Drink and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The Alcohol Trade and the Politics of the Irish Public House 9780755694662

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To my parents, Fred and Sue Kadel, who taught me the important values of hard work and perseverance.

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Acknowledgments

I am profoundly indebted to my family, friends and colleagues who have assisted me over the years on the work of bringing this project to publication. My team of research assistants, who sat with me countless hours in archives and library reading rooms from Madison, Wisconsin to Dublin, Ireland, were indispensable. These include Rob Ferrett, Steve Bistrup, David L. Roberts, Paul More, Eric Brown, Rebecca Entel, Robin Rudorf, and Trish Ramos. Thank you for your assistance. I will always remember your voices reading to me the primary source materials around which this study has been based. The staff at the National Library of Ireland and the National Archives of Ireland were also incredibly helpful and generous, opening up their facilities to my special requests for unique physical accommodations. Without the kind assistance of Gerry Cavanagh at the National Library of Ireland, for example, this study could hardly have gotten off the ground in its early days.

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Abbreviations

BLVA CCB CCLT CSRP FP GA IAPI LGVPA LGVAA LVA MP MTU NAI NLI PROB PTAA UKA

Belfast Licensed Vintners’ Association Central Control Board Central Committee of the Liquor Trade Chief Secretary’s Registered Papers Fenian Papers Guinness Archives Irish Association for the Prevention of Intemperance Licensed Grocers and Vintners’ Protection Association Licensed Grocers and Vintners Assistants’ Association Licensed Vintners’ Association Member of Parliament Mandate Trade Union National Archives of Ireland National Library of Ireland Public Records Office Belfast Pioneer Total Abstinence Association United Kingdom Alliance

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Introduction

I Publicans and public houses so profoundly transfigured the rich landscape of the social, political and economic history of the long nineteenth century in Ireland, that an investigation of the world surrounding the Irish drink trade marks a crucial – if not indispensable – step in comprehending the history of the making of modern Ireland. On either side of the bar, from the masses of drinkers who socialized and passed so much of their lives in and around the pub, to the publicans and their assistants who managed these businesses, the public house built and disseminated networks of social power and political influence across Ireland and beyond. On one level, affluent publicans built one of the most politically powerful and savvy forces in Irish parliamentary politics, and inserted themselves into the center of some of the most crucial legislative de´ of the bates of the nineteenth century. On another level, the habitues pub relied on this social institution to construct, manage, and spread their various social and political causes. From the onset of modern parliamentary politics in the 1830s to the end of World War I, the publicans of Ireland, as a group, played one of the leading roles in public life and provided an economic route to middle-class prosperity for many Irish Catholics. In the years following the Act of Union, Dublin publicans began working together in new ways for the mutual protection of their livelihoods. Regrouping in 1819 to face newly emerging political demands, vintners from the Corporation of Cooks and Vintners, in an attempt to 1

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create a more politically oriented trade association, withdrew from the guild society and founded the Licensed Vintners’ Association (LVA).1 In the decade following its founding, the new organization, like its predecessor, focused much of its attention and resources on philanthropic endeavors, though a new, more overtly political role quickly emerged after the passage of the Reform Act of 1832. In an earnest campaign that foreshadowed its later role as the political defender of the Irish drink trade, the LVA plunged in 1833 into the political world of Westminster during the protracted negotiations over the Irish Licensing Act.2 The considerable concessions procured by the Irish trade in this sweeping legislation, which began the nineteenth-century effort to modernize the liquor-licensing laws in Ireland, marked the emergence of Dublin vintners in the still-nascent world of nineteenth-century Irish popular politics. The adept political role performed by the LVA during the drafting of these laws demonstrated the association’s new function. The association would serve primarily as an apparatus for protecting the trade from restrictive government measures and preserving – if not expanding – the rights of the publican under the terms of the standard liquor license.3 In its role as a source for providing social security for vulnerable vintners and members of their families – mostly the aged, widows, and orphans of Irish publicans – the organized trade continued to concentrate much of its efforts on social relief until the transformative decade of the 1860s.4 By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the concern for humanitarian relief had been almost completely eclipsed by the more political role of the association at home in local politics and legal affairs, and at Westminster with the overseeing of parliamentary matters. Foremost among the new perils to the drink trade were those emanating from the Irish magistracy and constabulary in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Under orders from Dublin Castle, officials began in the late 1830s to execute a series of new orders that, it was hoped, would purge dangerous conspirators from the working-class taprooms across Ireland. In an effort to bring social discipline to the public house, the Scottish-born undersecretary for Ireland, Captain Thomas Drummond, inaugurated a fresh offensive against Ribbon societies, oathbound secret underground organizations pledged to the overthrow of British rule. Drummond’s innovative approach to fighting Ribbonism in Ireland centered largely on levying harsh legal penalties against publicans

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who knowingly hosted meetings of secret societies on their premises, and intensifying the policing of the barroom itself. Reacting to these new legal threats, the LVA began to pressure members of their trade association to distance themselves from any linkage with groups with ties to revolutionary activities. Moreover, the bourgeois leadership of the LVA found in the controversies swirling around the public house and Ribbonism an opportunity to purge their ranks of traders who were perceived most wanting in that powerful Victorian quality of respectability. The facile identification of the public house with vice, excess, crime, and treason in the new era of temperance and improvement, most imperiled those license holders in Ireland located on the lower rungs of the social ladder. Located at the nexus of lower-class life, the public house was perhaps the most natural – if not nearly irresistible – retreat for revolutionary secret societies during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, publicans and their assistants were disproportionately represented within the leadership of physical-force nationalist groups, at least until the zenith of the Fenian movement in 1867. As the threat of civil unrest began to fade later in the century, the importance of the public house as a locus of underground revolutionary activities began also to decrease. The reasons for this move away from the pub were many, but the most important factors included reforms to the licensing laws, the merging of temperance and nationalist politics, more intense monitoring of the barroom by police, and the growing clout and respectability of the licensed trade. In fact, by the turn of the century physical-force, revolutionary organizations in Ireland would almost completely retreat from using the barroom for meetings and recruitment, the leadership opting instead for more secure – and less public – meeting places. The 1830s marked a historical watershed for the Irish licensed trade, making it a natural point at which to begin mapping the landscape of the politics of drink in Ireland. During this formative period, vintner trade associations and the temperance movement began a long struggle with one another to define and dominate the issues surrounding what would become known as “The Drink Question.” Involving all matters surrounding the sale and consumption of intoxicants, this question permeated Irish politics and divided the country along uneven economic, social, and gender lines. In 1833 the debates on these issues got under way when the British Parliament took the first of a series of steps to reshape

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the licensing laws that governed the public-house system. Guided, on one hand, by liberal principles and, on the other, by a sense of urgency to preserve social order, MPs considered measures that would extend to Ireland the lifting of restrictions on the beer trade, increased penalties for publicans suspected of hosting meetings of secret revolutionary societies, and more rigorous application procedures for those seeking a retail license. In Ireland the reforms would give constables greater access for policing public houses, and magistrates the liberty to suspend trading in those houses where it was suspected that outrages were most likely to be planned. For the vast majority of those lower-class men who partook publicly of alcohol, a law passed in 1836 would have a profound impact: the legislation empowered constables to arrest any individual for being drunk, without any pretext whatsoever. Thus, the new era of liquor licensing reforms would subject not just publicans and assistants behind the counters to unprecedented regulatory oversight and penalties, but would mandate, by threat of fines and incarceration, the respectable comportment of drinkers themselves. A resurgent physical-force brand of Irish nationalism, and the growing potency of the temperance legislative agenda at Westminster, prompted the Irish retail drink trade in the 1860s to consolidate its splintered trade under a single organization.5 In the opening year of that decade vintners and licensed grocers in Dublin – by far the largest group of businesses licensed for the sale of spirits – resolved their differences, combining to form one consolidated trade association, the Licensed Grocers and Vintners’ Protection Association (LGVPA). That licensed grocers – those retailers who carried on a trade in both intoxicants and groceries – identified with the licensed trade rather than with shopkeepers and drapers provides evidence of a maturing political consciousness among the holders of retail licenses. In contrast to the situation in England, licensed grocers were common – if not the norm – in Ireland until the latter half of the twentieth century. Though the British government had sought to separate spirit and beer licenses from the sale of food and other goods in Ireland in the 1830s, the licensed-grocery trade would remain the most common form of liquor retailing throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Equally important to the political realignment defined by the formation of the LGVPA in 1860, however, was the increasingly

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isolated position of the beerhouse keepers and spirit grocers. By excluding these license holders, who were bound by unique legal rights and restrictions in Ireland, the LGVPA gained the political upper hand within the trade.6 Finally, this step towards greater trade consolidation aimed to place pressure on the illegal shebeen trade that was so widespread in Ireland. Shebeens were legally unrecognized places, and so-called shebeening tended to damage the reputation of publicans and licensed grocers. In this concerted effort to discipline the popular culture surrounding drink, Dublin vintners, along with their sister trade associations around the country, largely cooperated with constables and officers from the Inland Revenue to streamline and more tightly regulate the liquor trade. By constraining as much as possible the competition posed by illegal distillation, low public houses, beerhouses, and – most important – secret shebeens, the newly united LGVPA hoped to capture market share from these threatening haunts of the lower classes and thereby recast the image of Irish publicans as protectors of the public good. The perception of the clandestine shebeen trade in intoxicants operating freely across the city helped to galvanize retail traders, who were otherwise suspicious of one another.7 In fact, statistics appear to back up vintner concerns over shebeens: In a reversal from earlier decades, parliamentary reports reveal that arrests for “shebeening” in Dublin and its environs were strikingly higher than in most of the rest of Ireland.8 Such damning statistics relating to alcohol consumption in Dublin helped to spur the LGVPA to embark on a project of ending the illegal shebeen trade that played such an important part in defining the neighborhoods and countryside of so many localities in Dublin and beyond. As temperance reformers shifted their attention from pledge drives to legislative restriction of the liquor trade in the 1860s, the LGVPA countered with an unprecedented political campaign of its own, centering its efforts on bringing all respectable publicans across Ireland into their trade association and securing parliamentary allies at Westminster. The legislative threat of the temperance movement alarmed vintners, since the announcement of the campaign broke with earlier forms of temperance reform in Ireland.9 Whereas the campaign of Father Theobald Mathew, dubbed the “apostle of temperance” during his phenomenally successful tenure as leader of the Cork Total Abstinence Association, had

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centered on instigating a moral revolution based upon individual vows of abstinence, the new danger to the vintner trade stemmed from a wellorganized and largely international temperance lobby with substantial legislative leverage.10 In its leadership, too, the movement showed signs of change. The temperance standard-bearers of the new era would be parliamentarians, not simply priests and pastors, and collective political action would be emphasized, rather than the mere reform of individuals through pledge-taking temperance campaigns and moral suasion. In the years immediately after the Great Famine, the temperance movement had attempted, with little success, to sustain the momentum of Father Mathew’s campaign, expanding its vision of temperance to fit better with the new age of progress and improvement.11 In a lecture delivered to the Dublin Statistical Society, James Haughton articulated this broader vision of temperance as a social and public project some two decades before its metamorphosis into a full-fledged legislative campaign: The great law of progress demands at your hands the sustainment of the temperance reformation. That love of our fellow man, which is the only sure bond of the social edifice, calls upon you to give your hearts to this good work, so that the economic, the social, and the moral laws may be no longer impeded in their operation by the counteracting influences of alcoholic drinks.12

Though Haughton’s views, along with those of his temperance colleagues, appealed to a widely perceived public necessity for temperance, his appeal remained, like that of Father Mathew, firmly linked to an individual sense of Christian conversion and spiritual revival. Reformer though he was, Haughton did not advocate the organized, multifaceted legislative campaign against drink that his Irish successors in the 1860s would implement. During the years that intervened between the campaign of Father Mathew and the emergence of a legislative temperance campaign in the 1860s, the temperance movement in Ireland had searched with little success for a way to revive the energy and effectiveness of the cause. This decline of temperance in Ireland had several grounds. First, much of the organizational apparatus and popular enthusiasm that Father Mathew had inspired had by the late 1840s been siphoned off by the demographic

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disaster of the Great Famine and by the Repeal movement of Daniel O’Connell.13 Second, in the 1850s temperance legislation had been overshadowed by more pressing concerns over tenant rights and educational reform.14 Although the post-famine years had featured a trend toward legislative coercion of the drink trade internationally (including the adoption of prohibition in Maine in the United States and the closing of public houses on Sundays in Scotland), temperance societies outside of Protestant communities experienced little organizational leadership in Ireland until the founding of new temperance bodies in the 1860s. During that decade groups such as the Irish Total Abstinence Society, the Permissive Bill Association, and the Sunday Closing Association, all of which possessed a circle of prominent Irish founding members, profoundly transformed the political face of temperance in Ireland. By targeting the reform of the public-house system, temperance reformers faced the formidable challenge of discrediting the profession of the publican in Ireland. As the keeper of the public house, the vocation of the Irish publican was woven into the fabric of political, social, and religious popular culture. The multiple social functions of the publican were arguably exceeded only by those of the priest.15 Publicans could act as bankers, offering loans as well as credit to their patrons. Wage-earning laborers commonly received their pay in the public house, a practice that would draw the fire of labor reformers only later, after workers’ unions began to challenge it in the early twentieth century. In addition, public houses could serve as post offices, distribution centers for relief of the poor, meeting points for working-class friendly societies and political groups, and courts for rural magistrates. Publicans also hosted special ceremonies, officiating at weddings and supplying drink (and in some instances accommodations) for the wakes of the dead and for the community festivals known as patterns. Few figures in popular culture acted as prominent a role in face-to-face relations as the publican. The challenge to this leadership in the nineteenth century reflected crucial shifts within the power structure of Irish society. Although publicans shared many of the predominant class insecurities of small shopkeepers in England, who found themselves by the late nineteenth century pressed on one side by large capital and on the other by emerging trade unionism, legal and social conditions in Ireland,

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especially outside of Belfast, clearly set the Irish case apart from its more industrialized English counterpart.16 Unlike the situation on the British mainland, in Ireland the legal code recognized drunkenness as a punishable crime, making the Irish trader more vulnerable to prosecution for serving intoxicated individuals.17 Distinguishing the position of the Irish publican further was the common use of public houses by clandestine nationalist organizations for gatherings and recruitment. Adding to this legal vulnerability was the stiff competition within the trade caused by the comparatively high number of public houses in Ireland. As a result, many Irish publicans were forced to rely on additional pursuits in order to eke out a living.18 Though legal and economic conditions may have resulted in a more precarious vocation for the Irish vintner, public houses in Ireland were only rarely owned and operated by large breweries; the “tied house,” which had become common in much of the United Kingdom, was the exception in Ireland.19 Like their shopkeeper counterparts, licensed grocers and vintners generally were suspicious of government intervention into their businesses, and they vehemently opposed state efforts to limit the hours of sale or the closing of their shops on special holidays. But licensed traders spent more time and effort opposing such restrictions than simple shopkeepers did because vintners arguably had more at stake economically owing to the high volume of liquor traded at such times; their potential for loss or gain was greater, for example, than that of grocers, butchers, and other small businesses. In order to fend off temperance legislative action during a time of incremental expansions to the political franchise, Irish publicans relied on a political and social alliance with lower-class communities.20 Framed by temperance activists as an issue that was, above all, in the best in´ of terests of the working classes who were the most frequent habitues the public house, much of the temperance debate of this period hinged largely on workers’ voices. Thus temperance reformers and publicans actively courted lower-class spokespersons. Integral to this public discourse was the contribution of vintner assistants, a group crucial to the drink question because of its unique position within the trade. The assistants’ union (the Licensed Grocers and Vintners Assistants’ Association) generally followed the lead of its employers in temperance matters, though there were notable exceptions to this rule when nationalist or labor concerns superseded support for publicans.21 In putting their position before

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parliament, licensed traders boasted of possessing a special understanding of the needs of public-house employees and the laboring classes generally. Furthermore, publicans depicted the public-house business as a trade open to the industrious artisan or assistant, a characterization that coincided with the popular image of the publican as a self-made and savvy entrepreneur.22 Yet for small traders with modest businesses in the poorer districts of Dublin, the exposure to the petit-bourgeois, entrepreneurial culture of the LGVPA could also reinforce for traders the class divide which separated them from assistants and public-house ´ habitues. Possessing a rich history, which Dublin vintners proudly traced back for hundreds of years, the organized licensed trade had little in common with the vintner assistants’ union. Though there are few precise statistics on membership for this period, publicans and licensed grocers joined the LGVPA in far larger numbers than assistants joined their trade union, a contrast that suggests a strong sense of solidarity among the middle-class publicans that was seldom experienced by wage-earning individuals who worked behind the counters of licensed shops.23 Unlike publicans, vintner assistants only rarely ventured into the polarizing politics of drink and preferred instead to use their union as a vehicle for involvement in the Irish nationalist movement. Hence, aside from its small degree of collective clout prior to the labor movement of the 1910s, the assistants’ organization lacked the numbers, political organization, and social credentials of the LGVPA. In 1860 the licensed grocers and vintners of Dublin recognized the shifting strategies of the temperance movement and the opening of a “new epoch in the annals of the licensed victualing trade.” Reporting on the meeting of the United Towns and National Licensed Victuallers’ Defence League in Liverpool, this LGVPA representative maintained that the introduction in the House of Commons of a permissive bill (allowing for the complete suppression of the retail liquor trade by local referendum) had marked the opening of the new era for licensed traders.24 In addition, his report warned of a new coalition of temperance reformers under the leadership of William Lawson, MP for Carlisle, who intended to sponsor even more sweeping legislation that would completely transform the licensing system across the United Kingdom. Although a comprehensive reform would not become law until 1872 and 1874, the

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drafting of a Sunday-closing bill for Ireland in 1863 did broaden the legislative agenda of the temperance movement to include a fundamental restructuring of the licensing system. But since publicans relied so heavily on lower-class patronage, any challenge to that mostly working-class custom provoked a robust response from the LGVPA. As beerhouse licenses were quickly and inexpensively issued in the 1860s to large numbers of working-class individuals in the capital city, the organized publicans in Dublin focused on building a campaign to eclipse – if not extinguish altogether – the beerhouse from the backstreets and alleys of the metropolis. Since licenses were inexpensive to obtain, beerhouses multiplied in number in the poorest neighborhoods of Dublin, posing a serious threat to the respectability of the entire public-house trade. By attacking beerhouses in the 1860s, Irish vintners began an unhesitating effort to modernize and streamline the licensing laws in order to eliminate “unfair” competition to their trade. In his book describing the Liquor Licensing Act of 1874 for Ireland, the prolific secretary of the LGVPA, Michael Dwyer, fairly observed that “the enactments are based in principle on the homely maxim that prevention is better than cure, as instead of increasing and maximizing penalties against offenders, the act aims at lessening the opportunities and temptations for the committing of offences.”25 Taken together with the Liquor Licensing Act of 1872 (Ireland), this watershed legislation reconstituted the complex Irish liquor laws in order to control more effectively the popular cultures and institutions (including government entities and trade associations) constructed around the drink trade. By empowering the police and local magistrates to authorize occasional licenses for fairs, races, and other special occasions such as parades and outdoor demonstrations, the acts sought to redefine the use of public spaces and thereby discipline a popular culture with an alleged penchant for immodest indulgence in alcohol. Furthermore, this legislation advanced many of the same reforms that Captain Thomas Drummond had first experimented with some three decades earlier. In the struggle over Sunday closing as well, vintners strategically cast themselves as both modernizers and crusading reformers who sought to limit public drinking to legitimate facilities under the supervision of publicans of “good character.” Sunday closing, they contended, would only push alcohol consumption into unsupervised spaces where

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drunkenness, crime, and violence were likely to occur. It is important to note that vintners and temperance reformers were, in a sense, working from the same cultural template. Both groups at least agreed that drunkenness and an unregulated drink trade imperiled society, and that to impose discipline through regulation was the way to combat this scourge. In their respective campaigns, both parties embraced a middle-class notion of respectability and sought to establish by statistics and other formal means the legitimacy of and social necessity for their different political agendas. As the drink trade formed ever-larger and more politically powerful associations to protect its economic well-being, its political network appealed to the public in nationalist terms used by Ribbon and Fenian societies in the mid-nineteenth century, and later by the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association, and numerous other nationalist groups. Whereas Elizabeth Malcolm and George Bretherton have written extensively of the ways in which temperance reformers resisted caricatures of the drunken Irishman and blended temperance and nationalist goals with slogans such as “Ireland sober, Ireland free,” little has been written on the contributions of publicans, their trade association, the assistants behind the counter, and the masses of public-house patrons to the growth of popular nationalism in the late nineteenth century. Extolled as a counterpoint to the corrupt land system in Ireland, which figured so prominently in Irish nationalist resentment of English rule, the public-house system was depicted by its defenders as a patriotic force essential to the preservation and growth of an Irish Ireland. In staving off temperance reform, Irish publicans and their assistants propagated the idea that, in a country hard-pressed to compete with its English neighbor, economic success depended on a healthy retail and manufacturing liquor trade.26 Despite the fact that the manufacture of beer and spirits employed relatively few workers as compared with the burgeoning English heavy industries, the numerous defenders of the economic importance of the Irish drink trade saw the public house as an essential component of Irish identity. The licensing system – and all legislation that proposed significant changes to the trade – sparked enormous controversy in Ireland and created unusual class, religious, and gender-based alliances and fissures. These divisions and unusual coalitions were perhaps never more apparent than during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century.

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With the founding of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Society by Father James Cullen (a Jesuit priest) in 1898, temperance reformers added a social component to their political-reform movement.27 Soon after its creation manufacturers such as Guinness’s brewery were reporting the adverse effects on sales caused by anti-treating leagues associated with the Pioneers. Based on individual vows of lifelong abstinence from alcohol, the Pioneer crusade aimed to rekindle the populist fervor that had surrounded the temperance movement of Father Mathew in the early 1840s.28 Adding to this virulently anti-drink movement, which melded religious and nationalist fervor, were still other trends that publicans saw as a threat to the public-house business. Labor activism by licensed grocer and vintner assistants, a rise in alternative working-class leisure activities, and the expansion of suburban Dublin represented for vintners serious new challenges to the continuance of their prosperity. Yet changes within the drink trade, like those in Irish society generally, accelerated markedly with the outbreak of war in August 1914. War brought unprecedented government intervention to the trade, further accentuating the need for trade organization. Beyond a preoccupation with such immediate measures as the restriction of public-house hours, heavier taxation, and harsh police surveillance (to name just a few wartime challenges), the drink trade also recognized the opportunity that such restrictions offered to the temperance movement to forward its antidrink agenda. Such concerns appear to have been well founded, for temperance organizations wasted no time in arguing that the wartime restrictions should not just be temporary measures; rather, they should be enshrined permanently in the legal code. Despite the heightened threat of state intervention, however, the wartime government at Westminster was wary of intervening with too heavy a hand in Irish affairs, especially after the ill-fated Easter Rising of 1916, when Irish public opinion swung sharply against British rule. In addition, labor unrest, the predominance of a temperance ideology amongst nationalists groups like the Gaelic League, and the growing popularity of rival entertainments to the pub all bore down with heavy force on trade interests at this time. Despite these challenges, however, the Irish retail trade emerged from the war relatively unscathed, at least when compared to other industries. Parliamentary reports, meticulously assembled by police and government officials, the wide-ranging records of the Dublin-based Licensed

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Grocers and Vintners’ Protection Association, trade and temperance journals, police and British intelligence reports, and newspaper accounts provide a fertile field of primary documents, from which to draw abundant information and firm conclusions about the historical status of the drink trade and about its responses and contributions to modernization in Ireland. In the eight decades encompassed by this study, the Dublin trade heightened considerably its authority over the political landscape of Ireland. As the guardians of the quotidian taproom, the public-house trade successfully assembled political and social connections in order to overcome the legislative campaigns of temperance reformers who increasingly identified licensed shops and the drink served therein as the root of Irish social problems. Defending the public house involved the Irish licensed trade in negotiations with various authorities (including constables, magistrates, Protestant and Catholic religious leaders, British politicians, Irish nationalists, and sundry members of the social elite) over cultural values centered on the contested space of the public house. Though the cultural cleavage between the public house and temperance societies would continue well into the twentieth century, the social and political strength of the LGVPA helped to ensure that the extreme types of reforms enacted after World War I in the United States would not be adopted in the newly established Free State in Ireland.29

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1 Reform and Secret Societies

I In 1833 the newly reformed British Parliament took a major step in ushering in a near-century-long effort to reshape the drink trade in Ireland. With a Liberal ethos in the ascendancy in Westminster, emboldened MPs saw the drink trade as an important part of their ambitious legislative agenda.1 In their effort to transform Liberal philosophy into practical reforms, no issue appeared more relevant to the moral principles of temperance, free trade, and industrial efficiency than modernizing the liquor-licensing system. Thus in 1833 the Drink Question assumed a prominent place within British political discourse, alongside other, more well-known moral issues as reforming female and child labor and the Poor Law. As with so many other areas of British governance in Ireland, however, reforming the Irish licensing system would prove a vexing venture for MPs with an otherwise clear social agenda.2 In order to reform the Irish public-house system, MPs faced political and social complexities that were irrelevant or non-existent on the British mainland. In Ireland, for example, the majority of revenue to the Crown stemmed from taxes on retail licenses and intoxicants, and thus any major changes to this financial resource gave politicians pause. More importantly, controlling and alleviating the threat of revolt preoccupied lawmakers in London throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century. As public houses and shebeens became increasingly associated with sedition, limiting lower-class access to drink in these poorly regulated spaces seemed a natural starting point for

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minimizing the likelihood of future rebellions. Thus, denying licenses to ill-disciplined taverns and quashing altogether shebeen keepers’ businesses would increasingly constitute the linchpin of the strategy to combat Ribbon and Fenian networks of crime, a strategy to which middleclass representatives of the trade associations of publicans in Dublin and Belfast would eagerly lend their support. Liberals during these years, in an effort to increase sobriety and productivity, advocated policies designed to replace lower-class consumption of strong spirits with more nutritious and less intoxicating ales and porters. Even before the reformed parliament of 1832 came to power, the legislature had passed the Beer and Cider Act, which had begun the social experiment of relaxing restrictions on strong spirits. Dropping regulations on the sale and consumption of beer offered a means, reformers believed, by which to make whiskey and gin less attractive to the working class. Specifically, reformers sought, first, to ease restrictions on the sale of beer within lower-class neighborhoods and, second, to decrease taxes on what they considered a more wholesome drink. By simplifying the process for an individual to acquire a beer wholesale license and lowering the cost of these sorts of refreshments, liberals in London hoped to create a more ethical economy, ruled by market forces, and with particular social relevance to the Irish case. Since whiskey was the “native drink” of the Irish, one social commentator asked, “can there be a doubt that health and morals would be less injured if, instead of Spirits, Ale or Porter was the only drink to be obtained in [public] houses?”3 Although the application of free-trade principles to the beer trade in Ireland would not completely come to pass until the passage of the Beerhouse Act (Ireland) in 1860, advocates of the measure continue to build their political support for its application to Ireland, despite widespread reports of drunkenness and social tumult in locales where it had been earlier implemented.4 Yet parliament in 1833 had larger reforms on the ledger than merely the revamping of the beerhouse trade. While on one hand attempting to simplify the licensing laws, reformers on the other hand intended to introduce additional distinctions between retail licenses to guarantee that no one form of license holder enjoyed a monopoly over the entire market. In addition, reformers were responding to magisterial and constabulary complaints of licensed grocery shops customarily serving,

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in breach of their licenses, individuals on their premises. Even more alarming were reports that these individuals were women and children from the lower classes, who, in the grocery shops, as one temperance reformer later put it, could “politely retire behind the ‘Great Wall of China’ (the tea chest) and take their dreams.”5 To address the problem, in 1833 parliament introduced legislation designed to curb the threat posed by licensed grocery shops to female and child sobriety. By delineating the various purposes of public houses from licensed grocers’ shops, politicians sought to make it more difficult for licensed grocers to serve women and the very young. To achieve their goal, MPs debated the merits of restricting the legal hours of sale for the various retail liquor licenses and the social costs and benefits of granting licensed grocers the right to sell small quantities of liquor for consumption on and off their premises. As politicians in London prepared in the spring of 1833 to take up reforms to the licensing laws as a whole, the LVA dispatched three of its most prominent members – Charles Kennedy, John Hughes, and John Drake – to Westminster to meet with Daniel O’Connell and other leading MPs with the obvious goal of shaping reforms into legislation that would be most advantageous to their businesses. Drawing upon the social reformers’ obsession with the destructive custom among the lower classes of “dram drinking” of strong spirits, Dublin vintners lobbied in 1833 against the rights of licensed grocers to sell individual servings of intoxicating liquor. In their meeting with O’Connell, Dublin publicans contended that allowing the licensed grocers of their city to peddle small quantities of drink at their counters would have a detrimental effect on the “habits” of men, women and children of “the lowest orders.”6 Further articulating their position, the deputation reported to MPs that allowing licensed grocers to enjoy the rights of a publican endangered “servants” and “females” who ran errands frequently to neighborhood grocer shops for such everyday staples as “sugar.” If passed as originally printed, Dublin vintners warned, “eating shops, provision shops, and even houses of ill-fame” could be licensed for the sale of spirits on the premises.7 To prove the innocence of the trade in the social problems of the city of Dublin, the responsible vintners in Dublin, the deputation claimed, served spirits “in a comparatively harmless shape,” watering down whiskey in a weak “punch.”8

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In their political pressuring of parliament, vintners found a ready ally in the venerated figure of Daniel O’Connell, whose ties with the liquor trade made him a natural ally to the Irish drink interest.9 At a meeting at his residence in London on 6 May of that year, O’Connell informed the prominent Dublin traders that he had only supported the original bill so that he might facilitate the trade with a printed copy. By doing so, O’Connell explained, he hoped they might clearly indicate their objections to the first draft of the legislation. At the close of the interview, O’Connell handed the draft in copy form to the three LVA representatives, urged them to “set down in writing [their] objections to [ . . . ] The principles and clauses in detail” and asked that they return the document to him personally with their criticisms clearly noted in the margins. After spending the afternoon and evening discussing the matter, the Dublin deputation returned the following day to O’Connell’s private residence to deliver their verdict. The following week the deputation visited the Lords of the Treasury, where they again stated their objections, emphasizing their disagreement specifically with magisterial oversight of public-house licenses, a duty hitherto carried out only by the Inland Revenue. A month later, following the return of the Dublin vintners home to Ireland, O’Connell wrote to urge the LVA to visit again the halls of parliament so they might appear before the select committee prior to the second reading of the bill. “Never before,” O’Connell wrote, had there been “so [ . . . ] Crowded a closing session,” a situation that, if they were to have an opportunity to meet again with the parliamentary leadership before a second reading of the bill, necessitated their “rapid return to the city to defend their interests.” Despite the crowded parliamentary schedule, the Liquor Licensing Act of 1833 passed parliament after limited compromise, though in the end Irish publicans received most of what they had lobbied for.

II With potentially harmful legislation stalled at Westminster, Irish publicans pivoted quickly in the later years of the 1830s to pressing new issues involving magisterial and constabulary surveillance of public houses in Ireland. In the history of the Irish public house, perhaps no one figure

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played more of a transformative role than that of Captain Thomas Drummond, the undersecretary for Ireland. Under Drummond’s directives, the Irish constabulary orchestrated a broad offensive against the notorious trade and took steps to monitor more closely public-house business. For Drummond, those taverns that he labeled as “low” public houses represented the most serious threat to public order: establishments that were far beyond the view of respectable society. In addition to targeting these public houses, Drummond zeroed in on the seemingly ubiquitous lower-class social institution of the shebeen. In this effort magistrates appear to have largely concurred with Drummond. At a meeting of the Irish magistracy in 1839, the assembled members unanimously passed a resolution condemning the shebeen trade as “one of the founts from which crime springs” and where “bad characters meet for the worst of purposes.” Going further, several magistrates opined on the laxity of Inland Revenue officers in their duty to bring so-called shebeeners to justice.10 This sense of frustration among the imperial bureaucracy over the seemingly booming shebeen trade in rural districts and the perceived social irresponsibility of low Irish publicans prompted Drummond to action. Basing his moves on a positivist conception of science and a modernizing vision of progress, Drummond encapsulated the quintessential liberal ethos of his time, seeking to implement rational reforms drawn from careful observation.11 To bring all of Ireland under British law and rid the country of dangerous conspiracies, detailed intelligence of Irish secret societies and the places wherein they met was, above all, necessary to achieve any progress. Learning that leaders of Ribbon organizations sometimes purchased public-house licenses for the exclusive purpose of setting up safe houses for their society, Drummond decided to do exactly the same. He ordered that the Irish constabulary hire a secret agent to apply for a public-house license specifically to “entrap” members of the Billy Welters, one of the two competing groups of notorious Ribbon societies active in the metropolis. While this police practice would only rarely be implemented in the future, Drummond would expand the collection of intelligence by means of hiring informants to visit public houses with money enough to purchase drink for suspects. The head of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, John O’Farrell, admitted that by the late 1830s, out of the several hundred pubs in Dublin, Ribbon societies were active only

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in two or three licensed establishments. This encouraging fact, O’Farrell alleged, stemmed from the police hiring informants, for a small sum (a guinea) a week, to pass time in working-class taverns. This type of intellegence gathering would continue through the 1880s, at which time most secret societies would begin to reduce their organizational use of the pub. Increasingly harried by the constabulary, the organizers of Ribbon meetings in pubs sometimes attempted to elude police detection by disguising their gatherings as business meetings for mutual-benefit societies. For example, the Billy Welters in Dublin appear to have cloaked their meetings under the banner of a working-class self-help organization. In another case, three publicans arrested on grounds of illegal “confederacy” had served as important parish leaders of Ribbon lodges in Cavan and Swadlinbar, while also playing leadership roles in social self-help groups for working men. One of the accused publicans, James Brady, argued that his public house did not host oath-bound secret societies, but instead facilitated only a working men’s organization. A symbol displayed at the entrance to the pub showed, according to the prisoner, a symbol of the “Sawyers’ Arms,” an emblem that indicated its use as a benefit society. In addition to running the public house, the accused conspirator also operated a hotel for travelers, another common business associated with the Irish nationalist underworld.12 When new members took their oath of allegence to the society, they did so by placing their hand on a prayer book on a table in the back room of a public house. Inside the tavern, they also might try to muddy any evidence that could potentially be mustered against them in a court of law. To avoid the charge of administering an unlawful oath, a member might voluntarily pick up the book before pronouncing “the prescribed declaration.”13 Even the book that contained the secret oath, according to intelligence, might contain misleading information: an oath declaring “allegence to his or her magisty [sic]” was never actually read; it existed only as a foil in case “the goods” fell into the hands of the law.14 The monitoring of activities within the walls of public houses represented only one part of Drummond’s larger plan to passify Ireland. Though fairs, races, and markets had long been notorious locales of violence and crime, the constabulary generally did not intervene in putting

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down sectarian melees that broke out at such events. Drummond believed, however, that order could be established and crime reduced by focusing attention on the nearby licensed establishments as well as the tents and vendors who often served intoxicants to fair- and racegoers. Constabulary complaints of gangs of young men on Saturday afternoons and evenings recklessly swarming the thoroughfares of working-class neighborhoods around the Pheonix Park in Dublin, indiscriminately damaging property and assaulting innocent persons, drew Drummond’s attention, prompting him to conduct a kind of social experiment there. Drummond himself visited the park on several occasions to implore vendors, under threat of legal action, to resist altogether the temptation to sell spirits, and requested further that all tents and stalls be taken down by mid-afternoon. Drummond imagined that the young men, renowned for their incitement of riots by attacks on rival gangs, constables, and soldiers, would return sober to their homes without incident once his reforms took hold. When local fairs were held completely in the revealing light of day, freed from the scourge of ill-disciplined drinking concealed by darkness, Drummond believed, men would no longer waste their afternoons and evenings loitering on the green and tippling at booths, which were the most dangerous of shebeens in Drummond’s mind. If violence did not break out after nightfall on the fairgrounds, Drummond contended, then it would surely follow later, once those same men resorted to the counters and back-room hearths of neighboring taverns. Crowded in these low public houses, their minds clouded by a day-long drinking binge, ill-conceived plans for mayhem and treason would quite likely be hatched. As a result of Drummond’s reforms in Dublin, MPs added a clause to the 1836 Liquor Licensing Act making prohibition of all intoxicants at fairs the law across all Ireland. Reporting to parliament in 1839, Drummond testified that the law had immense importance in “clearing fairs” quickly and effectively after the legal daytime transactions had taken place. Despite Drummond’s deep conviction that drunkenness posed a threat to public order, he also viewed intemperance among the lower classes as indicative of the weakness of the movement. The Irish would not “rebel again,” Drummond asserted, “because six of eight of them” lived in a “brutish, nasty condition.” In a footnote to a description of the “potato-eaters” in his memoir, Drummond dismissed the idea of any

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serious grievances behind all of the talk and displays of sedition in Ireland. “The worst sentiments of disloyality arose,” Drummond wrote, “less from a sense of historic injustice and more from “hy [sic] watchwords and meaningless party cries.” Drummond described the division between lower-class Protestant and Catholic communities in Belfast as a superficial struggle between “those, [who] when drunk, leap in the air, and cry ‘to hell with the Pope’, and those [who], in a like condition, cry ‘death to King William’.”15 He further opined: To curb this pernicious habit of inebriety among the lower orders of the Irish, Drummond supported the inclusion of an article in the Liquor Licensing Act of 1836 that granted to police the legal authority to arrest and detain any individual for simple drunkenness. According to the law, one could be detained simply for being intoxicated, even if not disorderly. Standing rounds of drinks for would-be members of the conspiracy may have been an effective way to build membership, but having the mere appearance of a drop taken made an entire underground group volnerable to exposure to the authorities.16

Given the centrality of drink to Irish popular culture, and to secret societies in particular, the law paved the way for police to arrest, interrogate, and search the person of anyone who showed the smallest sign of intoxication. The power and scope of this law dramatically expanded the ability of the police to search any of those suspected of Ribbonism.17 While secret societies tried to sidestep the law by requiring that leaders who were in the possession of secret papers and passwords abstain from drink during meetings, enforcing such rules would prove problematic. So much of the material evidence gathered by police came by way of arrests made under the grounds of drunkenness that it is difficult to overstate its utility in bringing secret societies to the attention of the authorities. Expressing his pleasure of the usefulness of the law before parliament, Drummond notified MPs that over the three years since the passage of the legislation in 1836, “no less than 40,000” individuals had been detained and brought before the magistrates on the charge of drunkenness. Out of those cases, as many as 16,000 had been sent to prison.18 Drummond continued through the 1830s to attack the pernicious drinking habits of the Irish by pushing for the elimination of what

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he called “low public houses,” a segment of the trade that, he believed, lacked the facilities and oversight to conduct responsible trading in intoxicants. For their part, official spokespersons for the licensed trade castigated those who furnished drink to Ribbon meetings as shebeen keepers or low publicans, individuals who were, they alleged, far outside the respectable membership of their society. In response to the specific allegation that publicans knowingly harbored Ribbon societies in Dublin, the LVA canvassed all publicans in the city, members and non-members alike, asking in a circular that all traders “pledge” that they would never knowingly “entertain any illegal group” on their premises. Going further, the circular threatened that if any non-members refused also to formally join the trade organization, such inaction would represent a sign of guilt by association with the criminal elements of the retail drink trade.19 The secretary of the vintners’ society further challenged Drummond to publicly disclose the names of those publicans he mentioned in his parliamentary testimony connected with the treasonous organizations in Dublin, so that the vast majority of the trade might be “exonerated.”20 Of course, most publicans at the bottom of the social ladder – and shebeen keepers particularly – held no membership in the association and likely paid little notice to such pleas. The secretary of the vintners in Dublin pointed out that Drummond’s condemnation of the trade might indeed have stemmed from political bias, gingerly suggesting, in nonetheless inflammatory words, that the accusations could have been “put up [by the] [ . . . ] rotten and orange Corporation” of Dublin.21 Following the tone of the secretary’s complaints of sectarian bias in Drummond’s parliamentary testimony, another Dublin publican observed that the social tensions Drummond had spoken of originated not in the public houses of the city, but in the fairs and markets, where Irish Catholics only defended themselves while under attack from the “orange” factions of the community.22 Despite the protests of the licensed vintners of Dublin, the evidence provided by Drummond before parliament helped to convince MPs to take the first tentative steps to strengthen magistracy supervision over the public-house trade in Ireland by requiring certificates of good character from applicants before licenses would be issued. Furthermore, Drummond pushed for greater legal penalties for shebeen keepers and more vigilant police supervision of all public houses, including those in country

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districts. Instead of relying solely on Inland Revenue officers to identify and convict shebeen traders, the Irish Constabulary would need to take on this responsibility itself. The Dublin-based licensed trade mostly cooperated with the constabulary and magistracy during these years to free the trade from the stigma of crime and sedition. Despite these efforts, low public houses and shebeens would continue to offer a means to both turn a profit as well as attract would-be conspirators into the world of physical-force revolutionaries in Ireland until at least the 1860s and early 70s, after which new licensing laws would facilitate greater police supervision, more stringent regulation of the physical condition of shops, and greater attention to the character of the license holder.

