Reports

South Tyneside Meeting - January 2002 "The Rise of Respectable Society" by Malcolm Grady A Report by Margaret Stafford

We welcomed several new people last night as well as one or two old faces, all waiting with bated breath to see which topic Malcolm Grady had chosen - and we weren't to be disappointed as you will see. His topics always seem to involve the baser aspects of everyday life. I don't think he particularly chooses them just for us - perhaps we'd better ask him!

The grand title for last night's talk was "the rise of respectable society " but in the event we focused on beer and drunkenness, oh and sausages!!

Malcolm candidly admitted he was using the group as guinea pigs for a new topic. Having been in this position before with Malcolm the group responded by initially being coy about claiming as family any people named in his examples as their own as we now know he gains a great deal of his source information from the police reports and magistrates' records.

You will get some idea of how the evening progressed when I tell you the first quote was along the lines of "Drinking and sex were the most popular pastimes of all classes in Victorian society". Having "done" sex in South Shields on a previous occasion we quickly realised this week's theme was to be the demon drink - as we all sat there in the upstairs room of the Old Ship!!!!

Malcolm's skill is to put together a series of quotes and then make you think about what lies behind them, what do they tell us about the life of the ancestors we so painstakingly seek

Which of us would claim as family, he asked, one Edward McCormick who in 1849 at the Magistrates' Court was fined 2s 6d for being drunk and unscrewing his wooden leg and using it to beat other passengers about the head (strange to say none of us thought Edward might belong to us!).

The thrust of the argument was that before the 1870s the social life of the working classes revolved around the pub. Additionally many cultural and work norms reinforced the important part drink played, from the sealing of bargains at the local hiring or fair to the requirement for apprentices to buy workmates a drink on completing their first piece. Glass workers, for example, were provided with up to 4 jugs of beer a day to replenish the fluid lost in the heat.

The poorer the district the more pubs or drink outlets - and the more drunks. In South Shields in 1851 there were 145 drinking establishments supplying drink via a license. In the same year bylaw 66 was passed which brought in a £5 fine for keeping a disorderly house. As Malcolm regularly reminded us - a law or a bylaw was usually introduced to regulate an existing problem.

In 1876 the average annual consumption was estimated at 34 gallons of beer and by 1880 South Shields had a total of 293 drink supplying outlets. The police report of the same year refers to 172 thieves, 138 prostitutes, 34 vagrants, 34 suspicious characters having been before the court - and 436 habitual drunkards.

The report of 1885 had 159 thieves, 228 prostitutes, 100 vagrants, 160 suspicious characters and 625 habitual drunkards. The population of South Shields at this time was about 83/84,000.

And it wasn't just the men..... in 1876 1 female, Mary Stoker (any claimants?!) was sent to Durham gaol for 1 month after appearing before the court 19 times for being drunk!

To remind us nothing changes, there were also concerns about supplying drink to the young (under 14) and in the 1880s a fine of £6 was brought in for this offense. Youth crime was linked to families where the mother had a drinking problem. In 1891 in Shields there were 33 deaths in suspicious circumstances, the highest number being associated with drink.

Of course the thing many of us didn't realize was that the drinking of beer had been positively encouraged by the Government as an alternative to the concerns after the Napoleonic wars of the damage to health caused by the high incidence of spirit drinking. So in 1830 the Beer House Act was passed and the tax on malt was reduced to make beer drinking more accessible. The expansion of the railways enabled the brewers to reach a greater public and there was considerable investment in the building of architecturally pleasing pubs often with huge rooms for social gatherings. One such the West Park survives and on the upper floor is largely untouched - Malcolm encouraged us to step back in time by befriending the landlord and asking for a tour - he didn't tell us if he had any shares in the brewery!!!

In 1880 however Gladstone needed money so the tax was put back on malt and from about the same time the Scottish malt whisky trade began to grow.

By the late 1870s the Temperance movement had begun to have an impact in Shields as had other institutions such as the YMCA, the beginning of the rise in respectable society referred to originally but we'd spent so much time on drink that that will have to be a topic for a future meeting.

We heard stories from members of going to the off license for the jug of beer for their father, of a man being found drunk in charge of a flock of sheep in Fawcett St in Sunderland (now in the heart of the city for those who don't know it!), of youngsters standing outside pubs to guide their inebriated fathers home and of someone taking the pledge at age 7 (though we all noted he hadn't kept it up!)

Quite how we ended up discussing sausages is a bit of a mystery (and I was on Coca Cola so no I wasn't drunk!) but we ended with a quote from one of Malcolm's favourite books "Once a week is ample" (the moderately sensual Victorian's guide to the restraint of the passions, the Victorian equivalent of the agony aunt) where a young man concerned about mastering feelings of a "lower nature" was assured he would be pure if he avoided pork, particularly in the form of sausages!!! We are promised a discussion about the Victorian attitude to food sometime soon!!

All in all a good night was had by all, thought provoking with a dash of humour and pathos.

The books Malcolm referred to are as follows

Once a Week is Ample Gerard Mac Donald Early Victorian Britain JFC Harrison Victorian Values James Walvin The Rise of Respectable Society FML Thompson The Northumbria Pub Lynn Pearson The police reports are in the local studies library at South Shields