The Gin Craze

Or, methanol has been a problem for a long time

You may have seen the reports about deaths from methanol poisoning in Laos. This terrible, tragic event immediately reminded me of the cheap gin craze in Georgian London, which killed or blinded so many people. Somehow it doesn’t seem so awful when it’s in the past, but the families of those people must have been devastated, just as they are today. I wanted to know more about it, so I asked Stephen to write this post.

Lady Geneva

Bingo, Blue Ruin, Daffy, Diddle, Heart’s Ease, Lightning, Sky Blue, White Ribbon. The names go on. These are some of many aliases of that queen of mirth and misery, Lady Geneva or, as she is more commonly known, Gin.

She arrived in England with William of Orange in 1688 when the Glorious Revolution gave him the English throne. Her presence was encouraged by successive governments who saw her as a viable alternative to the sometimes politically undesirable French brandy.

Gin is one of the easiest spirits to make. At its simplest, it consists of grain alcohol (made from any grain: wheat, millet, barley) distilled with juniper berries. Other botanicals may be added to taste. It requires little in the way of specialist equipment and can be made cheaply (but not necessarily safely) in back rooms.

The early Georgian period saw what has become known as the ‘Gin Craze’ in full flight. Because it so easy and cheap to manufacture it became the staple drink of the poor who could afford little else—and they drank a lot of it.

Unfortunately, quality control was something of an alien concept in Georgian England. It was very much a laissez-faire, manage-your-own risk sort of society. Drinkers without the ability to manage that risk were in serious risk of blindness and even death from adulterating chemicals, and many died or were blinded over the years of cheap gin.

Some chemicals were a by-product of careless manufacture (methanol, for example, which turns into formaldehyde and then formic acid in your body and attacks your organs, starting with your eyes) but others, like lead, were added to enhance the flavour!

William Hogarth, Gin Lane, 1751

Despite the risks, it became so popular that it actually began to affect production when people turned up drunk to work (you just can’t trust the working class), so moralists and politicians joined forces to try and bring the Lady to heel. The task proved to be less simple than it first appeared.

An attempt to tax it in 1729 ran into difficulties in finding where it was being manufactured. In 1736 the government brought in a punitive tax of 20 shillings to the gallon plus a 50 pound annual licence. This was widely ignored—not surprising when a day labourer might only earn nine pence a day, and a loaf of bread cost a penny! Twenty shillings on the gallon made it a rich man’s drink, and the poor (and their drink suppliers) were never going to comply.

Attempts to use informers at five pounds a time resulted in riots, the magistrates’ courts being overwhelmed and known informers being lynched. The Riot Act was read (which was a serious matter, allowing authorities to use lethal force) to little effect.

Sanity eventually made its voice heard and in the 1750s the Gin Act reduced tax and licences to almost nothing and illegal stills became hardly worth the effort.

In the latter part of the Georgian period, gin was just another drink, although still a very popular one.

Various ‘Daffy Clubs’, convivial societies devoted to imbibing gin, sprang up in the Regency period. The most famous was inaugurated by a Mr James Soares and was held at the Castle Tavern in Holborn. The tavern was run by the famous boxer Tom Belcher (and later by another pugilist Tom Spring) and became a favourite haunt of young sporting afficionados.

It was all a far cry from the mayhem of the mid 18^th century. Madame Geneva had become respectable—and much safer.