III In Dublin during the Fenian movement of the 1860s several pubs known for offering sanctuary to seditious groups became targets of magistrates and police concerned with uprooting networks of Fenian agitators hatching seditious plots. Because of the prominent role of Irish-Americans in the movement and the peripatetic nature of its leaders, public houses offered the most convenient point at which Fenian organizers and local sympathizers might converge. As R.V. Comerford has written, “publichouse conviviality was at the very heart of the fabric of Fenianism.”23 Beyond providing spaces for clandestine meetings of Fenians, pubs operated as public theaters for nationalist displays of defiance. On St. Patrick’s Day in 1867, for example, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa famously met with a group of Fenians at Jude’s of 13 Grafton Street, an event that acquired notoriety in nationalist histories of Fenianism and the ensuing unrest over subsequent decades.24 Further reflecting their accommodating relationship with the movement, publicans who displayed nationalist banners and flags drew the attention of the constabulary, who often opposed the renewal of their licenses at annual licensing sessions. Answering a parliamentary inquiry into habitual drunkenness in 1870, the police of County Meath reported that pubs were “much frequented by the disaffected for the unlawful purpose of Fenianism and Ribbonism, the low public houses being the places where these combinations are principally carried out.” In the same report the authorities in Meath

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recommended that “it would be very beneficial to society at large if a great many of those public houses were suppressed.”25 Unlike sports gatherings, which also offered cover to Fenian meetings, public houses were more directly linked to the threat of revolt.26 Charging inexpensive prices for intoxicants, so-called “low public houses” became associated with the luring of otherwise law-abiding citizens into circles of criminality. In 1864 the police in Dublin started patrolling pubs in pairs instead of walking their beats in solitude, thus increasing their ability to intimidate and control crowds in pubs and other spaces.27 From 1864 until 1867 arrests for drunkenness fell precipitously, and both police and temperance reformers credited the diminution to the more visible police presence within and around the pubs. Richard Corr, superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, testified before parliament that throughout the Fenian agitation the police had kept under surveillance those public houses in Dublin suspected of Fenian recruitment.28 Despite the constabulary’s increased monitoring of the public house, the temperance movement held that taverns still lured unsuspecting individuals into the worlds of crime and disorder.29 The president of the Irish Sunday Closing Association, Henry Wigham, condemned public houses before parliament as representing more of a threat to public order than shebeens. Taverns, Wigham insisted, drew a great number of unsuspecting Irishmen into Fenian networks and conspiracies: With the present police system in Ireland, if a conspiracy is carried on in private houses, there is a very fair chance of the police getting a clue to it; but if a conspiracy is carried on in public houses where everyone has a right to enter without being questioned, a conspiracy is much more difficult of detection.30

For temperance reformers the openness of pub conviviality – the very “public” nature of the public-house environment – threatened to increase the Fenian rank and file. Conspiracies concocted behind closed doors, according to temperance reformers such as Wigham, were more insular and thus controllable events, whereas the open doors of the public house presented the threat of new combinations of support drawn from the general public. Although the official police policy of regularly visiting pubs as a part of daily protocol was not adopted until 1894,

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the increase of police incursions into licensed houses in the 1860s and 1870s eventually caused Irish nationalist groups – LGVPA members and their assistants foremost among them – to resist regular police inspections into the public house and to accuse the police of establishing a system of espionage in the surveillance of licensed premises. Yet the LGVPA, which would be so vocal in the late 1870s and the 1880s in protesting against police incursions, made few objections to the more stringent surveillance of the 1860s; in fact, no mention of the matter appears in reports of its weekly meetings throughout this period. Instead, the Dublin-based LGVPA, beyond mustering funds against the first of the Sunday-closing and permissive bills, concerned itself primarily with demonizing beerhouses, shebeens, and other retailers of drink outside its organization. It was a way of keeping the trade “respectable” in the face of temperance reformers’ harsh accusations of moral depravity and claims that public houses served as incubators for seditious plots. Instead, and in contrast to their earlier position during the Ribbon movement of the 1830s and 1840s, the LGVPA tended to emphasize the more moderate and reforming aspects of the grass-roots nationalist movement. The head of the LGVPA in Dublin, Michael Carey, claimed before parliament that the new nationalist sentiment in the country, far from engendering drunkenness and immorality, had brought about a reform of sorts in the uses of alcohol: “The Fenianism which sprung up in some places in the country had a wholesome effect upon some people who were in the habit of taking more than was good for them, and they do not take it now.”31 Before the same parliamentary committee on Sunday closing, C. De Gernon, a Tipperary magistrate, pointed to the inclination among the working classes to spend their leisure time on Sundays engaged in reading newspapers aloud and debating politics, not just in public houses but on their “doorsteps” or in their own private homes.32 It was this perception of moral reform that defenders of Irish nationalism – vintners foremost among them – focused on, while at the same time they excoriated the more seditious elements within Fenianism and assisted at times in government efforts to stamp out treasonous plots LGVPA leaders appeared to recognize that to condemn all nationalist sentiments would isolate their members from their customers as well as the organization itself from many in their economically and socially splintered association.

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In 1863, for example, the LGVPA reacted sympathetically to various labor groups that lobbied for the association’s backing in supporting Dublin-based manufacturing, a campaign known at the time as the “home-manufacture movement.” Perhaps reflecting a latent nationalism within its ranks, the LGVPA appeared eager to blend patriotism, economic cooperation, and personal duty in its initial reception of home manufacture. Brass fitters and cork cutters requested and received support for their nationalist-oriented movement both from the association’s officers and from its members. In June 1863, Michael Carey responded enthusiastically to a group of Dublin cork cutters lobbying for “home manufacture,” pronouncing in a patriotic tone that the vintners’ association should “support the trade and business of their own citizens by taking home manufactures.” In his response to the workers Carey also emphasized the interconnected nature of business, “for they all lived by the mutual support they gave each other.” In addition, Carey warned that “nothing could be more destructive to the people of Dublin than wresting from the workingman their means of livelihood and using foreign manufacture,” by which he meant the purchasing of non-Irish corks and bottles. Upon the suggestion of the association’s secretary the meeting unanimously recommended that these workers “should supply the society with the names of those parties, whether soda-water manufacturers or bottlers of porter and ale,” who failed to purchase home-manufactured corks. As a testimony to his strong personal feelings on the matter, the secretary further pledged that henceforth “he would not take soda water, wine, or any other drink from any party who purchased foreign-made corks.”33 According to a subsequent report of an LGVPA meeting submitted to the Freeman’s Journal in October 1863, the brass fitters of Dublin also sought the association’s backing of home manufacture, contending that if the “influence” of the licensed grocers and vintners was “exercised on behalf of the Dublin gas fitters, a great deal of the brass castings which are now imported might be made in Dublin.”34 Although the concern with home manufacture failed to hold the attention of the LGVPA throughout the 1860s, its embrace of the workers’ nationalist concerns reflected the Dublin vintners’ economic conception of a moderate form of Irish nationalism. Furthermore, their warm reception of working-class sentiments illustrates the direction from which nationalist ideology was flowing: External forces, namely, concerned

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artisans from outside the organization, sparked the interest, albeit shortterm, of the LGVPA. This populist pressure from below foreshadowed future developments in the 1870s and 1880s, when similarly widespread discontent propelled the association toward a more open acceptance of Irish nationalism. Eclipsed in part by the physical threat posed by revolutionary Fenianism later in the decade, nationalist sentiments within the LGVPA were rarely expressed publicly during the rest of the 1860s, and even the seemingly moderate home-manufacture movement subsequently attracted little or no official attention from the association’s leadership. Moderate, nonrevolutionary nationalism at this time represented a politically risky proposition for middle-class publicans in Dublin, but later, in the 1870s and 1880s, popular pressure from outside their association would again alter their political stance. Despite the cooperation of the LGVPA in assisting the British government’s campaign against Fenianism, the temperance movement nonetheless worked assiduously to exploit Fenian unrest in justification of the need for reform of the liquor laws in Ireland. Temperance reformers were vociferous in accusing publicans of fostering a culture of chaos and rebellion.35 In the anxious climate of this period the temperance campaign hoped to further its legislative agenda of curtailing the liquor trade by appealing to the cause of law and order. In a Temperance Star article of 1866 about rioting, entitled “The Fenian Head,” the author wrote that “the public houses of this country are the real nurseries of every seditious movement, and [ . . . ] it is at the taproom table that disloyalty and treason are best promulgated, and it is under the influence of the public house that young men are led into conspiracies of this class.”36 For this anonymous contributor to a journal edited by the powerful temperance politician T.W. Russell, the most effective way to stem the plotting of seditious acts was for the government to exercise more control over the culture of drink itself. Governmental efforts, according to this line of argument, should be directed at the vice of drunkenness because it represented an unnatural state of being. “Surely,” the author contended, “it ought to be much easier to keep men sober than to make men loyal.”37 In effect, temperance reformers argued that regulatory legislation in the form of Sunday closing and the permissive bill, coupled with greater police supervision, would foster loyalty more effectively than covert attempts by the government to force allegiance to the crown.

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In a nation without the distorting effects of alcohol, temperance reformers argued, the minds of sober individuals would remain a tabula rasa, upon which the impressions of the world could be fairly registered. English as well as Irish commentators on Irish society and its troubles tended to romanticize the bucolic life of tenant farmers, who allegedly were by nature peaceful and passive. Writing on the rapid decrease of Fenian violence after the failed 1867 rising, Philip Bagenal noted that “no occupation implants so speedy and effectual a love of peace and order as husbandry and tillage of the soil.”38 Agrarian violence, based less on sound ideas than on irrational emotions, reflected a society sick with the pains of alcohol. Dr. William White, a Dublin coroner, wrote in 1872 that “when any agrarian outrage threatening life occurred, the stimulus beforehand was generally drink, and invariably before any such act was attempted, the party to commit the attack was primed with spirits.”39 For those interested in defeating Fenianism, the habitual use of intoxicants posed a real danger to public order because of the notoriously passionate and impressionable character of the Irish. The stereotype of the childishly innocent but alcoholic Irishman looms large in the early debates over legislation that aimed to restrict the liquor trade in Ireland. More than the English, with whom the Irish were most often compared, the Irish working class and agrarian laborers required special measures of protection and correction. Frederic Richard Lees, writing in his book An argument for the legislative prohibition of the liquor traffic (1880), characterized Ireland as “our unhappy sister country [ . . . ] where the freedom of sale in usquebaugh has inflicted more mischief than in any other part of the U.K., aggravated by the peculiarly excitable character of the people and the absence of intellectual and social culture as restraining forces.”40 Archbishop Maning, a crusader against drink, confirmed before parliament this image of the childish Irishman: I believe that the Irish working men are tempted into public houses and habits of drink more from companionship, and from a certain lightheartedness and joviality of character, than any other race I know of; that they do not set about it with the gravity that we Englishmen show, that I am quite sure of; and that they respond readily to any efforts to correct them and that they count any man who tries to correct them their true friend.41

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Slurs against the Irish character were of course common, but in the context of the temperance debate in Ireland they took on a new salience. The alleged naivete´ and excitability of the Irish presented a unique dilemma for the licensing authorities in Ireland and the legislature in London. British MPs were aware of the unrest that the Sunday-closing issue had inspired in London in the 1850s, and given the increasingly agitated state of the countryside in the 1870s, similar unrest in Ireland seemed a real possibility. Indeed, conflict between temperance and anti-temperance rallies in Ireland did lead in several instances in the 1870s to isolated riotous confrontations between the opposing crowds. Similarly, nationalist demonstrations in the 1870s also acquired a reputation for rioting. Using physical force to control nationalist meetings, Captain George Talbot, assistant commissioner of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, warned that physical force created an air of distrust between the nationalist communities in the poorer sections of the city and the police. Speaking before parliament in 1877, Talbot recalled the difficult relations that had existed between the police and the denizens of working-class Dublin “after the unfortunate meeting in the park in 1870.” In that demonstration in favor of amnesty for Irish Fenian prisoners, the police had used force to put down the riotous crowds, but the more long-term result of that action was an increase of ill-discipline in Dublin’s notoriously rough slums. Talbot explained to parliament in March 1877 that in the years after the “park riots” that had taken place around the Wellington Monument, the animosity toward the constabulary had made patrols of working-class sections of the city difficult. “There was a very ill-feeling showed to the police, and numbers [of the A and D divisions], up to the year 1875 and even up to last year [1877], have been assaulted constantly in the streets at night,” Talbot claimed. The result of the violence, according to Talbot, “was that the men, for their protection, had to be doubled.” Although just prior to the time of his testimony “a much better feeling [ . . . ] existed between the people and the police,” Talbot nonetheless remained adamant about the socially dangerous consequences of dramatically altering the publichouse system.42 Talbot’s testimony stood as a warning to the government authorities concerned with policing Dublin’s slums in the face of overwhelming popular resistance to the constabulary, especially when it came

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to enforcing the licensing laws. Suppressing shebeens, beerhouses, and spontaneous drunken revelries was in fact a dangerous job. While authorities in Dublin since the days of Captain Drummond had spoken assuredly of their ability to dominate disturbances in the city’s working-class districts, by the 1870s this optimism had given way to pessimistic resignation. Claiming that a consolidated and conspiratorial community of lower-class rebels had taken strong root around the shebeen houses in Dublin’s notorious slums, police felt there was little that could be done to restore order. This perception on the part of the authorities of overwhelming resentment within the urban slums of Dublin led to a reluctance to use physical force, a stance that contrasts sharply with police confidence during the Ribbon and Fenian agitations. This historical shift is apparent when contrasting the respective parliamentary inquiries into Sunday closing in 1867 and 1878. When asked if the shebeen trade in the “lower” sections of the city could not be identified and suppressed by means of undercover police, Talbot replied that “a dozen plainclothes [men] wouldn’t be enough [ . . . ] because he would be looked upon as a common informer by the people; the same 12 men would be known throughout the city, and I do not think their life would be very enviable.”43 Moreover, Talbot also expressed reservations about physically suppressing the trade by force because of similar concerns over inflaming popular feelings within the heart of the city’s working-class neighborhoods.

IV No one single group could have been more familiar with the ceremonies, toasts and songs of Ribbon and Fenian meetings than publicans. Having a working knowledge of passwords and secret hand signals became, in fact, part of the everday vocation of many publicans and their altogether criminal counterpart, the host or hostess of a shebeen. Over drinks supplied, and perhaps even served by a publican or shebeen keeper, patrons drank seditious toasts, sang treasonous songs, unfurled Irish nationalist banners, listened to lectures on various topics from military drilling to Irish history, and swore oaths of allegiance to their leaders. A publican might have offered, say, toasts in the front barroom, expecting true Ribbon Men to have offered in return the familiar rejoinder that would

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have won them intry to an interior chamber, an upstairs room, a rear courtyard, or a nearby hideout. For example, one of these simple, lyrical toasts began with the words, “The Black Rabbit,” to which the newcomer would be expected to respond with the phrase, “may she never be caught,” and confirmed with the final verse, pronounced by the gatekeeper of the secret meeting, “Black and All Black.”44 In a parliamentary testimony, Captain George Despard of North County Meath described the secret transactions of Ribbon meetings, according to his informants, that took place in public houses in Dublin during the height of the movement there. In separate but similar ceremonies held on the occasion of swearing in three new members, the initiates knelt, placed their hands on their hearts, repeated the creed and the Lord’s Prayer, and “declared to God that [they] would be true to them. Following this, members sitting around the room put [the initiate] through a long test, baraging the new-comer with questions designed to test his mettle.” At the conclusion of the meeting, more toasts would be offered at the society’s expense in the spirit of congratulations and brotherhood. Publicans possessed a reputation for sly business practices designed to facilitate off-hour tippling on and off public-house premises. Late at night, following the legal closing of the bar, publicans protected their own reputations, along with those of their clientele, by sometimes moving meetings of underground groups out of the barroom itself. Even if publicans did not physically host meetings on their premises, they still could act as sentries for nearby gatherings. A visiting member of a secret society needed only to enter a predesignated public house, make the prearranged secret sign or pronounce the passwords, and the publican or the assistant would pass on to the visitor the whereabouts of the clandestine meeting. Intelligence reports indicate that hideouts were sometimes as close as a back or upstairs chamber, a private house in the neighborhood, a nearby lodging house, or even a stable at the rear of the pub. Publicans and their assistants easily acted as guardians at the doors of their pubs or behind the bar, sounding an inauspicious alarm upon any sign of the police. Even the appearance of a stranger who failed the test of knowing the secret protocol could raise the alarm, springing the barman into action – for instance, by sending a boy messenger out to alert the nearby conspirators of an intruder. The numerous shebeens in

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mid nineteenth-century Ireland no doubt represented a tempting market for publicans, who could supply, sometimes just beyond their legal premises, the whiskey and beer enjoyed in these spaces. By the time of the Fenian movement in the 1860s, publicans accommodating shebeen houses with drink appear to have been far more common in the countryside, and so, too, were their close associations with secret societies there. Though Ribbon and Feinian societies were formally organized around parish districts, it might be more accurate to describe their organization as centered just as much around the pub as the local chapel, with publicans playing a far more prominent role as “centres” of the organization than the parish priest in day-to-day matters.45 In this way, the pub functioned as the natural home on a local level for Ribbon and Fenian communities, while also serving as an initial staging ground for visiting members to initiate contact with fellow societies. Publicans, serving as leaders at all levels of secret societies, and public houses, serving as common resorts, helped to hold otherwise geographically scattered groups together. During times of political and social unrest and, perhaps more importantly, during quieter times when the more “respectable” classes lapsed into political apathy over the questions of Repeal and Home Rule. The Irish taproom thus helped to sustain and unite an otherwise fractious nationalist culture of resistance. Letters obtained by the police and reports of detectives in plain clothes describe a world linked together by well-known watering holes: safe houses where like-minded men could gather, sing songs, and later retire to a more private locale for more serious business. Often the only knowledge a Ribbon or Fenian member might have of another parish organization would be the pub in which its members drank in the neighboring district. Despite the centrality of drinking to the culture of Ribonism and Fenianism, group indulgence in intoxicants also created a host of problems for secret societies. Alcohol fuddled the emotions of members and inflamed passions, transforming what might otherwise have been trivial disagreements and rivalries into brutal fights that could create long-term organizational cleavages and jeopardize months and even years of planning. Ribbon meetings often turned violent, and divisions between local Ribbon communities were common. To minimize these disruptions to

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their operations, Ribbon societies adopted preemptive strategies to decrease the likelihood of violent outbursts in and around meetings that often included heavy drinking. The aptly-named “quarreling symbol,” which secret societies devised and deployed with modest success, relied on the simultaneous use of visual and auditory cues to end disputes between fellow members quickly and without incident. One sequence of passwords, for example, included the words “don’t be quarelsome,” to which the opposing individual would respond, “the lad’s intentions are good.” If the predesignated hand signals were simultaneously given, an injurious brawl could come to a bloodless end. Such practices illustrate how Ribbon societies grappled with the side-effects of intoxication, seeking to minimize its impact on the overall plans and goals of the organization. Many publicans chose the riskier course of hosting secret meetings rather than face being economically and socially ostrasized. Decades before Irish nationalists developed the practice of the boycott, Ribbon societies in the 1830s deployed a similar – albeit less formal – version of this collective economic action against publicans. In parliamentary inquiries Irish authorities warned that publicans often had little choice over whether to serve Ribbon men. Since members of these secret societies were so numerous in rural districts, they could force publicans to allow them sanctuary at their will. Chief Constable John Hatton of County Meath testified in 1839, for example, that common “whiskey shops in County Meath would be ‘destroyed’ if they did not host the meetings and drinking parties of the Ribbon men.” Publicans accommodated these groups, turned a deaf ear to seditious conversations, played the role of gatekeeper at official proceedings held in the adjoining environs of the pub, and provided drink to nearby shebeens in order to keep business solvent. Intelligence reports indicate that secret societies spent a substantial portion of their funds and time recruiting new members inside public houses and shebeens. As the favorite haunts of British soldiers stationed in Ireland, public houses and shebeens represented the most commonly cited venues wherein Fenians and Ribbon men attempted to recruit soldiers. Constables worried, often for good reason, that in such places Irish soldiers might be cajoled, while under the influence of drink, to join the ranks of treasonous societies. By funnnelling to their centres”

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(and parish leaders) a steady stream of money for the purchasing of drinks at social gatherings, Ribbon societies hoped to gain a foothold within the intertwining worlds of public-house drinkers both in civilian and in military clothes.46 Beyond being a fertile recruiting ground for new members, public houses often served as staging grounds for military drilling and marches of public defiance of British rule. One drilling exercise began in Dundalk just south of Dublin at Mr. Carol’s Public House, a “well-known watering hole” in the neighborhood. According to the newspaper report of the incident, a crowd had slowly grown in numbers at the pub over the course of the afternoon, until at 5 p.m. approximately 200 men had been commanded to “fall in” on the road to Black Rock. From there the group moved with military discipline toward the south, using military expressions like “close up,” “forward,” and “range in sections of four.” Around two hours later the band of Fenians arrived at Ferguson’s public house, halting briefly outside the premises in “regular sectional formation” before entering the building. Out of the original 200 men, 50 completed the entire journey (although it is possible that the group could have split up at earlier points along the route). In parliamentary reports, police and magistrates complained of the difficulties of monitoring activities within the shebeen, arguing that restricting the respectable public-house business might push Fenians increasingly into holding their meetings in the shadowy underworld of this trade. Keeping Fenian revelries in the legally certified public houses, the police believed, would make Fenian circles of conspiracy more easily penetrable by the constabulary. However making public-house licenses more difficult to acquire, prohibiting the singing of songs and traditional music, and the actions of the Licensed Grocers’ Association to separate itself from low public houses, meant that the Fenian movement could find resort in few other places than the shebeen. As the constabulary began to include, on their nightly sweeps of working-class neighborhoods, the low public houses in the back lanes and alleys of Irish cities, Fenians began to abandon their use of the pub for the conducting of official business. Instead, Fenian societies chose more secretive locales situated safely away from the heavily policed barroom. Since the use of intoxicants remained at this time intregal to Fenian sociability, most hosts in these secret houses facilitated

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members with drink, leading the authorities to label them, as they commonly put it, as “shebeeners.” Although identifying and prosecuting shebeen keepers was often difficult for lack of evidence, searches of suspected houses often yielded copies of seditious ballads and Fenian poetry popular within the ranks of the movement. In one suspected shebeen in Dublin, for example, a search by constables revealed a rich collection of Fenian broadsheets, a trove of evidence powerful enough in the magisterial court to issue a warrant of detention for the occupant of the property.47 The growing tendency by secret societies to steer clear of the public house would continue through the 1880s and 1890s, and by the turn of the century public houses would rarely be mentioned in the intelligence reports documenting the movements of suspects.

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2 Consolidating the Trade

I Dublin publicans emerged from the crisis of the Great Famine and the Fenian agitation with a vigorous political sensibility that was centered – both formally and informally – on their trade association, the Licensed Vintners’ Protection Association. Given that the number of public-house businesses had swelled to over 900 in Dublin during the 1860s, coupled with the economic and social recovery of the retail liquor trade after the temperance campaign of Father Mathew, Dublin publicans possessed the numbers and social prestige requisite for asserting social and political influence. Joining forces in 1851 with the licensed grocers of Dublin, the Licensed Vintners’ Protection Association became the Licensed Grocers and Vintners’ Protection Association. Furthermore, increasingly coordinating efforts with kindred trade associations on the British mainland, the LGVPA strengthened its organizational network and adopted the political strategies employed by the English trade to protect its interests. Moreover, Dublin vintners increasingly identified themselves during the mid-Victorian decades with a form of middle-class respectability modeled upon what one Dublin representative saw as those “excellent English generals” of the affluent leadership of the English retail liquor trade.1 Although not representative of all vendors of drink in Dublin – especially those in the beerhouse and spirit-grocer businesses – the inner circle of the LGVPA invoked a self-conscious public discourse that claimed moral authority and advocated thoughtful moderation in the emerging world of Irish popular politics. 36

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As the LGVPA began to model its internal political apparatus on English vintner trade associations, the changes made to the licensing laws in Ireland during the mid-nineteenth century also tended to increase the shared characteristics between the Irish and English trades. For example, reforms to the Irish licensing system tended to favor the publican’s license over that of other retail licenses. As a result, businesses licensed as public houses began absorbing the market from other branches of the trade that had previously been held by beerhouse keepers, spirit grocers, and wine dealers. Thus the pub became identified as the primary center of working-class drinking and conviviality, a fact celebrated in workingclass culture while maligned by middle-class reformers. Similarly, publicans themselves became integral parts of working-class communities, while not necessarily identifying directly with the class upon which their businesses depended.2 Writing in the journal of the Dublin Statistical Society in 1856, James Haughton rather sentimentally recalled earlier times when publicans and the public house played a less salient role in the liquor trade overall: And yet as debauched as we are grown, many men can remember when we were as remarkable for sobriety as we are now for rioting and drunkenness; when our ancestors, of the best families of the nation, used to have their wines brought in by dozens, and when sack and spirituous liquors were sold at the apothecaries’ shops for cordials for the sick. The taverns have indeed long since taken the trade out of their hands, but in return they have brought them in ten-fold a greater one for their drugs by increasing the number of patients, and what is worse, of distempers too.3

For Haughton – and for later temperance reformers – the growth and consolidation of the public-house trade represented a dangerous shift away from the responsible use of alcohol, ostensibly by spirit grocers and wine dealers who catered to a more middle- and upper-class clientele, toward a more ill-disciplined and physically stultifying form of alcohol consumption. Indeed, as Haughton alleged, the wine dealer’s license had been marginalized by economic shifts in the drink trade by the 1860s, and the affluent spirit grocers, who continued to cater disproportionately to the middle and upper classes, played a rather small role within the liquor trade relative to the growing body of licensed grocers and vintners. While the beerhouse posed an increasing threat to the public house in

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working-class communities in Dublin, it too would come under increasing restriction during the 1860s and 1870s, allowing publicans to restore their law-abiding public image and lower-class market share. In large part because of the threats posed by a rapidly expanding beerhouse trade and a reinvigorated temperance movement, efforts toward organizational growth, both within Dublin and in the provincial cities, became a top priority for the licensed trade in the early 1860s. In an LGVPA report on a meeting of the United Towns and National Licensed Victualing Defence League in Liverpool, the Irish representative optimistically described “a wonderful unanimity” in the ranks of licensed traders throughout the British Isles.4 Similarly, in an oft-quoted article at association meetings originally published in 1862 in the Galway American, vintners in Dublin apprehended a new need for establishing satellite vintner associations “in every town in Ireland in connection with the parent society in Dublin.”5 Although relations between Dublin vintners and the English trade were intermittently fraught with political disagreements and distrust, Irish vintners outside Ulster from the early 1860s to World War I slowly built a strong network of trade associations across Ireland, with the Dublin association taking the primary leadership role. (Belfast, Cork, and Waterford also possessed significant trade associations of publicans.) This is not to say that regional divisions in the trade disappeared; the various vintner groups continued to face difficulties in creating a solid, single trade association in Ireland. Nonetheless, with the exception of the Belfast trade, represented by the Property and Liberty Defence League, Irish vintners were largely successful in creating an organizational network that took orders from its headquarters in Dublin.6 The overriding concern of the LGVPA in 1862 was to head off the impending threat of coercive legislation aimed at tightening government control of the retail liquor trade throughout the United Kingdom. At a meeting in London with the home secretary, Sir George Grey, and a deputation from the England-based United Towns and National Victuallers’ Defence League (which included Dublin representatives of the LGVPA), Grey predicted that “there was no doubt that the whole licensing system must soon come under the revision of parliament. It might not be this year, but it would be the next.”7 Given the tone and content of the conversation, the Dublin traders left the meeting with the

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renewed intention of separating the officially licensed trade in Ireland from accusations of vice and excess. By distancing themselves and their trade from the stigma of crime and public drunkenness, the vintners hoped to keep the Irish Catholic middle class and its representatives in parliament as allies in the debate over the licensing laws. To accomplish this goal, the LGVPA sought to consolidate the most respectable portions of its trade and to call for greater regulation of businesses outside of its association, especially those establishments licensed as beerhouses, which operated under relatively lax licensing protocols. Although publicans had found themselves the targets of moral campaigns in the past – most notably during Father Mathew’s temperance crusade in the late 1830s and the early 1840s, and during times of social unrest – Dublin publicans now found it necessary to tighten their control over the entire retail trade, castigating those establishments that fell outside the association as the actual cause of excessive drinking in Ireland. When temperance-minded members of parliament and government officials were advocating a more active role for the state in regulating public drinking, the association responded by attempting to redefine the identity of the public-house trade and to play a stronger role in monitoring and controlling its excesses. Thus it was not only imperial government officials in London but also the more affluent, largely middle-class publicans in Dublin and the larger provincial cities who were seeking to centralize and streamline control of the trade. Yet the strategy of Dublin publicans went beyond simply tightening discipline within the trade. The LGVPA certainly recognized the economic advantages of strengthening regulations, since this would funnel liquor and beer consumption into the public house. In Ireland there were many unauthorized outlets for unregimented consumption outside of the barroom. Renowned for drunken revelries in the open air, debaucheries at wakes that could last for days, and rampant illegal distillation in the remote countryside, Irish popular culture presented publicans with the opportunity for increasing sales of intoxicants by expanding their market base. The Irish trade was not so much simply seeking to “protect the pub,” as was the case in England; rather, the LGVPA advocated a more disciplined form of drinking that would bring new business into the public house.8 In 1862, Dublin vintners reacted coldly to William Gladstone’s budget because of its inclusion of “supplementary licenses

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for occasional retailers at markets, fairs, and other galas.”9 Since, according to the LGVPA, “great quantities of liquor were sold at those places without license,” the authorizing of these certificates would only cause “an injurious competition with the licensed trader.” Similarly, the LGVPA also requested that the police crack down on the all-night trading that allegedly transpired at military canteens in Dublin, at places like the Linen Hall Barracks.10 Given the competitive danger that these vendors posed to the trade, if the extremely complex Irish liquor laws were to be reformed the LGPVA held that it was the relatively open licensing system outside of the retail trade of publicans and licensed grocers that required legislative correction.11 The reform of spirit-grocer and beerhouse licenses was part of the larger project of granting magistrates and constables greater authority with respect to those sectors of the liquor trade over which the Inland Revenue commissioners and department held jurisdiction. Spirits sellers and beerhouse keepers, whom publicans and temperance reformers demonized for their excessive practices beyond police and magisterial supervision over the decade of the 1860s, were hobbled by legislation in 1872 and 1874; they now came under many of the same regulatory checks as other retail traders, though this process of creating a more uniform licensing system would continue for several decades. For some within the legal profession the reforms marked an important legislative shift, though the legislation represented only a small step toward a manageable legal system. Whereas the acts sought to streamline the licensing system, many of the complexities remained, leading experts in the field of licensing laws, such as Morgan Butler Kavanagh and Albert W. Quill, to voice the frequent criticism that had been leveled against the licensing system in the years just before passage of the 1874 bill: “Such a measure will of course be a step in the right direction; but until the numerous acts, some wholly, some partially enforced [ . . . ] have been codified into a single act, both the public and the profession must expect nothing but perplexity and confusion.”12 Despite the failure of these laws to quell the grumblings of the legal profession, the two acts nonetheless represented the first in a series of reforms that would be made to the liquor-licensing system between 1872 and 1902. Taken together, they accelerated the modernizing of the public-house system by rationalizing the legal code and increasing the level and scope

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of surveillance of alcohol consumption. Although debate over its more controversial clauses would continue – namely, over the status of bona fide travelers and the legal protocols for the transfer of licenses – the two acts authorized broad new rules, which impinged in novel ways on the use of alcohol outside the barroom, the business of the publican, and the rights of the everyday drinker as well as the habitual drunkard.

II By the 1860s the beerhouse trade had become the most salient threat to the business of the publican in Dublin. As a result, the LGVPA initiated a multifaceted effort to rein in this largely unregulated sector of the trade. By reforming the beerhouse system, Dublin vintners also intended to rehabilitate the reputation of the licensed trade and separate the public house from drunkenness, sexual license, and crime. At a time when rival attractions to the public house were beginning to draw patrons away from the pub, the LGVPA sought to reclaim the respectability of public-house patronage as a legitimate form of leisure activity. To accomplish this goal, Dublin publicans contrasted the orderliness of the well-managed pub with the growing chaos of the beerhouse. Prior to sending a deputation to place its grievances before the Home Secretary, the LGVPA president Michael Carey recommended that a group of association members should first alert the Dublin metropolitan police to the seriousness of beerhouse abuses in the city. In taking this action, Carey hoped to amass an official record that would clearly illustrate the gross misconduct of Dublin beerhouse keepers. In calling for an intensification of its campaign against beerhouses in June 1862, Carey complained at an association meeting that the “300 beerhouses in the city [ . . . ] harboured drunkards and the most abandoned characters at all hours of the night.”13 Provision of such facilities for clandestine revelries, according to Carey, called for “active measures” in order to “suppress” the trade.14 Vintner complaints about the beerhouse centered largely on the unique legal grounds on which it operated and on the difficulty of monitoring this unusual form of business. Although beerhouses were licensed only to sell in amounts no greater than four and a half imperial gallons

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or two dozen corked bottles and were not to provide accommodations for onsite drinking under any circumstances, the system, according to its critics, was flawed on several levels. Unlike with the public-house system, the Department of Excise was responsible for the issuing of beerhouse licenses and the surveillance of the premises licensed for this form of trade. Whereas the public house was policed by the constabulary and monitored annually by the magistracy at licensing sessions, the beerhouse keeper was largely free from these supervising bodies. With a growing reputation for mismanagement, corruption, and lack of adequate accommodations, the Inland Revenue Department found it difficult to allay the concerns of a doubtful licensed trade, concerned citizens, and temperance organizations alike.15 In fact, the comparatively relaxed protocols for beerhouse supervision in Ireland in the mid-1860s contrasted sharply with those for the reformed beerhouse in England. Chief Justice James Henry Monahan had decided in a historic Irish case in 1833 that because the Excise Department licensed beerhouses, police supervision was unnecessary; therefore, to enter a beerhouse, police had first to obtain a search warrant. Police records, parliamentary reports, and other diverse testimonies, originating from inside and outside the Irish drink trade, claimed that beerhouse keepers, especially in the warren-like streets of Dublin slums, regularly served patrons inside their shops or encouraged consumption in areas immediately nearby or adjoining their establishments.16 As the Dublin Metropolitan Police themselves noted, apprehending those beerhouse keepers who were guilty of breaching the licensing laws was a difficult task, and “in point of fact [ . . . ] the law had been evaded with impunity.”17 While this unique kind of license also had been issued in England in 1830, its reform there preceded the incremental changes to the licensing code which eventually placed considerable limitations on the beerhouse trade in Ireland. Contrasting the English and Irish licensing systems, Michael Carey accused the British authorities of allowing the beerhouse experiment to continue wreaking havoc in Ireland after it had already been proven to have caused a social catastrophe in the industrial cities of Liverpool and Manchester. In the summer of 1862, at the conference of the National Victuallers’ Defence League in Birmingham, when the English representatives “enumerated the many abuses that were emanating from

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those plague spots [beerhouses],” the Irish trade responded by claiming that English beerhouses were “paragons of perfection as compared to the beer shops in Dublin.”18 Contrasting the licensing systems in the two regions would remain a basic strategy of the LGVPA for garnering public support for reform of the liquor laws in Ireland; this became the dominant approach after 1880, when nationalist resentment galvanized vintner sentiment against British control over the licensing system. In addition to the allegedly inadequate supervision of beerhouse businesses, beerhouse licensees faced few qualifying conditions for obtaining a license. As with the lenient supervision of these premises, the application process for procuring a beerhouse license differed markedly from that of the common vintner. Prior to the Beerhouse Act of 1864 there were no formal screenings of beerhouse applicants. A beerhouse license was relatively inexpensive, increasing the ease with which an individual could set up shop; to purchase one, interested parties paid only £4 to the Excise Department, with no qualifying inspections of the premises of sale.19 This largely unregulated application process, with the attraction of high sales and potentially considerable profits, created an intense demand for such licenses and fueled a dramatic increase in the number of beerhouses in Dublin. Indeed, in the late 1850s and early 1860s the number of beerhouses in Dublin had grown at such an exceedingly rapid rate that they could be found in every neighborhood in the city. But it was their excessive numbers in the poorest districts that galvanized middle-class enmity against them and pushed lawmakers in England and Ireland to take measures to check their spread. Including the districts immediately surrounding the city, the total number of beerhouses, according to statistics that the LGVPA supplied in 1863 to the Dublin Metropolitan Police, was 452.20 Even after the passage of the 1864 Beerhouse Act, the Irish constabulary stated in May 1867 that in the Dublin Metropolitan Police district there were still 256 beerhouses, with 177 within the Dublin jurisdiction and 89 in regions outside the city borough.21 With approximately 900 public houses in the city, a number that remained relatively stable throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, the substantial beerhouse trade certainly must have cut into the profits of the public-house commerce. In the 1860s the LGVPA focused primarily on separating the pub trade from beerhouses by raising public awareness of the issue through

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a campaign carried out largely in daily newspapers. Periodicals like the Morning Advertiser and Era represented “those papers which so ably and bravely defended their cause,” while the Freeman’s Journal ostensibly took a more impartial stance on the issue.22 In its assault against the beerhouse the LGVPA called on the public to collect information on beerhouses and send these accounts directly to the association.23 Between 1862 and 1864 the association often reported that it had received an abundance of letters of complaint both from members of the association and from concerned citizens, in part demonstrating the scope of middle-class sentiment arrayed against the beerhouse system in Dublin by this time. In one such letter a self-described “friend of the trade” wrote to the LGVPA that, going through the neighbourhood of Upper and Lower Stephen Street, Mercer Street, and South King Street on Sunday morning on my way to chapel, I saw the doors of beerhouses wide open and the people drinking while a policeman of the B Division was looking on at them going in and out.24

Although the LGVPA urged the public and its own members to collect information on illegal transactions in beerhouses around the city, its secretary also reminded members that “the suppression of these pest houses was not exclusively the business of this association.”25 Publicans insisted that sobriety and discipline could return to Dublin only with reform of the licensing laws and increased police vigilance to pursue and prosecute traders who carried on this type of illegal trade. Complaints about beerhouses from the LGVPA and the public centered on their irregular trading and the threat they posed to civic harmony. The secretary of the organization, identified only as Gilligan, acting as the mouthpiece of the retail trade in his frequent reports to the popular press, most often put the matter in hyperbolic and inflammatory terms: “A greater moral plague could not have fallen on the city than the introduction of beer shops into it.”26 Intoning the common charge that beerhouses were “the receptacles of robbers and murderers,” the secretary’s condemnation echoed police complaints that the beerhouse was a hotbed for Fenian conspiracies.27 In a sense anticipating the debate over whether restricting the hours of sale would decrease drunkenness, the LGVPA contended that beerhouse keepers opened their businesses

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at the very time when the law forced public houses to shut down. “After the regular houses were closed on Saturday nights,” a spokesperson for the LGVPA declared, “the beerhouses were open at half past eleven on Saturday nights and every other night, all day and all night on Sundays, and on half of Monday.”28 Pinning the accusations of immorality and illegality squarely on the approximately 300 beerhouses then in the city, the association adopted the same highly charged language that its temperance foes were increasingly using against the liquor trade generally, often with substantial political effect. In the popular front arrayed against the beerhouse, economic pragmatism, which fueled the vintner attack, was sharpened by fears of Fenian conspiracy, middle-class urban reform, and Victorian notions of respectability. According to the LGVPA, beerhouses represented the leading cause of social and physical ruin in Dublin. Minimal administrative procedures and the paucity of police surveillance drew the ire, however, of temperance reformers and the LGVPA alike, though admittedly for markedly different reasons: Vintners perceived the beerhouse as an unfair rival to their closely moderated public-house trade, while temperance reformers made few distinctions between the beerhouse and the public house, both of which, they claimed, posed the same general threat to the well-being of society. Like temperance reformers, the LGVPA in its public campaign pointed to arrests for drunkenness, the multitude of facilities, and the limited effectiveness of surveillance in order to drive home its argument. Addressing a meeting of the association, Carey blamed the unusually high number of arrests for drunkenness the previous Monday on “the facilities given by those plague houses [beerhouses], of which two or more were established in every bye street, lane, and alley in the city.”29 Located largely in out-of-the-way locales beyond the purview of respectable society, beerhouses put civic harmony at risk, publicans alleged. At a meeting in London with the Irish Chief Secretary and a deputation representing a general meeting that had been held in Dublin’s Mansion House some weeks earlier, a Dublin alderman succinctly laid the case before this cabinet minister when he protested against “the demoralizing effects of beer shops” in Dublin. In a similar vein the Daily Mail declared that “respectable people who oscillate between their offices and their homes, live decorously, and never penetrate into back slums at nightfall, are

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probably unaware that during the last few years the vice of drunkenness has greatly increased in Dublin.”30 Officials, temperance reformers, and publicans stressed the low character of the beerhouses in the most notoriously raucous neighborhoods where it was difficult to supervise the business. Ultimately, reformers held that the government’s inability to adequately monitor the beerhouse trade threatened the moral fiber of society. According to the LGVPA, this open licensing system had encouraged “persons without character, respectability, or stake in society” to enter into the trade.31 In an oft-quoted argument the LGVPA contended that “as the law stands at present, a ticket-of-leave man, a garrotter, may obtain a beer license and open shop in a stable, and keep open all night, entertain their former and present accomplices in crime, and set the police at defiance.”32 Although the aspersions cast upon the beerhouse by vintners blindly overlooked the culpability of the rest of the licensed trade, suspicions of Fenian conspiracies during the 1860s provided a receptive climate in which the vintner case against the beerhouse gained a certain legitimacy. During parliamentary hearings in 1867 it was the testimonies given by Dublin constables, more than other accounts from provincial police officers in Ireland, which stood out as the most desperate in tone and content, suggesting the extent to which the social problems associated with beerhouses were perceived as urban ones, unique to the Irish capital city. The Dublin police chief sounded a typical complaint about the illegal trade when he stated in 1867 that “the spirit grocers and beer dealers, wholesale and retail, keep open on Christmas Day and Good Friday, and every Sunday in the year.” To demonstrate his point to the parliamentary committee the head constable referred specifically to a beerhouse in his division “which keeps open all night for the sale of drink not to be consumed on the premises,” and in order to check the disruptions it was necessary “to keep a constable there, at the door, to prevent parties from congregating about the place and to preserve order in the locality.”33 Those establishments most threatening to civic order, according to this constable, were located “in the lanes and in court ways” where “it was never contemplated any license should be given such place at all.”34 Publicans and reformers of the liquor system castigated beerhouses as places where women freely associated with the worst class of men. The

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organized licensed trade singled out the ostensibly female-dominated beerhouses as “sinks of iniquity” and a danger to the moral order of society.35 Such conviviality, they alleged, had a most “demoralising effect upon both sexes.”36 Moreover, it was the “youth of both sexes” who were most at risk of “corruption.”37 At a time when the category of the habitual drunkard was first being defined by reformers as a unique social problem, the licensed trade began to point out women as singularly important examples of the physiologically susceptible class of persons most vulnerable to the lures of shebeens and beerhouses. When the President of the LGVPA learned of an arrest involving a beerhouse keeper serving an intoxicated female, for example, he reported the matter to the Freeman’s Journal as an egregious example of the poor judgment of beerhouse proprietors. Although individual cases of female inebriety were rarely reported by the association at this time, which instead tended to bring police statistics to the attention of the press, this particular case was exceptional. According to the report of an association meeting submitted by the secretary, a beerhouse keeper, identified simply as “Tierney,” “allowed a woman of questionable character to enter his shop [at No. 6 Temple Bar] while she was in a state of intoxication, and there remained for a period of 25 minutes.” After receiving more drink while still on the premises, “she came out very much inebriated,” at which time she was arrested. Although cases based on the culpability of the proprietor for serving intoxicated women would become common with changes in the licensing laws in 1872 and 1874, the bringing of charges against vendors who encouraged female drunkenness in specific, individual cases marked a departure from the usual order of business for the police at this time.38 The Dublin police echoed these concerns of many publicans and middle-class citizens, condemning the beerhouse as the worst kind of drink shop. In 1863 a Dublin constable, identified simply as “Mr. Byrne,” complained that beerhouses were responsible for “entrapping not only the abandoned of both sexes but also parties who, from their position, ought to be respectable.” According to the constable, “amongst the prisoners” who were regularly arrested for drunkenness in and around beerhouses, there were “married women congregated [ . . . ] with the worst characters.” By claiming that beerhouses attracted disreputable women, crusaders against the beerhouse menace identified such unregulated

