-gan and Rushton, “The magistrate, the community and the maintenance of an orderly society in eighteenth-century England,” Historical Research 76 (2003): 54-77.

12. Alan F. Cirket, ed., Samuel Whitbread’s Notebooks 1810-11, 1813-14 (Bedford: Bedford-shire Historical Record Society, 1971).

13. Registers of convictions 1781-1815, QDX, North Yorkshire Record Office, Northallerton.14. Irene Wyatt, ed., Calendar of Summary Convictions at Petty Sessions 1781-1837 (Bristol:

Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 2008).15. David Philips and Robert D. Storch, Policing Provincial England 1829-1856: The politics

of reform (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), 22-25.16. See, for example, among many references to this, David Eastwood, Governing Rural Eng-

land: Tradition and transformation in local government 1780-1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 87 and 227; and Paul Jennings, The Public House in Bradford, 1770-1970 (Staffordshire: Keele University Press, 1995), 43.

17. W. Branch Johnson, ed., “Memorandums for…” The Diary Between 1798 and 1810 of John Carrington (London: Phillimore, 1973).

18. J. E. and P. A. Crowther, eds., The Diary of Robert Sharp of South Cave: Life in a Yorkshire village 1812-1837 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 154, 392-93, 493, 535 and 587.

19. For more on this topic, see Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The temperance question in England 1815-1872, Second edition (Staffordshire: Keele University Press, 1994), 85-99 and Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A social history 1200-1830 (London: Longman, 1983), 250-60.

20. Clive Emsley, The English Police: A political and social history, Second Edition, (London: Longman, 1996), 5.

21. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 64-65 and 79-84; Paul Jennings, The Local: A History of the English Pub (Stroud: Tempus, 2007), 57-72.

22. For developments in policing including the “landmark” reforms, see Emsley, The English Police, 24-64.

23. Drew D. Gray, Crime, Prosecution and Social Relations: The summary courts of the City of London in the late eighteenth century (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 39-40, 96-97 and 116-23.

24. Select Committee on the Sale of Beer, Parliamentary Papers 1833 (416) XV.1, 246; Brian Barber, “Municipal government in Leeds 1835-1914,” in Municipal Reform and the Industrial City, ed. Derek Fraser (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982): 61-110.

25. Bernard Jennings, ed., A History of Harrogate and Knaresborough (Huddersfield: Adver-tiser Press, 1970), 343; Harrogate Advertiser, July 16, 1842; June 19, 1847; June 26, 1847.

26. Peter Bramham, “Policing Keighley – a northern industrial town in the mid-nineteenth century,” Craven History March 2003: 40-50 and also as “Policing in an industrial town: Keigh-ley 1800-1856,” The Local Historian 35 (2005): 243-53; diary of James “Pie” Leach 1848-1853, BK309, Keighley Local Studies Library.

27. Select Committee on Inquiry into Drunkenness among the Labouring Classes of the UK, Parliamentary Papers 1834 (559) VIII.315, Appendix 5, 437; Return of Number of Persons taken into Custody for Drunkenness and Disorderly Conduct by Metropolitan and City of London Po-lice 1831-43, Parliamentary Papers 1844 (217) XXXIX.265.

28. Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Bill for regulating the Sale of Beer and Other Liquors on the Lord’s Day, Parliamentary Papers 1847-48 (501) XVI.615, 16.

29. British Medical Association, Alcohol Misuse: Tackling the UK Epidemic (London: British Medical Association, 2008): 39.

