Dead Drunk for Two Pennies: The Story of the London Gin Craze of 1720-1757

  In 1734 London is a teeming city that’s nearly bursting at the seams with a population in excess of 600,000 souls and growing everyday.

Most immigrate to the city looking for work with hardly a penny in their pockets.  They arrive with high hopes seeking opportunity but usually find nothing but squalor and despair in England’s largest city.

In the city’s East End you turn a corner and enter into a narrow sewage strewn back-alley.  London’s East End is home to the city’s most densely packed and derelict slums.  It is a den of poverty, prostitution and crime.

In the alley you descend a staircase into a dark dank cellar and push open a creaking wooden door on rusty iron hinges.  Above the door hangs a sign, common in this part of London, reading:

DRINK FOR A PENNY; DEAD DRUNK FOR TWO PENNIES; CLEAN STRAW FOR NOTHING.

This sign invites you to come inside; drink your fill and then pass out on the floor, only to awake from your stupor a few hours later and repeat the vicious cycle all over again.

You have just entered one of the more than 7,000 gin shops that are hidden away in cellars and in hole-in-the-wall hovels across the city.  Once inside, your senses are immediately assaulted by the smell of vomit and stale alcohol that permeates the dense, heavy air in this type of establishment.

Places like this gin cellar have been popping up all over London for over a decade.  Great Britain’s largest city is slowly drinking itself to death during the first half of the 1700’s in what activists and pamphleteers are then calling the “Gin Craze”.

      

Stylized View Inside a Gin Cellar

The London Gin Craze lasted for over three decades and spanned, roughly, the years 1720-1757, though most historians today believe that the Gin Craze really began much earlier, sometime in the late 1690’s.

Prior to about the year 1690 the drinks of choice in Great Britain had been either ale or French brandy, which both have substantially lower alcohol content than gin.

However, during the latter half of the 17th century, due to ongoing wars with France it became not only unfashionable, but even unpatriotic, for Britons to consume anything at all imported from France including brandy.  Additionally, at about this same time (ca. 1690) members of the English aristocracy began to develop a taste for gin, which originally had been imported from nation’s in central and northern Europe.

In 1720, in an effort to essentially reduce Great Britain’s trade deficit when it came to liquor, Parliament passed legislation that made domestic spirit production both cheaper and less regulated than it had been before.  This act of Parliament led to the proliferation of countless gin distilleries throughout Great Britain, particularly in and around the city of London.

Once locally distilled gin flooded the market it became dirt cheap, and when the new spirit nicknamed “Madame Geneva” began to replace penny ale as the drink of choice among London’s poor it led to disaster.

The London Gin Craze of 1720-1757 was an epidemic of addiction and despair perhaps only rivaled in the annals of history by the  crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980’s which ravaged America’s inner-cities.

And just like crack, the masses of London’s poor in the 1700’s became hooked on drinking gin because it was cheap, stilled hunger pangs and produced a quick escape into oblivion.

Gin, when it was first made affordable for the poor, was much stronger than the beers and ales that had been consumed by the impoverished masses up that point.  At the time there were no social norms or traditions attached with or to the consumption of gin and this led to London’s poor literally drowning their sorrows in gin by consuming the spirit at any time of day or night and in large quantities that ensured they would pass out quickly into drunken oblivion.

Cartoon Depicting London's Leading Distilleries

By 1734 the London Gin Craze was in full and deadly swing.  Underground gin shops, literally hidden away from the light of day in dank cellars and gin carts that traveled around from slum to slum selling shots of the spirit for a penny, were everywhere.

Even worse, to save a few pence here and there, many gin shops and gin peddlers used turpentine or sulphuric acid to flavor and cut their spirits.  This adulterated gin led in many cases to blindness, insanity and even death.

Drunkenness as a result of gin consumption became so prevalent that in 1751 noted London writer and historian Henry Fielding wrote, “A new kind of drunkenness, unknown among our ancestors, is lately sprung up among us by the poison called gin.  It is the principal sustenance of more than 100,000 people in this metropolis.”