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spaces as primary agents in the corruption of female morality. Besides facilitating female drinkers, beerhouses promoted a dangerous “mixing” of the sexes that threatened established notions of gendered spaces. Women were still being associated with the scenes surrounding beerhouses in 1871, even after the process of restricting such businesses in the metropolis had begun. In that year, in responding to an inquiry submitted by a sub-inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary into the state of beerhouses in County Dublin, the Rathfarnam licensing magistrates reported that 77 beerhouses remained in the county, and all but eight had been “disapproved by the magistrates or constabulary.” Of this number, the report denounced all of them as “a decided evil” and recommended that they all be “abolished.”39 More significantly, the report ended by noting with a starred comment that 22 of these houses were owned by women.40 This noteworthy record of female involvement in the beerhouse trade mirrored the popular image of the female-dominated shebeen trade.41 Though it is difficult to calculate how many women served as publicans, females appear to have been far more visible in the sectors of the trade that required little if any startup capital or magisterial authorization, such as beerhouses and shebeens. Naturally, those opposed to the beerhouse system in Dublin (the organized licensed trade, temperance reformers, and much of the Protestant and Catholic religious establishments) described these license holders as little better than shebeen keepers. The beerhouse license itself, according to these critics, operated primarily as a cover for the serving of intoxicants on their premises. A master cooper at Guinness’s Brewery and the president of the Coopers’ Society, Patrick Higgins, writing in the Freeman’s Journal on 21 May 1872, vividly described the beerhouse system as it then operated in Dublin: It was the system with the people in the lower part of the city, if they had only a dozen of turf, to bring it into the shop or cellar, it did not matter which, and a few pipes and some bottles with Guinness’s label on them; and they would pick up an old label of Guinness’s or Mander’s and would stick them in the window. There was sufficient guarantee for the person that owned the apartment to go out and get a license to sell beer from six o’clock in the evening until six o’clock the following morning, night and day.42

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A small sign placed in the window of a beerhouse or shebeen – a piece of turf, a label from a well-known brewery – offered a precarious balance between overt advertisement and complete secrecy. Such subtle fac¸ades and meager accommodations also offered mobility for the notorious violators of the liquor laws – most commonly those carrying on an illegal beerhouse or shebeen. It was a simple task to move a business from one neighborhood to another, to a “vegetable or a turf shop,” in another police district of the metropolis following detection by the constabulary. It is significant that Higgins’ account, despite his working-class credentials, still represents an outside view of the beerhouse – a beerhouse or shebeen was not a place that a respectable artisan or laborer would admit to frequenting.43 Like shebeens, beerhouses operated largely in secret, according to rules most familiar to the denizens of the lower-class neighborhoods of the city. The absence of other first-hand accounts of ´ operated beerhouses suggests in part the extent to which their habitues outside of respectable – and hence visible – Irish society. Police testimonies do suggest some of the ways in which beerhouse and shebeen keepers avoided the law or minimized the fines levied against them. For example, George Talbot, assistant commissioner of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, declared before parliament on 27 February 1877 that oftentimes “the liquor is not what we call exposed for sale, but is kept in a back room.”44 Dublin’s labyrinthine and densely populated tenements served only to hamper police efforts to enforce the law. Again, Talbot’s account characterizes well the inherent problems faced by constables charged with the enforcement of the provisions of the new licensing acts: In a backyard in one premises lately we have detected as much as nearly a van load of bottled beer [ . . . ] The house is tenanted by different parties, who all pay rent on a separate day. We cannot find the owner of this liquor amongst them all; it is generally consumed in a hall which is common property, and when the police are coming, it is all thrown aside; and when we do detect them, and they are brought before the magistrates, the penalty can only be £2 because it was not exposed for sale.45

Talbot’s testimony blurred the lines between beerhouse and shebeen. In effect, the constabulary viewed the two as almost synonymous with one another. Both types of establishments, according to Talbot, offered

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“profits [ . . . ] so large upon the sale of this liquor that they can afford to pay the £2 every week.” Lower-class vendors of spirits looked upon the fines they incurred, the police argued, as a kind of weekly tax on their underground businesses; therefore, incurring the occasional fine was simply the price one paid for selling intoxicants in Dublin’s slums. Beerhouses offered convenient locales for after-hours imbibing, and they undercut, so publicans alleged, the prices of the legitimate trade. The LGVPA identified the higher duties on whiskey imposed by the Wine Act of 1860 as at least partly responsible for the excessive growth of the clandestine beerhouse trade in spirits. The president of the LGVPA, Michael Carey, condemned the government attempt to discourage the laboring classes from purchasing whiskey by raising taxes on the product, which had effectively “deprived the poor man of the opportunity of taking the nourishment which a limited use of whiskey afforded.”46 Similarly, a petition signed by a group of concerned Dublin citizens assembled at the Mansion House charged that “the enormous duty on home-made spirits” had merely bolstered the beerhouse trade; this trade, “by its irregular and discreditable conduct, [had] rendered the issuing of the [beerhouse] license a disgrace and scandal to the entire body of the citizens of Dublin.”47 By placing such a heavy tax on whiskey, lawmakers had also unwittingly given a boost to illegal distillation, a trade that the Department of Excise had proven so poorly equipped to stem. Just as publicans called on the police to assist the excise in pursuing the illegal distillation of poteen, they also held that the excise alone was incapable of detecting whether substances of a poisonous and illegal character were sold in such beerhouses. In the unregulated beerhouse, the LGPVA alleged, “gin, salt, sugar, copperas, tobacco, nux vomica, and vitriol” were also added to “the composition of the cheap beer” sold by the trade.48 Even more threatening to law and order, the beerhouse supplied a ready black market for contraband whiskey, for, according to publicans, “illicit spirits of the worst kind” were “disposed” of in beerhouses across Dublin.49 Largely unaffected by police supervision, beerhouses, as vintners put it, “offered a premium to illegal distillation, for it was only in such places [that] the wretched compound made in underground stills could be sold.”50 By supplying “the vilest whiskey surreptitiously,” beerhouse licensees fostered more than a safe marketplace for poteen; they additionally nurtured “crime, destitution, and madness.”51

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In fact, by 1871, when a second wave of vintner outrage against “excise licenses” had surfaced, publicans pushed their accusations so far as to assert that the presence of beerhouses tended to attract other socially and morally destructive businesses. Shebeens, “low” spirit grocers, and houses of prostitution, publicans alleged, often sprang up in neighborhoods where public houses had been replaced by licensees overseen by the Department of Excise. To prove this point Joseph Dennehy, a vocal Dublin publican, cited before an LGVPA meeting a report sent by the Belfast constabulary to J.C. O’Donnell, also of Belfast, which claimed that, in Union Street a short time since there were six public houses, no spirit grocers, and only one or two houses of ill fame. Now, however, there were only three public houses in Union Street, but there were also seven or eight spirit grocers and seventeen houses of ill-fame.52

Armed with such police reports, the LGVPA grounded its case on a spiraling crime rate.

III In the mid-1860s public opinion decisively swung against the beerhouse. Even moderate voices with no direct ties either to temperance or to the licensed trade rejected the rationale behind the legislation responsible for the notorious license. It had been the Beerhouse Act of 1830 that had taken a laissez-faire stance toward the issuing of this type of license in England, reflecting in part the growing mid-Victorian movement in government of a classically liberal licensing policy, along with a desire for new sources of revenue.53 In fact, the beerhouse had originally drawn few criticisms from the early temperance movement, for it was thought at the time that the ready availability of beer would encourage the working class to abandon such stupefying intoxicants as whiskey and gin. The extension of the free-market beerhouse system to Ireland in 1833 reflected this attempt to engineer a reduction in whiskey consumption, especially in a country where per capita consumption of spirits remained markedly higher than in England.54 Yet by the early 1860s the measure, which had initially enjoyed popular support among both the working and middle

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classes, had brought neither the promised working-class prosperity nor a reduction in drunkenness. In 1862, in a final attempt to recapture political momentum, the remnants of the coalition which had created the beerhouse initiated an ambitious plan to streamline the liquor trade in a way not unlike that of the beerhouse model. This sweeping proposal, supported by a group of Liverpool magistrates, enraged the LGVPA, since it called for an expansion of the laissez-faire approach to granting licenses to vendors of intoxicants.55 This legislative proposal, referred to by politicians as the Liverpool bill, was vehemently opposed by Irish and English vintners, who cautioned as to the dangers of expanding this already troubled form of licensing though they also recognized that their opposition would put them in a political alliance with their temperance foes. An article espousing the vintner position in the Freeman’s Journal warned of the impending social danger of placing the whole spirits trade on an equal level and cautioned that the free traders’ presence complicated the reflexively oppositional relationship between the retail liquor trade and temperance reformers. “A third party [has] entered the arena in the shape of free traders,” the article claimed, with the intention of “throwing open the spirit trade and setting it on the same footing as [ . . . ] beer-shops and wine-shops.” Foreseeing that the alliance between vintners and temperance reformers was a short-term matter of political expediency, the unnamed writer spied duplicity in the adoption by temperance reformers of “the cause of the vintners.” The temperance campaign, according to this line of argument, would “wage war a` l’outrance with the free traders,”56 though the temperance reformers, buoyed up by the passage of prohibition in Maine in the United States, would remain political bedfellows with the drink trade only as long as the free traders represented an immediate legislative threat. For the LGVPA the threat of the Liverpool bill lay in its promotion of competitive market principles and an open licensing system. Although the flourishing of a clandestine beerhouse trade and the rapid increase of these facilities in working-class districts certainly limited the support for any expansion of such a licensing system – and spelled the inexorable defeat of the bill – the LGVPA brandished its backing for temperance principles in order to soundly quash the movement. “Free trade in the ordinary occupation of life works well,” the trade proclaimed, “but

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free trade in the sale of intoxicating liquors, unaccompanied [ . . . ] by the most stringent surveillance for the preservation of order and regularity, must and will work prejudicially to the best interests of society.”57 Striking a utilitarian stance in the face of the Liverpool magistrates, the association reasoned that, since “the object of all legislation should be to secure the greatest amount of good for the greatest possible number,” a free-trade model of licensing public houses would only increase “the facilities for drunkenness, dissipation, and consequent crime among a whole people.”58 Like temperance reformers, publicans contended that the licensing system should reflect a moral edifice worthy of respect by publicans, their customers, and the public generally. If the system were formulated wisely, the LGVPA argued, publicans would be well placed to guarantee a respectable and morally responsible trade, which would provide a bulwark against wanton intoxication. Increasingly, Irish vintners agreed that the standard issues in license approval should be the number of licenses in the locality, the character of the applicant, and the suitability of the premises. In the words of the LGVPA Secretary, the Recorder of Dublin should establish three basic principles: the first condition was that a necessity must be proven to exist for additional retail accommodation in the locality for which the license is sought to be obtained; the second condition is that the applicant must possess such a character as will be a sufficient guarantee for conducting his establishment orderly, regularly, and peaceably; the last condition is that the house for which the license is sought is fitted up suitably for carrying on the business of a retail victualler.59

These three principles would remain the basic guidelines for publicans and for the authorization of new public-house licenses until new beerhouse licenses were again severely restricted by law in 1901. The last two principles, however, represented a new focus for the LGVPA and constituted key components of its claims to middle-class respectability and of its contention that vintners’ licenses were a species of real property. Of these guidelines, publicans pointed to the character of the individual as the most important component in the application process for obtaining any sort of retail liquor license. It was thus crucial that vintners maintain their social status by emphasizing publicly the good character

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of traders in their organizations. At a meeting in 1863, as the LGVPA Secretary reported to the Freeman’s Journal, a unanimous feeling pervaded the entire assembly of delegates that, as the licensed victuallers possess greater facilities for good or evil than any other class in the community, therefore licenses to sell intoxicating drinks should not be entrusted to any person who had not established before a competent tribunal an unblemished character.60

This issue became the touchstone of political action during and after the anti-beerhouse campaign to separate the trade from accusations of immorality and poor management. For temperance reformers, however, the character of the vendor of beer and spirits was of only secondary importance. Instead, these reformers pointed to the nature of the alcoholic product itself as the defining characteristic that marked the trade for government intervention and reform. All of the liquor trade, including breweries and distilleries – most reformers thought – should be exempt from the ideology of free trade. As John Paten explained in the Irish Temperance League Journal, alcohol was a “narcotic,” the demand for it was unnatural, and those involved in supplying it were not participating in the usual type of marketplace exchange. “A persistent use of alcohol,” according to Paten, “must take place to beget the appetite that demands it.” Once established, Paten continued, the “relationship” between “alcohol” and “appetite” bred an inexorable demand by which the “supply” of intoxicants then “disturbed the moral order of society.” The goal of restrictive legislation should be “to limit the supply to a point” which would be “compatible with social order,” Paten held. Like most temperance reformers, Paten subscribed to the idea that “the drink trade [was] so exceptional that it [needed] to be treated exceptionally.”61 Echoing this sentiment in 1881, J. James maintained that free trade and retail competition ran contrary to the standard rule of the business because of the physically addictive and socially destructive quality of the substance available for sale.62 Even though the beerhouse had initially been envisaged by moderate temperance reformers as a positive development, the strident temperance ideology of complete teetotalism, which was in the ascendancy in the latter half of the nineteenth century, construed all

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intoxicants – no matter what their potency – as inherently destructive to the health of the nation. Certainly, the advancing medical knowledge of alcoholism strengthened the case against free trade made by temperance reformers. Thus, though vintners and the temperance movement could agree – at least in a broad theoretical sense – on the need for regulation of the beerhouse trade, their conceptions of the regulations needed were fundamentally at odds. Yet temperance literature tended to blur the lines separating science, social reform, and religion. Writing in the Temperance Star, a temperance advocate described the lowly place of alcohol in the Christian conception of the universe: This mighty agent of the evil one had no existence when “very good” was pronounced as the verdict of highest wisdom, nor does it now exist throughout the widespread kingdoms of animal and vegetable nature, except as the result of decomposition and decay. Search where you will, and nowhere will you find a particle of alcohol in any form or combination whatever as the effect of any single living process. It is from the disorganization of matter, from the disillusion and corruption of its component parts, that the foul thing is evolved. It is no more the creature of God and, as such, “good,” than is the poisonous malaria which hangs over the stagnant marshy receptacles of decaying vegetable life. Alcohol the creature of God! Alcohol the legitimate fruit of the vine! Say, rather, it is the creature of the devil, the development of sin, the offspring of man’s perverted ingenuity and his depraved appetite.63

As science increasingly linked disease with environmental causes, temperance reformers used this connection to call for increased regulation of the trade. Although alcohol had often been thought of as a cure for many ailments, by the 1860s temperance campaigners and the medical profession were in the vanguard of a fundamental rethinking of the effect of alcohol on the human body.64 Legislation aimed at improving urban conditions should curtail the licensing system. “If the filtered water be bad, surely the unfiltered water of which porter and ale are chiefly made must be much worse. But drinkers never think of this,” a temperance advocate claimed.65 According to this argument, publicans carrying on their businesses – even the most respectable and conscientious traders – threatened all society with physical ruin. The temperance movement by

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the 1860s did not consider free trade a viable alternative to the licensing system. Temperance activists framed their rhetoric in a language of social improvement. Increasingly, temperance groups claimed that the new era of social progress dictated “private rights must ever yield to social rights.”66 It thus followed that “we are then prepared to show that if society so will it, there is nothing but what is perfectly fair and just in the total prohibition of the sale of all alcoholic liquors.”67 Until prohibition or permissive legislation passed parliament, temperance reformers would espouse arguments of this type – particularly in the 1870s, when temperance lobbyists spoke of the social benefits to be garnered by closing public houses on Sundays. As the organization of both the temperance movement and the retail drink trade modernized and became more politically engaged during the 1860s, their arguments would make free trade irrelevant to the question of regulating alcohol sales. Both temperance reformers and publicans realized that passage of the Beerhouse Act in 1864 marked a rare moment of agreement between their legislative movements. As Elizabeth Malcolm has noted, by the mid-1860s few supporters of a freetrade approach to the sale of alcohol were left in parliament or on the benches of the magistracy.68 The passage of the Act in 1864 reflected this political irrelevancy. At the same time, the overshadowing of the free traders inaugurated in Ireland the development of a sharp political dialogue between vintners and the temperance lobby. It is significant that this development occurred later in Ireland than in the rest of the United Kingdom, where the laissez-faire beerhouse system had already been largely reformed. Beyond the moral arguments against the beerhouse, it was in part the sharp rise in the number of arrests for drunkenness in the years just before the 1864 Beerhouse Act that prompted lawmakers to take legislative action. In 1861 there were 8,651 arrests, while in 1862 and 1863 the numbers rose to 11,269 and 13,227 respectively.69 Sounding the alarm over the deepening crisis of drunkenness, an opponent of the beerhouse system calculated in May 1864 that “this year matters are still worse: from the first of January to the 16th of May the convictions for intoxication were 6,431; and at this rate the total for 1864 would be 16,912.”70 Whether these statistics indicate increased breaches of

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the licensing laws or greater police vigilance against drunkenness is impossible to determine. But the figures did raise concern about the dangers of a laissez-faire licensing system. Furthermore, the escalating problem of drunkenness dictated that immediate measures be taken at Westminster. Of course, the frequency of illegal activity in beerhouses, as evidenced by police and parliamentary reports, greatly assisted vintners in the task of isolating beerhouse keepers and, through the juxtaposition of the two trades, helped to promote the legitimacy of their own businesses. On 1 July 1864 parliament acceded to the demands of the broad coalition arrayed against beerhouses. The Beerhouse Act (27 and 28 Vict, c.35) stood as the first of a series of legislative measures designed to place checks on the various licenses overseen by the Department of Excise. By requiring beerhouse applicants to furnish excise officers with a certificate of good character from two local county justices of the peace or, in the case of the Dublin Metropolitan Police district, two certificates from district justices of the city, the act sought to screen potential licensees. As vintners had demanded, the law stipulated that signers of these certificates should vouch for “the good character of such person” applying for a beerhouse license and “the suitability of the premises” for conducting such a business. Adding to the legal oversight of the application process, the act further specified that the police could reject any application for renewal by objecting to the certificate of good character issued by the justices. Additionally, the law detailed specific punishments for misconduct, setting penalties for drinking inside a beerhouse at 5 shillings or a prison term of from one week to a month. Subsequent offenses would be punishable, according to the act, by a fine of between 20 shillings and £5, and a prison term of between one and three months. The LGVPA naturally applauded the passage of the reform, anticipating that its trade would benefit from the increased protection from unfair competition and a decrease in the spectacle of public drunkenness.71 Reporting the proceedings of the monthly meeting of the LGVPA to the Freeman’s Journal a day before the law came into effect, the Secretary of the LGVPA expressed the hope that a new state of things might commence with the introduction of the bill – that temperance, good order, and quiet would take the place of drunkenness, disorder, and brawl, and that the regularly licensed parties – but more

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particularly the members of the society – would redouble their vigilance in the discountenancing and suppression of intemperance.72

In this way the LGVPA put itself forward in public forums as the legitimate guardian against drunkenness and immorality, and touted its role in curbing the beerhouse system. Yet the association quickly learned that the act contained a major loophole that singularly compromised the intended effect of the reform. Although the new legislation required of the beerhouse applicant a certificate of good character from the magistracy and allowed the police to object in individual cases, the act did not specifically overturn the right of an individual to obtain a beerhouse permit by first applying to the Excise Department for a wholesale license.73 Ever since the 1833 Irish Licensing Act, individuals could receive a wholesale beer-dealer’s license directly from the excise. After 1864 those seeking a beerhouse license (or retail beer-dealer’s license) could circumvent the requirement of a certificate of good character simply by paying the fee to the excise in order to receive the additional beer retail license. The 1864 measure thus failed to end the open licensing system and brought little closure to the controversies surrounding the beerhouse. The act thus satisfied few stakeholders within the licensed trade, nor did it quell the concerns of the constabulary. Although it sought to increase police supervision, the police continued to complain of legal difficulties in enforcement. Similarly, though the act increased the fines for consumption on the premises, the constabulary nonetheless contended that the penalties were not nearly large enough to offset the lures of opening a beerhouse. For the LGVPA the most significant shortcoming of the act was the lack of any legal guarantees to insure that the number of beerhouses in certain regions of the city would be held in check.74 “Instead of doing something toward limiting the number of public houses to the necessities of the neighborhood,” lamented the LGVPA Secretary, “the chancellor of the exchequer [ . . . ] had introduced into the present bill a saving clause which enabled the beer dealer to take out a beer license wherever he pleased.”75 Following the passage of the Beerhouse Act in 1864, the number of beerhouses in Ireland continued to increase. At the end of that year there were more than 300 retail beerhouses in the country, but within five years

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that number had increased to nearly 900.76 In fact, in 1868 alone the Inland Revenue Department reported that 1,017 beerhouse licenses had been issued, netting some £3,800 in license fees for the government. Most of these licenses, however, appear to have been issued in regions outside the Dublin area, for within County Dublin the number of beerhouses declined.77 In 1871 only 73 were reported to be legally trading in the county.78 Given the heavy pressure from the LGVPA, temperance groups, and concerned citizens, the diminution in Dublin probably reflected greater magisterial and police attention to the problem in the city. On 31 January 1871, responding to a parliamentary inquiry into the issue, magistrates at petty sessions in Rathmines, a district then on the outskirts of the city, declared that there was a “unanimous opinion” in their ranks that “beerhouses are a decided evil, and we should be glad to see them abolished.”79 The magistrates added, “We understand that the large number of 36 now exist in this constabulary district.”80 Although arrests for drunkenness did fall after 1864, the police statistics were probably affected by the crackdown on Fenianism in and around Dublin and by the subsequent changes to the policing of the city. Reacting to fears of Fenian rebellion in Ireland, the constabulary in 1864 changed its method of policing the metropolitan district. Instead of walking their beats individually, the police began patrolling the city in pairs. Thus, because the police force was not enlarged, the parts of the city under close surveillance must have been substantially reduced or even cut in half, which may account for part of the decrease in arrests. Furthermore, this intensified means of policing the city, which relied on intimidation and a show of physical strength, may have helped to curb the number of confrontations in the metropolis. Nonetheless, disturbances in beerhouses continued after the 1864 Beerhouse Act, and police records appear to support the claims of beerhouse critics. According to police statistics supplied to parliament, the number of complaints lodged against beerhouses was considerably higher than those against public houses. In 1867 there were 266 beerhouses in the Dublin police district – 177 in the municipal borough and 89 outside it. The number of complaints for illegal trading on Sundays from May 1867 to May 1868 in these establishments was 271; the total number of complaints in that year reached 468.81 In contrast, there were nearly four times as many public houses in the Dublin police district; in 1867 the

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number of public houses and licensed grocers stood at 1,001 – 784 within the city and 217 outside it. The number of complaints reported against these traders for illegal trading on Sunday was 191, and total complaints for the year amounted to 324. At the same time it should be noted that, largely as a result of complaints, 191 beerhouse licenses were canceled in Dublin from 1867 to 1868, whereas only one public-house license was revoked.82 Thus, by the late 1860s, at least in the vicinity of Dublin, the beerhouse system was in retreat – or at least under siege – though its decline was spasmodic and at times difficult to detect. The passage of Meldon’s Act in 1877, however, brought a quick end to the “low” beerhouse in Dublin. By placing a minimum requirement of £15 in valuation on beerhouse premises, the legislation targeted those houses that had become a fixture of the Dublin slums over the previous two decades. In fact, the majority of beerhouses failed to meet the test of £15 in valuation; 177 beerhouses in Dublin were abolished by city magistrates during one single licensing session soon after the legislation was enacted. Naturally, the LGVPA welcomed the enforcement of the new law, as it did away with much of the competition stemming from poorly outfitted beerhouse premises across the city.

IV The public scandals over the beerhouse in Dublin in the early 1860s did not immediately provoke the LGVPA to take up a similarly strident campaign against spirit grocers. Even though the spirit-grocer license, like that of the beerhouse, was overseen by the Excise Department, the executive committee of the LGVPA, along with the Dublin constabulary, tended to place spirit grocers in a different category to the much-maligned beerhouse.83 The substantial number of spirit grocers in Dublin, amounting to between 200 and 300 businesses, constituted a splintered class, though the trade was associated with a respectable middle-class ownership that helped to insulate it from the reforms to other liquor licensees.84 Although police records and complaints from the public alleged gross violation of the law in spirit groceries across the city, the LGVPA would join the chorus of complaints against spirit grocers only in the early 1870s, when feverish parliamentary lobbying over the licensing system finally led the association to turn against this

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unique rival to the pub. As the entire licensing system came under close parliamentary scrutiny during the debates over changes to the licensing laws in 1872 and 1874, when concerns over habitual female drunkenness and prostitution in the city moved to the foreground of liquor-licensing reform, the success of the LGVPA campaign in raising public hostility against the beerhouse trade in Dublin served as its model for a new attempt to focus adverse public attention on the spirit grocer. In many respects the legal underpinnings of the spirit-grocer license were analogous to those of the beerhouse, though the history, clientele, and ownership of the spirit-grocer trade made its license singularly unique. The license itself had been created by the Irish Parliament in 1789, and following the Act of Union would still apply only to Ireland. Its original purpose, according to Andrew Reed, a sub-inspector of the Irish constabulary and an expert in liquor licensing, had been to provide an alternative setting for middle- and upper-class individuals to purchase drink “so they would not have to resort to a public house.”85 Similarly, Cian Molloy has asserted that the spirit-grocer license had been intended by its creators as a means of protecting women against “risking the moral dangers and temptations” of the pub.86 In stark contrast to the beerhouse, which had been conceived as a working-class remedy for the heavy use of spirits among the poor, the original purpose of the spiritgrocer license was to encourage the evolution of a genteel environment for procuring both groceries and spirits for home consumption. Further separating it from the beerhouse, the cost of a spirit-grocer license was far higher than its beerhouse counterpart, placing it far out of reach of the working class.87 The acceptance by the LGVPA in the early and mid-1860s of the spirit grocer hinged largely on the “respectability” of the trade and its historic place within the licensing system. In the rare instance of an active LGVPA member suggesting that spirit grocers be included with beerhouses in the association’s complaints to the Lord Mayor of Dublin because spirit grocers were “equally intolerable [as beerhouses] and ought to be dealt with at the same time,” the comment was quickly scotched. Since excise officials also oversaw spirit-grocer licenses, the issue of supervision appeared reasonable to some publicans at the meeting, who responded to the suggestion with “Hear, Hear!” In the absence of a clear consensus, however, the secretary and the president quickly

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intervened.88 Gilligan, the secretary, reminded the meeting that the creators of the license had “never contemplated to include the respectable class of spirit grocers with those beer sellers who were bringing disgrace upon the trade.”89 Following the remarks of the secretary, Carey then completely quashed the debate, declaring that “there never could have been any intention of including with the low beer sellers the respectable spirit grocers of this city.”90 For the leadership of the LGVPA it was the contrasting reputations of the two trades and their markedly different histories that set them apart. In addition to the reluctance of the LGVPA to call for the reform of this unusual branch of the trade, spirit grocers in Dublin also benefited from a hesitancy on the part of the police to advocate reforms that would ease the problems associated with supervision. The spirit-grocer trade was held in high esteem by the police, despite its growing record of flagrant disregard for the law. John Lewis O’Farrell, the chief of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, acknowledged in 1868 that on Sundays most arrests for drunkenness were a result of all-night drinking at spirit grocers, not at beerhouses. Yet when asked whether he would support regular police incursions into spirit grocers’ establishments, he demurred, maintaining that the trade would never accept such intrusions into the running of their businesses. According to O’Farrell, “the wealthiest” grocers in Dublin were spirit grocers, and they were a class of business “worth many thousands a year.”91 In a similar vein Joseph Briscoe, a delegate from a working men’s club and a butcher by trade, while acknowledging that the most notorious “illicit houses” in the city were the spirit grocers, further reminded his listeners that “those are a very respectable lot of men,” and added that “some of them, in fact, are far more respectable than publicans.”92 Yet not all spirit grocers appeared to cater to respectable middle-class tastes. Some of the more notorious ones in Dublin displayed an unmistakable resemblance to the reviled eighteenth-century gin palaces of London – at least in the outward fac¸ades and interior decor of the shops. Lit by gaslights and sporting engraved glass and mirrors in rooms fronting onto the streets of major city thoroughfares, many spirit-grocer shops of the 1860s obtained a reputation that belied their founders’ original vision. In fact, critics of the system charged that the spirit grocer posed

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a unique threat to both female servants and middle-class housewives, who, they charged, were often furnished with special accommodation for drinking in such businesses. Since women were more likely to enter a spirit grocery, critics held that such shops posed a special threat to female propriety. Females commonly lingered at the counter, where they fostered a dangerous taste for intoxicants.93 The most ardent criticisms of the spirit grocer emanated from those in the temperance movement. Collecting information for the parliamentary investigation into Sunday closing, T.W. Russell, one of the most active temperance leaders and avid advocates of Sunday closing, visited a series of renowned spirit-grocer shops in Dublin in order to chronicle the misconduct of the trade. Although his anti-drink agenda probably colored his account, Russell’s testimony mirrors other descriptions of spirit-grocer practices emanating from temperance groups and the LGVPA. On his tour Russell visited five spirit-grocers before 11 p.m., when the public houses were still open to patrons, and claimed to have been served in every one for consumption on the premises. In his testimony Russell described the underground trade as commonplace throughout the city. “In most cases men were drinking at the counter,” Russell reported to the committee.94 Even more disturbing to the MPs, however, were the arrangements made for secretive drinking for spirit-grocer patrons, whom Russell saw “drinking in a room behind, separated from the shop by a partition, a check-string from behind the counter opening the door.”95 Partitions, which provided compartmentalized drinking spaces for customers, were characteristic of spirit grocers. Given the more middle-class nature of this trade and the allure of tippling in relative privacy, partitions offered an air of secrecy to drinkers concerned with outward appearances.96 Compartmentalized drinking, based largely on one’s social rank and gender, became, as scholars have pointed out, increasingly common within public houses as well during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Of particular concern were those shops that appeared to cater specifically to a female clientele. In extreme cases complaints involved separate rooms established for the accommodation of women drinkers. A self-proclaimed friend of temperance and a “working man” wrote to the Freeman’s Journal in 1877, denouncing the new spirit grocer who had recently opened up shop in his neighborhood:

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I wish to call your attention to the bare-face trading going on at no. – Street, a spirit grocer kept by two young ladies [ . . . ] They have a partition up, and a mere child watches for them. They have a drawing room upstairs where they send their good customers to drink and smoke at their ease. But that would not annoy me, only that I find my wife has got into a bad habit when she goes for a bit of tea and sugar. I found out that she comes back half drunk; other times I have to go to my work without my dinner or breakfast, she stops so long in the spirit grocer’s.97

Beyond the disruption to his household, the anonymous “working man” also added that it was not simply his home that had been adversely affected by the spirit-grocer shop, but also those of other working men’s wives, who had learned “very bad habits since the house opened in the neighbourhood.”98 As the beerhouse threat started to recede in the city of Dublin, and as parliamentary debates opened over reform of the licensing laws, the generally genial relations between spirit grocers and the LGVPA began to show signs of strain. With growing support for permissive and Sunday-closing legislation in Ireland, a rift appeared in 1870 between the respective trade associations of licensed grocers and vintners and of the spirit grocers of the city. Details of the disagreement are difficult to piece together from the fragmentary evidence.99 But after the partial suppression of beerhouses in 1864 the next logical step, at least for many in the LGVPA, was an attack on the middle-class spirit grocers, whose licenses were governed by most of the same protocols as those regulating the beleaguered beerhouses. In his annual report to the LGVPA in 1871, Carey gave the by-then familiar complaint against license holders governed by the Excise Department. “They were the cause of blatant drunkenness on Sunday mornings before the publicans and licensed grocers even opened their doors for legitimate trading,” the LGVPA claimed in its public pronouncements.100 As a new liquorlicensing bill was under debate in parliament, Carey urged the legislature to intervene and abolish altogether the spirit-grocer license, since, according to his address, “there was no necessity for any kind of license but one.”101 The LGVPA acted by canvassing its members for incriminating information about spirit grocers’ abuses of the law. In a series of exchanges

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in the Dublin daily press during 1871 and 1872, spirit grocers and publicans traded accusations. Just as the most notorious beerhouses in the city were being denied licenses, so too the LGVPA wanted spirit grocers’ licenses to be limited to the most respectable establishments. To achieve this, the association called for the requirement of a certificate of good character from the police. Michael Dwyer told the editor of the Freeman’s Journal that “the police, not we, have a controversy with such of them who are habitual violators of their licenses, and the police commissioners have urged the legislature to decide this dispute.”102 Since spirit-grocer licenses, like those of beerhouses, were issued by the Inland Revenue Department, the LGVPA advocated bringing spirit grocers under the same magisterial oversight as the rest of the licensed trade. The LGVPA drew attention to the backing of the Irish chief secretary, Chichester Fortescue, in its resolve to “recognize [ . . . ] no licensing authority in Dublin save that of the recorder.” In criticizing the intransigence of spirit grocers for resisting the reform, Dwyer rhetorically asked readers of the Freeman’s Journal to consider “why [ . . . ] a respectable trader [ . . . ] living in such a neighbourhood as Mount-Street [would] fear that his just rights would not be scrupulously respected by [the magistrates] whom, amid the worst bitterness of political antagonism, the great O’Connell complimented as ‘the just judge’?”103 The public sparring between publicans and spirit grocers revolved around the protocols for license approval, though spirit grocers resented equally the growing political tactics and clout of the LGVPA. Just as the spirit grocers feared the loss of certain privileges of their trade, they also lamented their relative loss of political power within the liquor trade generally and chafed under what they perceived as the heavy-handed tactics of the LGVPA. According to William Stapleton, a spirit grocer for 40 years, If the publicans have contributed to prevent a greater spread of the beerhouse license, morality is largely indebted to them for their efforts; but, unfortunately, the manner in which they treat every class of licensed trader but themselves throws such an air of selfishness over their proceedings as is sufficient to lessen the credit otherwise due to them.104

In fact, both groups tended to support a simplifying of the trade, along with placing both branches of the retail business on the same legal footing. M. McManus, the president of the Spirit Grocer Association,

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laid out his group’s platform in clear terms: Shorter hours on weekdays, partial or total closing on Sundays, a uniform system of licensing, and uniform privileges and restrictions for every licensed trader.105 Of course, the LGVPA objected most to the spirit grocers’ tendency to support limited Sunday closing and shorter hours of sale – positions that most Dublin publicans considered anathema to their interests. The LGVPA must also have disliked the tendency shown by magistrates to grant spirit-grocer licenses more freely in new neighborhoods of the city where applicants for public-house licenses were often denied. In 1872 and 1874 parliament complied with temperance and LGVPA demands to strengthen control over spirit grocers and beerhouse owners. The 1874 Licensing Act (Ireland) stipulated that beerhouse licenses would not be granted without a certificate of good character from the police. In addition, the law mandated that proprietors of beerhouses and spirit grocers’ establishments grant free entry to constables for inspection of their premises; failure or delay would result in a fine of £5 for the first offense and £10 for subsequent violations. These penalties marked a considerable increase; earlier fines under the 1864 Beerhouse Act, for example, were 5s. for the first violation and 10s. for subsequent transgressions.106 The success of the LGVPA in bringing beerhouses and (admittedly to a lesser extent) spirit grocers under the umbrella of magisterial control exemplifies the degree to which licensed grocers and vintners were consolidating their authority over the trade. As the threat posed by beerhouses receded after 1877, the LGVPA turned its attention briefly to a number of pubs slated for demolition under the Dublin Corporation’s plans for urban renewal. In 1883 the LGVPA received calls for legal assistance from publicans threatened with the loss of their premises. These publicans, in letters sent to the association, contended that “special opposition should be given by the society to schemes for removing licenses from courts and lanes into leading thoroughfares.” At a meeting where the matter was considered, “after a period of discussion” the assembled members “resolved that counsel should be retained [ . . . ] and strenuous opposition given to every new license, whether sought for by way of removal or otherwise, which might injure the vested interest of the licensed traders.” Michael Dwyer, the association’s full-time secretary, agreed “to inspect the various licensed houses which were proposed to be removed so as to enable

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counsel to place the facts fully before the court.”107 Although it is difficult to ascertain from LGVPA records alone the exact degree of effort that the association invested in this campaign, the evidence suggests that no major mobilization of resources ever took place. Traders located in the backstreets and cul-de-sacs of the city, representative generally of the lower strata of Dublin’s vintners, probably represented those traders who possessed less than respectable social credentials – those Michael Dwyer had labeled “the black sheep” of the trade some years earlier. In its legal efforts the LGVPA instead focused on defending nationalist publicans facing withdrawals of their retail licenses by magistrates and police for political reasons.108 At a time when the well-situated publicans in Dublin were taking advantage of the economic and social changes affecting the city, defending the “vested interests” of those traders barring the way to social progress and hurting the respectability of the liquor trade held few attractions for LGVPA officers. By the early 1880s the LGVPA had scored significant social, legal, and political victories that helped to usher in a prolonged period of prosperity for many Dublin traders. Though the trade remained a splintered one in many respects, the growth of an increasingly affluent LGVPA helped to eclipse the beerhouses, and, to a lesser degree, the poorer public houses and spirit grocers that had outraged public opinion. LGVPA efforts on this front culminated in the passage of legislation in 1864, 1872, 1874, and 1877 that established new licensing protocols for regulating spirit grocers and beerhouse proprietors. With the struggles inside the retail liquor trade in Dublin all but settled, efforts from the 1870s through the outbreak of World War I focused on combating temperance legislation, primarily in the form of the permissive bill and Sunday closing. The modernization of public houses – making them more attractive to the rising Irish Catholic middle class – also continued until World War I. At the same time pubs remained central to the debates over national morality and the respectability of Ireland and its traditions.

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3 Sunday Closing and the Trade

I The passage by the British Parliament of the Irish Sunday Closing Act in 1878 represented the most significant temperance measure passed into law between 1860 and 1918. Arguably, its enactment marked the zenith of the political influence of Irish temperance reform at Westminster. This legislative achievement was, however, only a partial victory for temperance, since the measure excluded the five largest cities in the country (Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Waterford, and Limerick). That the retail drink trade was able to organize enough opposition to the bill to secure a compromise political outcome suggests both strategic advantages held by the trade and weakness within the temperance lobby. While, before the political ascendancy of the Liberal Party in the first decade of the twentieth century, the drink trade on the British mainland may, as R. B. Weir has contended, have viewed temperance legislation as a mostly irrelevant threat, in Ireland the case was quite different. The majority of Irish MPs favored Sunday closing before the partial bill was passed in 1878. What is more, Ireland possessed a robust popular culture with abundant memories of the “great apostle of temperance,” Father Mathew. Cultural symbolism and political leadership thus underpinned the Sunday-closing movement in Ireland, distinguishing it from its English counterpart. Reinvigorated temperance groups across Ireland in the 1860s and 1870s, consisting of reactivated and reorganized temperance societies, formed a distinctively resourceful movement with the moral and social mission of ending the public-house traffic on the Christian sabbath. 68

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The public debate that centered around the closing of public houses on Sundays helped to define the sinewy contours of the politics of drink in Ireland. Given that weekends and public holidays represented times of increased patronage for most licensed businesses, fighting the Sunday-closing movement represented a top priority for the organized licensed trade in the country. Even more than permissive legislation, which aimed to throw open the question of prohibition to local constituents, passage of a Sunday-closing bill remained a palpable threat for Irish vintners from the time of its first introduction in 1863 until the 1880s, when the issue of Home Rule effectively pushed Sunday closing to secondary legislative status. Despite the failure of temperance coalitions to pass a thoroughgoing Sunday-closing measure for Ireland, the Sunday-closing movement – spearheaded directly by the Irish Sunday Closing Association – marked the emergence of legislative temperance on a new, more highly organized political level. The popular debate over Sunday closing emerged in the 1860s as an arena for competing definitions of the Irish labor system, leisure time, and the function of the public house. In order to overcome the criticism of Sunday closing as “class legislation” that would unfairly impact the lives of artisans and laborers, the Sunday-closing movement actively encouraged working-class participation. Sunday closing thus offered unique opportunities for laborers and trade unions to voice their concerns over the way in which their leisure time could best be spent. The public debate over Sunday closing presented workers with the opportunity to meet with members of the middle class over an issue of social reform. More specifically, public meetings organized by groups like the Sunday Closing Association offered a place and a time for workers to meet face to face with their social superiors. In the ensuing dialogue not only did laborers have the chance to advocate for the improvement of their lives, but middle-class activists present at these meetings were receptive to worker complaints. This rare opportunity for exchange was especially important in Ireland, where the organized trade-union movement was less developed than its counterpart in England. As the temperance movement improved its organizational strength in Ireland in the 1860s, the middle-class Sunday Closing Association increasingly recruited

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working-class members and trumpeted their participation as a boon to their cause.1 Gaining broad popular support was of further significance to the Sunday-closing campaign because of the subservient position of Ireland within the British Empire. Throughout the 1860s it became increasingly obvious to contemporaries that the opposition to Sunday closing originated more from English MPs and less from members representing Irish constituencies. As a coda to the executive summary of the work done in 1871 to forward its legislative campaign, the Association for the Closing of Public Houses on Sunday concluded in its report that the most important barrier to success was the intransigence of English legislators: “On a question such as Sunday closing [ . . . ] it is most unjust that the opinions of all classes of the people should be thus overruled.” To achieve their goals, according to the report, “this point would require to be pressed both in and out of parliament; and in the future greater efforts must be made to convince English members that Irishmen of all classes demand this measure of self-protection.”2 For Sir Dominic J. Corrigan, one of the association’s more prominent leaders, the issue “was not a political but a social problem.”3 As a strictly social issue pertaining uniquely to Ireland, Sunday closers believed, the measure deserved special consideration by the imperial parliament. The Daily Express, for example, rhetorically asked, “Of what use is it for Irishmen to cooperate for social reform if their collective wishes are disregarded and theories set against their experience?”4 Sunday closers spoke frequently in these terms, stressing the English veto barring social progress in Ireland. Weighing in on the issue, the Manchester Guardian proclaimed, “If it is to be true that, imperial interests being duly preserved, Ireland has a moral right to be governed by Irish ideas, we do not know that it would be easy to find a more suitable occasion for the application of the maxim.”5 Sunday closing was seen by advocates of the measure as an issue so closely tied to local and domestic concerns that its blockage flew in the face of imperial justice. As the pub was the primary social resort for the working classes, its defenders attempted to show, through petitions and large meetings, widespread popular opposition to the measure. For those opposed to Sunday closing – most notably the retail drink trade – working-class voices opposing the message held the potential of exposing middle-class

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duplicity within the temperance movement. Belying the claims of temperance reformers, vintners pointed out, was the ubiquitous and multifunctional use of the pub by the lower classes in the cities of Ireland. Recognizing the political expediency of invoking class, the drink trade fought Sunday-closing efforts by appealing to a sense of social justice predicated upon the authenticity of native working-class traditions and institutions. Publicans vouched for the respectability of the Sunday traffic and for the social need that the pub met. Placing the blame for working-class intemperance on the low class of spirit grocers and beerhouses, the LGVPA and its working-class allies forwarded a message that stressed the role of the public house as a legitimate social meeting point for the hard-working laborer. John Dooners, writing in the Irish Builder, rhetorically asked his readers to consider the comforts of the pub for a laborer forced to wait outside in the elements for his meager wages: “What is more tempting to a man [ . . . ] than the public house, where there is a bright fire to warm him externally and a drop at hand to do the same internally?”6 For the supporters of the public-house system there was no ready alternative to the everyday tavern. The patterning of social behavior around the local drinking place – be it a clandestine shebeen, a boisterous snug, or a roadside inn – loomed large in the lives of the lower classes, complicating any effort to limit their use.