30. For rural areas see Clive Emsley, “The Bedfordshire police 1840-1856: A case study in the working of the rural constabulary act,” Midland History 7 (1982): 73-92; W. J. Lowe, The Lancashire constabulary, 1845-1870: The social and occupational function of a Victorian po-lice force,” Criminal Justice History 4 (1983): 41-62; Roger Wells, “Implementation and non-implementation of the 1839-40 policing acts in East and West Sussex,” Policing and Society 1 (1991): 299-317. For urban areas see Michael Weaver, “The new science of policing: crime and the Birmingham police force, 1839-42,” Albion 26 (1994): 289-308; Graham Bush, Bristol and


its Municipal Government 1820-1851 (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 1976), 159; David Jones, Crime, Protest, Community and Police in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982); David Taylor, “Crime and policing in early Victorian Middlesbrough, 1835-55,” Journal of Local and Regional Studies 11 (1991): 48-66; John Field, “Police, power and community in a provincial English town: Portsmouth 1815-1875,” in Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain, ed. Victor Bailey (London: Croom Helm, 1981): 42-64; Miles Og-born, “Ordering the city: surveillance, public space and the reform of urban policing in England 1835-56,” Political Geography 12 (1993): 505-21; T. D. Howard and S. T. Miller, “Reform of the policing system in Sunderland in the early nineteenth century,” Durham County Local History So-ciety Bulletin 32 (1984): 54-64; Roger Swift, Police Reform in Early Victorian York, 1835-1856 (York: University of York, Borthwick Paper 73, 1988); Roger Swift, “Urban policing in early Victorian England, 1835-56: a reappraisal,” History 73 (1988): 211-37; B. J. Davey, Lawless and Immoral: Policing a Country Town 1838-1857 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983). For comparisons with the United States, see Wilbur R. Miller, Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830-1870 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Eric H. Monkonnen, Police in Urban America, 1860-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Sidney L. Harring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cit-ies, 1865-1915 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983).

31. Robert Storch, “The plague of blue locusts: police reform and popular resistance in north-ern England, 1840-57,” International Review of Social History 20 (1975): 61-90 and “The police-man as domestic missionary: urban discipline and popular culture in northern England, 1850-1880,” Journal of Social History 9 (1976): 481-509.

32. R. E. Foster, “A cure for crime? The Hampshire rural constabulary 1839-1856,” Southern History 12 (1990): 48-67.

33. Stephen Inwood, “Policing London’s morals: the metropolitan police and popular culture, 1829-1850,” The London Journal 15 (1990): 129-46.

34. Bradford Observer, October 15, 1840; July 9, 1872; July 20, 1872; also, for example in 1846, Emsley, “The Bedfordshire police”.

35. Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords appointed to Consider the Opera-tion of the Acts for the Sale of Beer, Parliamentary Papers 1849 & 1850 (398) XVIII.483, 50.

36. Report and Minutes of Evidence of the Select Committee of the House of Lords for inquir-ing into the Prevalence of Habits of Intemperance, and the Effects of recent Legislation, Parlia-mentary Papers 1878-79 (113) X.469, xxxiv.

37. Judicial Statistics for England and Wales, 1903, Parliamentary Papers 1905 [Cd. 2336] XCIX, 15. The 1902 Licensing Act made a number of other changes with respect to drunkenness, creating a new offence of being drunk in charge of a child apparently under the age of seven and targeting habitual drunkards in particular but the numbers dealt with under these provisions were negligible. See Judicial Statistics, England and Wales 1912, Parliamentary Papers 1914 (Cd. 7282), Table C Courts of Summary Jurisdiction 1893-1912 Non-indictable offences persons tried.

38. Parliamentary Papers 1834 (559), pp. 14, 25-6; Parliamentary Papers 1844 (217); First Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Intemperance, Parliamentary Papers 1877 (171) XI.1, 116.

39. Stefan Petrow, Policing Morals: The Metropolitan Police and the Home Office 1870-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 213-14 and generally for the policing of drunkenness and drink-ing places in the capital.

40. Parliamentary Papers 1877 (171), 5-6.41. Bradford, Bradford Corporation Watch Committee Minute Book, December 22, 1847,

BBC/1/5/1, West Yorkshire Archive Service, Bradford. 42. Bradford Observer, May 3, 1849.43. Leeds Mercury, May 1, 1866.44. The Times, April 3, 1872; June 23, 1875; January 31, 1876; for other deaths in custody

see April 17, 1877; July 25, 1878 and for undue violence September 16, 1887; Petrow, Policing morals, 218.

