The Campaign for Prohibition in Victorian England

The United Kingdom Alliance 1872-1895

Anthony Dingle, Anthony E. Dingle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317218166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The evils of drink were a constant preoccupation in late Victorian England. The United Kingdom Alliance, founded in 1853, fought a long and vigorous but ultimately unsuccessful campaign for prohibition. In doing so it eventually developed into one of the most powerful reformist pressure groups operating in Victorian political life.

First published in 1980, this book covers in extensive detail the legislative activity of the Alliance and analyses the administration and campaign strategies involved, from its formation to the disastrous electoral defeat of the liberal party in 1895. Stressing that the phenomenon of Prohibition cannot be adequately explained purely in political terms, this study shows that the preliminary success and eventual failure of the Alliance was closely related to its nonconformist ethics and attitudes.

This book will be of interest to those studying Victorian history, politics and religion.

Chapter 1

EARLY YEARS

The campaign for prohibition in England began in 1853. Two years earlier the state of Maine had introduced statewide prohibition and information about this experiment had been disseminated in England by visiting American prohibitionists. Nathaniel Card, a Quaker cotton manufacturer and member of the Manchester and Salford Temperance Society, was impressed by what he heard and early in 1852 he tried to interest other members of his society in starting a campaign for a ‘Maine Law’ in England. During a meeting at Card’s house in June 1852 it was decided to form a ‘National League for the Total and Legal Suppression of Intemperance’. After further private meetings and intensive lobbying for support among ‘men of influence’, the ‘United Kingdom Alliance for the Suppression of the Traffic in all Intoxicating Liquors’ was established. It held its first public meeting and made its first appeal for popular support in October 1853.¹

The appearance of the Alliance was a new departure for a temperance movement which had been fighting against the evils of drink for almost a quarter of a century. Whilst the ultimate objective of an alcohol-free utopia remained unchanged, new methods were now to be employed in an attempt to realise it. Teetotallers had always sought to eliminate the demand for drink by persuading people to take a pledge of abstinence; this approach did not directly threaten either the drink trade or the licensing system. Prohibitionists in contrast wished to stop people drinking by eliminating the supply of drink. This represented a rejection of the belief, strongly held by early total abstainers, that man could control his own destiny by voluntarily renouncing the use of alcohol. Because the temperance reformation had not occurred prohibitionists concluded that in an environment filled with drinkshops the individual was powerless to improve his lot by his own unaided efforts. Licensing in any form was rejected as unsound and unworkable, and the drink trade became the target for a frontal assault aimed at its elimination. Thus after more than twenty years’ concentration on the individual as the focus for all reforming efforts, a branch of the temperance movement now looked to legislation to effect a remedy. Parliament was to be the new battleground and the emphasis shifted from social regeneration within local communities to political campaigning on a national scale.

At the outset of the campaign for prohibition none of the leaders of the Alliance had a clear idea of how they could achieve their purpose. Echoing Benjamin Disraeli they assumed that ‘all public questions pass through various stages. They are first popular, then parliamentary, and lastly governmental’.² While it was anticipated that the campaign would follow this pattern, no one had yet thought out how progress from one stage to another could be achieved. Nevertheless the first stage, that of popularising the principle of prohibition, presented few problems. The Alliance had at its disposal a heritage of techniques developed by the anti-slavery and anti-corn law campaigns which could be used to attract and demonstrate the existence of mass support. The public meeting, the petition and the deputation were all familiar to prohibitionists and they immediately began to employ them with skill and ingenuity.

The Alliance rapidly attracted support. Temperance pioneers such as Joseph Livesey, John Dunlop and Father Mathew were attracted to prohibition because it appeared to offer a political short cut to universal abstinence, and a means of rejuvenating the ailing teetotal movement.³ Total abstainers followed their lead and began joining in large numbers. Within a year the Alliance had enrolled over 4,500 members, this rose to 21,000 in 1855 and 30,000 a year later. Membership was open to anyone willing to donate a shilling, regardless of whether they personally were total abstainers. This was condemned by some as hypocritical but the Alliance defended itself by arguing that it was engaged in a national crusade and ‘to accomplish a general object, it must obviously be inappropriate to employ mere sectional effort’.⁴ Its pool of potential support was thereby widened to include those who supported prohibition but still personally drank. Open membership allowed the Alliance to benefit from the services and support of people like Lord Brougham, Professor F.W. Newman and the future Cardinal Manning at a time when the last two had not yet renounced the use of alcohol.