II In 1863 the introduction of the English and Welsh Sunday Closing Bill in the British Parliament began the prolonged Sunday-closing debate for Irish vintners. Reacting to the introduction of the bill, the secretary of the LGVPA kicked off opposition to the movement by stating at the weekly meeting of the association that “everything would be done to oppose it strongly, because it was believed the effect of the measure [ . . . ] would be not only to inflict injury on the trade but also on society generally.”7 In the coming years publicans would hone this message of the negative social consequences that Sunday closing would inflict. Invoking a moral language, not dissimilar to that used by their temperance foes, the LGVPA resisted attacks by temperance reformers that identified publicans as a self-interested class enriching themselves

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at the expense of public health and morality. Voluminous parliamentary inquiries into Sunday closing, bolstered by numerous compilations of police statistics, recorded and mapped the working-class culture of drink in Ireland, and the LGVPA sought to shape the interpretation of these portraits to its own political advantage. Moreover, these studies of the usages of public houses on Sundays, together with the rich public debates surrounding the issue, indicate the changing definitions of leisure and the advantages and disadvantages that such changes represented for the pub trade. Though the Sunday Closing Bill introduced in 1863 applied only to England and Wales, there was concern among the LGVPA leadership that it might establish a threatening legislative trend and constitute a reversal in the political fortunes of the drink trade. It had been little more than a generation earlier that Irish publicans had won the right to trade on Sundays. The parliamentary success of the licensed grocers and vintners in passing the 1833 legislation, which established the right of publicans to carry on their trade on Sunday from 2 o’clock in the afternoon until 11 o’clock in the evening, represented an important concession which the LGVPA was not eager to abandon 30 years later.8 Irish publicans were also aware of the Forbes MacKenzie Act, passed in 1853, which mandated for Scotland the closing of public houses on Sundays. The initial reaction to the introduction of the Sunday-closing bill appeared in an account of the proceedings of the monthly meeting of the LGVPA released to the Freeman’s Journal. The LGVPA’s secretary proclaimed in the report that before the passing of that act [the Forbes MacKenzie Act] there were but two shebeen houses in all Glasgow, and upon the evidence of Captain Smart, Chief Superintendent of Police, there were, in 1861, not less than sixteen-hundred of these shebeens in that city, which open at eleven o’clock on Saturday night, kept open all day on Sunday, and till seven o’clock on Monday morning, filling the whole city with drunkenness and debauchery.9

With the flood of incriminating materials disseminated by the LGVPA condemning the threat of unlicensed houses, this type of parliamentary evidence against Sunday closing would have already been familiar to most publicans. The LGVPA worked assiduously to promote in the popular press evidence attesting to the respectability of the liquor trade and to

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the social ill-discipline that would attend the closing of public houses on the sabbath. In the year following the introduction of Sunday-closing legislation in the House of Commons, the Permissive Bill, introduced in 1864 by William Lawson, MP for Carlisle, prompted the LGVPA to develop more fully its political agenda in light of the forthcoming struggle over Sunday closing.10 Addressing the monthly meeting of the LGVPA, the association’s president, Michael Carey, characterized the bill and its supporters in overtly class-conscious terms: “These permissive men know that the root of the disease, if disease there be, is the distillery, the brewery, etc., yet they have not the manliness, the honesty, the straightforwardness to petition parliament for the abolition of these establishments.” Instead, Carey claimed, the permissive movement took as its target the more vulnerable publicans and licensed vintners: “They prefer carping at and abusing, vilifying, and maligning smaller traders, whom they imagine they can abuse with impunity.” In concluding his remarks to the association, Carey predicted, “The first petition presented to parliament on this head would not only not get a first reading through courtesy, as in Mr. Lawson’s case, but would be ignominiously kicked out on the first reading, not having a dozen supporters.”11 Within the context of the Sundayclosing discourse, the LGVPA fashioned a picture of its members as respectable, independent traders under siege from a well-funded group of social elites. Moreover, the LGVPA spoke of the social injury that such restrictions would create by forcing the working class out of the public house and into entirely unmonitored spaces on the fringes of society. Beyond increasing the illegal traffic taking place in shebeens and beerhouses, Irish publicans also argued that Sunday closing would unfairly exempt the middle and upper classes, who purchased their drink in places other than public houses. It was pubs, vintners claimed, that primarily served the needs of the working population in Dublin, and Sunday closing would disproportionately affect the lives of this class. “If the clubhouses and hotels were to be closed on Sundays,” Carey remarked, “the proposed measure would be fair enough, but if the public houses were only to be closed, it would be very like class-legislation.”12 Recognizing the potency of labeling Sunday closing a “social question,” the LGVPA emphasized the inherent social bias of any efforts that significantly infringed on the existing public-house system to which the laboring

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classes had become accustomed and, more importantly, on which they depended for the quotidian needs of their lives. Referring to the MP responsible for introducing Sunday closing in the House of Commons, Carey sounded a typical complaint of social favoritism, saying, as reported in the Freeman’s Journal, that if Mr. Somes had sought to curb the aristocratic portion of the community and had included them in his bill, he would not make any observations on the subject, but he could not conceive why Mr. Somes’s measure should be introduced to oppress the poor; but he knew that he dare not touch the rich or interfere with their luxuries and comforts.13

Given the social instability in Ireland, coupled with the riots that had accompanied discussions over Sunday closing in London’s Hyde Park in 1855, such arguments certainly resonated with members of parliament. As demonstrated by the pointed questions that committee members put to witnesses during the two major inquiries into the issue in 1867 and 1877–8, Sunday closing was above all a social question, though the social effects of the legislation would remain a contested issue even after partial closing came into effect in 1878. In both of the major parliamentary inquiries into Sunday closing, the opponents of the measure, led by the LGVPA, stressed the practical services, hard-to-find social space, and modest fuddle enjoyed by drinkers, which pubs provided to the working male. The LGVPA continued to warn of the inherent class bias of Sunday closing throughout the 1870s. As the trade resisted Sunday closing, they increasingly honed their objections and attempted to undermine the prejudiced nature of the social reform. Not only did the measure threaten to increase drunkenness, according to a publican identified only as MacCann, but it also would serve to encourage workers to “bring drink into their houses on Saturday, and thus perhaps to corrupt their innocent wives and children.”14 In pointing out the dishonesty of the middle-class temperance reformers who claimed to speak on behalf of Dublin’s working class, the association’s president directed the secretary on 26 March 1872 to send reports to the daily press exposing the way in which a proposed meeting in the Mansion House in support of the bill was “calculated to virtually exclude the working classes.” Because

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of “the time and place of the meeting,” Carey alleged, the public forum would fail to represent those “who were the most interested in the question at issue.”15 Dublin vintners repeatedly claimed that, as an unnamed publican put it during an association meeting in 1875, “the support of influential public men had been gained [ . . . ] under the pretext that the right people were in favour of Sunday closing.” With the momentum created by the political elite’s advocacy of the cause, the speaker recognized that “the workingmen’s petitions” were the only impediment to the legislation becoming law. Writing on behalf of Dublin’s laborers, John Dooner articulated a remedy for working-class insobriety that encapsulated basic worker grievances. Dooner asked temperance advocates to embrace labor reforms as part of their attack on insobriety. If the temperance movement were to call for “temperate labour first,” Dooner wrote, then education and sobriety were sure to follow. Dooner’s characterization of the overuse of the public house reflects the view put forth more recently by scholars that the harsh realities of urban life for rural migrants and their long hours of labor made the public house – and the prospect of intoxication therein – a primary lure. Further reflecting more contemporary Scholarly concerns, Dooner emphasized the dire conditions of working-class life in his explanation of intemperance among laborers.16 Dooner saw in the temperance movement nothing but cupidity and duplicity. In order to garner working-class support, Dooner held, temperance reformers would need to embrace worker demands for better labor conditions: How hard it is to make members of our class believe that what is said and written is sincere. We would like to see members of the temperance union prove their sincerity by other means than by merely exhorting him to keep sober. If we could prevail upon them, therefore, to discuss the question of a reduction in the hours of labour, together with a rise of wages for unskilled labourers, in conjunction with their temperance movement, we feel we could promise them a hearty response on behalf of thousands of the sons of toil.17

Better working conditions, Dooner alleged, constituted the only reform that would lessen workers’ reliance on the public house. While earlier

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temperance activities had evoked similar responses from labor leaders in England, the corresponding development occurred in Ireland only after the initiation of the Sunday-closing movement.

III In order to disarm opposition to Sunday closing, many of its supporters articulated the necessity for restricting Sunday liquor traffic by appealing to the new leisure movement. In terms of its political practicality the growing emphasis on leisure presented for temperance reformers the possibility of creating a groundswell of lower-class support among those workers whose jobs afforded them little time for other activities. Respectable forms of Sunday recreation were steadily becoming more available to individuals who had enough time away from work to cultivate an interest in pursuits outside the public house. Temperance reformers spoke of Sunday closing as a reforming measure that would allow workers to enjoy Dublin’s Botanical Gardens, Phoenix Park, and other outlying public spaces made accessible to workers by trams and railways. By taking away the temptation of the pub, Sunday closing could improve the quality of workers’ lives, its supporters contended. It was Archbishop Maning who voiced a typically bourgeois note of social concern, articulating a commonly held view of the need for recreation outside the pub. Testifying before the initial parliamentary investigation of Sunday closing, Manning claimed, “I have a very strong wish to see honest and innocent recreation given to our working people.” As a corollary to the “state of tension” that hard labor produced in both the “body and the mind for six days in the week,” Maning further asserted that it is absolutely, I will say physically necessary, for them to have more than the simple rest of their limbs. I think that they require something that will cheer life and give them new ideas; but they do not get it [ . . . ] I say it in the interest of religion, that I do not believe that the sharp transition from hard weekly work to the acts of religion on Sunday, unattended by other contributions to their happiness, which I think comes under the greater part of religious charity, is putting them in a fair condition.

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Temperance reformers like Manning highlighted the physical demands placed upon urban workers, contrasting their hardships with more familybased forms of rural life. “In the country,” Manning contended, “our working people have the fields, and the trees, and the sun; and their children walk with them, as I know from old experience, and I believe that there they have very great mental relief upon their only day of rest.”18 At the next parliamentary inquiry, nearly a decade after the first investigation, F.R. Faulkner, one of the more outspoken commentators on this subject, echoed before parliament this romantic view of country life when he described “the country places” as having “advantages that a close population have not.”19 According to Faulkner, the recorder for Dublin, the Irish peasantry enjoyed “country walks, hurling matches, and things of that kind.” In a typically nineteenth-century fashion Faulkner concluded his depiction of peasant life by noting the advantages that the countryside provided for healthy residence through good ventilation, fresh air, and copious amounts of “oxygen.”20 This nineteenth-century romantic notion of country living, however, ignored the way in which alcohol loomed so large in the daily rituals of the peasantry and instead stressed the reforming force of a more natural life spent in the outdoors. For the workers and artisans of the city there were only places such as the Botanical Gardens, but temperance campaigners claimed that no urban amusements could compete with the lure of the tavern, ever-present seven days a week. Yet, to transform Sunday closing into as successful a popular movement as Father Mathew’s temperance campaign had been, required more than sentimental appeals by clergymen and magistrates to the bucolic life of the Irish peasantry. Mathew’s campaign had inspired a populist upsurge in Irish society, and in order to build similar populist momentum, grass-roots organization on the part of the laboring classes was required. The social mobilization associated with Mathew’s movement had been distinguished from other temperance drives because of its organic connections with the masses of the rural poor. More than any attraction to temperance itself, the prospect of both temporal and spiritual revival, coupled with the charismatic leadership of Mathew, drew unprecedented numbers into his pledge-taking campaign.21 In the intervening decades since Mathew’s time, however, demographic and occupational

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change had not only transformed the social make-up of rural Ireland but had also served to enhance the importance of the urban-based working and artisan classes. Workers located in the cities who passed their workweek indoors, middle-class reformers held, required open air and the opportunity for natural pursuits away from their cramped, unhygienic urban environment. With Irish cities facing substantial social dislocation, urban drunkenness attracted above all the eye of the reformer. Unlike the case of Mathew’s temperance movement, it was urban workers, not agricultural laborers, who held particular potential importance for the success of Irish Sunday closing. More regimented forms of labor, ruled by the clock and not the call of the seasons, necessitated more rational forms of recreation than the public house could offer.22 Alternative activities to public-house tippling included the growing popularity of sport and athletics, but it was suburban excursions that supporters of Sunday closing stressed most in their testimonies before parliament. In 1868, J. Sullivan, a Dublin silk weaver (aged 27) and an advocate of total Sunday closing, characterized the new habits emerging among certain members of the working class: “What I call the respectable portion of the working classes very often take a run to Kingstown or Bray on a fine Sunday evening.”23 Those in favor of Sunday closing, artisans and laborers as well as more middle-class supporters, stressed the growing popularity of Sunday excursions among the temperate workers. Those who supported temperance, and Sunday closing more specifically, fused the “recreational movement” with Sunday closing and a broader moral reformation taking root in the working class. Dubbed the “excursionists,” those workers who took their families outside the city attained a level of ´ of public houses on Sundays. respectability unavailable to the habitues Rhetorically conflating these two issues provided a convenient means by which to overcome criticism of Sunday closing as a movement based upon narrow class and religious interests. Furthermore, this emphasis on excursions demonstrated that there existed, for those conscientious workers, more legitimate forms of recreation than the public house. Much of the testimony before parliament in 1877 and 1878 focused on the lack of working-class amusements in the cities of Ireland beyond the walls of the public house. Again, it was F.R. Faulkner, testifying before parliament on 6 March 1877, who explicitly described what he saw as a woeful lack of leisure activities. When asked if the

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people of Dublin had “fewer amusements on Sunday than [in] other parts of Ireland,” Faulkner responded by saying that “until the depletion of the population by the great changes in Ireland in recent years [ . . . ] Sunday was a day of great recreation; they used to have hurling matches and such things [ . . . ] I wish to see young men going out into the suburbs and playing cricket, as they do in the suburbs of English towns.” Faulkner further pointed to the absence of “amusements” be´ with their yond the lure of alcohol within Irish pubs. Unlike French cafes supplies of “dominoes and backgammon,” Faulkner classified Dublin pubs as mere drinking dens. Concluding his answer to the parliamentary committee, he criticized the Dublin working classes as “the most ignorant people in respect to the comforts of home and to the way of amusing themselves [ . . . ] that exist in the civilised world.”24 A large part of the stigma attached to the image of the Irish working class revolved around their allegedly single-minded approach to entertainment. Public-house patronage, for middle-class reformers, was not a valid form of recreation, nor was it therapeutic for body or mind. The desire to encourage weekend outings in lieu of public-house patronage prompted legislators to consider the wants of the weekend traveler. The bona fide traveler clause within the Sunday-closing bill that eventually passed through parliament provided an exception to the law in the countryside. According to this provision, if a person traveled more than three miles without having undertaken their outing specifically to acquire drink, they could nonetheless purchase drink in any public house licensed for retail on any day of the week for consumption on or off the premises. While not altogether a new law, the Sunday-closing act dropped the distance requirement for a bona fide traveler from four to three miles.25 Of course, to determine whether a person was indeed a bona fide traveler was often difficult for publicans or the police to do with any degree of certainty. Still, the clause did indicate the commitment by lawmakers to foster more sober habits in the working class, despite the fact that it was flagrantly violated by weekend tipplers. In addition to compensating rural publicans for the loss of their regular clientele on Sundays, the bona fide traveler clause gave “tourists, excursionists, people of business, and those who wished to enjoy a few miles traveling on pleasure, the means to getting refreshments when three miles distant from their residence.”26 Ireland lagged behind its English counterpart,

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social commentators alleged, in providing weekend amusements for the laboring class, and weakening the bona fide traveler provision and imposing Sunday closing in rural districts, would encourage weekend travel to the seaside or other nearby rustic vicinities as reasonable alternatives to Sunday drinking. Enticing workers and their families into the open air on their day of rest would, Sunday closers maintained, increase good order, improve physical health, and strengthen family bonds.

IV One of the more numerous bodies of Sunday laborers in the towns and cities of Ireland comprised those who worked behind the counters of public houses and licensed shops, namely, the vintners’ and licensed grocers’ assistants. Located within the very heart of the retail trade itself, these workers labored and lived inside the retail houses targeted by Sunday closers. With their unique relationship to the trade the vintners’ assistants stood to play a pivotal role in the Sunday-closing movement, and temperance reformers did not overlook this fact. William Sullivan, in speaking before parliament, characterized Sunday closing as a reform measure for those laboring within the drink trade: “Large numbers of young men are employed [in public houses], and the tendency of our times is to shorten the hours of labour, and that is a class that is very much overlooked.”27 Assistants working behind the counters of licensed shops and public houses accounted for a considerable number of workers in Dublin during this period. Although Elizabeth Malcolm has noted that the assistants stood staunchly behind Sunday closing, this interpretation overlooks the tenuous position of the assistants within the debate.28 It was estimated around the time of the Sunday-closing debates that over 2,000 men worked in the public-house trade in this capacity. Of that number, around 300 belonged to the Licensed Grocers and Vintners Assistants’ Association (LGVAA), the Dublin-based union formed in 1862 to advance workers’ rights. The thoughts and inclinations of assistants had a twofold importance for the Sunday-closing issue. First, as those most familiar with the inner workings of licensed grocers’ shops and public houses, their stance on closing could either confirm or undermine their employers’ various criticisms of restrictive legislation, especially the claim

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that Sunday closing was “class legislation.” Second, because of the long hours that assistants worked on Sundays, they stood to be most affected by the limiting of Sunday sales. Exposing the conditions under which assistants labored could additionally assist in the temperance campaign’s broader project of demonizing the publican as a dangerous misanthrope and a threat to society. Around the time of the first exhaustive parliamentary inquiry into Sunday closing in 1867–8, when the movement was only beginning to attract substantial public attention, the assistants guardedly opposed the measure. Even from the beginning their position was by no means unanimous. The question facing the assistants appeared to be a vexed one: union members viewed Sunday closing as an opportunity to improve the terms under which they labored, yet they also recognized a need to support the trade upon which they depended for their wages, board, and lodgings. Ever since its founding in 1862 the assistants’ union, the LGVAA, had had a largely cooperative relationship with their employers’ union, the LGVPA, and the cordial relations over Sunday closing at this time was no exception. At the outset of the debate, in their tepid criticisms of Sunday closing, the assistants tended to follow the lead of the publicans insofar as they supported equal treatment of the retail trade in intoxicants. Sunday closing, according to the most oft-quoted argument against the measure, threatened to increase drinking in shebeens and, what was even more threatening, the likelihood of more spontaneous forms of drunkenness in informal, unmonitored spaces. In a report of an LGVPA meeting, the association warned readers of the likely result of this misguided legislation in Dublin: There was a working population of seventy-seven thousand, and on the day of rest they required refreshment, and it was idle for gentlemen to say they could do without it. They could not, and if they did not get it in the regular houses, which were kept in good order, they would get it elsewhere.29

Like their employers, the LGVAA also stressed the potential breakdown of social discipline that would attend the shutting of public-house doors on Sundays. Furthermore, assistants recognized the need to place the trade on an equal footing with other businesses such as inns and hotels

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when it came to the legal hours of sale. Owen Rankin, on the floor of an assistants’ meeting, proposed the following resolution: While we are desirous that the hours for Sunday trading be shortened, also weekdays, we are also of opinion that it is an act of injustice to grant certain privileges to hotels or other places for sale and consumption on or off the premises, other than the regular hours for public houses.30

The inclusion of this type of non-prejudicial, more moderate reform would, the assistants claimed, negate the tinge of class bias that otherwise colored the issue of Sunday closing. The assistants, however, did not follow the lead of their employers in lockstep. Unlike the Dublin vintners, the assistants supported the restriction of hours of sale on Sunday, though their official proclamations fell short at this time of calling for the closing of pubs and licensed grocery shops altogether. After both the founding of the Sunday Closing Association in 1866 and the 1867 parliamentary inquiry into the issue, assistants organized special public meetings and circulated petitions in favor of restricted hours on the Christian sabbath. Although there was no unanimous opinion on the issue, there was a consensus in the ranks of the assistants’ trade association for a substantial decrease in the hours of labor on Sunday. In 1867 the assistants’ official platform, put forth by the LGVAA’s president, Hugh O’Donnell, before the parliamentary committee investigating Sunday closing, recommended that public houses in Dublin be allowed to carry out their retail trade from only 2 o’clock until 5 on Sunday afternoons.31 Prior to the parliamentary hearing the assistants appeared to have taken little interest in the matter; no mention of Sunday closing appears in the assistants’ minutes before 1868. After the official inquiry, however, Sunday closing became a hotly contested issue that dominated the dialogue during LGVAA meetings. With the conclusion of the parliamentary inquiry the LGVAA moved toward supporting a more sweeping Sunday-closing measure. As the debate intensified after the parliamentary investigation, the assistants shifted their stance on the question. In November 1869 they passed a resolution calling for the complete closing of licensed houses on Sunday, though there is evidence from the meetings of the LGVAA that this more extreme stance did not enjoy unanimous support. The issue did serve, however, to mobilize the assistants in an unprecedented

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way. On 9 January 1870 the LGVAA sent circulars to all its members announcing its support for complete Sunday closing. Over the next ten years the LGVAA would hold special meetings, prepare official statements, and send deputations to parliament and the Home Secretary to put forth its case.32 For the assistants, closing public houses on Sunday was part of the larger “recreational movement” that was gaining popularity within their ranks. The LGVAA essentially supported Sunday closing for the leisure time away from work that it would afford its members. Their President was reported as explaining it in the following way to his members: They lived in an age of progress, and he sincerely hoped that he would see the time that those young men [ . . . ] would, after the transaction of the business of their meeting, be able to go to the park or some other healthful place instead having to go behind the counter.33

O’Donnell did not miss the fact that, beyond freeing up time after union meetings for other activities, Sunday closing would make participation in the LGVAA itself easier for members. According to parliamentary evidence, assistants were on duty as much as 18 hours per day. Given the long hours of work required of them, it was difficult to find time to attend monthly meetings and to take part in other ways in both the labor and nationalist movements, a fact frequently alluded to in the records of the association. Of great significance to assistants was the perception of Sunday closing as a form of socially progressive legislation that would reform the system of labor under which they worked. E.M. McMullen observed at a special meeting called to discuss the measure that he considered it “a great grievance to be obliged to work eighteen hours on weekdays without taking into account Sunday work at all.” McMullen complained that “there was no day for recreation or amusement for the grocers’ assistants. The motto of their society appeared to be ‘toil and be content.’ That state of things had continued since 1833, when the nefarious bill was passed allowing the Sunday opening.” Concurring with McMullen, O’Donnell was reported as declaring that “he did not see why they should go back to the old system. They were living in days of progress, and he did not see why the young men of the trade should be debarred the privileges which were enjoyed by others.” Singling out “many in the neighbourhood of the

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markets who had to get up at five and even three in the morning and continue working all day,” O’Donnell lamented that “that was slavery in almost its worst form.” For assistants like McMullen and O’Donnell, this proposed reform had little to do with concerns over temperance, religious convictions, or immorality on Sundays. Instead, the assistants voiced the hopes of using this time to improve the quality of their lives through physical exercise and participation in the growing outlets for leisure activities on Sundays. Foremost among the activities available to assistants outside of work was the nationalist movement. Sunday closing became a salient issue for assistants in part because of the popularity and force of Irish nationalism. On 3 October 1869 the assistants requested that the grocers and publicans close their shops by 5 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, 10 October, to allow participation in a meeting for the freeing of political prisoners – part of the Fenian amnesty movement. According to LGVAA leaders, if their employers acceded to their demands, “the assistants of Dublin . . . [would] make a stand fully in keeping with the position in such a great cause.”34 Nationalist demonstrations and displays of solidarity provided the kind of grass-roots appeal that transformed Sunday closing into something more than an insular issue affecting merely the running of the liquor trade. From the beginning of the LGVAA’s discussions their members’ understanding of Sunday closing was suffused with concerns for nationalist participation. The nationalist movement, and the need for time away from work to take part in that cause, helped to push the assistants toward a more vehement opposition against their employers on the issue.35 As the debate over Sunday closing intensified, the Irish Total Abstinence Society (ITAS) made overtures to the LGVAA, seeking outright support for the temperance cause. Nonetheless, the assistants were careful not to ally themselves overtly with the temperance movement, despite their near-agreement on Sunday closing at this juncture. The assistants themselves guardedly sought temperance support in procuring Sunday closing. In February 1870 the Reverend John Spratt, president of the ITAS, replied to a letter of thanks from the LGVAA and expressed his admiration for a body of workers caught in such a destructive trade, explaining that the leisure time promised by Sunday closing would be best spent in the open air rather than in the taverns and shops of the retail

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trade. Spratt’s private letter illustrates well the concept of the socially therapeutic impact that Sunday closing would bring to the lives of those most closely involved in the liquor traffic. Spratt recognized that framing the Sunday-closing issue in the language of social reform would appeal most effectively to the newly organized LGVAA. Labeling the system of Sunday labor “one of the serious evils of the day,” Spratt appealed not only to assistants’ religious duties but also to their ideas of natural rights. He deplored the fact that “such a large number of active, intelligent, and educated young men [ . . . ] should be deprived of that natural recreation which almost all other men, even of the humblest class, enjoy on that day of rest [ . . . ]” At the very time when they should be “enjoying the beauties of the lovely scenery ever spread out with so lavish a hand for man’s instruction, benefit, and admiration, adding to their health by breathing a purer atmosphere,” they were “shut up the whole length of the cheerful Sabbath afternoons and evenings to a late hour of night.”36 Spratt painted a sinister image of the interiors of the licensed shops and pubs, describing them as “darksome recesses [ . . . ] heated with gas and redolent with the fumes” of whiskey and porter.37 By emphasizing the noxious environment of the public house, he underscored the physical as well as moral threat that a vocation at the center of the drink trade posed to workers. Spratt also understood the importance of separating the interests of the assistants from those of their employers. In the same letter to the LGVAA, Spratt not only attacked the public-house environment but also took aim at the system of labor under which the assistants worked: They [the assistants] are compelled, in the interest of their employers, to be the dispensers of that destructive fluid which ruins the souls and body of so many thousands, and being the unwilling listeners of all the profanity and no sensing. The releasing [of] such a number of valuable young men from what, as regards “Sunday labour,” can be termed nothing short of a demoralising slavery, is itself sufficient to render any little trouble I may take relative to “Sunday closing” a labour of love [ . . . ]38

Taken as a whole, Spratt’s message fitted in well with the concerns voiced by assistants, who were anxious to secure time away from work for nationalist meetings, union work, and recreational activities.

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Although the assistants’ union generally enjoyed good relations with the LGVPA, Sunday closing threatened to cause conflict between owners and their employees. In fact, the issue raised awareness among LGVAA members of other temperance issues that placed them and their trade in a potentially vulnerable position. As the assistants and publicans parted ways over Sunday closing, the split over the issue complicated cohesive resistance to other temperance legislation. For example, E.P. McMullen, at a meeting of the LGVAA in 1870, blamed the selfish behavior of vintners for popular resentment against the trade and the seemingly growing popularity of the permissive bill: Were the grocers and vintners not to blame in this matter? He contended that if the grocers and vintners had not insisted on carrying on their business on that day which required that their assistants should work for eighteen hours on weekdays and nine hours on that grinding system, the permissive bill would not have attained the support it had from the public.39

At the same time, however, in the spirit of good relations that existed between the assistants’ association and the LGVPA, McMullen took note of the compromise worked out by the assistants for partial Sunday closing: “Even now the assistants would meet them hand in hand and ask them to close at five o’clock.”40 Assistants saw Sunday closing as a popular measure that, if broadly supported by the trade, could thwart the larger temperance agenda of permissive legislation and other unwarranted checks on the drink trade.41 Essentially, the assistants believed that both Sunday closing and permissive legislation were, above all, matters for the laboring classes to decide by themselves. Protesting against the conceptual underpinnings of the permissive bill, McMullen declared that as “highly as I respect the ratepayers, I cannot let this pass from my mind that they upon this question are not to be regarded in the true sense of the word as the people of Dublin.”42 The operation of the public-house system, for McMullen and many other assistants, lay outside the will of the official ratepayers. The people who frequented and staffed the pubs and licensed shops, according to this working-class perspective, had the right to regulate the retail liquor trade for themselves.

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V Mirroring earlier conditions during the beerhouse crises, by the late 1870s there appeared to be a substantial increase in arrests for drunkenness, especially on Sundays. Police statistics reporting increased arrests spurred the Sunday-closing movement forward and created an obsession with gathering and publicizing reports that condemned Sunday traffic as destructive of many aspects of working-class life. But unlike the beerhouse, which occupied a space at the periphery of respectable society, the ubiquitous and highly visible pub served the various needs of workers in neighborhoods where there was no alternative meeting point. Thus reforming the larger public-house trade by way of Sunday closing stood as a far more ambitious reform goal, pitting the temperance movement against not only the political luminaries within the drink trade, but also against the scores of workers who habitually frequented pubs. Changing entrenched social patterns by legislative means, contemporaries understood, constituted a potentially dangerous act. Writ large in the two major parliamentary inquiries into Sunday closing was a preoccupation with the habits and inclinations of the urban artisans and working classes of Ireland. Of particular interest to these special inquiries were the ways in which the working classes spent their leisure hours. It was in the cities, temperance reformers and authorities concluded, that the vice of drunkenness was most pernicious. The evidence provided to parliament certainly attests to the overwhelming popularity of frequenting public houses among the lower classes. The police observations of these establishments, carried out to obtain statistics for the Sunday-closing parliamentary inquiry in 1877–8, illustrate well the predominantly working-class custom of visiting pubs, especially on Sunday. More thorough in its scope than the 1867 investigation had been, the 1878 report of the Dublin constabulary provided both a temporal and spatial portrait of the habits and inclinations of Dublin’s ´ In the 1878 inquiry, out of the 910 houses open public-house habitues. for business on Sunday in the city, the police kept 210 premises under surveillance. The results of the investigation were striking. On Sunday, 9 January 1876, between the hours of 2:30 and 8:30 p.m., the police counted 46,257 visits made to public houses. Although the police did not account for repeated visits made by the same individual, the count nonetheless underscored the extent of the Sunday retail trade taking

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place in public houses. Given Dublin’s population of some 337,600 individuals, it is clear that the capital’s working-class society revolved on Sundays largely around pubs, especially given the fact that the count was only a partial enumeration of the whole of the Sunday traffic occurring in the city’s taverns.43 In a subsequent observation of 50 of the busiest public houses in the city, the findings established the hour between 2 and 3 p.m. as the most popular time for visiting pubs. At least according to the vintners, respectable visitation of this sort confirmed the overwhelmingly moderate use of the pub by estimable persons. The LGVPA tended to emphasize the practical working-class usages of the public house. Michael Dwyer, the organization’s secretary, set forth before parliament the service-oriented nature of the licensed trade in Dublin in his testimony in 1877. The Sunday traffic, according to Dwyer, was heaviest between the hours of two and three when the public houses carried on a booming trade. Drink was “carried away in cans for the dinner of the artisans and workingmen,” Dwyer asserted. The Sunday traffic was a matter of working-class practicality, not a debauched rush to public houses after the sabbath services: “In many houses they can scarcely meet the demand, there is such a great hurry during that hour, but it is only during that hour.” Moreover, Dwyer specified that this practical use of the licensed houses in Dublin applied mostly to “the houses in the districts where the working classes chiefly reside, not to the leading streets, such as Sackville Street.” Dwyer depicted Sunday trading as a subject easily misunderstood by gentlemen unfamiliar with Dublin’s backstreets who never sent out “for a beer on Sundays, or in fact any other day.”44 The practical uses of public houses by and large drew few objections from constables or magistrates. In a parliamentary return in 1874, police recommendations instead dwelled on the need to punish more severely the individual drunkard rather than on disciplining publicans. In essence, the largely indifferent attitude of the constabulary toward Sunday closing – and toward the disciplining of the public-house trade – complicated the Sunday closers’ political agenda. Police Inspector J.T. Smith of County Longford, for example, recommended increased prison terms for drunkards and removal “to an asylum (provided specially for drunkards) for twelve months.” Instead of monetary fines, the setting of prison penalties for drunkenness possessed the advantage of creating a deterrent against such behavior. Fines meant little to a nearly

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impecunious group, whereas penal servitude or treatment, it was thought, would discourage offending behavior, in addition to removing the habitual drunkard from public life. In addition to underscoring the populist nature of frequenting pubs, the dialogue also constructed a corollary framework that linked Catholic church attendance with an underground trade in intoxicants. Impromptu Sunday drinking following holy services was a frequent complaint made by police. George Talbot, in describing a seemingly booming “illicit business carried out the whole of Sunday,” described a notorious shebeen located near “the Roman Catholic church of St. John’s.” At the conclusion of Sunday mass, according to Talbot, the former worshippers “were noticed for a long time slipping into this house one by one, and by two and threes.” When the police discovered the house and “effected an entry,” Talbot remarked, “nearly thirty or forty dozen bottles of beer were found in a room towards the back premises.”45 This image of an already well-established pattern of secret drinking, in addition to reinforcing a perceived predilection in the Irish character toward obsessive use of intoxicants, underlined the difficulties of enforcing restrictive liquor laws at a traditional time of working-class sociability. Talbot feared that if total Sunday closing were enacted, the measure would lead to “rows around the public houses for the purpose of getting liquor.” While the violence could be “put down,” Talbot warned that in doing so, the police would “engender an ill-feeling” among the workingclass denizens of Dublin’s notoriously violent slums. Altercations with police, often involving baton charges, had already punctuated the enforcement of the licensing laws and convinced Talbot that attempts at keeping civil peace in the event of Sunday closing would only complicate the constabulary’s role. Talbot also understood the impracticality of altering long-established weekend binges by workers. As he told the committee investigating Sunday closing, “A man [ . . . ] will seek drink in an unlicensed house, and he will follow that craving on a Sunday morning, as it were, to keep the steam up.”

VI As the Sunday Closing Bill worked its way through a first and second reading in the House of Commons during the 1878 session, the

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LGVPA resigned itself to the compromise measure that appeared to have garnered a consensus both inside and outside parliament. In April 1878, William Slattery, the chairman of the LGVPA, expressed the view that “the interests of the Dublin licensed trade ought not to be endangered in order to promote those of the country traders who have shown themselves so apathetic about the Sunday closing question.”46 At the same time it was also noted that the five exempted cities had provided-two thirds of the signatures on petitions opposed to Sunday closing, though rural districts in the counties of Dublin, Kildare, Wicklow, Cork, Limerick, and Kerry also had lobbied heavily against the bill.47 The general acquiescence in the rest of the country can be explained by the widespread tradition of voluntarily closing public houses on Sundays. The final passage of the Sunday Closing Bill in 1878 did little to end the popular debates over the matter. In fact, in some respects the legislation appeared to intensify political and social rancor. Because it exempted the five largest cities in Ireland (Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Limerick, and Waterford), its supporters regarded the legislation as only a partial victory or a first step toward complete Sunday closing. They hoped to sustain the political momentum that they had initiated by securing further legislation for complete Sunday closing covering all of Ireland and restricting the hours of sales on Saturday as well. With over a decade of organizational experience behind them, both sides were well placed to continue the fight at home in Ireland and at Westminster. Because the bill adopted in 1878 stipulated a four-year trial period in order to assess the effects of the law, Sunday closing remained in the public spotlight. Sunday closing and the fractious response to the campaign reflected new cultural concerns over leisure. Drafted in such a way as to promote a more orderly use of workers’ free time, the law had minimal impact upon social-drinking patterns. Because of the exemption of the five largest cities – the very places identified by zealous Sunday closers as the heart of the problem – the pub remained an integral part of laborers’ lives, even on the sabbath. The Sunday-closing movement itself also contributed to a bifurcated pattern of alcohol consumption. The middle class increasingly identified itself with a morally sanitized ideology that stressed activities outside of the public house and reflexively balked at the image of the drunken Irish laborer, whereas the working class

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continued its recreational reliance on the pub and even devised means by which to circumvent the act. Sunday closing did represent a thorn in the side of publicans. For those within the exempted cities there was the fear that the legislation would eventually be expanded to include their businesses. William Slattery explained to the members of the LGVPA that “in consequence of this measure becoming law for four years,” it was incumbent upon the association “to extend and strengthen the organisation for trade defence.”48 While Cork vintners believed that the act would actually improve their trade by drawing additional custom from outlying regions, they pledged to assist in establishing new vintner organizations in Waterford city and other provincial centers in the southern part of the country.49 For other country traders the exemption of the five largest cities only exacerbated the differences in wealth and status between rural and urban proprietors. Indeed, nearly half of all the licensed houses in Ireland were very small businesses. T.W. Russell, MP testified in 1871 that out of a total of 16,430 public houses then operating in Ireland, 8,071 of these premises were valued at under £10, and most of them were located in country districts where sales were restricted by the Sunday Closing Act.50 While organizing provincial traders would remain an ongoing priority for the LGVPA, the Sunday-closing restriction fueled resentment among country traders. Joseph Maxwell, a publican and town councillor from Dundalk, asked an LGVPA assembly whether “the Dublin body would act loyally by them and stand all for or with them?” For such traders outside of Dublin the LGVPA had “in 1878 thrown the provincial men overboard for the purpose of getting concessions for the favoured cities.”51 This gap in wealth and status between rural and urban traders would only increase with time, for the act had effectively accelerated the trend toward divergence in the fortunes of the two groups. Beyond the various results of the legislation, the debates that had swirled around Sunday closing demonstrate the centrality of the pub to issues of social reform in nineteenth-century Ireland. Temperance groups were loath to accept the pub as a legitimate form of modern leisure for the working classes. But to reorient the working classes to new leisure outlets, and thereby alter their long-established social pattern of frequenting pubs, would require a great amount of time and effort by temperance reformers. Those working-class groups who did embrace

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Sunday closing – most notably the vintner assistants – did so because they saw the measure as a positive labor reform. Assistants did not join the call for Sunday closing out of any genuine sympathy with the aims of the temperance movement, though their support for the measure stood as one of the more salient breaks with the vested interests of their employers during the final quarter of the nineteenth century. While Sunday closers certainly made some impressive inroads into the heart of working-class attachment to the pub, it would take more modern and alluring forms of leisure to draw the working class away from the pub – even on Sundays.

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4 Irish Nationalist Politics and the Drink Trade

I As the threat of a Fenian uprising dwindled in the 1870s, middle-class Catholic publicans in the major cities of Ireland began playing a more central role in the politics of Irish nationalism. Given that middle-class Irish vintners and their trade association in Dublin wielded profound political influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their new, unwavering support for popular nationalist causes helped to lend social respectability to the Home Rule movement and other nationalist issues. In a reversal of their earlier cooperation with constables and magistrates under Captain Thomas Drummond’s administration in the 1830s, both publicans and licensed grocers in Dublin increasingly opposed the over-surveillance of public-house premises. Whereas bourgeois publicans’ support for Irish nationalism before the Sundayclosing debates of the 1860s had been guarded and sporadic, by the 1870s and 1880s Dublin vintners had adjusted their political language to appeal to the popular nationalist sentiment in the country. With the Sunday-closing debates supplanting the issue of reforming beerhouse and spirit-grocer licenses in the popular press, attention shifted over the next two decades to concerns over the hours of sale and the alleged mistreatment by magistrates of publicans sympathetic to the nationalist agitation. Framed in the context of British imperialism in Ireland, these questions transcended mere arguments about trade

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restrictions and thereby provide insights into the adoption and growth of nationalist ideas in Ireland. To accomplish its political goals in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, the Irish drink trade portrayed the liquor laws passed by the British Parliament as coercive legislation designed to subjugate the Irish to English laws and traditions unsuitable for Ireland. While the legislative ambitions of the temperance movement grew in the 1860s and 1870s, the vintner trade attacked the legislation with the same sentiments that the Irish nationalist historian D.P. Conyngham categorically used to decry all legislation emanating from Westminster: “One object was kept steadily in view – to render life in Ireland intolerable to Catholics, or, failing their absolute expulsion, to degrade them to the level of brutes.”1 Burdening the legitimate drink trade with excessive regulations and taxes, publicans held, would increase drunkenness and civil disorder by encouraging the clandestine distilling and shebeen trades, which were altogether outside of police supervision and regulatory controls. Denying respectable recreational outlets to the Irish working population, they argued, would thus set a dangerous social precedent; restrictions such as high taxes imposed on spirits and beer, and Sunday-closing legislation would, like other laws passed at the expense of the Irish people, force otherwise law-abiding citizens to act in criminal ways. At the same time publicans staunchly resisted characterizations of the Irish people that emphasized their “slovenly” and “intemperate” nature. Like Irish nationalists, many of whom belonged to the temperance movement, Irish publicans and licensed grocers perceived that the increasing tendency to link “insobriety and lawlessness” with “the Irish character” diminished the legitimacy of calls for nationhood.2 For the drink trade negative perceptions of the Catholic Irish threatened the prospect of an independent Ireland, and depictions of the “native” Irish as a drunken and lawless race undermined the respectability of publichouse custom. Recognizing this fact, publicans often found themselves joining temperance reformers and the police in opposing drunkenness at beerhouses and shebeens, as well as at fairs, wakes, nationalist rallies, and holidays, during which events great quantities of drinking took place outside officially licensed public houses. For those involved in the liquor trade, for the many urban artisans and laborers who attended large

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anti-temperance rallies, and for the many more who habitually patronized public houses, resisting the temperance lobby amounted to fighting for an increasingly regulated, modern, and – as Irish publicans saw it – uniquely Irish conception of the public house. Thus the movement, built to defend the liquor trade from serious legislative restriction, worked to defend its economic and social status under the banner of the Irishman’s right to legitimate recreation, at any respectable hour or on any holiday, within the walls of the well-conducted licensed house.