45. Report of the Royal Commission upon the Duties of the Metropolitan Police, Parliamen-tary Papers 1908 [Cd. 4156] L.1, 95.


46. Medical assistance was required if the individual was insensible through drink but also to confirm if necessary whether or not that individual was drunk; see Parliamentary Papers, 1908 [Cd. 4156], 48-49; and for examples see Old Bailey Proceedings Online, www.oldbaileyonline.org, (version 6.0, last accessed June 2 2011), January 1904, trial of Robert Allen (t19040111-161) and September 1911, trial of Hatchard, Harry (t19110905-69).

47. Petrow, Policing morals, 217; 48. Parliamentary Papers, 1877 (171), 119; see also Wilson, Alcohol and the nation, 29049. Jennifer S. Davis, “Prosecutions and their context: the use of the criminal law in later

nineteenth-century London,” in Policing and Prosecution in Britain 1750-1850, ed. Douglas Hay and Francis Snyder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 420; Emsley, English Police, Appendix 1.

50. Annual Report of the Chief Constable of Bradford 1903, West Yorkshire Archive Service, Bradford.

51. Parliamentary Papers 1877 (171), 130.52. Norman Moorsom, The Demon Drink in Mid-Victorian Middlesbrough (Middlesbrough:

The Trustees of the Middlesbrough Temperance Society, 2000), 13; Parliamentary Papers 1908 [Cd 4156], 60.

53. Bradford Observer, October 20, 1874.54. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, www.oldbaileyonline.org, (version 6.0, last accessed June

13, 2011), July 1888, trial of George Russell (t18880702-700); for another example in “a most notorious street for ruffianism”, Cirencester Street, off the Harrow Road, November 1907, trial of Adams, James (t19071119-42).

55. Parliamentary Papers 1877 (171), 120.56. Michael Brogden, The Police: Autonomy and Consent (London: Academic Press, 1982),

67-70.57. Parliamentary Papers 1877 (171), 195-99, 207 and 213.58. Jan Crowther, Beverley in mid-Victorian Times (Beverley: Hutton Press, 1990), 119.59. George W. E. Russell ed., Sir Wilfrid Lawson: a Memoir (London: Smith, Elder and Com-

pany, 1909), 124.60. Second Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Intemperance, Parlia-

mentary Papers 1877 (271) XI.357, 250-51.61. Emsley, English Police, 200 and the studies cited at note 30.62. Parliamentary Papers 1877 (171), 10.63. Wilson, Alcohol and the nation, 286. 64. Abstract of return of the number of persons taken into custody for drunkenness and disor-

derly conduct in each city and town in the United Kingdom in each year 1841 to 1851 Parliamen-tary Papers 1852-53 (531) LXXXI.295.

65. Judicial Statistics for England and Wales 1893, PP 1895 [C. 7725] CVIII.1, 99-100 ex-plains the changes and Parliamentary Papers 1914 (Cd. 7282), Table C; Judicial Statistics for England and Wales, 1899, Parliamentary Papers 1901 (Cd 659) LXXXIX, 16.

66. T. R. Gourvish and R. G. Wilson, The British Brewing Industry 1830-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 24-25.

67. Parliamentary Papers 1901 [Cd 659], 16-17.68. George B. Wilson, “A statistical review of the variations during the last twenty years in the

consumption of intoxicating drinks in the United Kingdom, and in the convictions for offences connected with intoxication, with a discussion of the causes to which these variations may be ascribed,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 75 (1912): 183-247.

69. Gourvish and Wilson, Brewing industry, 30-31.70. A. E. Dingle, “Drink and working class living standards in Britain 1870-1914,” Economic

History Review, Second series 25 (1972): 608-22; see also the discussion in Gourvish and Wilson, Brewing industry, 27-40 and Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 38-62 and 290-308.

71. Judicial Statistics, England and Wales, 1857, Parliamentary Papers 1857-58 (2407) LVII.383, ix.

72. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 306.73. Hansard Third Series vol. 211 c. 489 (May 8, 1872).74. Parliamentary Papers 1878-79 (113), xxxiii-xxxv and xxxviii.