The social backgrounds of those who gave money to the Alliance during its first twenty years have been examined by Brian Harrison.⁵ Most came from the industrial counties of the north, particularly Lancashire. Manufacturers, particularly those in the textile industry, were the largest occupational group and provided the major single source of finance. Subscribers were almost exclusively Nonconformist in religion and Liberal in politics. There were a few Anglicans, large landowners, professional people and others from diverse backgrounds, but they tended to be untypical of their class. To the end of the century the prohibitionist campaign continued to draw the bulk of its support from Nonconformity and Liberalism.

Alliance subscription lists greatly underestimate support for prohibition. Many more people were content to turn up to the numerous Alliance meetings, of which 500 were held in 1855 alone, in order to demonstrate their approval. The evidence of these meetings and the results of canvasses in the provincial cities convinced Alliance leaders that their cause enjoyed wide popular support. They believed they had the backing of the aristocracy of labour as well as the lower middle class of shop keepers and clerks. Some even asserted that those of the unregenerated, drunken ‘residium’ would also, in their more sober moments, give prohibition their blessing. Sir Wilfrid Lawson insisted that the demand for prohibition came ‘absolutely from the people themselves. It has sprung from them’.⁶ Such claims were perhaps somewhat extravagant, but by the 1860s the campaign had harnessed some of the money-power of northern manufacturers and was attracting support from two groups whose political influence was in the ascendancy. Nonconformists were at last putting their political quietism, bom out of long years of social and political exclusion, behind them. The stage was set for the emergence of ‘militant dissent’ and the Alliance was to be one of its vehicles. Likewise the articulate working man was flexing his political muscles through trade unionism and the Reform League, before being enfranchised in large numbers in 1867.

As donations poured into Alliance coffers, £4,427 in 1855 rising to £15,290 by 1869, the foundations for the campaign were gradually established. An Executive Committee (hereafter referred to as the Executive) in Manchester was entrusted with control of the movement. A number of energetic individuals filled key roles; Samuel Pope, a Nonconformist businessman turned lawyer, became the first secretary. When he later became honorary secretary his place as secretary was filled by the vegetarian accountant and former commission agent T.C. Barker. The Baptist minister and temperance historian Dawson Bums, a founder member of the Alliance, became metropolitan superintendent of the campaign. The Radical activist James Hayes Raper was appointed parliamentary agent in 1860 and Henry S. Sutton, a vegetarian poet and disciple of Swedenborg became editor of the prohibitionist newspaper Alliance News in 1854. As funds allowed, a network of district agents was established and by 1870 there were nineteen of them covering the whole country. In addition to this, autonomous Alliance auxiliaries sprang up in towns wherever there were enough enthusiastic prohibitionists to establish one.⁷

As support increased and an effective organisation was established, the next stage of the campaign was to convince parliament of the benefits of prohibition. Prohibitionists identified parliament, still in the fifties and sixties predominantly aristocratic in composition and indifferent to the evils of drink, as the main obstacle to progress and it was here that the first major problems were encountered. The resources at the disposal of the Alliance, impressive though they appeared, were not immediately equal to the task. The Nonconformist background of most Alliance leaders was a handicap because their history of political disabilities left them without knowledge or experience of government processes. The Executive reluctantly conceded that ‘temperance men are mostly inexperienced in the wiles of political struggle’.⁸ Consequently they were forced to approach their task blindly and, by a process of trial and error, endeavour to locate the seat of political power. It soon became clear that no further progress could be made until the Alliance acquired a parliamentary leader willing to push its cause, and a specific legislative proposal which incorporated the principle of prohibition and could be introduced into the House of Commons.

Sir Walter Trevelyan the eccentric Anglican naturalist and landowner had become the first president in 1853. He was asked if he would become an MP and lead the cause in the Commons but he was not interested in undertaking so onerous a task. Samuel Pope wished to do so but he was defeated in his attempts to get elected for Stoke-on-Trent in 1857 and 1859. The problem was eventually solved when Wilfrid Lawson, the young MP for Carlisle since 1859, agreed to take on the job. A large landowner, keen amateur sportsman and ‘a cobdenite of the Cobdenites’, his reasons for doing so are obscure. ‘I did not take up the question’ he declared, ‘the question took me up’, but then somewhat equivocally added, ‘I certainly would not have taken the part which I did if anyone else would have undertaken it.’⁹ Although at first regarded as a stopgap, he remained to lead the Alliance in the Commons for over forty years.