II As the temperance movement mobilized in the late 1860s and 1870s to pass permissive and Sunday-closing legislation, the drink trade and its allies, recognizing the potential appeal of Irish nationalism, began to edge toward a more identifiably nationalist position. If, as R.V. Comerford has argued, the popularity of Fenianism can be linked to a “modest prosperity” and new forms of recreation in the 1860s, then economic depression in the late 1870s and the prospect of losing what small progress had been gained hardened attitudes among assistants and employers toward the economic mismanagement of the country. Indeed, in Ireland, where issues of land tenure, rent, and other economic matters were more than abstract issues, Irish resentment of the economic mismanagement of Ireland quite easily spilled over into the incendiary politics of the pub. Isaac Butt, the prolific pamphleteer, lawyer, and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the 1870s, forged a new “generalist” approach to economics which did not hesitate to conflate material grievances with social, moral, and historical issues.3 Butt’s pamphlets on the Great Famine, for example, found no fault with the Irish gentry, but instead focused on the English form of economic domination which, he alleged, had led to the catastrophe.4 Increasingly in the 1870s it was this form of economic nationalism that the LGVPA drew upon and transmuted to fit the politics of the public house. This nationalist perspective found a voice in Cornelius Dennehy, a Dublin trader and outspoken critic of British rule, who represented the more advanced nationalist wing of the association. In addressing a monthly meeting of the LGVPA in Dublin, he publicly decried the wealth of statistics advanced by temperance organizations

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to prove the degree of inebriety in Ireland: “The semi-pagan population of England committed crimes unknown in Ireland without the incentive of drunkenness at all [ . . . ] and it was absurd to try to prove by statistics from Great Britain that this country was in a state of semibarbarism.”5 At the next month’s meeting of the association Dennehy continued his series of direct attacks on the temperance movement and on the Permissive Bill Association as it existed in Ireland. As in most matters of the new nativist-minded cultural nationalism, it was the English origins of the temperance legislation that made it most suspect: They all knew that for a long time in England a great association had existed, with vast funds at its disposal, for the total suppression of the trade in intoxicating drinks. When that organisation was introduced into Ireland, it came with a new name – that of the Irish Permissive Bill Association. What did that word “permissive” mean? It meant repression and coercion when applied to this country [ . . . ] It was not by these means that the great and good men who had passed away sought to promote the cause of temperance amongst the Irish people. It was by appealing to their feelings and their generous instincts that the people had been taught to be temperate and not by threats of coercion.6

Vintners like Dennehy sought to establish a fundamental difference between “the great and good men who had passed away,” referring to Father Mathew’s generation of temperance reformers of the pre-famine decade on the one hand and the movement of the 1870s on the other. Whereas Father Mathew’s temperance campaign had appealed to virtue and originated within Ireland, the new temperance movement had its roots in England and sought to enforce sobriety only through heavyhanded legislation. The passage in 1872 of a new liquor-licensing law for Ireland (34 and 35 Vict., c.88) sparked a firestorm of similar nationalist-oriented criticisms from the assistants’ union, the Licensed Grocers and Vintners Assistants’ Association (LGVAA). Hugh O’Donnell, the association’s president, in beginning his speech to the LGVAA condemning the legislation, challenged the nationalist credentials of those members of parliament recently elected to defend the rights of the Irish:

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A great deal of agitation had been got up in reference to a revision in the present licensing laws; and mock patriotism and mock legislation had been used as a means to return to parliament those on whom the grocers and vintners of Dublin had relied to represent them in parliament – but in this respect the trade had been seriously disappointed.7

Having failed to stop parliament from including Ireland within the jurisdiction of the licensing law (originally the law had been drafted to apply to England only), the assistants expressed little confidence in their parliamentary representatives. In his address O’Donnell depicted the provisions of the bill in historically charged terms: “It is a bill so devoid of common sense, so utterly opposed to justice and the spirit of the age, that its parallel cannot be found. It is not alone a confiscatory bill [ . . . ] but it is a ticket-of-leave bill.”8 Speaking from the floor of the meeting, Martin Kelly, concurring with the President, pointed to the historic moment that the bill represented for Ireland: “Every day since the Act of Union Ireland has been suffering from English legislation, and was the system now to culminate in a bill [ . . . ] that would assuredly be the means of destroying the only remnant of trade left in this country?”9 The result of the restrictive legislation, for another assistant identified only as Clark, would be the loss of jobs for the shop apprentices, who would be “forced to walk the streets of Dublin, and after that, start to another shore.”10 The resolution subsequently passed by the LGVAA encapsulated much of the assistants’ outrage, and charged that the act in essence would prove to be “penal in working, encouraging of the spy system, and directly opposed both to the interest of the association and the trader.”11 The differences in the varied reactions of assistants and publicans to the licensing act of 1872 reflected their respective positions within the trade. Unlike the assistants’ association, the LGVPA leveled few criticisms at the new act. Many provisions in the bill in fact contained measures certain to benefit the trade. Crackdowns on temporary licenses, shebeens, and other informal gatherings where drink was often consumed, for example, promised to augment the official trade that occurred in public houses. Moreover, the LGVPA was especially concerned with derailing provisions that would “separate the sale of spirits and tea,” an issue to which the assistants gave little thought.12 Most importantly,

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however, publicans at this time were complacent about the increased powers that the new licensing act gave to the constabulary. In contrast, the assistants centered much of their criticism of the new licensing laws upon the way in which the measures empowered the constabulary. The assistant E.P. McMullen, a firebrand nationalist and strenuous opponent of British rule, took aim at the “espionage system” that the legislation would likely bring to Irish pubs. The licensing act, for McMullen, “would have the effect of sending to their houses for inspection not men in uniform but corydons and such-like characters.” Working behind the bars and counters of Dublin shops, assistants were especially sensitive to police authority over the daily responsibilities which their vocations demanded of them. Foreshadowing not a little the complaints against the licensing laws that their employers would level against all proposed changes to the public-house system in the 1880s, assistants focused on the encroaching power of government authorities into the world of the public house: the rights of the police to enter premises, to evict drunken persons, and otherwise to impinge upon the inner workings of the trade. Following the lead of their assistants, publicans increasingly recognized in the 1870s that construing permissive and Sunday-closing legislation as penal laws offered the opportunity for harnessing – if not inflaming – popular resistance to temperance. Garrett Barry, the president of the Licensed Grocers and Vintners’ Association of Cork, stressed this point before parliament in April 1868 when he declared that “the more penal you make the law, the more likely it is to be violated and not availed of.” Going further, Barry explained that “traders look upon laws with regard to the sale of beer and spirits in Ireland as penal laws, and anything to make them more penal will certainly excite a desire to evade them.”13 With the expansion of the nationalist press in Ireland in the 1870s, the LGVPA frequently appealed in this way to Irish historical resentment of English rule and self-interested justice. In a similar vein Dublin vintners claimed that temperance legislation appeared popular only because of the vast sums of English money lavished on the comparatively small temperance groups in Ireland. According to these public pronouncements by vintners, it was the English economic juggernaut that paid “agents” to organize rallies, saturate the press with alarmist stories of the immorality of Ireland, and circulate

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deceptive petitions in support of Sunday-closing and permissive legislation.14 As with the land question, it was the powerful English economic order that encouraged its agents to extract a heavy toll from Ireland. According to the Dublin vintners’ calculations, which are most likely exaggerated, the Permissive Bill Association had spent between £18,000 and £19,000 in Ireland in the nearly ten years since its beginnings there in 1862. With such large sums of money available to Irish temperance advocates, the vociferous Dublin publican and town councilor Cornelius Dennehy surmised, “It was evident that the work done was not volunteer work or spontaneous work, considering that it was accomplished at such a vast expenditure.”15 Unlike other social-reform movements which sought volunteers and charitable contributions from the Irish middle class, temperance reformers were painted by the Dublin trade as English outsiders or their Irish agents, whose work had the effect of bringing “Ireland into the category of crime in order that there might be some extenuation of the debasing state of things that existed in their own country.”16 In contrast to the stance of the working men and assistants behind the counters of pubs and licensed grocers’ shops, the socially prominent leaders of the LGVPA drew special attention to the denial of the rights of property inherent in temperance legislation. Dennehy in particular, whose nationalist diatribes were a fixture of the Dublin daily press in the 1870s, couched his denunciation of temperance in terms of various other historic injustices perpetrated upon Ireland: “He [Dennehy] remembered the reform and corn law agitations, and he did not remember when there was a more powerful party organized for the carrying out of any measure than the party whose efforts were now concentrated for the purpose of depriving them of their property.” Dennehy’s objections flowed from a middle-class ideology of fairness that emphasized the enormity of English capitalist interests at odds with a nation like Ireland, where wealth was primarily in the hands of small farmers and traders. Dennehy continued his jeremiad to the LGVPA by appealing to the publicans’ vulnerability in the face of such large economic and imperial interests. “This was not an abstract question – it was one involving the best rights of property, and some of the ablest speakers in the United Kingdom were arrayed against them, and they had also against them the facile pens of the newspaper writers.”17 With the

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public press at its disposal, the well-funded temperance campaign prompted publicans to counter this agitation with their own public message that cast the liquor trade as involved in a desperate struggle against all the odds. In fact, the imposition of the temperance agenda in Ireland was, according to publicans like Dennehy, part of a larger imperial project of militant economic domination by England. By equating Britain’s gunboat diplomacy under the banner of free trade with the forceful exporting of permissive legislation for the sake of economic efficiency, Irish publicans depicted temperance, like the English economic system of big business concentrated in the north of England, as founded upon imperial selfinterest. Again, it was Dennehy who put the matter in the most politically inflammatory terms when he rhetorically asked the question, “What were the principles of free trade originated in the Manchester School, and how were these theories manifested throughout the world?” In reply he answered that “they were promulgated in China and Japan at the point of the bayonet and the mouth of the cannon, and they were put forward with bated breath before the emperor of the French.” Thus Dennehy invoked a commonly used linguistic sleight of hand to show that temperance legislation was anything but permissive: In seeking to promote the permissive principle, as it was called, they had the usual amount of selfishness in view. They imagined that by depriving the working man throughout the empire of what was absolutely required to sustain him in his physical exertions, there might be a larger fund created to be expended on the various productions which emanated from Manchester.18

The motive behind prohibiting the traffic in liquors, according to Dennehy’s argument, was English economic subjugation of Ireland by means of extinguishing everyday expenditures on Irish goods, thus maximizing the amount of Irish money spent on English manufactures. Dennehy concluded his remarks, published in the increasingly nationalist Freeman’s Journal, by taking aim at the Dublin distributors of English products who stood to gain the most economically from the permissive bill: “So they could imagine that that same feeling affected the proprietors of some of the monster shops in Dublin, who, under the pretense of carrying out a moral principle, had never forgotten the counter. It had been a

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system of shop from the beginning to the end.”19 As the debate over Sunday closing intensified in the mid-1870s, Dennehy’s nativist portrait of temperance grew to dominate the vintner response to legislative action. During the intense scrutiny of the public-house business during the parliamentary investigations of 1877 and 1878, the liquor trade and its allies honed their oppositional message to denounce the legislation as partisan. The parliamentary defense of the Irish drink trade emanated primarily from nationalist MPs like N.D. Murphy and P.J. Smythe, though nationalist support for the drink trade was by no means unanimous. Among the most eloquent spokespersons for the trade, N.D. Murphy, the long-time ally of the LGVPA and a nationalist MP representing Cork city, warned that Sunday closing would, if passed, place a “social brand” upon the majority of Irish people.20 In a letter sent to the press Murphy denounced the legislation as setting a threatening legislative precedent: Parliament has [ . . . ] made a law which unquestionably will interfere with the lawful habits and convenience of the means of the people, and leave all other classes untouched. It remains to be seen how that law will work. That it will prevent the fractional minority of habitual drunkards (for, compared with the population, they are but a fraction) from indulging in their unhappy propensities, no one [ . . . ] can venture to hope; but that it may suggest to or teach those who have never been intemperate to evade a law which they would consider both unjust and unnecessary, is an evil but to be feared and deprecated. Its very authors declare it to be but an experiment – and if a measure, impossible to be justified on principle, notoriously not called for by those it principally concerns, and which purports to affect by compulsion and not be voluntary action, men’s own volition towards themselves, should succeed and be obeyed – then, indeed, we shall have a new departure in legislation.21

Like other nationalist critics of the bill, Murphy viewed Sunday closing in a historical framework that defined the act primarily as a reinvention of the eighteenth-century penal laws. From such a nationalist vantage point the passage of Sunday closing, though a compromise measure, appeared as nothing short of a humiliating defeat of Irish interests. Throughout the debate on Sunday closing Murphy emphasized the degrading influence that the measure would have on the Irish population. More damaging

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than “the restriction of individual action,” Murphy declared, was the way in which the legislation would affect “a man’s own volition towards himself.”22 By denying individuals the right to decide for themselves what was in their best interest on their only day of rest, the government, according to Murphy, struck at the very heart of individual human dignity by “stigmatizing [ . . . ] the most numerous portion of our population as poor weaklings, wanting in self-reliance and self-control.”23 In a similar nationalist denunciation of Sunday closing, P.J. Smythe, the nationalist MP from Westmeath and one of the most stalwart allies of the trade, asserted that the imperial nature and negative effect of the legislation appeared clear. In a letter sent from London to the trade association in Dublin, Smythe described the triumph of Sunday closing in terms that implied a need for resistance against an altogether unworkable legal system: It is coercion, for it is a violent interference with the exercise of a natural right; except in a few instances it has not been abused to the detriment of the community at large. It is one law for the rich and one for the poor, for it leaves to one the club of which it deprives the other. It is legislative robbery as regards the trade, and legislative intolerance as regards the people. It has the form of law, but every element of true law is wanting in it. Its capacity for mischief will be in proportion to the extent to which it is allowed to operate.24

This interpretation of the bill typified the stance of the LGVPA toward Sunday closing for the next generation. More important for nationalist publicans, the bill underscored the need for a native legislature to guard against laws which robbed small businessmen of their profits, tampered with the rights of the Irish working classes, and encouraged clandestine habits of drunkenness. For Smythe it was the manner in which the bill passed through parliament and the lack of regard for popular opinion in much of Ireland that pointed to the real victors of the legislative battle. Reflecting a growing sectarianism within Irish politics, Smythe singled out the north as wholly responsible for the passing of the bill; for according to his interpretation, there was no unanimity of opinion in Ireland in support of Sunday closing outside of Ulster:

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Munster is all but unanimously opposed to this bill. Leinster is divided about it. Connaught is indifferent and not agreed – there being two opinions even in Roscommon. Ulster alone was unanimous for the bill. It was the pressure brought to bear by the Ulster members which forced the government to transgress the usages of parliament, and in defiance of precedent and authority, to rush through the House of Commons, on the last Saturday of a virtually defunct session, a private member’s bill, of the principles of which they had repeatedly declared they disapproved. Yes, Sunday closing is the triumph of the north – her first real victory since ’29 – and if I mistake not the signs of the times – [it] will not be her last.25

By labeling Sunday closing a success for the Protestant north, Smythe played on a long-held Catholic suspicion of temperance which had been especially powerful before Father Mathew had taken up the cause in the 1830s and 1840s. In this sense Smythe attempted to reinvigorate such a nationalist interpretation of temperance legislation. To do this, he not only pointed to the ignoring of popular sentiment among the lower classes, but he also underlined the confiscatory nature of the bill, a theme which again had a historical resonance for nationalists in Ireland. Without offering compensation for the loss of business, Smythe contended, Sunday-closing advocates would confiscate a sizeable portion of the natural business upon which publicans depended. Certainly, the passing of Sunday closing intensified the nationalist rhetoric surrounding temperance. But this new-found interest in invoking Irish patriotism had its roots in the fertile popular culture of resentment against British rule. Indeed, the working-class response to the Sunday-closing campaign became increasingly shrill and socially divisive throughout the 1870s. Social critics who painted with broad strokes the debauched character of the working class evoked harsh responses from spokespersons from laboring communities and inflamed working-class opposition to Sunday closing. Several gatherings in favor of Sunday closing, for example, were marred by scuffles between opposing crowds. At a meeting between Dublin artisans and laborers opposed to Sunday closing and the Irish Chief Secretary, a house painter named John Ward claimed to speak on behalf of all working men in the city when he was reported as stating in his address that

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They considered it to be a libel on their class, and he knew of no greater degradation than that which it implied, there could be no greater degradation, no greater libel upon them, than to turn round and say there was a necessity for this measure, that a Sunday-closing bill was necessary in order to make them respectable. The working men of Dublin, the tradesmen and mechanics of Dublin, were not drunkards; he knew the public houses well, being a moderate man himself, and in taking his walk on Sunday through the suburbs, he failed to see the degradation or drunkenness which was imputed to them.26

The adversaries of the Sunday-closing movement spoke with increasing frequency of the libelous statements lodged against the laboring classes and the nation by temperance reformers. Beyond other specific grievances defenders of the pub relied upon a politics of “character” that was essentially reactive to the moral arrogance of temperance advocates. The guardians of the pub system never spoke as apologists for barroom excesses – the folk culture that nationalists seemed to harness in the taproom (consisting of toasts, songs, and poetry) found little expression in the arena of Irish public-house politics. Like other parties interested in the drink trade, the working men publicly displayed an obsession with moderation, a stance that appears at odds with the nature of Irish popular culture that celebrated heavy drinking as a rite of passage for lower-class males. The nationalist undercurrent within the politics of drink is writ large in the records of the assistants’ association. Unlike Dublin publicans, the assistants’ association acceded to requests from the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and the Land League to support on principle the closing of shops on special nationalist holidays. In addition, the assistants’ union advertised in its newsletter the activities of Young Ireland and the GAA and corresponded with the Land League over the need for closing licensed shops during political demonstrations. This development also reflected the expanding outlets in everyday life for expressions of Irish nationalist sentiments. Nationalist parades, holidays, and sporting events, growing in popularity in the 1870s, offered spaces and time away from work to show one’s colors. The minutes of the assistants’ association reveal that union participation was above all a matter of nationalist activism. The assistants were

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most active in such pursuits during the summer months, when nationalist commemorations were common. On 1 August 1875 an unnamed assistant reminded his fellow union members of the duty of all within their ranks to display their gratitude to the late Daniel O’Connell at the public ceremonies to be held in Dublin in honor of his birth: They would be degenerate sons of the men who[m] O’Connell emancipated if they did not assemble in their numbers on the sixth of August to prove it to the world that they are as grateful as any other class of men for the services rendered by the mighty and immortal dead – not that the assistants and their fathers derived most benefit from his indefatigable labours. It was the great Catholic families of the country who were most benefited, and who, I dare say, will be on that day conspicuous by their absence.27

Although O’Connell, according to this working-class view, had been “deserted” by the Catholic elite who had gained so much from his efforts, the speaker’s eulogy staked out an important role and “proper place” for the association; for the assistants would participate in the ceremonies in order “to honour him not only as the emancipator but as the unflinching advocate of a native parliament for Ireland.”28 In the following disturbed years of the Land War the assistants lent their support to numerous nationalist demonstrations, including protests calling for a settlement of the “land question” and the 1882 centenary celebrations commemorating “the Volunteers of 1782.” For an assistant named Anglin, the best way “to celebrate the latter” was “to bring together the assistants and imitate the Volunteers [ . . . ] who accomplished their work by unity and moral force.”29 For union members the most effective means of opposing Anglicization was organizational strength. The assistants saw support for the nationalist movement – and the “recreation movement” (as assistants called it) that would allow members time to participate in nationalist activities – as a way of raising their numbers and political influence. More vehemently nationalist in tone and in action, the licensed grocers and vintners’ assistants also countered temperance reformers by emphasizing their non-Irish character. The president of the assistants’ association stressed the Scottish element in the temperance movement and took aim at its most prominent leader in Ireland, T.W. Russell: “He thought it was too bad as Irishmen that they should be lectured and dictated

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to by this Scotch intruder.”30 Like the Welsh Chartists of the previous generation, Irish nationalists in the retail drink trade, especially those who worked behind the counters and bars in Dublin, saw the sponsors of temperance legislation as enemies of the working man as well as of the “Irish” nation. Following the lead of their assistants, Dublin publicans emphasized the “fanatical” and “non-Irish” attitudes toward the drink trade of those Conservative and Protestant members of parliament who represented Ulster districts. Increasingly, publicans claimed that the “intemperate” views of temperance politicians were arrogant claims based on misunderstandings of the Irish masses. The LGVPA passed a resolution in June 1884 proclaiming that “we regard it as both impolitic and unjust to legislate for this country in deference to the sabbatarian feeling of the Scottish people and the Scottish colonists of Ulster, and we earnestly urge upon the Irish representatives the duty of protecting the people from such oppressive and obnoxious legislation.”31 The explicit labeling by the LGVPA of Sunday closing as a sabbatarian threat marked an intensification of sectarian rhetoric, usually the preserve of their working-class apprentices.

III By the late 1870s Irish nationalism had attained a degree of popularity and respectability that it had not possessed in earlier decades. Publicans were at the center of the emerging Catholic middle class that pragmatically joined the Home Rule movement by the end of the 1870s. More importantly, LGVPA organizational growth, especially after 1880, no doubt contributed to the respectable image associated with moderate, non-revolutionary nationalism among Catholics living in the south.32 Though temperance reformers in Ireland were also a highly vocal group of influential reformers inside the broad spectrum of the Home Rule coalition, the experienced leadership of the LGVPA in Dublin and the National Defence League in the countryside welded economic and legal concerns together with the broad objective of Home Rule. Given the well-placed position of the publicans – located as they were throughout both rural and urban locales – for exercising a leadership role in politics and blending local, national, and nationalist concerns, the LGVPA

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constituted a powerful force within the conservative wing of the Home Rule movement. This was especially the case by 1882, when during the course of that chaotic year in Irish politics the Irish Parlimentarian Party moved considerably to the right, and left-wing activists lost influence with rank-and-file members of Parnell’s party.33 One of the immediate results of the unprecedented political activism of the LGVPA during the Sunday-closing debates was the considerable expansion of vintner politics.34 The vigorous involvement of the LGVPA in the 1880 parliamentary election broke with its previous position of maintaining a low profile in general elections, a development that is illustrative of a new political confidence, realignments within parliamentary politics, and a fresh determination on the part of Dublin vintners to modernize the political influence of the association. Outraged at an electoral challenge “aimed at winning a second Conservative seat” for Dublin city, Francis Devine introduced from the floor of an association meeting a resolution that called on members “to repel a calumnious approach frequently cast upon their political integrity by employing their untiring energies as electors and citizens to secure the triumphant return of the nationalist candidates Messrs. Brooks and Lyons.”35 Although vintners had certainly engaged in political contests in the past, seldom had they passed resolutions aired in the daily press, nor had they sent circulars to members requesting votes for a particular candidate.36 But the 1880 Dublin election, bitterly contested between Home Rule, Liberal, and Tory candidates, saw the association mobilizing to secure victories for those who were both “most friendly” to the trade and supportive of Home Rule principles.37 With nationalists gaining electoral support, the LGVPA increasingly spurned Tory candidates, breaking ranks with kindred brewer and trade associations in England, organizations with which the LGVPA had been coordinating efforts since the early 1860s. With the 1880 election, as it became clear that the Parnellites represented a considerable political force, the LGVPA turned to nationalist candidates and reached out to the Irish provinces for political backing – to those regions where the political organization of the Land League had brought victory to Parnellite nominees. During the general election the issue of public sobriety led some temperance-minded political advocates to oppose brewer-family interests. In a rather unusual alliance between drink-trade and temperance

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proponents, both camps opposed the Tory candidacy of Sir Edward Arthur Guinness.38 The fact that the LGVPA actively repudiated Guinness’s bid for re-election indicates the growing split between manufacturing and retail-trade interests and the increasingly distinctive political position of the Irish trade from that of its counterpart on the British mainland.39 Furthermore, this reconfiguration illustrates that the politics surrounding drink in the 1880s did not conform to a simple binary model defined by the two mutually opposed temperance and drink forces. In Ireland the principle of Home Rule, expressed by Charles Stewart Parnell as a precept based on political self-reliance, found ready adherents in both temperance and drink circles.40 As William Gladstone would indeed strategize, the issue of Home Rule could overshadow the political divisions of faddist reformers and other entrenched interest groups. The general election of 1880 made this clear in Ireland, where the “drink question,” while still generating a considerable amount of public comment, nonetheless now needed to be framed in a nationalist discourse. In an effort to demonize candidates connected with the drink trade, the temperance campaign blurred nationalism, respectability, and opposition to a drink industry bent (so they alleged) on robbing the nation of its virtue. Writing in the Freeman’s Journal, a temperance advocate predicted that it would be “the honest tradesman” who would oppose the two Tory candidates, James Stirling and Sir Edward Arthur Guinness, in the impending election because, as his advertisement proclaimed, “the self-respecting temperance men of Dublin will know how to value at its proper price the entanglements sought to be thrown around them by the enemies of their country.”41 More descriptively, the writer cautioned his readers that before voting for a drink-friendly candidate, he would “first” have to “tear down the portraits of the saints and patriots who vivify the walls of that home to which he brought the Irish bride and at whose knees his children now say their prayers.”42 Voting for the drink interest entailed, so the advertisement alleged, a compulsory forfeiture by the voter of “his little library, the temperance medal hung around his father’s neck by Father Mathew,” and “the Repeal card won by honest service under the Liberator [O’Connell].”43 By cataloguing in this way the constituent features of the ideal Irish tradesman, the advertisement blended images of a domestic, national, and temperance import in order to appeal to voters.

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This rhetorical strategy of combining respectability and Irish nationalism was not lost on the LGVPA. Dublin vintners recognized the vulnerability of their trade to attacks that suggested disloyalty or – worse yet – sedition. Prompted by the palpable threat of riot and rebellion in rural Ireland, the repression authorized by Dublin Castle in 1881, and the still-fresh stigma on public houses carried over from the Fenian unrest, the LGVPA headquarters issued circulars to the trade throughout the Land War cautioning members to be vigilant during these difficult times. Caught amid the swirling scenes of evictions and boycotts taking place in rural Ireland, country publicans found themselves at the mercy of licensing magistrates who were seeking to restore order in troubled districts. In 1881, Michael Dwyer warned LGVPA members “to keep clear of anything that might be used as a handle against them by their enemies.” According to Dwyer, a pronouncement made by a Catholic bishop that “licensed houses were used as meeting places for conspirators” had done much to sully the reputation of the licensed trade, and as a result, “great prejudice had been raised against them by the advocates of Sunday closing.”44 In contrast to periods of unrest in the 1860s, the LGVPA at this stage actively undertook to challenge incriminating comments such as this, sometimes succeeding in procuring a retraction or a qualification of the statement. In this particular instance, in fact, the cleric in question evidently acquiesced to the LGVPA and offered a “denial” of the “imputation” against “respectable traders” such as those in the LGVPA.45 The interpretation given by temperance reformers to Hancock’s parliamentary inquiry into the operation of the Sunday Closing Act also alleged a link between the policing of insobriety and nationalist unrest. The report showed that arrests made by the police for drunkenness and disorderly conduct were highest in Connacht, notoriously the most rebellious region of the country, while all across the rest of Ireland, such arrests declined between 1877 and 1880. Temperance reformers quite naturally pointed to these statistics as evidence that the Sunday Closing Act helped to create a more sober and lawful Ireland. For example, T.W. Russell, the temperance reformer and future MP for Tyrone South, explained the ineffectiveness of Sunday closing in the west of Ireland by pointing to the general social “distress” so prevalent there.46 For Russell – and no doubt for others in the temperance movement – Sunday closing

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in Connacht had not been fairly tested owing to the agitation that continued to affect the region.47 Temperance reformers viewed the positive statistics for the remainder of the country as evidence of the benefits of the law. Responding to Russell’s charge that the Sunday Closing Act had been the cause of the fall in consumption of alcohol all across the country, Michael Dwyer, secretary of the LGVPA, countered by insisting that the “bad weather and the bad harvests and other elements which tended to the misfortune of the country” were responsible for the slump in consumption.48 The drink question in Ireland was politicized amid the larger political context framed by the land and Home Rule questions. Comparison between the “drink question” and the distress in rural districts became in fact a rhetorical convention in Irish politics of the day. Often appearing in the same newspaper pages or adjacent articles, coverage of the popular land and drink issues drew the attention of both temperance reformers and opponents of Home Rule, who saw in police statistics on arrests for ´ drunkenness a chance to berate publicans and public-house habitues. Contending that “poverty was at the root of the difficulties in Ireland,” Mitchell Henry took aim at the “unjust system of taxation” that weighed so heavily on the people. With the amount spent on rents and taxes on spirits roughly equivalent to each other, Henry asked if there were “any sane man who [would] say that they [the landlords] inflict the same amount of injury on their country which is inflicted upon it by the publicans?”49 For Henry, publicans were responsible for inflicting at least as much social damage as those beleaguered landlords so condemned by Irish popular opinion. Another writer noted in the Times of London the comparatively high per-capita consumption of legal whiskey in Ireland, a statistic made to appear much worse by the disproportionate number of illegal stills detected by the Department of Inland Revenue.50 In contrast, what the licensed trade read in these statistics was the unfair treatment of publicans in Connacht.51 For the rest of the country, where records showed a decline in arrests, publicans emphasized the longer-term and widespread decreases in apprehensions for drunkenness, which had begun well before the Sunday Closing Act of 1878. While Dublin vintners vouched in the public press for the respectability of the public-house trade, they also began to defend more actively publicans in the countryside accused of misdeeds in carrying on their

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businesses. The resistance to police authority by rural publicans occurred on three different levels during the agrarian unrest of the 1880s: refusals to allow entry onto their premises, denials of refreshments or food to police or notorious Protestants in the community, and refusals to provide services in support of police duties, such as renting horses and carts to constables. By the mid-1880s complaints about such conduct had become a centerpiece of temperance attacks on the trade, a development that no doubt did little to establish a popular foothold for temperance within nationalist communities. The stricter regulation authorized by the Sunday Closing Act only exacerbated the poor relations between the police and vintners. Some country publicans in Sligo complained to the LGVPA that the act encouraged police espionage aimed at rooting out agrarian militants, and though “the police force had lately been augmented,” they seemed powerless to “prevent” Sunday drinking.52 The police were allegedly checking whether publicans were serving only bona fide travelers, but Sligo publicans claimed in 1880 that the act “has been unjustly used by the authorities to harass” the supporters of the Land League.53 These reports also gave evidence of the growing strength and broadening goals of the organized licensed trade, as nationalist publicans – or publicans who catered to a nationalist clientele – increasingly turned to groups such as the LGVPA to defend their rights. Thus it appears that many country publicans, encouraged by Dublin licensed retailers, entered the politically charged world of vintner politics that revolved around the city of Dublin. Communication and coordination with publicans in the capital city not only established a firm basis for rapid mobilization but also became a vehicle by which isolated rural publicans could imagine themselves as part of a larger nation. During the Land War publicans and their allies emphasized the particularly delicate position of the licensed trader. On the one hand, publicans needed to maintain their reputations as fair-minded business people who carried on their trade in an appropriate fashion in order to procure the annual renewal of their licenses. On the other hand, with boycotters and public opinion generally turning against the symbols of British rule in the early 1880s, vintners found it necessary, beyond any sympathies that they might have shared with the agrarian movement, to comply with populist pressure in conducting their businesses under the government policy

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of coercion. In 1881 the Dublin licensing authorities applied pressure to have stipulations added to the official procedures at annual renewal sessions that the denial of any services to constables would result in the revocation of the offending publican’s license. The LGVPA chafed at such proposals and arranged for a delegation to meet with William Edward Forster, the Irish chief secretary. Heading up the vintner delegation was Charles Dawson, a former lord mayor of Dublin and MP for Carlow town, who claimed that the actions of the police and magistrates amounted to “actual persecution.”54 Dawson underscored the “difficult” role of the licensed trader by pointing first to the helplessness of a publican confronting a riotous mob: “In the south one of the most conspicuous victims of ‘boycotting’ has been a respectable licensed trader who was mindful of his legal obligations rather than of the popular excitement around him.” In this case and others like it, the trader’s business had incurred substantial losses. Similarly, “in many of the cases in which opposition to renewal certificates has been entered,” Dawson explained to Forster, “the unlawful acts complained of have originated in the absence of legal protection,” and cases were unjustly decided because of the lack of an adequate consideration of the context of the breach of the law.55 In his appeal to Forster, Dawson pointed to the economic necessity which underlay the problem and painted a scenario of one such instance that in his view exemplified many others: A respectable young woman, carrying on the principal commercial hotel in a country town, is served with notice of objection, setting forth that she is a bad character because she refused to give her cars for police use at evictions. Her hotel is the chief hotel for commercial gentlemen, who are constantly on the road taking orders for English, Scotch, or Irish firms, and it is for their convenience that she keeps the cars. Now, it is quite certain [that]had she given the cars to the police, these commercial gentlemen would be placed in a position of the utmost difficulty and should either forsake her hotel [in which case she might have to close her doors] or return to their employers without the usual orders for goods.56

As traders charged with the responsibility of serving the public, publicans had their hands tied when it came to serving constables, Dawson argued. Furthermore, to ignore popular sentiment and cater to the

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demands of the police could subject publicans to “the intimidation of the mob.”57 Such a recognition of the plight of the publican was not just an admission of sympathy for vintners but also an acknowledgment of the irresistible force of the social movement attached to the Land League. The LGVPA’s petitions to Forster made little impression on the notoriously tough-minded executive. Instead of regarding publicans as taking prudent actions to preserve the peace, the Chief Secretary saw the refusals of service and refreshment to police as the “obstruction or frustration of the execution of the law.” According to Forster, the “nature” of a publican’s license “bound” the holder “to give to everybody” access to the services and goods available for sale. He proclaimed that “the constables are engaged in the duty of protecting the civil process,” and police objections to renewals of licenses for offending publicans were hardly “surprising.” In laying the matter to rest, the Chief Secretary icily observed, “You [the LGVPA deputation] stated you wished to banish politics from this interview. I wish to do likewise. But we must take things as they stand.”58 The vulnerable position in which country publicans found themselves, situated as they were between a nationalist clientele and the police and magistrates, compelled many to join the association. Among the most important benefits of membership were the legal assistance at the annual licensing sessions, access to powerful political figures, and, not least of all, the ability of publicans to persuade magistrates to adopt a “more sympathetic interpretation of the law.”59 According to the LGVPA President, country publicans were eager to join an “organisation which would stand for them, and which had the interest and the ability to make the magistrates construe the act of parliament in a proper manner.”60 Throughout the agitation in the countryside the LGVPA sent deputations to take advantage of the unrest. In the early 1880s, spearheaded by the LGVPA in Dublin, the association founded the National Defence League, a trade association designed to defend country publicans from unfair or politically motivated attacks on their licenses. Recruitment drives in Sligo, Galway, Kildare, Carlow, and Cork all proved successful, thus gaining for the association new subscriptions and the beginning of a “national” – if not “nationalist” – association. Moreover, in 1886 the association hired a full-time solicitor “who would take up every legitimate case of a member.”61

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Complaints that publicans were supporting criminal elements within the nationalist movement filled the popular daily press.62 Publicans who displayed nationalist banners and flags outside their businesses were sometimes forced to remove the items or had their licenses canceled at the subsequent annual sessions.63 In one of the more outspoken public denunciations of police raids on public houses, a special meeting was called “by advertisement” to protest against a police raid that included searches of some of the more prominent public houses in Dublin.64 Unlike the situation during the Fenian agitation two decades earlier, the LGVPA in Dublin, while warning against the dangers of harboring seditious meetings, was quick to condemn police forays into licensed houses and to offer legal assistance to beleaguered publicans. It offered aid, for example, to a Drogheda publican named Elcock who had flown nationalist banners and flags outside his premises in order to welcome the visit of Charles Stewart Parnell to the town in 1884. The organized vintners in Dublin defended their fellow traders by appealing to the rights of the free Irishman of good character to carry on a “respectable” trade. Publicans had long claimed that by limiting or prohibiting the retail drink trade, the authorities would succeed only in pushing “public” drinking into the mountains and bogs of the countryside and the back alleys and cul-de-sacs of the cities. During the land agitation of the 1880s such concerns assumed a new importance; the Irish practice of frequenting shebeens was soon perceived, as during the Fenian unrest of the 1860s, as a threat to public order. For their part the licensed vintners acknowledged that on Sundays in the countryside, where public houses were closed, vintners sometimes evaded the law by setting up secret entrances to their premises. In some cases in which publicans had “a friendly neighbour,” business continued “by means of a hole in the wall.”65 Indeed, secret entrances to public houses did appear common, both in the city and in the countryside. The existence of hidden entryways and rooms, along with secret signals and passwords required for entry, were among the most frequent complaints voiced by constables before parliament. One of the most complicated points of enforcement was the clause that dealt with the treatment of bona fide travelers in the Sunday Closing Act of 1878. Those considered bona fide travelers had traditionally been afforded special rights under the licensing laws.