By the middle of the 18th century the London Gin Craze was so out of control that both the British aristocracy and Parliament could no longer ignore it.  The public outcry over the Gin Craze became immense and Parliament faced constant demands to do something about it.

Between 1720 and 1750 the death rate in London far outstripped the birth rate each and every year in an era prior to any effective contraceptives.  Rampant alcoholism, which for the first time in history affected the female population in large numbers led to widespread prostitution, child neglect, starvation and even infertility.  Pamphleteers, journalists of their time, took to calling gin “Mother’s Ruin”, a name that stuck with the spirit right up through the 20th century.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century cloth, which had to be spun and woven by hand, was much more expensive than it is today, and therefore, the most valuable possession that most of London’s poor had was literally the clothes on their back.  In order to obtain money to buy gin many of London’s destitute took to selling and pawning nearly all of their own clothing and this led to masses of mostly naked men and women stumbling drunk, or passed out on street corners, throughout the city’s poorer neighborhoods.

In 1734 a heinous crime, committed by a woman who may have had a preexisting psychiatric condition, but who nonetheless was addicted to gin, finally spurred the British government to action.

Judith Dufour’s two year old daughter Mary had just been given a new set of clothes by the local parish workhouse.  Dufour, who worked as a prostitute to support her alcoholism and who therefore had relinquished custody of her daughter to the parish due to her alcoholism, stopped by to ostensibly take her child out for a visit the next day.  Once outside the confines of the workhouse grounds, though, Judith promptly strangled the two year old child, threw her body into the River Thames, and sold her new set of clothes to buy more gin.

On the heels of the public outcry over this crime Parliament passed the first of what would be called “The Gin Acts” in 1736.  The first Gin Act stipulated that all establishments had to pay a 50 pound a year tax, in order to serve gin on their premises.  The problem with the 1736 Gin Act is that it didn’t mention anything about gin carts or hidden gin shops.

Though the first Gin Act was marginally successful in shutting down some smaller gin shops, overall, it was not a success in ending the Gin Craze among London’s poor because distiller’s simply became more creative at devising new and more surreptitious ways to sell gin.

One such new and creative way to sell gin was something called the Puss & Mew Machine which was introduced by the Old Tom distillery of London around the year 1740.  The Puss & Mew Machine was a sort of rudimentary manpowered vending machine.  The Puss and Mew Machine was an iron cat mounted on a wall of the distillery building.  A man would sit behind the iron cat and anyone wishing to purchase gin would hand a penny through the cat’s eye and then the man behind the cat would pour an ounce worth of gin through a spigot in the cat’s mouth.  Of course, the Puss & Mew Machine was effective because it was part of the distillery itself and not, technically, a drinking establishment.

The Puss & Mew Machine still Outside the Old Tom Distillery Today

It is believed that rather than helping to decrease London’s gin consumption in 1736, that gin consumption actually peaked in 1743 a full seven years after passage of the First Gin Act.

Finally, in 1751 another more effective Gin Act was passed by Parliament.  This Third Gin Act essentially dictated that all merchants must obtain a liquor license to sell gin through the British government and that distillers could neither sell gin independently nor sell it to unlicensed merchants.  Licences to sell gin were limited and prohibitively expensive, and since gin could only be gotten through what amounted to government run distilleries, the Third Gin Act of 1751 effectively eliminated the underground selling of penny gin and made it far less attainable for London’s poor.

Slowly, over the next several years in the 1750’s, beer and ale would once again supplant gin as the cheap alcoholic beverage of choice among the masses of London’s poor and the Gin Craze would gradually dissipate.  In a way, through applied government intervention in the affairs of private business, Parliament did effectively help to end the Gin Craze which so tragically ravaged London during the first half of the 18th century.

Sadly though, gin would be only one of the first of many mind-altering addictive substances that the destitute poor would turn to over the course of history to try and temporarily escape from their bleak realities.  The Victorian-Era of the mid-nineteenth century would see the rise of opium, followed by morphine use in the early 20th century, and then right on into the opioid crisis that the entire world faces today.  If we learn nothing else from the London Gin Craze of the 18th century, we should at least learn that those who have come before us might be more like us than we would like to admit.