75. F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society (London: Fontana, 1988), 330 and 314-15. See also on this point, David Beckingham, “Geographies of drink culture in Liverpool: Lessons from the drink capital of nineteenth-century England,” Drugs: Education, prevention and policy 15 (2008): 305-13.

76. V. A. C. Gatrell, “The decline of theft and violence in Victorian and Edwardian England,” in Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500,” ed. V. A. C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker (London: Europa Publications, 1980): 238-370 (quote on 291); also V. A. C. Gatrell and T. B. Hadden, “Criminal statistics and their interpreta-tion,” in Nineteenth Century Society: Essays in the use of quantitative methods for the study of social data, ed. E. A. Wrigley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972): 366-432.

77. John Greenaway, Drink and British Politics since 1830: A Study in Policy Making (Hound-mills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 53-59.

78. First Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Operation and Administration of the Laws Relating to the Sale of Intoxicating Liquors, Parliamentary Papers 1899 [C-9379] XXXV.1, 2. For the perceptive analysis of a contemporary journalist who sought to put a common sense view of the whole question, see Arthur Shadwell, Drink, Temperance and Legislation (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1902), 43-65.

79. Parliamentary Papers 1844 (217); Parliamentary Papers 1852-53 (531); Judicial Statistics England and Wales, 1857-1913.

80. Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 227 and 309.

81. Zedner, Women, crime and custody, 222-30.82. Frances Zanetti, “Inebriety in women and its influence on child-life,” British Journal of

Inebriety 1, no. 2 (1903): 47-57.83. Deborah James, “’Drunk and riotous in Pontypridd’: women, the police courts and the

press in South Wales coalfield society, 1899-1914,” Llafur 8 (2002): 5-12.84. Zedner, Women, crime and custody, 228-29.85. Sir Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal law and its Administration, volume

5 The Emergence of Penal Policy (London: Stevens and Sons, 1986), 301.86. Thomas Holmes, “Habitual inebriates,” The Contemporary Review LXXV (May, 1899):

740-46.87. The Times, August 26, 1890. 88. James, “Drunk and riotous.”89. There is now a substantial literature on this subject but see, for example, Zedner, Women,

crime and custody, 219-63; Bronwyn Morrison, ”Controlling the hopeless’: re-visioning the his-tory of female inebriate institutions c. 1870-1920,” in Punishment and Control in Historical Per-spective ed. Helen Johnston (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 135-57; and David Beckingham, “An historical geography of liberty: Lancashire and the Inebriates Acts,” Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010): 388-401.

90. Zanetti, “Inebriety in women.”91. Northern Star, 30 November 1839.92. Elizabeth Sloan Chesser, “Inebriety among women,” British Journal of Inebriety 6, No. 3

(1909): 186-89.93. Wyatt, Calendar of summary convictions.94. Bradford Observer, 1834-36 and 1849.95. David Jones, Crime, Protest, Community and Police in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Lon-

don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 164.96. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 376.97. Wilson. “Statistical review”.98. Stuart Porteous, “Crime in Northumberland: 1870-1879”, unpublished Dissertation sub-

mitted for the degree of Master of Arts in Historical Studies, University of Sunderland, 1997, whom I would like to thank for permission to use it.

99. North Riding Constabulary Charge Book: Hang Division of Hang East Petty Sessional District, commences January 1, 1910, Ripon Museum Trust. (to whom I am grateful for permis-sion to view).


100. Wilson, Alcohol and the nation, 272-93 and 432-33; Gwylmor Prys Williams and George Thompson Brake, Drink in Great Britain 1900-1979 (London: B. Edsall and Company, 1980), 253-71.

101. Royal Commission on Licensing (England and Wales) Report, Parliamentary Papers 1931-2 (Cmd 3988) XI, 13 and 22.

102. An early example is Evidence of Increasing Drunkenness Amongst Persons Aged Under 21. Period 1950-1953 (London: Economic Research Council, 1954) and subsequent reports.

p d in e and ales late ighteenth w · pdf filepaul jennings lectures in history at the...

Documents