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Stemming from the pre-modern tradition of accommodating those making long-distance trips during a time when transportation by land was arduous and often dangerous, the customary conceptual grounding that extended special privileges to such travelers appeared increasingly at odds with the age of rapid transit.66 More efficient forms of transportation – improved roads, railways, trolleys, and even bicycles – all had the effect of reducing travel times. These modern forms of transportation challenged the usual definition of a bona fide traveler, making the traditional 6-mile limit more a leisurely outing than a real journey. The Sunday Closing Act of 1878, however, shortened the distance. According to this law, people were bona fide travelers if they traveled only 3 miles. At the time this provision represented a compromise, allowing country vintners with premises outside of the five cities exempted from the restrictions to retain the bona fide-traveler business. Of course, by shortening the qualifying distance, the provision also had the effect of stimulating such trade and, as the critics of the measure charged, encouraging flagrant violations of the law. During the nationalist agitation this provision appeared increasingly at odds with the original aims of Sunday closing. The 1888 parliamentary investigation of Sunday closing highlighted many of the social problems for which the bona fide-traveler clause was allegedly responsible. As rail and tramway commuting shortened the travel times especially in the towns and villages surrounding the five exempted Irish cities in the 1880s and 1890s, the clause appeared increasingly an unworkable provision. Bicyclists too could take advantage of this clause – the activity was popular among Irish nationalists at the time. R. Patrick Troy, a stone carver, emphatically rejected Sunday closing on the grounds that it represented sabbatarian legislation. Speaking on behalf of a working men’s club, Troy described his group as consisting of a majority of “nationalists” who were “most Catholic” and involved on Sunday with sporting activities sponsored by the Gaelic Athletic Association. Troy emphatically articulated the importance of Sunday for these members: They hold their meetings on Sunday, and they would not be sabbatarians. We have men now that take an interest in bicycles and go for long rides on Sundays, and they cannot be sabbatarians; and we have members who go to see all these things, and they cannot be sabbatarians.67

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As for those publicans who did run a legitimate business, serving only those they knew to be bona fide travelers, the LGVPA claimed that they were often unfairly harassed by police who stood sentry outside their doors all Sunday long in order to monitor the bona fidetraveler traffic. The licensing laws, constructed by an English legislature which many Irish publicans considered “foreign,” were viewed as tools for entrapping otherwise law-abiding citizens. The bona fide-traveler clause thus offered the LGVPA an opportunity to criticize the police without directly showing sympathy for nationalist groups who sometimes met in public houses. In addition to vintner charges of unfair police procedures, publicans complained of their treatment before local magistrates and appealed to the rights of the “Irish free citizen.” One LGVPA member condemned the magistrates because “he considered it unfair to punish” a publican for “any act or acts unconnected with the licensed business [ . . . ] in his capacity as a free citizen.” Since “great latitude was allowed to magistrates [ . . . ] in saying whether a licensed trader was or was not a man of ‘good character,’ ” the speaker delineated and defended publicans’ civil rights.68 Publicans, according to this view, possessed the freedom of political association as long as this did not diminish the “character” of the vintner’s business management. The LGVPA continued throughout the 1880s to denounce the overly subjective manner in which magistrates authorized new public-house licenses. In their efforts to unmask the prejudicial opinions handed down by the licensing courts, vintners found a ready ally in the nationalist MP John Dillon, who intervened on behalf of traders by claiming that “the landlords throughout the country or their agents on the bench were too ready to grant new licenses for houses in which they happened to be interested.”69 In the same way that vintners accused magistrates of political bias in the authorization of new licenses, they and their allies in parliament were also quick to condemn politically motivated withdrawals of licenses on the grounds of a publican’s alleged “bad character.” When asked by the investigating committee on Sunday closing in 1888 if there was “any different attitude maintained by the police towards houses known to be nationalist as compared with others,” Maurice Healy (MP for Cork city) replied that “it is almost inevitable it should be so.” According to Healy, those “prominent” publicans in the country who displayed

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“strong political opinions” were quite likely to be singled out at licensing sessions. It was the “gross misuse” of the licensing laws “for the purpose of oppressing and harassing [ . . . ] political opponents” and “injuring nationalist publicans” that Healy identified as most damaging to the licensed trade as a whole.70

IV Dublin publicans embraced Parnellism in the mid-1880s and adopted a Home Rule ideology that staked a claim to issues of immediate domestic import to Ireland. From the vantage point of the Irish drink trade, Charles Stewart Parnell’s emergence as a political colossus offered an opportunity to derail the temperance agenda of the Liberal Party. Following the general elections of 1885 and 1886, Parnell’s followers exercised great influence in the House of Commons at Westminster. On 28 March 1886, seeking political support, a group of Irish publicans from the LGVPA met with Parnell in an effort to counter freshly drafted Sunday-closing legislation. In the context of the Home Rule movement in the mid-1880s, the deputation saw a new and more advantageous reason for invoking the uniqueness of the Irish case. With a broad-based movement in Ireland mobilized behind Parnell and his party, a definitive statement identifying the drink trade as a uniquely “Irish” issue would, it was hoped, discredit, if not destroy altogether, the temperance movement’s close relationship with Irish nationalism. Moreover, Gladstone’s adoption of home rule as a legislative principle offered the possibility of overshadowing the temperance wing of the party and neutralizing its program. The adoption of Home Rule by Gladstone’s government initiated a long period of tactical obstruction of all legislation touching on the drink trade. The LGVPA lobbied nationalist leaders to embrace Irish self-governance over control of internal matters such as the retail drink trade. In a meeting between Parnell and representatives of the LGVPA, according to its secretary, the delegation of publicans protested against “having the Irish vintners’ means of livelihood endangered, and the Irish peoples’ social rights experimented [with] by that powerful body of Englishmen.”71 The vintner representatives sent to London wasted no time in putting their case in historical terms, complaining that new temperance legislation represented one more example of English “social experimentation” at

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the expense of the Irish people. The secretary’s account of the deputation’s meeting with Parnell emphasized the untimely appearance of the proposed legislation: It was manifestly unfair that their interests should be assailed by an English majority, just at a time when a native legislature was about to be given to our country. English legislators had been continually experimenting on this country in matters of this kind, but the present was not the moment for such experiments, nor was the present English House of Commons constituted in such a matter as to treat the subject impartially. Therefore, they asked Mr. Parnell, as a leader of the great Irish parliamentary party, to express his opinions as to whether such matters should not be relegated to an Irish legislature. He [Parnell] said he believed all such legislation should be dealt with in an Irish parliament.72

In a speech before parliament on 2 April 1886, Parnell acceded to the vintners’ petition, declaring publicly that Ireland should exercise control over all such domestic matters as that of the liquor-licensing laws and their enforcement. This speech had the intended effect, in the view of the licensed trade at least, of officially tying together the national and liquor questions. Keeping vigil over the moves of the Irish temperance lobby, Irish drink sellers attempted to stall all legislation affecting liquor retailing until the national question could be solved. For the next 30 years Irish vintners would cite this speech when countering temperance legislation for Ireland, appropriating the image of Parnell and his leadership to legitimize their demands. For Parnell, it seems, Home Rule and the drink question were two separate issues. He never displayed much of an interest in temperance or any other legislation affecting public houses. But he could ill afford to lose the backing of publicans, who were among the most experienced political organizers and leaders in the country. As the land question assumed an increasingly subordinate role to Home Rule, Parnell would rely on the more conservative forces in his coalition – like licensed traders – for support. Since left-wing support for Parnell was far from assured by the mid-1880s, the endorsement of the LGVPA was all the more crucial to a strong political base at home. The immediate effect of Parnell’s nationalist stance on the drink question was dramatic. On the heels of his endorsement of the vintners’ position, legislation that would have banned child messengers from entering

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public houses to convey drink and other goods back to their families was dropped owing to his party’s opposition. According to the LGVPA’s viewpoint, if the Child Messenger Bill had “become law, a poor working man dare not send his child out for a pint of porter without a baptismal certificate.”73 In a country already beset by troubled relations between constables and citizens, the LGVPA proclaimed, Ireland hardly needed a bill that would heap “labour on the police [ . . . ] anxiety and trouble on the licensed trader [ . . . and] annoyance to the poorer classes of the community.”74 In contrast to England, where, vintners claimed, there existed ample facilities beyond the public house for acquiring food and drink, the Irish case was markedly different. The increasingly close-knit network of publicans throughout Ireland disseminated leaflets to members that conflated the issues of Irish nationalism and opposition to virtually all temperance legislation. On 15 May 1886 the LGVPA sent a circular to all its members, assuring them that the result of this declaration [Parnell’s] at the present time, when restrictive legislation can be rushed through [with] such facility, we look on as most important, for it amounts to a protest on the part of Mr. Parnell against any attempt at tampering with our Irish liquor laws in the imperial House of Commons.75

On the introduction of an early-Saturday-closing bill in parliament, the LGVPA printed a circular condemning the licensing system as encouraging “the evasion of the law, the social abuse, and the loss to the licensed trade” so ubiquitous in Ireland.76 Widely distributed circulars of this sort were common, especially after Parnell’s endorsement. The LGVPA in Dublin adeptly used its alliance with Parnell in its recruitment drives in the countryside. In an initiative designed to organize the traders of Carlow, the LGVPA Secretary stated that “as long as Parnell was at the head of affairs in Ireland, no class would be unfairly treated.”77 The LGVPA Chairman went so far as to compare the unity and organization of the Land League with that of the vintners, urging publicans to mobilize the trade “so that when the present great agitation was concluded, the trade would be able to stand up like the farmers and all others whose rights were threatened.”78

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In response to the political machine of the LGVPA, temperance reformers spoke in terms that suggested a political cabal of publicans in Ireland, and especially in Dublin. In their rhetorical strategies English reformers invoked the same associations between public houses and Parnellism that had served them so well during the Fenian unrest of the 1860s. Wilfred Lawson, Liberal MP for Carlisle, remarked that “the publicans are nearly as powerful as the priests in politics.” In Ireland, Lawson declared, “the making and selling of drink is the one paying occupation.” Scorning the “corporation of Dublin” as “that bright example of nationalism,” Lawson made a common – yet still provocative – link between the “retail drink sellers” in Dublin and the salience of crime and corruption in Ireland. Lawson’s condemnation extended to Irish MPs “under the Parnell regime,” who, he alleged, were “the proprietors of common shebeen houses.” As his argument gave way to political rant, Lawson charged that the “subversion included Parnell himself.”79 The construction during the 1880s of the network which bound together the drink trade, besides defending publicans from attacks by their political foes served also as a vehicle for sustaining and expanding a distinct alternative to the brand of nationalism espoused by cultural nationalists at the head of the temperance movement in Ireland. Like those cultural revivalists, the LGVPA had determined by the 1880s that the provincial towns and local villages of rural Ireland held a special significance in the political as well as cultural defense of the Irish drink trade – though the attention of the LGVPA to the political concerns of small farmers was a matter of political necessity rather than a recognition of the purity of rural virtues. The strategic reorientation of Dublin vintners signaled a forward-looking strategy based on rapid communications, modern advertising, and efficient political organization. The adoption by the LGVPA of a politics of drink based on patriotisms suggests the extent to which, by the 1880s, vintners hoped to capitalize on the successes of the National League and the Home Rule movement. Before Home Rule came to capture widespread popular support, LGVPA leaders had rarely lobbied the state on issues outside of their own direct economic interests. This sole reliance on the Irish Parliamentary Party would prove rather short-lived, however, for after the devastating split in the party in December 1890 and the untimely death of Parnell in

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1891, the LGVPA turned again to its traditional allies across the Irish Sea for political protection in parliament. Despite this change in strategy, however, the LGVPA would continue, while working away from Westminster, to employ the nationalist stance adopted first during the turbulent Parnell years.

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5 Trade Growth and Modernization

I The decade between the 1888 parliamentary investigation into the operation of the Sunday Closing Act in Ireland and the royal commission’s massive inquiry into the licensing system at the end of the 1890s was a time marked by trade expansion and the retreating legislative threat of temperance-inspired restrictions on the Irish drink trade. In fact, the 1890s constituted a golden age of sorts for the industry. More precisely, the fin de si`ecle in Ireland was a period when developments advantageous to the trade both bolstered the public esteem in which publicans were held and gave economic advantage to those pubs well placed and resourceful enough to take advantage of occupational, demographic, and cultural changes in the country. The developments that were most advantageous to the retail trade in Dublin included a mix of factors. First, there was a general consensus, put forth and supported in parliament by the LGVPA, that any fundamental settling of the “drink question” would have to wait until the nationalist question could first be resolved. Second, new urban-based market forces prompted a considerable expansion of public-house services to both working- and middle-class patrons. Third, the LGVPA put to good use its organizational network in order to exercise greater control over trade practices that cut against the grain of market principles. Undergirding and foreshadowing the generally friendly stance of the British Government toward the drink trade in the 1890s was the 1888 parliamentary investigation, which drew considerably fewer caustic

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criticisms from the retail liquor trade in Ireland than had official inquiries of a similar nature in the 1870s. With reports showing across-the-board falls in arrests for drunkenness and alcohol consumption, the need for reform appeared to have lost much of its momentum in the face of the statistics. Although the numbers may have reinforced a positive image of the partial Sunday-closing bill, passage of new measures to restrict the trade was not a pressing matter for a legislature grappling with the urgent questions of Home Rule and land reform. Maurice Healey, a nationalist MP from Cork, told the investigating parliamentary committee in 1888 that, among nationalists who were also temperance advocates, “the temperance question, like all other questions,” had lost much of its popular appeal, “owing,” as he saw it, “to the prominence the nationalist question has received.”1 Frederick Richard Faulkner, the recorder for Dublin, in his testimony before the investigating committee in 1888, pointed to certain environmental improvements in the city: “better thoroughfares, better house scavenging, [and] some building of labourers’ houses” had all contributed to the encouraging statistics.2 In addition, Faulkner cited the “libraries act” as having had a positive cultural impact on the working classes of the city. More importantly, official witnesses before the parliamentary committee tended to emphasize, as did Faulkner himself, that the problem of drunkenness could be solved only by changing “the habits” of the people themselves.3 Thus, while legislation aimed at improving the environment in which the working classes lived could have a beneficial impact on the habits of the people, encircling the drink trade with more regulations and restrictions appeared to be a less effective means of checking the problem than it had in earlier decades. As with the visible improvements in the city itself, the 1890s witnessed the growth and increasing size of many publican businesses as well as the physical improvement of these properties. The rising value of retail licenses during the 1890s and the expanding variety of pub businesses suggest increases in the potential for public-house profitability. While the years after 1900 would see a return of hard times for some pubs unable to meet stiff competition, afford the steep increases in taxes and licensure, or resist magistrates and police eager to extinguish those houses deemed superfluous to the public need, the 1890s were for the vintners a time of political dominance. This was underwritten by economic progress for

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public houses in Dublin and the expanding suburbs, and a notoriously efficient political machine both at home and at Westminster. In this period of greater public-house diversification, broader trade consolidation, and an increased determination to wage a multifaceted public-relations campaign, Dublin vintners experienced a sense of political and social primacy which allowed them to spend time and resources on strengthening business practices within their association. The abolition of the custom among publicans of giving Christmas boxes to public house employees and the extension of synchronized pricing, for example, became increasingly important to vintners during the final decade of the nineteenth century. As another indication of vintner success and confidence, the LGVPA records reveal a marked increase in the financial and logistical planning of lavish banquets and luxurious country excursions to the west of Ireland on trains specifically outfitted for the association. While the temperance movement attempted to capitalize on the visible increases in the wealth and status of the LGPVA by pointing to the materialism and greed of the trade, attacks from this quarter remained largely isolated and ineffectual forays against an entrenched and wellconnected business community. Despite temperance initiatives at this time to recast its mission and organizational strength in light of its lackluster achievements in the 1880s, this restructuring would take time, and it was not until the late 1890s that Cardinal Paul Cullen’s vision of a militant organization of teetotalers would affect a serious shake-up within the drink trade and Irish society generally. Until then, the shrillness of temperance attacks on the character and alleged monopoly of the drink trade suggests the rearguard defensive position of a harried temperance movement set against a forward-moving drink trade.

II The political preeminence of the LGVPA was perhaps most profound within the municipal government of Dublin. In an illustrative example of its local influence the LGVPA enjoyed considerable representation within Dublin Corporation. Between 1880 and 1890 the number of publicans and grocers in the corporation nearly doubled, from nine in 1880 to 16 in 1890. Through the 1890s and 1900s the LGVPA consolidated and expanded its influence in the corporation. In many respects

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this political influence appeared to pay off, for the corporation in general granted the drink trade, wherever possible, wide latitude in the conducting of its businesses. Moreover, it generally supported the political platform of the LGVPA, leading temperance reformers to condemn the body as nothing more than a thinly veiled cabal of the city’s licensed vintners.4 The political effectiveness of the LGVPA in the 1890s depended on cooperation among association members in Dublin and on a quick-fire rebuttal strategy for defending the trade. The execution and substance of anti-temperance refutations by the LGVPA were increasingly systematic, professional, and in line with a middle-class moral framework that condemned such individual excess as drunkenness. LGVPA officials pointed to their association’s successes, respectability, and wealth as testimony to their respectable credentials as business owners. Their embrace of market principles and the rights of property were not only part and parcel of their economic successes but also played a large role in their highly successful public responses to temperance advocates. Some of the most noteworthy victories of the trade took place in the courts. Clear judicial triumphs for publicans in the 1890s established a more flexible interpretation of licensing protocols and served to enlarge the rights of the license holder along lines that privileged private interests over public needs. In the much-watched suit of Smith vs. The Justices of Cavan in 1892, the LGVPA continued to build upon a succession of legal triumphs. In this “important and celebrated case” for Irish publicans, the justices of the Court of Queen’s Bench reaffirmed their earlier decision by finding that transfers of public-house licenses to a new locale were valid regardless of the public need in the surrounding vicinity. While in England the case of Sharp vs. Wakefield had upheld the right of licensing justices to consider the number of existing public houses already in a neighborhood before permitting the transfer, this Irish case marked out a decidedly more pro-vintner interpretation of the law.5 This legal judgment, taken together with the poor showing of support for temperance legislation in the same year, led the Chairman of the LGVPA to declare that “1892 will be a memorable one in the annals of the licensed trade” for its successes at home and at Westminster.6 In the world of vintner politics the Irish trade benefited in the 1890s from a renewal of cooperative efforts with the English trade societies.

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During the 1870s and 1880s the Irish trade had frequently relied on its own parliamentary representatives for defense against intrusive laws. This was particularly the case during Parnell’s tenure as head of the Home Rule movement. By the late 1880s, however, while still relying on strategies that underlined the exceptional case of Ireland, relations between the Dublin-based trade and English associations appeared to be improving. Reporting on a conference of the National Defence League held in London in 1889, the LGVPA representative informed the executive committee back in Dublin that the chairman of “the London society” had complimented the Irish trade in his address to the conference and called attention to “a much better feeling [ . . . ] at present existing” between the two respective groups.7 Having lavished his praise on “the difference in the character of the representatives who had recently gone to London from Dublin” and the on “spirit which animated their address,” this London official was quite likely referring to changes in parliamentary strategies. A move away from obstreperous parliamentary maneuvers on the part of the Home Rule party to an emphasis on more cooperative tactics and individual alliances with MPs, regardless of party affiliation, distinguished the LGVPA’s parliamentary plan of action.8 In 1890 the Secretary of the LGVPA reported to the association’s members that their “parliamentary defences had been considerably strengthened by the adhesion of many members of the house who hitherto were rather neutral or hostile, and by the greatly increased heartiness of the cooperation of the London and provincial trade organisations.”9 Further evidence of the close relations across the British Isles between the various liquor-trade associations was the meeting on 10 September 1890 of the parliamentary committee of the licensed victualers of the United Kingdom in Dublin, a previously unheard-of venue for the group.10 This more congenial relationship between the Dublin trade – a center point of Parnell’s parliamentary support – and other trade associations throughout the rest of the United Kingdom reflected larger political realignments within parliamentary politics. Whereas the Dublin trade had, during the Sunday-closing debates, banked on the parliamentary support of MPs representing provincial districts, such as N.D. Murphy and P.J. Smythe, by the 1890s their strongest defenders were those who had begun their careers as Dublin luminaries active in the

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public-house politics of the capital city. Perhaps this relative preeminence of the drink trade explains in part the lack of attention that this decade has received from historians; even students of British temperance have generally given short shrift to the 1890s.11 It was at least in part the removal of Charles Stewart Parnell from politics in 1891 that compelled the LGVPA to abandon its reliance on the strict parliamentary discipline which his leadership had provided. Instead, the LGVPA assembled a “watch committee” consisting of a handful of MPs who were friendly to trade interests. According to the minutes of the LGVPA, the watch committee in 1890 was composed of the following Irish MPs: Richard Power, J.C. Flynn, M.J. Kenny, Peter McDonald, D. O’Reilly, P.J. O’Brien, Joseph Nolan, William Abraham, and John O’Connor.12 While other parliamentary associates certainly joined this group occasionally, these listed members were the most unflinching and reliable allies of the trade; they endeavored, sometimes on a daily basis, to block temperance legislation on the floor of the House of Commons. At the head of the LGVPA’s watch committee were John O’Connor and Peter McDonald, who effectively functioned as the chief exponents of Dublin vintner interests in the Commons; the former had served as a Dublin alderman and vice-president of the LGVPA, and the latter had been lord mayor of Dublin and was a past chairman of the association. Thus, while the departure of Parnell from the political scene may have complicated the Home Rule agenda, the 1890s saw an unprecedented number of Irish publicans and anti-temperance figures rising to the highest echelons of political power. Though these MPs lacked the authority that Parnell had exercised over his party, their intimacy with the Dublin trade compensated in some respects for their comparative deficiency in political clout. Although the 1890s saw the introduction of both permissive and Sunday-closing bills in every annual parliamentary session, support for such restrictions generally decreased as the decade progressed. After 1897, Sunday-closing legislation for Ireland failed to receive a second reading in the House of Commons, a fact that reflected waning support in parliament and a lack of interest back in the home constituencies of Irish MPs. Looking back in celebration of a decade of increasingly impressive defensive legislative successes, and in a typically vitriolic condemnation of temperance, the author of the 1901 annual report of

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the LGVPA proclaimed that Sunday-closing legislation had “never possessed much vitality since 1897, when the majority on second reading was reduced to vanishing point.”13 Indeed, the year 1897 did appear to represent a watershed, at least for the prospects of passing the Sale of Intoxicating Liquors (Ireland) Bill, which included a provision for total Sunday closing. Prior to this date the legislation had enjoyed ironclad majorities on its second reading in the Commons, majorities that only rarely dropped below 100 votes; but in 1897 its majority on second reading shrank to merely 29.14 After narrowly passing on its second reading, the “Temperance Party,” according to the chairman of the LGVPA, was “quite successful in attaining a good place for the bill,” securing 2 May for the reading of the bill as the first order of business. In 1897 the Irish trade “succeeded in getting about fifty percent of the Irish vote [in the Commons], whereas in the past much of the party had been opposed.”15 Recognizing the import of the moment, the President of the Central Committee of the Liquor Trade asserted in 1897 that “if they made a determined stand now, it was possible that when next their opponents attacked them, they would be in a position to turn defeat into victory.”16 The decline of parliamentary support for temperance coincided with the developing political assertiveness and new political strategies of the LGVPA in Dublin. In order to insure that politicians congenial to trade interests received support from the LGVPA and the other trade associations throughout Ireland, Dublin publicans began in 1890 to distribute a list of questions that candidates for parliament would be asked before gaining the LGVPA’s endorsement. Building on this policy of official commendation of candidates friendly to the drink interest, the LGVPA circulated in 1892 to all members and kindred trade associations a “manifesto” calling on them to assist “in asserting our rights and in defending our common interests in parliament.”17 The manifesto, dated 20 June 1891, asked the entire trade to obtain “promises” from parliamentary nominees that they would “oppose all further restrictive and harassing legislation on the liquor trade by the imperial parliament.” Reacting to accusations of political obscurantism among publicans, most often made by temperance supporters, the manifesto offered three lines of argument against those who maintained that the retail trade was acting in a “selfish” and “unpatriotic” fashion. First, it proclaimed that “in these days” such

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political strategies and representations were carried out by all sectors of manufacturing and commerce: “The clergy of different denominations, the medical and other professions, the bankers, the great commercial bodies, the ship owners, the farmers, the labourers – all protect themselves in this way.”18 Second, the manifesto propagated the idea that the liquor trade represented a “great national industry” in which “a majority of the labouring and mechanical classes in the cities and large towns of Ireland” had acquired employment.19 Third, the document professed its members’ political legitimacy by alluding to recommendations in favor of the LGVPA “by all leaders of the Irish political parties,” who had actually encouraged this form of direct political activism.20 The political “command center” of the LGVPA also adopted in the late 1880s a rapid, almost reflexive form of defensive posturing in local politics. In 1890 the Secretary of the LGVPA reported that a temperance poster commissioned by the Irish Association for the Prevention of Intemperance (IAPI) was “very much in evidence across the city.”21 This temperance flier listed the members of the Catholic clergy who favored extending Sunday closing to the cities of Ireland. The public roster of prelates spurred the LGVPA to “order” an investigation and to “bring out” a poster that would serve as a counterweight to the offending placard. In order to contradict the temperance claim of a clerical mandate for Sunday closing, the LGVPA planned a poster of its own that would catalogue the members of the clergy who opposed the measure. Discrediting temperance claims occupied an increasing amount of the LGVPA’s efforts in the 1890s.22 The association’s executive committee took swift measures to denounce temperance literature by targeting offending posters, newspaper advertisements, and journal articles. In another example of the LGVPA’s attentiveness to potentially damaging public pronouncements by temperance advocates, the Dublin association, along with the Belfast trade, reacted rapidly to an article entitled “Paradise for publicans,” which appeared in Irish Society on 22 June 1889. This piece made such an impression on the LGVPA that the association stepped up its own public-relations campaign by running a regular column in the Irish journal Sport, from which it could reject temperance allegations against the public-house business.23 In fact, the organized trade in Belfast (the Licensed Vintners’ Liberty and Property Defence League) went so far as to urge all of its members to withdraw

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advertising from the offending journal, and it encouraged the LGVPA in Dublin to initiate a similar counter-offensive.24 While certain advertising and publishing firms, such as “LTD, D’Olier Street,” had begun “on principle” to refuse to publish material from the LGVPA, they appear to have been exceptions to the generally open doors of the printing trade.25 The LGVPA never faced a serious collective threat from the publishing community that was able to diminish its ability to mount counterattacks on temperance materials appearing in the press. By increasingly relying on professionally produced reports, briefs, circulars, and news columns during the final decade of the nineteenth century, the LGVPA proved adept at public-relations management. Unlike temperance efforts over the previous 30 years, which had focused on the legislative front, the IAPI looked to wage a cultural battle against the management of the entire drink trade in Ireland. The IAPI’s emphasis on “prevention” meant stigmatizing retailers in such a way as to undermine their custom. What specifically struck the LGVPA as “libelous” about the article appearing in Irish Society was the venomous attack by the IAPI on the character of publicans. The article called for a cultural cleansing of “holy Ireland,” and the only way to achieve this goal, it alleged, was by attacking “the plague of drink” at its source – the misanthropic publican. This new temperance advertising campaign self-consciously paid less heed to damning “economic statistics” than earlier drives had done, and instead it turned to a more cultural condemnation of the drink trade and the publican specifically. The association’s opening attack, intentionally polemical, laid out a temperance strategy that targeted not the habitue´ of the public house, but rather those who guarded the premises and promoted the vice of drunkenness: “If there is a class more dangerous to healthy progress than the class of drunkards,” the IAPI alleged, it was the publican. The vintner, “the legal poisoner,” knowingly induced those with a hereditary weakness toward inebriety to overindulge habitually, the article claimed. Blistering in its language and tone, the article represented a wholesale and strident attack on the drink trade: The banded publicans are a ring of criminals, dangerous to the progress and liberty of the community. They seem to lack a moral sense. They are willing to profit by the wholesale degradation of their fellow citizens, and they’re

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growing fat on the spoils of prostitution and insolently assume an air of superiority. It is time that they were taken by the throat and the villainous traffic erased from the list of legitimate trades. They are a disease in the community – filthy parasites who grow bloated on the corruption of the body politic.26

Moreover, in a subsequent article in Irish Society entitled “Conspirators in session,” the IAPI continued to savage publicans for what it called “universal poisoning.” Referring to the founding of an intertrade association of brewers and retail traders (the Central Committee of the Liquor Trade), the IAPI blasted vintners and the brewers who supplied them for their “mood of indignant manliness,” which they had allegedly displayed in their successful protest against the Intoxicating Liquor (Ireland) Bill.27 This public assault on the whole retail trade spurred LGVPA leaders to match temperance assaults with their own intensive publicity. The LGVPA increasingly viewed the association as a mechanism for “ventilating” pro-vintner ideas in the print media. This emphasis on conveying through advertising to the public a positive image of vintners was undertaken not just to garner political support for parliamentary protection, but as a way of maintaining and strengthening their base of support within the public arena. Driven also by the expansion of literacy and the popular press, the vintners’ campaigns to defend the reputation of their business moved beyond newspaper editorials, so characteristic of their collective action over the previous three decades, to other forms of public relations in the pages of the popular media and the rapidly expanding vintner press.

III By the early 1890s efforts to consolidate the liquor trade in Ireland had reached a new level of sophistication and scope. Guided by the LGVPA in Dublin, the leaders of the retail trade called for the creation of a single umbrella association to represent all publicans and licensed grocers. In contrast to earlier efforts to achieve national unity among members of the retail trade, however, the organizers envisioned an association not just of retailers, but of all distillers, brewers, and wine merchants throughout Ireland. The Vice-chairman of the organization alleged that the catalyst

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of this movement for a larger, more unified national body of licensed traders and producers of intoxicants originated from the introduction in 1892 of the Intoxicating Liquor (Ireland) Bill in parliament. More specifically, it arose from the activities of the primary author of the bill, Foster Arnold, who had been “the unwitting means of bringing together this magnificent demonstration.” While legislative defense against temperance reform certainly represented the primary function of the Central Committee of the Liquor Trade (CCLT), it was the inclusion of distillers and brewers in the organization that set this apart from earlier campaigns to centralize the trade. The inclusion of such large capitalist concerns as Arthur Guinness and Co. suggests a realignment, however tentative, between the producers and sellers of drink. Earlier attempts at cooperation between these two branches of the liquor trade had been difficult and fraught with tension over prices and special privileges. The alliance with large capitalists at this time indicates the growing affluence of many within the leadership of the trade – and the LGVPA particularly. The organizational structure of the CCLT, however, did not altogether distinguish it from earlier efforts by the LGVPA to erect a national trade association. As the drafter of its constitution and bylaws, the LGVPA structured the CCLT in such a way as to guarantee its own dominance within the organization. According to the constitution of the CCLT, traders would pay a 5-shilling subscription fee to join the association, and membership procured full voting rights for every trader who joined. Each organized county would elect one representative to sit on the executive board. In addition, four of the provincial cities outside Dublin would be allowed to elect one so-called “deputy” to the executive body. Finally, the wholesale traders in spirits and beer from the five major cities of Ireland would also send one deputy each to Dublin. But what assured the LGVPA’s monopoly over the association was the clause which stipulated that the LGVPA could nominate 40 of its members to the executive – the exact number of members on the board of the association in Dublin. The way in which the structure of the CCLT favored Dublin points to the strength of the LGVPA. At the same time this imbalance of power within the association guaranteed instability in its ranks. The Belfast trade, for example, eventually withdrew completely from the CCLT, as did many others in the provincial cities of Ireland.

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Nonetheless, this defense pact among the various branches of the liquor trade persisted until 1906. Beyond reflecting a growing self-confidence on the part of the Dublin trade, the CCLT’s attempt at national unity was a direct result of the nationalization of politics during the previous two decades. Its chairman, in his annual address to the association, highlighted “the extraordinary evidence of a reaction of feeling amongst the Irish people in favour of a united parliamentary party and in favour of a healthy and wholesome organisation through which [the] feelings of the country might be ventilated.” Reflecting back upon the “discord” that had “prevailed during the past ten years,” the chairman recalled the heady optimism of the Parnell era: “The people of Ireland naturally clung to the idea of returning to the days when it looked as if a united effort was going to bring them the realisations of their hopes.”28 In fact, this sense of national mission had been intoned at the founding of the CCLT in 1893 when the vicechairman, James Kavanagh, proclaimed the exceptional strength, power, and popularity of the Irish drink trade in his welcoming speech to the assembly of delegates: We should be far more powerful than our fellow traders in England and Scotland. For in England [ . . . ] a great many of those engaged in the liquor trade are Italians, Germans, Frenchmen, and other nationalities, and, consequently, their connection[s] in the main in the country are limited to their customers. In Ireland it is very different, for in Ireland every man [ . . . ] engaged in the liquor trade is a born Irishman and has his friends in this country. Go to any county in Ireland and [at] the first farmer’s place you come to [ . . . ] ask him how his family are situated and in what position of life they are. You will find that either a brother or a brother-in-law [ . . . ] is engaged in the liquor trade. Go to the next farmer’s place and he will tell you that he has a son, or perhaps three or four, at the same business. Go into the workman’s cottage and the old woman there will tell you that she has two sons in Dublin, one of them perhaps working in Power’s Distillery, and the other working in the Mountjoy or some other brewery [ . . . ] We have more friends in Ireland than those directly engaged in the trade, and I believe that when we are properly organised, and when we show the country that we are determined to protect ourselves, and that we are fighting in a just and honourable cause, we shall be able to command

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very nearly half the voting power of Ireland. It now rests with our provincial friends whether this movement will be a success or a failure.29

Given the disadvantaged role of traders outside the LGVPA, Kavanagh’s appeal to traders in the countryside mostly fell on deaf ears. Nonetheless, the CCLT’s very creation suggests the nationwide scope of the LGVPA’s political vision at this time.

IV As early as the 1870s Dublin publicans had begun to diversify the publichouse business to take advantage of newly emerging public spaces – most notably the construction of deluxe pubs near railway stations and the innovation of selling hot lunches to both middle- and working-class patrons. These entrepreneurial innovations multiplied and accelerated in the 1880s and 1890s, fortifying the association of publicans with savvy business owners eager to extract a profit from the new opportunities offered by economic and social changes in the late nineteenth century.30 Although it is difficult to state whether members of the middle class were frequenting respectable public houses in greater numbers than earlier in the century, the modest prosperity that Ireland experienced in the late 1860s and early 1870s surely helped to fill the coffers of vintners well placed on the main thoroughfares, near railway stations, and in middle-class neighborhoods. As early as 1871 a correspondent for the Irish Builder wrote approvingly of the trend toward constructing and remodeling public houses in Dublin, thereby erasing the troubling legacy of the gin palaces which had existed there earlier in the century: Certain it is that our modern metropolitan architecture has largely benefited by the immense increase, during the last decade or so, of handsomely appointed and ornate structures in which “King Alcohol” holds sway, and to those who remember what Dublin was in the olden time, when the “native” manufacture was not one-half its present cost – and consequently more obtainable – vended in ill-fashioned “shebeens” with forbidding exteriors, compared with what it is at present, the contrast cannot fail to be striking.31

Middle-class publicans turned increasingly toward selling hot food, lunches, and dinners in addition to drink and began to move away from

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the selling of groceries. Although roadside inns had traditionally sold hot dinners, the preparing and selling of hot food became a way, in some instances, of attracting a more respectable and well-off group of patrons. This shift toward a more middle-class conception of the public house appeared most distinctly in Dublin and alarmed the temperance movement there. Dr. William White, senior coroner for the city, asserted that members of the professional classes were falling prey to drunkenness in increasingly large numbers because of their more frequent patronage of pubs. Drunkenness was largely on the increase, so it was claimed, among the better classes in Dublin, such as shopkeepers, professional men, attorneys, and barristers, arising to a large extent from the new practice of lunching at taverns and taking glasses of sherry, brandy and soda, and so on. In many cases such men were allegedly on the direct road to intemperance.32 The revamping of the drink trade certainly did present the temperance movement with new challenges, not just politically but also culturally. It would prove difficult to galvanize and sustain popular sentiment against public houses offering an increasingly mixed trade in hot food in the 1880s and 1890s. Those uncompromising temperance reformers pledged to a doctrine of complete abstinence from alcohol hailed the opening of coffee houses and temperance hotels as a more wholesome alternative to the public house. By the 1890s the fashionable shopping district of Grafton Street on Dublin’s south side featured several establishments that advertised themselves as “temperance hotels.” Among the most luxurious and well-known of these was the St. Stephen’s Park Temperance Hotel, which was owned by the strident temperance politician T.W. Russell.33 Located in the same upscale neighborhood of Grafton Street, another inn catering to the well-to-do visitor, Rippingale’s Hotel, claimed in its advertising booklet for travelers that “the success of Rippingale’s shows that a temperance hotel, properly managed, can be successful.”34 By 1900, however, few hotels in the Grafton Street district overtly marketed themselves as having a connection with temperance. This brief experiment in marketing such premises as “temperance hotels” to the middle and upper classes seems to suggest the limited appeal of such establishments. While temperance hotels in the heart of the city experienced no long-term success, a new brand of highly profitable public houses was

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springing up in and around Dublin. Indeed, the most lucrative and highly developed businesses within the public-house trade appear to have been those new establishments built near or within railway stations in the city. Whereas the most affluent and prestigious pubs had existed earlier in the century in upper-class hotels and inns, these new public houses built in and around Dublin’s growing railway system in the 1870s and 1880s provided a variety of services and attempted, through designated drinking areas delineated by class and gender, to facilitate every respectable patron. These “refreshment houses” represented the pinnacle of the public-house trade and were, like the railway stations themselves, icons of nineteenth-century progress. In 1886 the periodical magazine Sport heralded the near-completion of such a public-house emporium: We trust that at an early day the passengers by this line will have no longer to complain of the want of this desideratum. Possibly no railway station in Ireland receives or gives exit to a larger number of travelers for short or long distances, and it is and was [a] matter of surprise why no refreshment saloon was provided.35

Boasting rooms divided into “three departments” identifiable by the level of ornamentation, the facilities mirrored similar construction projects in England that reflected and reinforced Victorian class divisions. As the same periodical noted, despite the decorous appearance of the new railway tavern, its planners had preserved space for the working class and given “fitting attention to this not unimportant portion of the community, for after all, the pennies and the third-class passengers are not the least of those who contribute either to the dividends of the railway company or the profit of the railway saloon.”36 Not coincidentally, these appreciative remarks appeared in Sport, a pro-vintner journal that the LGVPA would use throughout the 1890s to publish its counterattacks against the temperance movement. The growing wealth of publicans and the diversification of their services, however, were viewed with suspicion by the Licensed Grocers and Vintners Assistants’ Association (LGVAA). On 17 June 1888, for example, the assistants called a special meeting to “take the necessary action to protect the interests of the assistants against the monopoly of licensed houses by Mr. Mooney and Co.” What galvanized the opposition of the assistants was the opening of a new pub in Dublin’s city

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center on Pierce Street by a firm with substantial vested interests in other public houses in the city. At the special meeting the secretary of the assistants, McManus, pointed out the great injustice that it would cause to the assistants should this company succeed in this attempt at monopoly in riding roughshod over the trade, and said that if they were successful, it would be useless for any assistant to ever hope to become an employer.” Another grocer’s assistant at the meeting claimed that the large economic interests of Mooney and Co. would destroy “business [from which] their natural benefits [as assistants] derived.”37 In contrast to their employers, the assistants’ trade union saw the growth in the size of pub businesses as a threat to their opportunities for advancement into the ranks of business owners. While one Dublin publican, W. Donnell, had earlier in the year raised the issue of Mooney and Co.’s new acquisitions of public-house property in the city, the LGVPA had put off any decision on the matter until the Recorder of Dublin decided whether to authorize further licenses. In the end the favorable decision granting Mooney and Co. the additional license drew no response from the LGVPA. Yet assistants clung to the idea that a pub assistant should, by thrift and industriousness, eventually graduate to the role of publican. With the establishment of large firms running public houses, assistants feared that their chances of social mobility would be lost. The only resistance to their complaints against the unfair practices of Mooney and Co. originated from McDonald who, on the floor of a meeting called especially to discuss the matter, claimed that the company was a “food employer” and therefore posed little threat to the trade. For McDonald there was a significant difference between a public house and a business which specialized in the serving of food. His refusal to oppose Mooney and Co. rested on an increasingly outdated notion of a pub as fundamentally a small business catering to the needs of the drinker, even though approximately 90 percent of pubs in Dublin carried on a mixed trade in intoxicants and groceries. At least for the working class, hot foods were suggestive of a restaurant, a type of business quite distinct from that of the everyday public house so familiar to any artisan or laborer. Following the lead of more middle-class public houses, in the 1890s working-class pubs began to diversify their services. Writing in Sport, an

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anonymous representative of the LGVPA applauded the growing practice of serving hot food in working-class pubs: The newly introduced system of serving luncheon in several leading licensed houses in the city has met with much public appreciation. The sequel to the introduction of the system has been increased trade. Houses where solids as well as fluids are sold necessarily command increased public patronage.38

Beyond securing the economic advantages of serving lunches and dinners, pubs that provided food to customers diverted attention away from their role as purveyors of intoxicants to the public. James Talbot Power stated at an LGVPA meeting that if the advocates of temperance would study the wants of the poor man more and provide for him clean places where he could get good food, they would have less reason to blame the members of their trade for supplying what science, or the wants of their damp climate, or the produce of their country, enabled them to give – a pure and good article, which they only desire to give for their benefit, their refreshment, or their need.39

In fact, magistrates at annual licensing sessions began to use the number of facilities serving food in a neighborhood as a litmus test for granting new public-house licenses. Even more important for working-class districts, where the availability of restaurants serving affordable food was limited, magistrates looked to the public house to meet the needs of the neighborhood for lunches for working men and for those taking weekend excursions into the suburban areas of the city. In responding to an application for a new license in 1899, a Dublin magistrate admitted his interest in promoting a public-house system catering to these working-class needs. At the licensing court this magistrate approved an application for a public house in Chancery Street to provide “a system of cheap lunches” for the working class there. In a similar petition the same publican applied for another license in Parkgate Street “to carry on the same system there, so as to provide hot lunches for the railway and tramway employees and visitors to Phoenix Park.”40 Certainly, licensing magistrates had long considered the number of facilities in the vicinity of an applicant’s business as important grounds for granting or withholding a public-house license, but the attention now paid to the

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usefulness of pubs as suppliers of nutritious working-class food exemplifies the process of redefining the public-house space as a multifunctional, service-oriented trade, flexible enough to satisfy various public needs. Serving hot lunches was also seen as a way of reducing the misuse of the bona fide-traveler provision in the licensing laws. In 1888 Sir Andrew Reed, head commissioner of the Royal Irish Constabulary, proposed a remedy for the scandals surrounding this law, which, ever since the qualifying distance had been reduced from six to three miles, had vexed enforcement and soured relations between urban and rural publicans. “In every public house where a bona fide traveler is entertained,” Reed advised, “there should be an eating bar” so that travelers could purchase “something to eat as well as drink.” In Reed’s estimation such provisions would “diminish the drunkenness in the country,” where “very often a poor fellow goes into a public house, sees nothing but the inviting liquor, and he drinks more than is good for him.”41 Ten years later, Reed reiterated his recommendation in his testimony before the royal commission on the liquor-licensing system, quoting before the committee a provincial magistrate, George Orr, to show that the problem was not limited simply to Dublin: “A great deal of mischief arises from the publicans not supplying solid food. In the rural districts people start very early to market, go nearly all day without food, and then drink bad liquor in the public houses.”42 Thus the serving of food within the setting of the public house was seen not just as a way of reforming these institutions in the cities, but also as a means of addressing one of the most controversial provisions in the licensing system in rural districts as well. The difference between city and country areas stemmed from the respective forces promoting the change in business practices. In the countryside it was simply a matter of reform advocated by the police; in places like Dublin it was market principles that motivated publicans to embrace the expansion of trade, though reformers too generally welcomed the change there as well. But it was in the growing suburbs of Dublin that publicans were most often accused of taking advantage of demand for alcohol under the shelter of the bona fide-traveler law. Complaints about publicans on the fringes of the city gratuitously serving bona fide travelers on Sundays centered on those outlying zones, like Clontarf, Howth, Blackrock, and Bray, that were known for attracting the patronage of weekend

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excursionists. Besides demonstrating a desire to meet the various needs of patrons, pubs in the suburbs of Dublin were the most notorious violators of the bona fide-traveler law. Thus the suburban public house, while representative of some of the more modern and prosperous new businesses, had a checkered public image. When asked before parliament if “the bona fide traveler caused trouble in Dublin,” George Gore replied, “We have very few bona fide travelers, but very many bona fide drinkers on Sunday.” While observing a suburban district on the northern fringe of the city, Gore claimed that ten electric trams had arrived in the space of one hour, and after disembarking, 186 passengers headed toward “one or more” of the public houses situated on Vernon Avenue.43 Given Gore’s credentials as a solicitor’s assistant “active in temperance work among working men,” his evidence may well have been exaggerated for political purposes, but evidence of the difficulties of enforcement appears in other records as well. In a judicial case against the publican M. Brennan of Blackrock, to cite a particularly salient case, two men named Lalor and Reddy, while claiming that they had visited Blackrock “for fresh air,” were accused of drinking illegally by police under the protection of the bona fide-traveler law. The Dublin-centered LGVPA usually supported publicans charged with serving illegally those claiming to be bona fide travelers, as they did in the case against Brennan of Blackrock, contending that placing the onus of identifying a bona fide traveler completely on the license holder was unfair and needlessly litigious. The development of improved forms of transportation around the turn of the century rendered the bona fide-traveler clause obsolete, untenable, and at odds with the changing face of modern Irish society. As a result, publicans’ calls for its reconsideration placed them on the side of sensible reform.