The second difficulty, that of embodying the aims of the Alliance into a specific legislative demand, was overcome with the emergence of the Permissive Bill. This gave ratepayers in any locality the power to ban the trade in drink in their district if a two-thirds majority of them desired it. A vote for prohibition would then automatically result in the suppression of all licensed premises. The idea of permissive legislation had first been proposed in an anonymous article in 1855 (the brewer Charles Buxton later admitted authorship). At the Alliance annual meeting in 1857 many suggestions for a ‘Voluntary Maine Law’ had been made, some of them extremely complex, but the Bill as it finally emerged was largely the work of Lawson, though he was given some assistance in drafting it by J. H. Raper. It was brief and simple containing one permissive prohibitory clause and nine others suggesting machinery for its operation.¹⁰

The Permissive Bill was in some ways quite different from the ‘Maine Law’ which had been the rallying cry in earlier years. The advocacy of a national and imperative change had now been replaced by a proposal that was both local and permissive. The immediacy of the demand for prohibition was thereby inevitably reduced. Total abstainers of the ‘moral suasionist’ school, who had enthusiastically pinned their hopes on prohibition as a once and for all short cut to national sobriety, were alienated by the change. Their most prominent spokesman, Joseph Livesey, complained that ‘the Permissive Bill is about the strongest symptom of Alliance weakness of anything that has transpired with it’. He saw it as an admission that national prohibition was impossible and believed that to campaign for it would simply ‘prolong a hopeless agitation’.¹¹ Alliance leaders did not see matters in the same light. While national prohibition remained their ultimate objective, they reluctantly realised that without much preparatory legislation it was not a practicable reform in the 1860s. All was not well with prohibition in Maine where the law had been repealed in 1856 only to be re-enacted again in 1858. J.B. Gough the prominent American temperance orator had toured England in 1857 under the auspices of the ‘moral suasionist’ National Temperance League and greatly embarrassed the Alliance by declaring the ‘Maine Law’ to be a ‘dead letter’.¹² The Permissive Bill was designed to avoid the pitfalls to which prohibition in Maine had proved susceptible. Because it was local it could only be adopted ‘wherever the condition of a favourable local sentiment existed’.¹³ There was then less chance of it subsequently being repealed. An additional reason for initially preferring a local to a national measure was highlighted in correspondence between Lord Stanley and Samuel Pope which was published in The Times in 1856. Stanley argued that immediate national prohibition would bring a large part of the country’s commercial and fiscal system to a halt because the drink trade was so extensive and drink taxes were the largest single source of government revenue. The Alliance was reluctantly forced to agree with him, but the Permissive Bill overcame this difficulty as even the most enthusiastic prohibitionists accepted that it would not be adopted immediately in every part of the country. Consequently the extent of the dislocation would be minimised.

The Permissive Bill emerged as a temporary compromise with political realities intended to pave the way for total prohibition. While it alienated some temperance men it also greatly broadened the appeal of the Alliance among many who had previously been disinterested.¹⁴ The Bill contained two elements, the demand for prohibition, and the insistence on local self-government as the machinery by which this would be carried out. These demands attracted considerable support, not only because they were seen as desirable in themselves, but also because they offered a way of achieving a wide variety of wishes for changes in society. Nonconformist businessmen expected that prohibition would benefit them economically. Sober workmen would be more disciplined and productive and, once drink expenditure had been eliminated from their budget, could purchase more consumer goods. Such a stimulus to domestic purchasing power would benefit both employers and workers by increasing business profits, employment opportunities and working-class living standards. Working-class leaders such as Thomas Burt supported the Alliance for different reasons. They believed that drink stupefied workers, making them the pawns of unscrupulous employers. A sober working class would be better able to organise in order to protect its interests. Many artisans and those of the lower mi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Early Years
• 2. New Directions, 1872–1874
• 3. Liberals and the Alliance
• 4. The Elusive Victory, 1880–1887
• 5. Conservatives and Compensation, 1888–1890
• 6. The First Veto Bill
• 7. The Second Veto Bill and After
• 8. The Alliance Machine
• 9. Campaigning
• 10. Conclusions
• Index