V Dublin publicans not only focused on expanding their businesses to other types of sales beyond those of intoxicants, but they also initiated efforts to modernize trade practices within the city. Synchronizing prices and eliminating the tradition of giving “Christmas boxes” to regular patrons and employees were among the most important customs that the association attempted to eradicate. By attacking both “looplining” (the practice

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of selling below the regular price) and the tradition of giving complimentary gifts of food and drink to assistants and regulars, the association ventured into areas of daily life that it had previously left to the indi´ to low prices vidual publican’s managerial discretion. Treating habitues and presenting complimentary Yuletide tokens to patrons and employees were rituals that appeared at odds with market principles of business. By suppressing the practice, the association aimed to implement a more regimented approach to management that would minimize competition and maximize profits on the sale of intoxicants. This campaign, which lasted some three decades, exemplifies the way in which the organized trade tangibly affected the popular culture surrounding drink. The LGVPA’s effort to eliminate the practice of giving Christmas boxes began in the early 1870s. On 30 September 1870, at the association’s weekly meeting, the assembled delegates from the organized licensed trade ratified the “discontinuance” of the popular tradition.44 Although no objections to the adoption of this stance were recorded by the secretary at the meeting, the monitoring of compliance with the prohibition remained a low priority throughout the 1870s and 1880s, when Dublin vintners were preoccupied with concerns over Sunday closing and the nationalist agitation for Home Rule. Appearing at the same time that the association’s political activism was bringing the Dublin trade into continual contact with kindred vintner societies across Great Britain, the exposure to other, more modernized retail trades in England most likely explains the new concern with streamlining business codes of conduct at this time. Borrowing business innovations from the retail liquor trade across the Irish Sea was a common occurrence during times when a concerted effort was deemed necessary to guard against potentially damaging licensing legislation.45 While the LGVPA had begun to see the need for suppressing the traditional holiday custom, the leaders of the temperance movement recognized that the subject offered an opportunity for them to stigmatize the public-house trade. By pointing to the selfish inclinations of publicans at Christmas time (a middle-class holiday of increasing importance to bourgeois identity), temperance reformers hoped to label the trade as a greedy class of parasitic business owners. The opposition of the LGVPA to the giving of Christmas boxes represented, for one such temperance reformer, a symbol of the trade’s tight-fisted approach to

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business. The association also established at this time a Christmas charity fund, though its creation did little to quell such temperance-inspired criticisms of publican greed. Patrick Duff, a vocal opponent of the drink trade, penned in the Temperance Banner a blistering critique of vintner benevolence by attacking the charity fund as a well-conceived ruse to hide the true motives of publicans. Recognizing that “contributions to public charities” and “church buildings” represented “a most effective means of disarming opposition to the [liquor] traffic,” Duff identified the appearance of civic goodwill as a powerful tool for manipulating public opinion. According to him, the establishment of a charity fund for Christmas relief represented a screen for publicans’ generally miserly behavior, illustrated best by their opposition to face-to-face Christmas giving. The abolition of such “a time-honoured tradition” as the giving of Christmas boxes, in Duff’s estimation, actually represented “as businesslike a transaction in its inception as ever prolific genius concocted.”46 Written to expose vintner duplicity in the matter, Duff’s article mirrored a frequent temperance strategy of pointing to the underlying economic motivations of the liquor trade that, for temperance reformers, trumped all other considerations of public morality or civic duty. For Duff the vintners’ charitable spirit was belied by their lack of humility. “It is not a practice of theirs ‘to do good by stealth’,” he wrote, “and consequently, they publish their charitable acts to an astonished and lauding world.” Duff’s criticisms drew upon a middle-class Victorian notion of Christmas that stressed individual offerings (though his review of vintner generosity somewhat conspicuously omitted to say that these gifts often included intoxicants of one sort or another). He went on to claim that the long list of subscriptions which appeared at last Christmas, and its successor which is appearing at present, published by themselves [the vintners], when sifted and examined, will be found to be not only a libel upon the sacred principle of charity but as audacious a bid for the public sympathy as can well be conceived.

To paint vintners as out of touch with the growing sentiment of Christmas goodwill could isolate them from their staff and patrons as well as fuel resentment against a class of business owners who, temperance reformers alleged, took money from those who could least afford it.

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As the legislative threat of the temperance movement waned in the 1890s, vintners acted to quash the Christmas tradition of offering gifts to regulars and assistants in the barroom. Between 1893 and 1903 the LGVPA applied pressure to all licensed grocers, spirit grocers, and publicans – not just its own members – in a collective effort to end the practice. The association circulated petitions, first in 1893 and again in 1903, requesting that members pledge to discontinue bestowing presents on employees and regulars alike. Interestingly, the 1903 canvass also included a request that all licensed grocers and publicans adhere to standardized prices. In fact, vintners frequently conflated these two issues, which embodied the principles of sound commerce and trade. Although throughout the 1890s the LGVPA noted progress in suppressing the practice, the campaign was intermittently marked by reports of continued noncompliance both by publicans and by spirit grocers. Disagreements and misunderstandings within the ranks of the association over the ban on Christmas boxes contributed to the difficulties of enforcement. The 1894 annual report of the LGVPA executive committee noted that “some complaint has been made that [ . . . ] the presentation of costly pictures has been substituted for Christmas boxes, and quite recently, complaints have reached the committee of the extravagant nature of some of those pictures.” Since, as the report put it, committee members were “so sensitive of the importance of this whole subject,” they promised to increase their efforts and work “in conjunction with the Family Grocers and Purveyors’ Association to convene a general meeting of the trade in January 1895 to take the necessary steps for the stamping out of any trace of this practice.” Although there appeared to be a “general consensus” that, as the Wine Merchant and Grocers’ Review put it, Christmas boxes “should not be given,” presentation pictures and plates proved more difficult to ban. Since these tokens represented advertisements as much as gifts, their abolition appeared at odds with the market-oriented principles that drove the movement. The competition among the approximately 900 public houses in Dublin also made the task of implementing a ban on the practice far from easy. For example, the owner of a public house on Upper George’s Street, M. Moynahan, in a letter to the LGVPA Secretary, objected to the unfair competition against his business by the continuance of the Yuletide practice. On the previous night, Moynihan wrote,

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six firemen belonging to one of the mail boats came into me and asked me for their Christmas box. No doubt they were customers in the habit of being into my house every day when they were in Kingstown. I told them that I could not give the like, and that I had signed my name against giving any.

Undeterred by Moynihan’s rejection, “one of them,” according to the letter, “then produced a bottle of whiskey they were after getting from Mr. Hynes as [a] X-mas box.”47 It is difficult to determine precisely how frequently such infractions of the ban occurred. Specific complaints during meetings of the LGVPA were rather rare, but ongoing grumblings about noncompliance, especially in working-class districts, persisted between 1890 and 1910. Particular grievances of the sort submitted by Moynahan, however, allowed the LGVPA to identify traders who had violated the association’s interdict. In a way similar to the difficulties surrounding enforcement of such prohibitions, the imposition of uniform prices across the Dublin metropolitan area was also problematic. Like the push to eliminate ´ tokens of generosity Christmas boxes, refusing public-house habitues in the form of exceptionally low prices represented an increasingly high priority for the LGVPA in the 1890s and 1900s, though the campaign, systematic as it was, took time to implement. Those who sold alcohol under the official price were known at the time as “loopliners,” a label that came into general use in the 1890s. By agreeing on a set price for intoxicants, the LGVPA could minimize competition and secure a stable margin of profit on their members’ sales. In order to isolate the loopline trade, the association pointed to the dangers that such public houses posed to civic harmony by their bare-faced encouragement of drunkenness.48 The effort to control prices began in earnest in the late 1880s. On 17 January 1888 a publican named in the minutes of the LGVPA as “Mr. Murtagh” drew attention to some houses in Little Green Street that were selling porter below regular prices. Murtagh claimed before the LGVPA that traders in this district of the city were selling Guinness’s porter at one and a half pence per pint. After hearing these complaints, the meeting resolved to send a deputation to Arthur Guinness and Son to have the offending traders’ supplies terminated.49 After receiving a

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negative response from Guinness, the LGVPA then turned to the police for assistance in ending the practice; it sent a letter to the constabulary to alert the police to “the disorderly proceedings tolerated” in that neighborhood.50 Like Guinness, the police were reluctant to interfere in such matters, though they would show increasing interest after 1900 in putting down these practices. Throughout the 1890s and 1900s the LGVPA sought the support of large breweries for its campaign against loopliners, but with little if any real success. Companies like Arthur Guinness and Son declined to entangle themselves in the retail side of the trade, though Guinness did support the association with an annual subscription fee, like most other breweries. Responding in 1907 to a request made by the secretary of the LGVPA, Robert Russell, for support from the brewery in cutting off those businesses guilty of selling under the set price, Guinness underscored its long-held “policy” of noninterference “in the question of retail selling price.” As in the past, Guinness made it clear that it would continue to sell its products to “any trader who conforms to our terms.”51 By the turn of the century, however, the LGVPA had at least partially succeeded in enlisting the police and licensing magistrates in its effort to reduce looplining. According to the association’s records, the Belfast and Ulster Property Defence League had made inroads by hiring its own inspectors to visit pubs known for offering exceptionally low prices and over-measure containers to regulars. While the police in both Dublin and Belfast were reluctant to pursue publicans specifically for looplining, they showed increasing interest in prosecuting vintners for serving over-measure to customers.52 In a communique´ to the LGVPA the Secretary of the Belfast league wrote confidently of its recent successes: “The majority [of Belfast publicans] are pleased to have an opportunity of abandoning the pernicious custom [ . . . ] We have sent a circular to all members and have placards for hanging up. The public here are very wide awake and are discussing the prosecutions and have given up the struggle to obtain more than they buy. The police are being kept up to scratch, and if we find they are lax, we will put on inspectors of our own, and we are determined to put an end to the abuse.”53 Prosecutions brought against publicans for serving over-measure to customers became a method embraced by the LGVPA, with the assistance of the constabulary, for suppressing looplining.

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Those accused of looplining defended the practice by claiming that low prices were granted only as privileges to regulars who had a longestablished history of frequenting their premises. As in the case of Christmas boxes, such arguments did little to sway the LGVPA or, increasingly, the police and licensing magistrates, who took a dim view of such matters. In one such case brought against an alleged loopliner, James O’Connor, the defense based its arguments on the fact that special prices were offered only to “a certain limited class of old customers.” The defendant assured the recorder of the court that he did not advertise low prices, nor did he “carry on his business in a disorderly way.” Both the recorder and the sergeant present at the proceeding stated unequivocally their opposition to the practice. While the sergeant claimed that “he would give no sanction to [looplining] whatever,” the recorder declared looplining to be a socially dangerous activity which attracted “the worst kind of drunkards” and made police supervision impossible. Nonetheless, the besieged publican insisted that, since 50 percent of his public-house business was in porter, to eliminate his porter-drinking regulars by charging the full price would result in his “bankruptcy.”54 As with the campaign against Christmas boxes, the LGVPA found it difficult to stamp out underselling across the city altogether. Certainly, increased police and magisterial attention to the issue did go a long way toward assisting enforcement of uniform prices, but sporadic complaints persisted until World War I. In fact, the high taxes and inflation of the war years created a climate in which looplining became increasingly common in Dublin. But in the decade and a half leading up to the war, regularly selling underpriced drinks came with the added risk of police and magisterial disapprobation, along with ostracism by the LGVPA. Equally important, too, was the passage in 1902 of the New Licenses (Ireland) Act, which capped the number of public houses in the country, thereby easing competition among pub businesses.

VI The long-awaited overhaul of the Irish licensing system in 1902 established the fundamental groundwork for checking the growth of the Irish retail-liquor trade for the remainder of the twentieth century. The system had not been so thoroughly transformed by parliament since the

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licensing acts of 1872 and 1874. In many respects the New Licenses (Ireland) Act was a victory for the trade, although the temperance movement also counted the legislation as a success for its cause. Not since efforts to better control beerhouse licenses in the 1860s had the two normally adversarial groups found themselves on the same side of legislation that would reconfigure so profoundly and systematically the authorizing of retail licenses for selling intoxicants. This cooperation in part explains the successful passage of the bill, which had such a profound impact and long-lasting effect on the licensed trade in the twentieth century. The intentions of the legislation were extreme – at least on the surface. The act placed a moratorium on new vintner licenses of all sorts, save for bars in hotels and short-term special licenses. Strict regulations were also placed on the upgrading of licenses. Expanding sale hours, for example, by upgrading a six-day license to a seven-day one was prohibited under the act. Taken in conjunction with the Spirit Grocer and Beer Dealer (Ireland) Act, which placed strict regulations on the authorizing of new spirit-grocer and beerhouse licenses, this law effectively checked additional competition in the liquor trade. The drafters of the legislation, pressured both by temperance reformers and by the organized licensed trade, were reacting to the threat posed by the proliferation of public-house licenses in the 1890s. In the nine years leading up to the passage of the bill, from 1893 to 1901, no fewer than 1,703 new licenses had been granted by the licensing magistrates in Ireland. The mushrooming of public houses, especially in the countryside, drew increasing comment from contemporaries, including those within the retail trade, temperance reformers, and increasingly the public at large. Critics charged that the heart of the problem lay with the magisterial bench. Writing in the New Irish Review in 1897, a solicitor disparaged his nationalist colleagues in the judiciary as being responsible for authorizing new licenses. “Nationalist though I am,” the anonymous solicitor wrote, “I am bound to say that the more recent appointments to the magisterial bench – of gentlemen who, from their surroundings and inclinations, are more susceptible to local influences than the old stand-off landlord clique – have but aggravated the scandal.”55 In the culturally sensitive climate of the 1890s, when nationalist credentials had become central to the public identity of professionals in Ireland, the author’s choice

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of anonymity suggests the delicacy of criticizing the Irish magistracy’s judgments in relation to a matter of “nationalist” principle. But this was indeed the aim of the article: to question the “local influences” placed on the licensing magistrates in Ireland and the lack of political will to resist such forces. Since, as the unnamed solicitor observed in the New Irish Review, “an old licence is rarely extinguished, the granting of a few licences each year has, in a decade, the effect of enormously swelling the number of licensed houses.” Granting so many new licenses, according to the author, had resulted in “the creation of a large number of small and struggling licensed houses [ . . . ] dotted here and there over a remote countryside or in the streets of a country town or village.”56 In most instances the crisis appeared especially acute in the countryside, a situation explaining to some extent the lack of attention given to the matter by the largely city-oriented licensed-trade associations. In the leading cities licensing magistrates had, prior to the passage of the New Licenses (Ireland) Act, generally adopted a policy of holding the number of public houses stable. This was particularly true in Dublin, Belfast, and Cork in the 1890s, though vintner complaints about the arbitrary authorizing of spirit-grocer licenses persisted. In 1901 magistrates in County Limerick followed the example of other Irish cities and pledged themselves to take a three-pronged approach to resolving the problem. In the report issued by the assembled magistrates “the greatest evil of all” was said to be “the creation of licences in wayside places – in mountains and amongst the bogs, where any proper supervision was impossible, and where licences became unmitigated dangers and a nuisance.”57 The actions recommended by the Limerick officials included a refusal of all new licenses in country districts, the authorizing of new licenses in towns and cities only after three existing licenses had been extinguished, and the placing of severe penalties on those publicans found guilty of breaking the licensing laws, especially those who sold outside of legal hours. Such rigid standards were the exception, not the rule, in Ireland before the legislation in 1902, though the new licensing bill of that year would enforce by law what the Limerick magistrates had agreed to in principle.58 Vintners recognized too that the proliferation of public-house licenses threatened the established business interests of their association. While generally supporting market principles in conducting individual

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businesses, the LGVPA also sought to minimize what it perceived to be unnecessary competition and, what was potentially more devastating for the future of their trade, a growing public outrage over the visible increase in the number of pubs throughout the country. Thus the trade applauded the passage of the New Licenses (Ireland) Act, which, according to the chairman of the CCLT, Daniel Fallon, stood to enhance “enormously” the value of licensed property and to strengthen “the existence of our vested interests.”59 More importantly, the licenses extinguished shortly after the passage of the act were largely those of spirit grocers, not publicans, adding to the effectiveness of the legislation in protecting the established pub trade. Fallon, looking back in 1904 on the two years in which the legislation had been in effect, praised the law for having checked the spread of the “off-licensed” trade. Had the legislation not been introduced, he maintained, “the whole country would have been honey-combed with spirit grocers’ licenses.”60 In addition, the New Licenses (Ireland) Act also demonstrated the degree to which the royal commission’s recommendations on reforming the licensed retail trade would be difficult to implement in Ireland, since the legislation fell short even of the reforms sought in the majority report.

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6 New Challenges, 1902–14

I The period between the passage of the New Licensing (Ireland) Act in 1902 and the outbreak of war in 1914 saw the emergence of new challenges for the drink trade in Ireland. Freshly introduced tactics by temperance reformers at home and the growing electoral strength of a reform-minded Liberal Party at Westminster reinvigorated the legislative threat of the temperance movement to the trade. In the home constituencies of Ireland the obstreperous parliamentary moves that had played such an important part in the defense of the Irish drink interest since the time of Parnell appeared less patriotic as Home Rule gained a stronger legislative foothold within the Liberal Party in parliament after 1909. The shifting political ground presented temperance reformers with an opportunity to expose in a broad array of venues the divergent interests between Irish nationalism and the drink trade. The political leaders of the LGVPA, however, were cognizant of the political cost of weakening its generally loyal nationalist support within the Irish Parliamentary Party. They realized that their opposition to the government, especially after 1909, placed them in the difficult and potentially vulnerable position of appearing to hinder the passage of Home Rule. Much of the LGVPA’s strategy in the decade and a half before the outbreak of war involved emphasizing in parliament a calculated compromise while at home checking public dissent by means of a moderate publicrelations campaign.1

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The troubled relations between the Irish retail trade and its parliamentary allies were exacerbated by a growing challenge originating from within the Irish nationalist cultural revival. As demonstrated in previous chapters, Irish nationalism had at times borrowed from the frequently moralistic language of temperance and Catholicism in order to legitimize its cause. In similar vein temperance reformers in the 1890s looked to the cultural renaissance taking place in music, art, and literature as a source for a moral revival based on temperance, if not on total abstinence.2 In an effort to counter the nationalist outcry against the public-house trade, the LGVPA had largely succeeded in constructing its own brand of popular nationalist politics since the Home Rule movement of the 1880s. By the turn of the century, however, a melding of temperance and nationalist ideologies again posed a significant challenge to the nationalist credentials of the drink trade. It was at least in part the creation of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart (PTAA) in December 1898, at the Church of St. Francis Xavier in north Dublin that served to strengthen and solidify the links of temperance with Irish nationalism. As the brainchild of Father James Cullen, SJ, the alliance between nationalism and temperance was viewed as a natural partnership that Cullen hoped would usher in parliamentary independence for Ireland. In an article in the Irish Catholic, he put forth his vision of a temperance and patriotic society that in its daily life would meld abstinence from drink with the cultural revival of a genuinely “Irish Ireland.”3 Integral to Cullen’s project was the need for the Irish people, while embracing the guiding moral code of abstinence, to adopt the festivals, music, dances, and games of “traditional” Ireland. Without the accompanying use of intoxicants, it was hoped that such counter-attractions to the allegedly stultifying public house would foster a cultural revival driven by a temperate generation of teetotaling “pioneers” pledged to a lifetime of complete abstinence. Taken together with the Irish cultural revival of this period, the PTAA’s influence on groups like the Gaelic League helped to solidify a strong anti-drink current within the nationalist movement that was fundamentally opposed to the culture and business of the public house. In the first decade of the twentieth century, conflict between this morally strident strain of Irish nationalism and the drink trade erupted most visibly over the closing of public houses on St. Patrick’s Day, an increasingly important national holiday for Irish nationalists at home and abroad.

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The challenges to the drink trade also included growing pressures from the police, who were increasingly charged with stricter oversight of pub businesses. Since 1894 constables had followed the policy of visiting public houses as part of their routine patrols around Irish cities and although the LGVPA had opposed the increased level of surveillance their protests had done little to relax the strict police protocol. By the first decade of the twentieth century, however, new legislation, along with political pressure for tighter magisterial scrutiny, transformed the conditions surrounding the policing of the public house. Laws prohibiting sales to children, crackdowns on those publicans guilty of supplying habitual inebriates, and increasing efforts to establish rigid forms of separation between the business and private areas of public-house establishments all vexed the trade in a myriad of ways in the years prior to 1914. These initiatives to increase control over pubs also added to police responsibilities and impinged on the authority and discretion of individual publicans in their management of the barroom. Beyond growing police surveillance, demographic and cultural pressures also weighed heavily on the trade during this period. The growth of a work- and home-centered middle-class suburban population in and around Dublin reconfigured social arrangements and domestic allegiances in ways which decidedly weakened ties to the public house. The domestic ideology of the middle-class suburbs that identified women and children as individuals requiring the shelter of the household reinforced for reformers the necessity of distancing the public house from the domestic sphere. Adding to and undergirding these cultural concerns, medical professionals also increasingly called for protective measures to root out the cause of habitual drunkenness in the working-class districts of large cities. In order to stem the spread of the “contagion” medical authorities and public-health professionals advocated policies designed to save young children from acquiring an early taste for intoxicants.4 The series of legislative measures passed during the first decade of the twentieth century reflected these growing concerns for protecting children and women from the perceived dangers attending regular contact with public houses. The unique form of the retail drink trade in cities like Dublin, where a mixed trade in intoxicants and groceries was common, distinguished the Irish case from the situation in the rest of the United Kingdom. According to temperance reformers, this system of mixed trading encouraged the use of public houses by women and children who

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were incapable of resisting the lure of drink and all of its debilitating moral and physical effects. Despite these gender-based criticisms of the drink trade in Ireland – and Dublin in particular – the LGVPA argued that the public-house system, because of its mixed trading, served multiple roles in the services that it offered to patrons. Using the argument that the licensed grocer served the quotidian needs of neighborhoods across the city, the LGVPA successfully won exemptions from otherwise restrictive legislation that would have altogether barred children and limited women from entering these shops. Despite these wide-ranging demands placed on public-house businesses, this was not a time of precipitous decline for all of Dublin’s vintners. Rather, publicans experienced an array of mixed fortunes. The prevailing social and political pressures demanded innovation and change on the part of vintners, and many publicans possessed resources enough to refashion and expand their houses to attract a more suburban and middle-class customer base, allowing them to weather the shifting social and cultural climate in and around the city of Dublin. Moreover, those publicans within the protective cocoon of the LGVPA enjoyed a degree of legal protection that was largely unavailable to those outside its organizational network, though membership in the association was by this time common within the city. Adding to these difficulties besetting the drink trade, the intense competition among public houses exacerbated the economic, social, and political challenges that led to a great diversity of outcomes for publicans in the decade prior to the outbreak of World War I. The public houses most vulnerable to the threats of higher taxes and competition were those located in working-class neighborhoods, where competition was most fierce, depreciation of licensed property was most acute, and publicans generally lacked sufficient capital to finance upgrades and additions to their premises.

II Following the release of the royal commission’s report on the licensing system in the United Kingdom, the LGVPA largely occupied itself with political matters on the parliamentary level. The spate of legislative actions with direct bearing on the drink trade between 1898 and 1902 buoyed temperance reformers’ expectations over the possibility of

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passing more sweeping laws to restrict pub businesses. Further bolstering the prospects for change were both the majority and minority reports of the royal commission, which appeared in 1899. Yet a third report, produced by the eight avowed temperance reformers on the commission, laid out in specific terms the temperance agenda for the upcoming decade. Following its release the temperance movement formed the Central Temperance Legislation Board to provide political support for passing into law the proposals made by the temperance members of the commission. The LGVPA moved quickly to denounce the royal commission’s various reports, especially the version penned by the “Temperance Party.” The platform set out in the report, the LGVPA held, was “confiscatory” in nature and contrary to the “vested interests” of the whole of the trade that had been “recognized in law for so many years.”5 The LGVPA’s annual report for 1899 sounded a nationalist tone when it described the growing threat from temperance and the need for a more cooperative and assertive political stance: “We have many examples of the benefits which have been won by combination; of the aggression which it has defeated; of the legitimate rights which it has conserved.”6 In April 1899 the LGVPA hosted a national conference to organize resistance to the royal commission’s reports and to formulate a new legislative plan of its own. For the next ten years the association chose not to oppose all legislation aimed at restricting the liquor trade, as had been its strategy since Parnell’s time, but instead worked to shape proposals to the interests of its own trade. Growing social changes and emerging cultural concerns about underage and female drinking also played a part in the LGVPA’s recognition of the need for a more determined and sophisticated legislative strategy that would both disarm temperance advocates and guarantee the continued free operation of its businesses. These cooperative efforts constituted a thawing in relations between the competing groups, albeit only for short-term tactical gains in parliament when the respective interests of temperance and the retail trade overlapped. At the same time these cooperative efforts were also proclaimed by the LGVPA as emblematic of its moderate politics and as examples of its evident concern with checking drunkenness and immorality. In seeking support for the renewal of the recent licensing act in 1906, the executive committee of the LGVPA pointed out to Lord Herschell, private secretary to the Lord Lieutenant,

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that there had been a history of “agreed measures” between temperance advocates and the association over the previous six years, a testimony to the fact that members of the association were discharging their duties as vintners and licensed grocers in a socially conscious manner.7 Dublin vintners, looking to the nationalist support of the Irish Parliamentary Party, forged a defensive strategy that distinguished between the Irish and English retail trades. The LGVPA and its parliamentary emissaries sketched out a distinctive social and cultural tradition of public-house patronage for Ireland. This was designed to appeal to the nationalist sentiments of politicians who, with an interest in temperance restrictions and a distaste for the English retail trade, could secure special exemptions for Ireland. The Children Messenger Act would have prohibited children less than 14 years of age from picking up intoxicants in open or sealed bottles from a public house for consumption at home. In negotiations over the proposed legislation, for example, the LGVPA pointed to the tradition of “mixed trading” in Ireland on which the working classes depended for their daily needs. Mirroring arguments first voiced during the Sunday-closing debates of the 1870s, the LGVPA made sharp distinctions between Irish and English public houses: The former catered to the domestic needs of a working-class population with no alternative for purchasing dinnertime beverages; the latter operated primarily as a center for on-site consumption of intoxicants. Such arguments, it was hoped, would reinvigorate the obstructionist tradition in Irish national politics that had held sway, with periodic lapses, since the time of Parnell. Robert Russell, the secretary of the LGVPA, in a letter to J. J. Clancy, MP, laid out the argument in favor of “separate treatment for Ireland,” contending that “the restriction should not apply to drink sold in bottles properly corked.”8 In Ireland “children [ . . . ] come into the public houses, and without the safeguard suggested,” Russell remarked, “they will always be open to suspicion on the part of the police.”9 Even though a large proportion of the mixed trade in Dublin took place in the spirit grocers’ shops, long-time competitors with public houses, the LGVPA nonetheless used this form of argument since mixed trading was also a fairly standard feature of pub business. Yet, given the starkly differing sympathies of the LGVPA and the temperance movement, cooperation between the two factions soon dissipated. An example of the difficulties surrounding concerted efforts

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by vintners and temperance groups to work together on legislation was the proposed Clubs Bill of 1903. Subsequent to the passage of the New Licenses (Ireland) Act, the LGVPA attempted to work with the temperance movement to pass legislation to crack down on the serving of liquor at working men’s clubs. While the latter hosted a variety of entertainments, it was the sale of intoxicants – and the comparatively low price that such clubs paid for this privilege – which drew criticisms from both the licensed trade and temperance groups. Vintners had endeavored for nearly 30 years to minimize the competitive threat that certain clubs posed to their businesses, though in the 1890s the issue had faded because of increased police vigilance in monitoring clubhouses. The LGVPA labeled these notorious offenders of the licensing laws as “bogus clubs” and claimed that they operated primarily as shelters for wanton drunkenness. In a typical condemnation the association alleged that such clubs were “frequented when public houses were closed,” most notably “late on Saturday nights” and “on Sunday mornings and Sunday nights.” More importantly, the LGVPA contended that “at these periods unlicensed drinking was carried on,” and that those present included men, women, and children.10 As in earlier campaigns, the association condemned working men’s clubs as a particularly grave threat to women and children. In addition, said the LGVPA, beyond facilitating raucous late-night gatherings, the clubs carried on a profligate off-sale trade, not just in bottles but in open vessels as well. In its annual report for 1903 the association called the attention of its members to “one instance” where the police found “over 50 persons [ . . . ] drinking at 9 o’clock on a Sunday morning.”11 In the same report the association also set about raising public awareness of the clubs by cataloging in a lengthy appendix all these groups and the addresses of their respective clubhouses. As in the case of its campaigns against spirit grocers and beerhouses, the LGVPA sought the assistance of the temperance movement in reining in and ostracizing working men’s clubs – its most serious competitors at this time – in the name of civil order. In the parliamentary session of 1903 it appeared to the LGVPA that a clubs bill had attracted enough political support to pass through the House of Commons. The proposed legislation would have prohibited the serving of intoxicants at clubs after public-house hours and eased

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the difficulties surrounding police surveillance. In order to secure passage of the bill, the LGVPA petitioned the Irish Temperance League to mobilize its substantial parliamentary organization and to work with the association on this project. To accomplish this goal the Secretary of the LGVPA wrote to the league president, W. Wilkenson, to request that the two bodies make the clubs bill their first priority in the upcoming legislative session. In response to the letter Wilkenson explained that the members of his association, while supportive of the clubs bill, would not “agree to abandon any part of the temperance work committed to their charge.”12 By this Wilkenson meant that he and his association would give no assurance to the LGVPA that they would put the clubs bill as their first priority when seeking a place for it on the parliamentary ballot. In a follow-up letter to the Temperance League, Robert Russell expressed his displeasure with the wavering commitment of the league to the clubs bill and made the association’s concerns clear: “What we are anxious to avoid is that the chances of passing such a measure should be in any way jeopardised by our having to attend to other bills and not being able to concentrate our energies upon it.”13 As the LGVPA had anticipated, temperance supporters, instead of making the clubs bill their legislative centerpiece, first advocated an early-Saturday-closing bill. The LGPVA blamed the subsequent failure of the clubs bill on this lack of unity, and from 1904 onward relations between temperance reformers and the organized vintners once again degenerated to the level of mutual opposition. The other dominant parliamentary threat to publicans’ interests at this time was the substantial increase in taxation associated with the Boer War in Africa. Foreshadowing political developments during World War I, the military expenditures in southern Africa prompted the government to levy additional taxes on the drink trade – a measure that was, according to government assurances made to the trade at the time, only a temporary, wartime provision. At least in the short term, the additional taxes had the effect of spawning cooperative efforts between the Irish and English trade associations, namely, the Licensed Victuallers’ National Defence League and the National Trade Defence Association.14 By 1904, however, the trade had given up any hope of having the taxes withdrawn. In his address to the Central Committee of the Liquor Trade, Daniel Fallon acknowledged that “it would be folly upon

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my part, or indeed upon the part of any commonsense individual, to hold out any hope whatever of relief from these impositions in the near future.” At the same time Fallon called on the trade to continue the tactic of resisting “the taxes as exceptional, as imposed for a specific purpose, and as taxes which ought to be removed at the earliest possible moment.”15 In Ireland the beer and spirit taxes associated with the Boer War were considered particularly grievous because of nationalist critiques of the British Empire, which questioned the imperial project much more vigorously than kindred trade groups did in England. “The real cause of the depression in England is the reaction which it was only natural should follow the termination of the South African war,” an unnamed contributor to the Irish Vintner and Grocer wrote in 1904, “and this is heightened by reason of the fact that, up to the present at all events, the Transvaal has turned out what the Australians would describe as ‘duffer’,” in other words, as an unprofitable and ill-advised venture.16 In this and other similar statements, LGVPA denunciations of the war taxes coincided with nationalist critiques of England for what was perceived as its economic plundering of Ireland for imperial purposes. Despite the sometimes negative attitudes of Irish commentators on the Boer War, temperance advocates saw in the conflict an opportunity to advance their cause. Temperance representatives contended that the drink trade depressed home-front morale and, by taking advantage of the patriotic fervor associated with the departure of the troops, acted in ways that were counterproductive to the imperial interest. “The war spirit,” one temperance advocate wrote, “was exploited by the public house and the music hall, whose ‘inhabitants are our weakness in the hour of trial, and our curse in the day of victory’.” This writer further alleged that “notices [ . . . ] exhibited in the windows of licensed premises” encouraged military tippling, and he accused the manufacturers of sending “cases of champagne and other less aristocratic drinks” to the celebrations which paid tribute to the departing soldiers. More specifically, the article charged that it was “the magnates of the traffic” who “boasted that they were supplying the sinews of war and that they paid 30 millions of revenue to the government, and affirmed that they and their supporters were the true patriots.”17 Another anonymous temperance writer contributing to the Temperance Yearbook pointed out that Viscount Wolseley and Earl

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Roberts had warned licensed traders “against the perilous and insane custom of treating returned soldiers.”18 The spectacle of an intoxicated soldier, in the eyes of such government officials, could cast into doubt the image of a well-disciplined military capable of defending the Empire. Although public support for the Boers and suspicion of men in military uniform was relatively common in Ireland, police and licensing magistrates in Dublin heeded the warnings issued by the British Government and brought prosecutions against those publicans who knowingly served soldiers in uniform – a development that no doubt hardened attitudes among Dublin vintners against a war which they already saw as pressing disproportionately upon the Irish trade.19 Proposals for a new general valuation of the city in the first decades of the new century posed an additional threat of increased taxation to publicans. This revaluation, upon which property taxes would be based, met with vigorous opposition from the city’s licensed trade. Because the new system would have ended the relatively lenient terms by which the government taxed licensed property, the LGVPA resisted the new scheme, claiming that it would unfairly penalize the public-house trade and force many out of business altogether. Even though these taxes would have helped Dublin Corporation to renovate the city’s dilapidated infrastructure, the LGVPA opposed being forced to contribute still more money to improving such municipal services as the city’s sanitation, waterworks, and transportation systems. In fact, as a sign of the political preeminence of the drink trade within the city at the time, Dublin Corporation itself joined ranks with the LGVPA in opposition to the proposed reappraisal. As Mary Daly has contended, the power of the entrenched drink interest within Dublin Corporation at the turn of the century led city officials naturally to resist the new general assessment.20 As a result of their political strength, the Dublin trade fended off the scheme to reconfigure the general valuation of the city until 1909. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century Irish vintners had benefited from a decidedly more favorable form of valuation than had their English counterparts. In Ireland, as in Scotland, no distinction was made between licensed and unlicensed retail property. Thus, despite the fact that a liquor license added considerably to the market value of a premises, the tax code based upon Griffith’s valuation scheme assessed all such properties on an equal basis, irrespective of the profitability that

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the liquor license brought to such business owners. Around the turn of the century, however, this advantage came under fire from a royal commission on local taxation, which recommended including the value of a publican’s license when calculating the value of the premises.21 The Secretary of the LGVPA called the issue “the most important” challenge facing the association.22 Despite the LGVPA’s opposition to the change, parliament passed the reforming measure in 1909, and the subsequent appeal to the courts by the Irish drink trade also failed. Thus public houses in Dublin were valued “not only [with] reference to the provable costs of building, situation, and character, but also with reference to the provable volume of business carried on in them, the test of which [ . . . ] [was] the provable value of the license.”23 The result of the changing valuation scheme in Dublin translated into aggregate increases of nearly 51 percent, from £24,659 to £36,154 in revenue netted for the treasury from Dublin.24 At the same time the valuation system that Dublin Corporation had twice rejected tended to validate publicans’ fears of a disproportionate rise in taxation for public houses. Whereas the assessed value of licensed property more than doubled after the “revaluation” which was forced upon the city just prior to World War I, the value of unlicensed property rose by only about 17 percent.25 These staggering increases in the tax assessments for licensed houses no doubt account for a good portion of the pressure that drove down the profitability of many licensed establishments and forced out of existence some of the more vulnerable ones. Notwithstanding these increases in taxation, the concessions that the LGVPA won for Ireland, with the backing of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, was considerable. Compared with the valuation scheme passed by parliament for the rest of the United Kingdom, the Secretary of the LGVPA projected that the special concessions won for Ireland amounted annually to £56,000 in savings for the trade, “roughly speaking.”26 In his full report the secretary estimated that Dublin would save £8,391, while Cork, Limerick, and Waterford would see savings of £9,579, £2,790, and £2,134 respectively. In Belfast, where a revaluation had already gone into effect, the savings were proportionally lower when one took account of the size and economic value of the trade there. The savings for Belfast, according to the secretary’s tabulations, added up to £5,411 – a considerable sum, though far lower than those for Dublin,

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which had avoided until now the new assessment scheme.27 In winning the compromise, the LGVPA followed its usual strategy of reliance on the Irish Parliamentary Party in securing special treatment for Ireland.

III While burdensome taxes levied on both intoxicants and licensed property proved difficult to circumvent, the LGVPA experienced greater success in parrying challenges to the trade on the local level. Since the base of political power for the licensed trade lay, as many of its critics alleged, within Dublin Corporation itself, the association’s ability to counter challenges from within Ireland rested largely upon this centerpiece of local governance.28 In fact, the corporation tended at this time to follow the lead of the LGVPA in positioning itself on issues affecting the drink trade. While the corporation actively opposed the proposal for changing property valuations, the local government could only forestall the imposition of the new scheme. To win the support of the corporation on a local issue such as the closing of public houses on special holidays, however, would be of use in staving off matters of cultural importance, namely, the Gaelic League’s movement to control more firmly the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day. Shortly after the Boer War, Dublin vintners found themselves embroiled in a struggle with temperance reformers and Irish nationalists over the solemnization of what had become the premier day for honoring Ireland and its past.29 The celebration of the “national holiday,” which had become increasingly popular in Irish nationalist circles in and outside of the country at the turn of the century, surfaced after 1900 as a point of contention between many cultural nationalists and the drink trade in Ireland. Since the 1870s nationalist groups like the Land League and the Gaelic Athletic Association had petitioned publicans to close up their businesses during times of nationalist festivals, demonstrations, and marches, but the LGVPA had rarely acceded to these demands. Instead, in an attempt at compromise, the association had recommended to its members that public houses close their doors only for a few hours while processions passed by their establishments.30 As a matter of policy, the LGVPA generally left decisions as whether to

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close shop for special festivals and demonstrations to the discretion of individual publicans. An exception to this pattern, largely stemming from pressure by its assistants’ union, was the association’s recommendation for its members to recognize Christmas Day as a holiday during which public houses should be closed. In 1906 the debate on St. Patrick’s Day closing reached its apex. In that same year the LGVPA acquiesced to legislation for the closing of licensed houses on Christmas Day, a move which represented a compromise between publicans and the assistants’ union on the one hand and temperance pressure on the other. Yet the proposed measure to close pubs on St. Patrick’s Day met with increasing resistance from the LGVPA in the first decade of the twentieth century. This opposition underscores the conflicting and divergent instincts of the Gaelic League and the drink trade. In some respects the struggle over St. Patrick’s Day mirrored earlier political alignments and arguments waged for and against Sunday closing in the 1860s and 1870s. Publicans contended that given the numbers of people entering the city to celebrate the holiday, there was a public need for houses to provide accommodation and refreshment for the influx of these “excursionists.” Just as in the 1870s, when publicans had pointed to the demand from weekend travelers for continued Sunday service, now they held that public houses provided important spaces and services for visitors to Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day. For the assistants working in the pubs, however, St. Patrick’s Day closing was a matter of labor reform, just as Sunday and Christmas closing had represented guaranteed time away from work to enjoy recreational pursuits. The divisions over St. Patrick’s Day, like those over Sunday closing, pitted employer against employee and temperance reformers against the LGVPA. Yet even more than Sunday closing, St. Patrick’s Day brought together temperance reformers and those Irish nationalists bent upon eradicating the widely known stereotypical image of Irishmen overindulging on their national holiday. In the vanguard of the movement around St. Patrick’s Day were the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association (PTAA) and the Gaelic League, which saw in the issue a cause worthy of political mobilization against what they perceived as an entrenched and self-interested drink trade. It was the strident temperance reformer Father P. Coffey who sensed that St. Patrick’s Day closing offered an

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opportunity to advance the temperance cause. He cited the popular nationalist outrage against intransigent publicans at the Gaelic League’s Irish-language procession, “where the drink trade had to bear more than the groans and bruises of an indignant people [ . . . ] for its attitude towards the national holiday.”31 As the innovator of the highly visible Gaelic-language procession at the turn of the century, the Gaelic League represented the front line of the nationalist allegiance to Irishness. By opposing the league, temperance reformers like Coffey reckoned, the LGVPA had placed itself in a vulnerable position. Irish nationalists deplored the displays of drunkenness on St. Patrick’s Day. That public houses were open and, more disturbingly, that they were full, diminished the “purity” of the holiday, nationalists held. It was the freshly organized Gaelic League’s Dublin district committee, formed in 1902 and comprising city and county members, which planned a language procession and set up a subcommittee charged with encouraging stores and shops to close on St. Patrick’s Day. The committee hoped to establish, first voluntarily and later by law, official recognition of the day as a bank holiday when all businesses would close in recognition of the occasion. This issue had first been raised in 1902 by the Limerick-district league, which made impressive strides in convincing that city’s publicans to voluntarily cease business for the national holiday. In 1903 the Gaelic League made its first attempts in Dublin to induce the retail traders of intoxicants to do the same, with the result that nearly half the pubs in the city shut their doors in deference to the request. In 1904 the Gaelic League in Dublin stepped up its efforts to bring the entire public-house trade into line. As a part of the initial plans for the holiday a special meeting of concerned citizens, presided over by the lord mayor, was held at the Mansion House to discuss the matter.32 In a stance that would contrast with the LGVPA’s later position, the representative sent by the organized vintners, J.J. Nagle, who owned a popular public house on Earl Street in Dublin, agreed that he would not open for trading on St. Patrick’s Day, and he introduced a resolution at the meeting calling on all traders to do likewise. In his report on the meeting a writer for the Leader, the mouthpiece of the Gaelic League, expressed skepticism over Nagle’s position, arguing that a particularly sympathetic member had purposefully been sent to the meeting to allay the concerns of the advocates for St. Patrick’s Day closing.33 In the same year the

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National Holiday Committee of the Gaelic League also directly asked the LGVPA to pass a resolution urging its members to cease business on St. Patrick’s Day. Having received an unequivocal denial of their petition, Liam O’Maoileoin wrote again to the association on behalf of the league with a more earnest appeal. After compiling a careful count of all pubs in the city in 1903, the committee claimed that 495 of the approximately 900 pubs had followed the league’s advice and stayed shut on the national holiday, reducing the number of arrests for drunkenness to a mere three cases. In a city where the number of such arrests was known to exceed 100 cases a day on holidays and weekends, this tally was certainly striking. Sensing that public opinion was on its side, the committee of the Gaelic League lambasted the LGVPA’s “ill-advised and unpatriotic decision of last year” and again asked the association to change its stance on the matter.34 O’Maoileoin perceived hypocrisy in the vintners’ refusal since even before debates on St. Patrick’s Day had erupted on the parliamentary level, the association had warned its members against opening on Christmas Day. Expressing dissatisfaction with what he perceived as a noncommittal stance on the closing of pubs on Christmas Day, “the great Christian festival,” O’Maoileoin rejected the LGVPA’s patriotic motivation for their “inaction regarding the closing of the houses on that day.”35 He then dismissed the rest of the LGVPA’s justifications for remaining open on St. Patrick’s Day as “stock arguments” and warned the association that the committee would next appeal “to the individual trader and to the opinion of the public.”36 In 1904 the Gaelic League again appeared to have succeeded in convincing a good portion of the trade to cease business on St. Patrick’s Day. Reporting to the Guinness brewery headquarters at St. James’s Gate in Dublin, the trade analyst for the Dublin city district, Mr. Herbert, noted that St. Patrick’s Day in 1904 was “generally observed as a holiday in Dublin and district by all trades and the large business houses.”37 In his forecast about Guinness sales, Herbert surmised that the trend toward general recognition of the holiday by the drink trade would continue “in the future, unless it falls on a Saturday, on which occasion, of course it cannot be so fully observed.” At the same time Herbert’s report, despite the partial closing of the public-house trade on St. Patrick’s Day, showed a general increase in sales for March, though its sales in bottled stout

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represented the article of trade with the most notable gains. This increase in the popularity of bottled stout reflected a more general trend toward a consumer preference for this product, a development which in part points to the growing importance of the trade in sealed vessels whose contents could be consumed at home rather than inside the pub. This form of consumption certainly complicated the Gaelic League’s efforts to create a more sober holiday since bottled intoxicants could be used for celebrations at locations outside the walls of the public house, whether at home, in the streets, or in other public spaces. Arriving at a solution that would not displease large portions of the population would prove a difficult task for those on both sides of the issue. As had been the case during the Sunday-closing crises of the 1870s, calls to disallow business on the national holiday provoked impassioned opposition among publicans in certain neighborhoods of the city where the custom of public-house patronage was most deeply entrenched. In fact, those pubs that tended to stay open were largely located in working-class neighborhoods of the city, presumably where the demand for remaining open was highest and competition for working-class custom was most intense. In 1906 the Freeman’s Journal reported that many pubs on the main thoroughfares and in many middle-class districts were closed, but others in some poor areas, witnesses claimed, remained ready for business, with “doors thrown wide open and crowded with ill-dressed men and, sadder still to say, with poorly clad women.”38 Despite the centrality of working-class pubs to the debate, the active resistance of the executive committee of the LGVPA helped to undercut the criticism that poorly managed working-class pubs were bringing disgrace upon the Irish holiday. In other words, the intervention of the LGVPA helped to lend an air of respectability to remaining open in the face of the Gaelic League’s pressure to force publicans to close shop. The LGVPA’s defense of St. Patrick’s Day trading relied upon many of their usual contentions regarding restricting pub hours. Publicans contended that forcing such closures was akin to treating the Irish working class as children incapable of controlling their more base instincts even when inside orderly and respectable public houses. Under the supervision of a respectable publican, the LGVPA held, drunkenness could be kept in check. Moreover, without the pub as a socially regulated arena for conviviality and refreshment, a more unrestrained pattern of

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drinking would occur in shebeens and impromptu gatherings beyond the purview of the police. As the Irish Vintner and Grocer observed, the closing of pubs on St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland was “a humiliating reflection on the character of her people,” since such a policy suggested that the Irish were incapable of resisting the lure of drunkenness during the “celebration of the national holiday.”39 With legislation under consideration in parliament for the restriction of working men’s clubs, the LGVPA pointed out in its public response to the Gaelic League that the actual sources of drunkenness in the city originated from such working men’s clubs and shebeens, not from public houses. Moreover, the association noted that it was working cooperatively with the temperance movement to regulate these clubs in order to alleviate the problem and promote civic harmony.40 As had been its policy during times of nationalist demonstrations, the association also emphasized the independence of individual traders in deciding such matters as whether to close their businesses on certain holidays. In 1905 a Limerick trader reported to the Irish Vintner and Grocer that the “entente cordial” between publicans and the Gaelic League was so widespread on the main streets that a person was unable to purchase a bottle of stout at any of the “hotel bars,” while in the “speakeasies” in the back streets a booming trade persisted.41 In 1905 the Gaelic League succeeded in enrolling the support of the Church in its drive to have pubs closed on St. Patrick’s Day. In Archbishop William Walsh’s “Lenten pastoral” of that year the licensed houses that remained open in the city were singled out for special condemnation. Walsh proclaimed that “the gratifying observance of the festival of our national apostle” was “attended with one serious drawback,” the refusal of houses in certain districts of the city to follow public opinion and shut their doors on that day. Those impeding “the effort thus made in so good a cause,” Walsh averred, “seek to make the praiseworthy action of others an occasion of profit to themselves.”42 In addition, it was also noted that the houses most likely to remain open were the “lower and less reputable class” of businesses in the city. The archbishop’s appeal was made “in the interest of religion and nationality” and called upon clergy, laity, religious confraternities, and the Gaelic League alike to work together in every parish of the city to guarantee sobriety on the day of the national festival.43 With the publication of the pastoral the

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movement against the unwavering publicans achieved a religious undercurrent rarely seen in earlier drives to have pubs closed during national festivals and demonstrations. In an effort to minimize damage to the trade, the LGVPA opened communications with the archbishop, hoping that it could affect a revision of the archbishop’s public statement on St. Patrick’s Day and the trade. Though the trade proposed to send a deputation to wait on Walsh, the prelate declined the vintners’ offer. In the letter sent by his secretary, Myles N. Ronan, the archbishop made it clear that he would not alter in any way his condemnation of those traders who insisted on carrying on business as usual on the national holiday.44 In a final attempt to arrange a meeting, Robert Russell wrote again to the prelate’s office to ask that his association be given the chance to lay before “his grace” the “conditions” under which their “property” was held.45 It is most likely that what the secretary had in mind were those usual arguments that pointed to the strict supervision of licensed property by the Dublin constabulary and the licensing justices; the large number of charges brought against publicans, only to be dismissed for lack of evidence; and the inherent danger of closing a trade which had proved to be so accountable to the authorities. Yet again, the archbishop refused to grant Russell’s request for a meeting. For the LGVPA the exchange marked a stinging rebuke and a demonstration of the breakdown of dialogue at this time between nationalist-minded temperance reformers and a drink trade dominated by intense competition and marketplace values. The campaigners for the closing of pubs on St. Patrick’s Day also found sympathetic MPs eager to champion their cause in parliament. Since a Christmas closing bill was working its way through parliament in 1905, a similar measure for St. Patrick’s Day appeared as a logical extension of that legislation during the parliamentary session. Because of the links between the powerful Gaelic League and the legislation, the LGVPA found it difficult to woo nationalist supporters away from the bill. In fact, the secretary of the LGVPA reported that it was hard to find any Irish nationalist members who opposed either the St. Patrick’s or the Christmas bills.46 Even MPs representing Ulster districts sided with the nationalists on this question, though their motivations were quite different from those of their nationalist colleagues in the Commons. Whereas nationalists hoped to “purify” the holiday by

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creating a more sober and orderly festival, Ulster MPs wished to ease the difficulties of police surveillance and minimize the likelihood of sectarian mobs clashing in the streets. What blocked the legislation was the successful lobbying on the part of the Irish trade by the National Victuallers’ Defence League, which in the end succeeded in winning the support of Frederick Banbury, a powerful MP and member of the government, who effectively quashed the legislation. In 1906 the LGVPA’s stance on the issue hardened significantly. Instead of leaving it up to individual traders whether to close their businesses, the association began actually to encourage its members to remain open for business on the holiday. The chairman of the association, Anthony O’Grady, after receiving a circular from the Gaelic League and a copy of a resolution passed by the Workmen’s Temperance Committee asking all publicans to close shop on the holiday, expressed the opinion that he hoped no “member of the trade” would be so “weak” as to cease regular trading on St. Patrick’s Day.47 Agreeing with O’Grady, an unnamed member described resisting the Gaelic League’s lobby to close on St. Patrick’s Day as a most important matter because “in closing upon such an occasion, they were abandoning their strongest fortress in fighting restrictive legislation of any description.”48 Beyond being mindful of the high sales associated with the holiday, publicans in the LGVPA leadership considered opposition to the Gaelic League as a defining issue that demonstrated the pride and character of the trade. According to this perspective, in order for the drink trade to continue its successful defense against allegations that the pub was the facilitator of drunkenness and chaos, no concessions could be made over St. Patrick’s Day. The association then passed a resolution encouraging members to stay open, though it tabled publication of the resolution in order to avoid an immediate public controversy and to allow more time for discussion of the issue. Specific instructions were also given by the executive committee to the trade representatives from the College Green and Harbour divisions Dublin city to induce publicans to fall into line with the association on the issue.49 In response to the vintners’ circular sent to members encouraging them to remain open on the holiday, the Gaelic League intensified its own efforts to win vintner compliance. The league organized a public meeting at the Rotunda on 12 March 1906 to raise public awareness on

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St. Patrick’s Day closing and publicly condemned the intransigence of some LGVPA members. Following the celebration in 1906, the Blackrock branch of the Gaelic League sent out a circular in its township condemning those grocers who had opened and declaring that it would “offer active opposition” to any of them nominated to run for public office. At the same meeting the Blackrock district committee also passed a resolution condemning the actions of the parliamentarians and long-time allies of the LGVPA, Patrick O’Brien and Tim Harrington, for blocking a bill that would have made St. Patrick’s Day an official holiday.50 From within the trade itself, however, there was considerable support for the Gaelic League, while many publicans in Dublin continued to shut their doors on the holiday. The vintners’ assistants union, which also had its own branch division of the Gaelic League, broke with the LGVPA and supported the league’s stance on St. Patrick’s Day. In their opposition to their employers’ trade association the assistants passed two resolutions. The first repeated the ordinary call for closing on St. Patrick’s Day; the second declared that the assistants’ union would not purchase catering for their entertainment from any house which stayed open on the holiday.51 This action by the assistants mirrored their concomitant position on Christmas closing, a long-held grievance for public-house employees, who supported the legislation which finally passed parliament in 1906. Similarly, the St. Patrick’s Day-closing debate reflected earlier political alignments that had split employer and employees on Sunday closing in the 1870s. In 1906, James O’Mara introduced in parliament a St. Patrick’s Dayclosing bill identical in its wording to the legislative drafts of 1904 and 1905. Although the trade benefited in this session from an increase in nationalist opposition to the bill, it lost one of its important allies, Sir Frederick Banbury, who had been responsible in previous years for blocking the legislation. This absence of support, one unnamed member of the LGVPA’s parliamentary subcommittee lamented, “altered everything.”52 It was G.G. Craig, MP, a generally reliable ally of the licensed trade, who stepped in to see that the bill was put down day after day on the floor of the House of Commons.53 Writing from London, the parliamentary agent for the Belfast vintners’ association, Frederick Miller, informed the association of his “fruitless endeavour” to try to interest English members in opposing the St. Patrick’s Day bill.54 According to Miller, it was

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nearly impossible to garner English legislators’ support for a bill which carried the stamp of Irish “social legislation.”55 For Irish nationalist MPs opposition was fraught with even more difficulties. Compiling his parliamentary trade report for the LGVPA, Joseph Nolan, an ally of the trade working on its behalf in the British capital, explained the difficult place in which MPs in the House of Commons found themselves when offering opposition to the St. Patrick’s Day-closing bill: While a number of the leading traders in Dublin and the provinces, yielding to the clamour in certain quarters, close their premises voluntarily and say they are not responsible for the action of their brethren who keep open, any M.P. who opposes a proposal to bring the backsliders into line lays himself open to the reproach that, while all the healthy opinion of the country and all respectable traders are in favour of reform, he – the wicked M.P. – is in favour of allowing the lower order of publicans to keep their houses open, and by so doing encourage drunkenness, debauchery, [and] violence [ . . . ] which are not only wrong in themselves but injurious to the fair fame of the “Isle of Saints.”56

Placed in such a defensive position, the LGVPA settled on a two-pronged strategy that emphasized both political resistance in parliament and unity at home. According to the secretary’s overview of the events at Westminster, the most successful means of combating the St. Patrick’s Dayclosing bill in parliament would be to “stick together” and open their doors on the day of the national festival.57 The only compromise agreed to by the LGVPA was for pubs to cease business for two hours while the parades and processions passed through the streets of their city. While the LGVPA failed to provide an estimate of the number of pubs that adhered to its requests, the association appeared to have built considerable consensus within its ranks for remaining open. In a letter sent to the Gaelic League, J.J. Nagle, the conciliatory LGVPA member who had advocated complete closing two years earlier, promised to close his business if others in his neighborhood did the same.58 Nagle’s move toward the LGVPA’s official position – tentative though it was – likely reflected the intense competition within the pub business and the consequent loss of trade to his shop for remaining closed while others in the vicinity continued to trade. His change of mind also reflected a growing opposition to complete St. Patrick’s Day closing. To overcome criticisms

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that it was only the smaller businesses in the poorer vicinities of the city that stayed opened, the LGVPA targeted larger trade interests that had been known to close shop. The Dolphin Hotel Co., for example, with two public houses under its management and one off-license premises in Essex Street, Dublin represented one such enterprise that the association successfully convinced to remain open on St. Patrick’s Day.59 In a vote of support at an association meeting on 13 March 1906, all members present pledged to comply with the association’s position.60 In parliament, the strategy of the LGVPA appeared to pay off handsomely. During the 1907 session a St. Patrick’s Day-closing bill failed to make a substantial showing in the House of Commons. The Gaelic League, too, generally gave up the struggle with the LGVPA, which suggests that the vintners’ compromise had succeeded in stemming the public outcry against public-house trade on the national holiday. In 1909 the issue briefly reappeared when Dublin County Council passed a resolution that “reiterated the national demand for the closing of all licensed houses on St. Patrick’s Day,” but the action seems to have had little impact on the workings of the trade.61 Having built support among its members for remaining open, the LGVPA ignored the resolution, and the Gaelic League put little effort into sustaining the campaign to convince publicans to close their doors. In 1911 the Irish Vintner and Grocer, the primary journal of the drink trade, reported that only eight arrests had occurred on St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin, owing to the “light” business carried out in public houses on that day. With such a peaceful observance of the holiday, the journal concluded, “the arguments of the Temperance Party had fallen to the ground.”62 Beyond such selfcongratulatory pronouncements by the trade, the low number of arrests for drunkenness certainly helped to quiet public debate over the role of public houses on St. Patrick’s Day.63 The picture that emerges from this evidence illustrates the conflicting motives within the broad nationalist community. Yet, despite the divergent impulses of the Gaelic League and the LGVPA, the failure of St. Patrick’s Day closing underlines the widespread influence of the drink interest in Irish politics during the first decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, beyond the overwhelming representation of publicans within the nationalist Dublin Corporation, vintners and licensed grocers also constituted an important element within the social fabric of the

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Gaelic League itself.64 The strong connection between Gaelic League membership and the retail drink trade – and the links to various vintner associations scattered across the country – may in part explain the league’s lack of resolve in continuing to press the LGVPA to support the “Irish” cause. At the same time a considerable number of publicans did follow the league’s orders, thus demonstrating a guarded sympathy among vintners for promoting a more sober and orderly national holiday and for the labor reforms sought by their employees.

IV While St. Patrick’s Day quickly faded from the forefront of vintner politics after 1906, the social and legal ramifications of recently enacted reforms affecting public houses now came to dominate the attention of the LGVPA. Although the 25 recommendations made by the royal commission’s investigation of the liquor-licensing system in 1898 had by and large not been taken up by parliament after the commission’s disbandment in 1900, the two major exceptions, the Children Messenger Act and the New Licensing Ireland Act, added considerably to police and magisterial responsibilities over the public house. After the passage of the Children Messenger Act, the police were required to keep a watchful eye on children entering public houses on errands for their families. The New Licenses Ireland Act further added to these duties by increasing the number of business codes, which mandated a more stringent separation between the business section of the pub and those areas used for domestic purposes. The passage of these two measures coincided with increased strictures against female and underage drinking. By drawing strict lines to set off the pub area from the domestic sphere, reformers hoped to reduce sharply the frequency with which women and children entered the public house. But given the fact that nearly all public houses in Ireland at this time served at least a dual purpose – as businesses and as places of lodging for boarders – separating private and public spaces would take time to implement, especially since the physical construction of public houses had not been designed with such regulations in mind. Stricter interpretation and enforcement of the liquor-licensing laws also tended to impinge upon the publican’s powers of discrimination

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and judgment. For example, new directives that were first implemented by the Dublin police in the 1890s attempted to strengthen measures designed to hold publicans responsible for serving intoxicated individuals on their premises, and sought to enforce the bans on games and afterhours activities within the pub. Unlike earlier modernizing trends in the trade that had largely originated from within the LGVPA, these actions by the authorities marked doubled efforts to regulate the professional behavior of individual publicans from outside the trade. In almost every case of police interference the LGVPA resisted the increased authority of the police. Since 1894 the Dublin police, as a matter of routine protocol, had begun paying visits to public houses as part of their daily foot patrols of the city. From the outset of the new policy the LGVPA lobbied the Chief Secretary for Ireland to have the surveillance relaxed. The association claimed that the increased visits by police unfairly penalized publicans who strictly followed the law, and resulted in a large number of frivolous charges being brought against vintners that were later dropped for lack of evidence. On 27 October 1903 the executive committee of the LGVPA instructed its solicitors to tabulate a return comparing the number of summonses issued to publicans by police with the corresponding number of dismissals.65 In the subsequent report issued to the LGVPA, it was shown that 50 percent of publicans summonsed for selling after hours or in uncorked vessels to children were dismissed, while 60 percent of the charges for permitting riotous or drunken conduct on their premises were also dropped.66 On 8 November 1904 the LGVPA passed a resolution condemning “the system of police espionage” that the Dublin constabulary allegedly employed in their oversight of the city’s public houses.67 Beyond creating additional legal expenses for publicans and the association, the strict police supervision, in the publicans’ view, was “resented” by customers and was responsible for the declining value of public-house licenses throughout the city.68 In 1902 vintners won a small victory when the Dublin chief commissioner of police, John Ross, under direction from the Chief Secretary, issued orders to have police “warn” a publican on any occasion when a drunken person was seen to enter a public house.69 Nonetheless, the change in policy appeared to have no impact on the number of cases brought against Dublin publicans. In 1906 the Irish Vintner and Grocer reported that police paid 25,896 visits

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to public houses in the city. As a result of this surveillance, 119 publicans and spirit grocers received summonses over the year, though the great majority of those prosecutions were later dropped.70 The LGVPA had singled out the Chief Commissioner of police in Dublin as largely responsible for the high number of allegedly groundless cases lodged against publicans throughout the city. As a result of the Head Constable’s encouragement of “individual members of the police,” according to an unnamed member on the floor of an association meeting, “they could hardly blame the rank and file [members of the police force] for resort to methods of a very questionable character.”71 For the LGVPA the most damaging of these methods, beyond the general over-policing of public houses, was the practice of the police holding a publican culpable for any individual case of drunkenness, regardless of whether the intoxicated person had obtained drink from the public house in question. In other words, the LGVPA asserted that the police brought prosecutions against publicans based upon entirely circumstantial evidence. The attentiveness with which the police carried out their observation of public houses at this time can be explained in part by the new awareness of the increasing prevalence of poverty and drunkenness in the city of Dublin. As Jacinta Prunty notes, by the turn of the century “the wretched poverty that had characterized the North [side of Dublin] had moved out into the main streets” of the city.72 With the chaos of the North Dublin slums threatening to spill out into the major thoroughfares of the capital, contemporaries noticed the conspicuous and threatening signs of poverty visible on the main streets of the city more readily than they had in earlier decades. Among the most emblematic symbols of that poverty was public drunkenness. While the effort to physically cleanse Dublin streets had begun in the 1880s, by 1900 the police and magistrates had incorporated a moral dimension into the reclamation of public thoroughfares. The authorities attempted to rid the Dublin streets of signs of destitution and wanton immorality by confining the business of the public house to the licensed premises itself. Crowds loitering outside public houses and assistants working to induce pedestrians to come in off the street for a drink became targets for the new campaign. In another extension of police authority the Dublin metropolitan police force attempted to clamp down on publicans or their assistants who

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served drunken persons. According to the LGVPA, the head police office in 1909 ordered constables, when arresting a person for drunkenness, to “question” the intoxicated individual “as to where he got the drink.” If the prisoner was too inebriated to indicate the house where he or she had obtained drink, then the nearest licensed house would be held accountable.73 Although this policy proved impractical to carry out owing to the large numbers of drunken persons arrested each night in the city, its partial implementation marked a new level in the effort to root out the sources of drunkenness on Dublin’s streets. In this earnest effort to control drunkenness in and around public houses, police attempted to enforce, with the encouragement of licensing magistrates, the increasingly strict laws that marked off the public house from its adjoining environs. One of the goals pursued by temperance reformers, along with changes made to the liquor-licensing laws, was the imposition of structural separations between the business area of a licensed property and the adjoining rooms used by publicans or their assistants for lodging. The two major reports that had been issued by the royal commission had recommended clearer divisions between the areas where alcohol was purchased and consumed and the other areas of the pub, especially those serving domestic needs. Yet separating business from personal activities proved difficult to enforce. In the case of a public house on Dorset Street, police charged that the owner, named Malone, was guilty of trading on Sunday. Since Malone possessed only a six-day license, the charge was a serious one and could have resulted in the forfeiture of his liquor license. In his defense, backed by the legal counsel of the LGVPA, Malone claimed that the only persons entertained in his establishment on the day in question were personal friends and family who, moreover, had been entertained not in the public bar but in his “sitting room.” Though the case was eventually dismissed, the issue remained a salient one for publicans in the city, who sought to convince authorities of the unreasonable difficulties associated with attempting to separate the personal or familial functions of the pub from its more conventional and obvious business uses.74 Although no specific statistics for Dublin were assembled by the LGVPA, the licensed trade in Belfast wrote to association officials in Dublin to inform them that there were “about 40 cases of reduction of premises” in the city. By this, the Belfast representative meant that publicans, under orders from

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the licensing magistrates, had to cut off all “communication between the business and the dwelling portion” of the pub and provide “separate entrances in the street for each.”75 Unlike their Belfast counterparts, the Dublin magistrates did not mandate the upgrading of all public houses; rather, they adopted an incremental approach which displayed some flexibility in their requirement that publicans remodel their property. The numerous licensing sessions suggest an air of leniency within the licensing court in Dublin, and in the period before World War I licensing magistrates generally singled out only the more notorious troublemakers within the trade. In one specific example of such a reputedly mischievous publican, Jeremiah J. Ryan, the police pointed out that the construction and layout of his public house posed a specific threat to good order in the neighborhood. According to the records of the case, Sergeant Andrew McDonald reported to the superintendent’s office of the A division of the Dublin metropolitan police district that Ryan had allowed dancing in a room above his licensed house. While on his beat and in uniform, McDonald discovered over 100 men in a room above a “wine store,” where “some with drink before them” were singing and dancing to the accompaniment of a piano. In addition, the inspector reported that “the room was fitted up with a bar and cash register, and an assistant [ . . . ] supplied liquor to the audience.” When confronted by the constable, the proprietor Ryan admitted that the room had previously been used for billiards, but recently, he said, the table had been replaced with a piano, along with furnishings to accommodate a group numbering as many as 150 individuals. It was the multiple entrances to the upstairs chamber that drew special attention from both the inspector and the superintendent’s office. While the publican owned the upstairs room, it was the easy access to that room which caused concern to the police. The two entrances to this room, one opening onto a side alley, Liberty Lane, and another giving access to the shop downstairs, which fronted on Wexford Street, encouraged illicit activities, the police alleged. The police used both the Liquor Licensing Ireland Act of 1872 and Public Health Amendment Act of 1890 to prosecute the publican. According to the police summons, by allowing singing and dancing without a permit the defendant had violated Section 30 of the Public Health

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Amendment Act, making him liable to a fine of £5 for every day that such activities transpired on his property.76 In addition, the erection of a new bar upstairs with a separate entrance onto the street placed the publican in violation of the Liquor Licensing Ireland Act of 1872 because, according to Superintendent Howe of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, its construction “really [meant] the establishment of a second house.”77 Despite the police prosecutions brought against Ryan – and his considerable record of previous violations against the licensing laws – the licensing justice nonetheless overrode police objections and allowed Ryan to transfer his public-house license to a new locale. The significance of the case was twofold. First, the various licensing laws, including the Public Health Amendment Act, had for some time granted police the authority to crack down on singing and other entertainments in the pub, though until this time the police had rarely shown an interest in prosecuting such infractions. From around the turn of the century, however, the police began more systematically to repress entertainments other than the drinking of intoxicants within the pub. Second, the decision of the licensing justice to permit the transfer of Ryan’s license underscores the larger tendency, continually stressed by temperance reformers, of licensing courts to uphold the licenses of public-house proprietors regardless of their pattern of violating the licensing laws. Thus, while publicans faced increased surveillance, citations, and prosecutions, licensing magistrates continued largely to allow transfers, and only rarely, it seems, were licenses revoked. While magistrates may have viewed the legal record of publicans with a lenient eye, they nonetheless placed a growing emphasis on the physical state of the premises to be licensed. In fact, it was common for licensing magistrates to refuse additions to public houses that included extra entrances to the pub or additional serving areas. A proposal for a door to be added to a pub at 25 Wexford Street, Dublin for “domestic purposes,” for example, was flatly refused by the presiding judge at the licensing sessions of 1901. The belief that public houses should be run in spaces completely separated from the domestic sphere reflected growing concerns for the welfare of children and women. At the same licensing session the magistrate also ordered that another public house, allegedly in a state of disrepair, be carefully “watched” by the police. According

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to testimony given by an unnamed witness, this particular public house was “one of the disgraceful structures in the neighbourhood” and “was not a decent place to be a huckster’s shop.”78 Furthermore, the witness claimed, “instead of having a business appearance,” the premises only purported to be a legitimate shop and was actually “a fraud.” In fact, the deponent characterized the premises in terms usually reserved for the description of a shebeen: “In the window was a great big black screen to prevent folks from seeing that nothing was going on inside,” and “a piece of paper was hung up with the words ‘special bar’ painted on it.”79 The denial of such additions indicates a conception of a professionally managed public house similar to that put forth by the LGVPA. Since the time of the beerhouse scandals of the 1860s, the association had promoted publicans as a professional class of business owners fully capable of protecting the public interest. By the first decade of the twentieth century, magistrates increasingly cast a suspicious eye upon those houses which did not match the image of a legitimate drinking establishment.80 Seeking to make an example of what they considered a most egregious abuse of police authority, the members of the executive committee of the LGVPA railed against the constabulary for harassing a respectable pub owner, one whom the police accused of conducting business after hours. According to a letter of protest written by the Secretary of the LGVPA, the police disrupted a dinner party above a public house on Upper Dorset Street for entertaining guests after hours. What most angered the committee was the lack of respect or exemption granted by the police in light of the social credentials of the group. According to the letter of protest, the group included the following individuals: Eugene Ryan, the landlord of the house and a solicitor in the Land Commission offices; Edward Finucane, a veterinary surgeon attached to the Department of Agriculture; Joseph Ryan, brother to the landlord, who was staying at the house; William Fitzpatrick, a publican; Frank O’Hare, a solicitor for Pierce and Co. of Wexford, who also kept lodgings in the pub; and Peter Haven, the manager of a public house in Chapel Street. Although such intrusions may have been necessary in the case of the less respectable public houses in the trade, Russell’s letter emphasized the LGVPA’s disgust that “even the respectable classes were often harassed by the police.”81

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In 1907 the police yet again stepped up their surveillance of Dublin’s public houses. In an order from the head police office, referred to by publicans as the “Five Cases Circular,” constables were required to report all incidents of after-hours entertaining on the premises of licensed houses. In one egregious example of the nefarious effects of the new policy identified by the LGVPA, a complaint was made by the police against “an old and respected trader” on the south side of Dublin. According to the secretary’s report to the LGVPA, the publican had “entertained” a group of friends on his public-house premises. “After closing hours” the group quit the licensed section of the property and retired to a “private ‘drawing room’ of the house,” where they continued their socializing over a game of cards. When the police appeared at the door and were “informed what the actual circumstances were” and that the “shop was closed,” they nonetheless insisted upon entering the establishment, taking the names of all persons in the room, and ordering the party to leave the establishment. The LGVPA pointed to this case and others like it as examples of the extent to which police abused their authority to “obtain convictions at any price.”82

V Adding to the progressively stricter regulation of public-house space during the decade and a half prior to World War I were the new measures designed to protect children and the family from the dangers of intemperance. Foremost among these measures were the Children Messenger Act (1902) and the Children Act (1909), which first limited children under the age of 14 from picking up intoxicants for their families and then barred children under age 14 from entering public houses altogether, even when accompanied by an adult. In the case of both acts the LGVPA succeeded in winning a special accommodation for Ireland which diminished the impact of the legislation on Irish publicans. The compromise secured by the LGVPA stemmed from the exceptional circumstances which distinguished the Irish case from the rest of the United Kingdom. The first of these conditions unique to Ireland was the preponderance of the spirit grocer, increasingly prominent in the suburban districts of the city, who attracted middle-class women in exceptionally high numbers for family errands. Second, this so-called

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“mixed trading” in both intoxicants and groceries was not exclusively confined to the spirit grocer, but rather was common across much of Ireland and was especially prevalent within Dublin’s densely populated working-class districts. As with the regulations which prescribed sealing off the business of the public house from hard-to-monitor entrances and adjoining rooms, the concern with “mixed trading” centered attention on the placement of a bar within a grocery store, a space increasingly identified as the domain of the dutiful Catholic mother. Publicans viewed the Children Messenger Act with mixed feelings. As the act was working its way through parliament, the LGVPA secured a special exemption for Ireland, while its leaders also cooperated with temperance reformers to secure passage of a restrictive bill. Relying on the argument that “mixed trading” was more common in Ireland than in England, the LGVPA contended that the pub in Ireland had, by its usage as a general supplier of groceries and other goods, a more domestic function. Following the passage of the Children Messenger Act, Irish publicans continued to grumble that forbidding children from visiting a pub for family errands would only encourage men to go in the place of their sons or daughters. As the Irish Vintner and Grocer put it, if forced to go himself to the pub on a simple errand for family provisions, the husband of the family would be more likely “not [to] stop at the one pint which would be his limit if he could have sent his child.”83 The LGVPA, while recognizing the importance of the publican’s role as a grocer, disseminated such characterizations of the pub that nonetheless underlined its male character. According to this ideology, the pub served as an oasis of sorts from the female-oriented home, while also meeting the everyday needs of the neighborhood. One of the more outspoken voices calling for reform was that of K.L. Montgomery. Juvenile intemperance, Montgomery averred, constituted the root of the “drink problem” in Ireland, where a unique blend of circumstances instilled in the minds and physiology of youth a strong thirst for alcohol. Moreover, he held that the popularity of wakes in Ireland, funded by insurance policies, threatened children early in their development by introducing excessive intemperance into the household of working-class families.84 “The most casual thinker,” Montgomery wrote, “can hardly fail to recognize the dangers attendant on the practice of paying a weekly half-penny or penny policy on the life of some unwanted

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little one, whose death could thus be the occasion of furnishing a tenement house with drink.”85 Nonetheless, while wakes were an important part of the problem, Montgomery believed that the licensing laws could most easily and immediately be reformed for the improvement of future generations. The prescription that such reformers recommended, like the regulations that sought to sharply confine alcoholic consumption, centered around protecting children from the contaminating environment of the public house. Since mixed trading distinguished the Irish business, reformers in Ireland focused more single-mindedly upon this portion of the trade, which they considered an egregious threat to the health and well-being of women and children. In contrast with trends in the rest of the United Kingdom, the number of publicans in Ireland who depended on sales not only of liquor but also of groceries had increased since 1881. In that year 71 percent of public houses in Ireland carried on a mixed trade. In Dublin the number was even higher, according to the Secretary of the LGVPA, with 78 percent of vintners ostensibly dealing in both liquor and groceries. By 1907 the number had risen to 80 percent for all of Ireland, with no specific statistics available for Dublin. The only exceptions to this trend were Cork and Belfast where, according to the secretary, the custom historically had never existed at all.86 In 1908 parliament again considered legislation that would have further restricted children from entering public houses. As it had done earlier in the decade, the LGVPA countered the Children Act by pointing to the prevalence in Ireland of mixed trading within the public-house business. An extraordinary parliamentary return filed by the Irish constabulary in 1908 appeared to vindicate the LGVPA’s position regarding the “mixed” nature of the public-house trade, especially when compared to other cities within Ireland. At the same time, however, the report also presented a potentially damning record of public houses as everyday resorts for women and children. According to the counts done by the police in the five major Irish cities, the visits made by women in Dublin far exceeded the corresponding tallies in the other cities across Ireland.87 The comparatively high number of women who visited public houses in Dublin drew special comment from both the Dublin and Belfast police. The annotations to the report spelled out specific conditions in Dublin that helped to account for the anomalous figures. The police pointed

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to the unusually high number of publicans dealing in both liquor and groceries in the city, a position that backed up the LGVPA’s long-held conviction about the distinctiveness of the Dublin trade. The figures for Belfast and Dublin, which show an unmistakable contrast, were certainly affected by the fact that 17 out of the 22 houses observed in Dublin carried on a mixed trade, while in Belfast only one of the 22 houses conducted a business in both intoxicants and groceries. The statistics, while confirming on the one hand the distinctive character of the Dublin trade also provided support for the temperance reformers’ contention that licensed grocery shops were overly popular among women and thus presumably detrimental to their health. Throughout the additional comments appended to the report, the police alleged that it was women of the poorer classes who frequented the public house. In Dublin specifically, the police pointed to the fact that in the working-class sections of the city it was nearly impossible to acquire groceries in a house that was not also licensed for selling intoxicants on the premises. In the explanatory note attached to their return the Waterford police claimed that women generally visited public houses which were owned and operated by females. “In such houses,” the constable observed, “there is a ‘snug’ set apart for them, which place is often full of half-drunken women with children, and when they remain there too long, the other children come looking for them, perhaps for food.” As a result of children entering the pub, according to the Waterford report, the youngsters “get drink and contract a taste both for it and bad language and other misconduct.”88 Despite the report, however, the LGVPA won special exemptions for Ireland in the Children Act. In its opposition to more sweeping legislation that would have prohibited children under age 14 from entering pubs altogether, the LGVPA convinced the attorney general to withdraw the bill in order to delete the clause that would have included Ireland in the restrictions. This parliamentary maneuver was, according to the Secretary of the LGVPA, “a result of a very remarkable example of the importance of organization.”89 By rewriting the bill with a provision that excluded Ireland from the more restrictive components of the law, the Children Act which was passed in 1909 made only modest changes to the legal code that applied to minors.90 Under the new act children’s access to licensed houses would remain the same in Ireland

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as under the earlier Children Messenger Act, with one major exception: Adults accompanied by children under age 14 would no longer be allowed to consume intoxicants on the premises. While this provision represented a “fresh restriction,” according to the LGVPA’s parliamentary representative, “matters were in a much more satisfactory position than if the clause had gone through unamended as it did for England and Scotland.”91 Following this change to the licensing legislation, the LGVPA distributed three different cards to its members to inform them of the revisions in the law. Since, as the parliamentary return compiled by the Dublin police demonstrated, the heavy use of public houses by women accompanied by children was common, if not widespread, across the city, the circulation of notices to members of the LGVPA was an attempt to minimize any disruption of the trade while simultaneously instituting compliance. The first card stated on one side the most relevant sections of the legislation itself, while its reverse contained simplified explanatory notes written by the association’s solicitor expressly for the use of shop assistants and publicans. The other two cards distributed by the LGVPA were intended to provide instruction for customers. Both of them were designed to be posted in a prominent place on the property of the license holder, and warned the public of the new restrictions on the presence of children.92 Owing to the compromise worked out for Ireland, the association’s solicitor, after reviewing the new law, decided that, unlike the situation in England, special waiting rooms for children would not be necessary in Ireland. Despite the fresh regulations placed upon children entering a licensed house, temperance reformers continued to press for further restrictions. The new target for reform that emerged from the temperance movement was the presence of “barmaids” working behind the counters of public houses. In the same way that the Children Messenger Act sheltered the young from the pub, temperance crusaders envisioned further restrictions based on gender to prohibit women from working within the “poisonous” atmosphere of pubs. According to the critics of the barmaid profession, the occupation was “perilous to virtue,” subjected women “to the hearing of things which it is bad for them to hear,” and put “their chastity to too severe a strain.” For these reasons such a female profession exposed women to “temptations from which [they] ought legally to

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be shielded.”93 According to this temperance perspective, women were ill-equipped, both morally and physically, to work in or patronize a public house without falling prey to the lure of intoxication or to sexual impropriety. Publicans within the LGVPA reacted quickly to rumors that the newly elected Liberal Government in London was considering legislation to regulate barmaids working in the male-oriented public house, a development which, as small business owners noted, would no doubt significantly increase labor costs. Defending their trade from state intervention on the barmaid question, publicans pointed to other occupations that posed similar threats to women but which failed to attract the attention of reformers. For example, in the Irish Vintner and Grocer, parallels were most often drawn between barmaids and women working in department stores and on the stage. In one such article an unnamed writer invited the temperance crusaders to compare barmaids as a class with other wage earners. In their comparisons, the author surmised, barmaids as a class would turn out to be no less virtuous than other young women wage earners of “the same social standing” – such as dressmakers, milliners, shop assistants in unlicensed houses, actresses on the stage, or “the girls employed behind the counter in [London’s] large West End shops.”94 In this way the author contended that “it would be out of place” to restrict the public-house trade without also restricting that of restaurants, department stores, or theaters.95 Unlike traditional Irish society, where, according to the author, women participated mostly in small family businesses such as licensed grocery shops and public houses, trends in England posed a greater threat to the well-being of women. Publicans also pointed out the inconsistencies in temperance rhetoric ´ In the years just before when it came to female public-house habitues. World War I, both local magistrates and temperance reformers claimed that female inebriety and pub patronage had increased substantially in a relatively short time. The issue mainly centered on the English pub, but the Irish trade wasted no time in sounding the alarm over possible legislative actions and growing judicial bias. In the final issue of the Irish Grocer and Vintner published before the war, a spokesperson for the licensed trade in 1914 asserted:

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While they [i.e., temperance reformers] regard licensed houses as places hardly tolerable and would deny citizens their right to enjoy legitimate refreshments, they have no word to utter against the West End emporiums in London which tempt women to spend considerably more on dress than their husband’s income can afford and oftentimes bring ruin on their families. In fact, some of these self-same “temperance” advocates are the worst of offenders in this respect and spend their days chattering in tea-shops undermining their constitutions by excessive tea drinking.96

Such hyperbole deflected criticism of the Irish pub toward the new icons of English consumerism and modern urban life, namely, the large department stores and consumer-oriented, independent female shoppers. Although not yet present in Dublin before the war, such English innovations were the real danger to public morality, Irish publicans argued. Like the rise of the English suffrage movement, it was a development that called for Irish vigilance, according to their trade association. Nonetheless, publicans could also appropriate the cause of women’s suffrage if it served their political purposes. In a case that the licensed trade publicized, publicans criticized a Cavan magistrate who refused to grant a public-house license to a woman. Rejected on the grounds that the pub business was not a suitable female occupation, the plaintiff eventually received her license, but only after the LGVPA intervened on her behalf. The attorney for the licensed trade flatly condemned the magistrate for “not being a supporter of women’s suffrage.”97 The woman’s husband was a public official of high standing; perhaps even more important, in his ruling the magistrate added that if the husband did not approve of his wife’s taking out a license, it would be revoked.98 More research is needed to determine whether similar cases in Ireland resulted in frequent rulings against independent female publicans. What appears clear, however, is that there was a strong effort on the part of magistrates and temperance reformers to minimize women’s presence within public houses in the years just before World War I.

VI The social and cultural pressures on Dublin publicans deepened and magnified in the years leading up to the outbreak of war in 1914. Indeed,

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the suburbanizing pattern of economic development in the city, first visible in the 1860s, began after 1900 to draw public-house profits away from the center of the city to the newly developed outlying regions. In addition, the revaluation of public-house property came into force in 1909 and, coupled with the new expenses for insurance and other costs associated with maintaining employees, added to the mounting hardships experienced by the trade. In fact, the LGVPA and the assistants’ union began wrangling with one another over hours, wages, and insurance benefits in a manner not seen since the Sunday-closing debates of the 1870s. Of particular concern, and emblematic of the sinking fortunes of the trade, was the considerable decline in the value of public-house businesses in Dublin. Robert Russell, the secretary of the LGVPA, in a speech before the association, laid the blame for the decline on temperance and labor reforms recently enacted by parliament, a substantial increase in taxation on several levels, and the uncertainty surrounding recently introduced legislation. As a result of these unfavorable conditions, Russell estimated that the capital value of the licensed houses of Dublin had fallen by “at least by half” in a period of a few years, leaving many public houses “on so unstable a footing as to render them unmarketable.” Summing up the state of the trade in the city, Russell declared that, beyond the many public houses that had already been forced to close, there were still “hundreds” of publicans in the city who were not “in a position to leave to their families one-fourth of what they paid for their houses.”99 Certainly, much of the depreciation of which the secretary complained centered around the new taxes levied on the trade and on a subsequent plunge in public-house profits after these new taxes came into force. In order to gauge the degree of damage done to the trade, the secretary compiled a report showing the decrease in profits across the city after new taxes on spirits were imposed in 1909.100 Although the results of his survey are striking, the findings should be viewed with a cautious eye since no doubt the LGVPA hoped to use such evidence in its political battle for tax relief. Nonetheless, the secretary claimed to have spent a considerable amount of time and effort combing the city in order to compile his statistics. His report, carefully based upon information gathered from the account books of public-house businesses across the

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city, showed drops in profits of between 25 and 80 percent. The portrait painted by the secretary suggests that the houses most profoundly impacted by the new taxes were those in the working-class sections of the city, where patrons could least afford the steep increases in prices and where whiskey was the most popular drink. This growing sense of the sinking fortunes of the Dublin public-house trade found expression in a letter written to the LGVPA’s solicitor by a Dublin publican and alderman. Alderman O’Connor’s complaint centered on the steep increase in the valuation of his public house from £26 to £42 at a time when public-house profits and property were suffering a considerable “slump.” Located in what O’Connor described as a “decaying neighbourhood,” his public-house business, he contended, no longer netted profits comparable to those earned by the previous owner of the establishment in the 1890s. Though at the time of purchase in 1898 O’Connor had “contemplated rebuilding,” the additional property tax and dwindling profits precluded such an upgrade. Instead of spending capital on modernizing the business section of his premises, O’Connor settled upon a more modest remodeling project, adding only an extra room for his employees.101 While O’Connor provided sleeping accommodations for his shop assistants, as most publicans continued to do at this time, the flight of artisans and laborers during the prewar period from traditional lower-class neighborhoods represented a threatening demographic trend for these long-established pubs. The LGVPA was well aware of the gravitation of the working classes of “moderate means” to the suburban districts of the city. According to a lengthy letter sent by the LGVPA Secretary to the association’s solicitor, John Barton, the problem was most acute in those regions once considered the outskirts of the city: Drumcondra, Pembroke, Glasnevin, Cabra, Clontarf, the North Circular Road district, and Rathmines. As Jacinta Prunty has noted, the sense of encroaching poverty and the lack of improvements to much of the city’s infrastructure helped to propel many inhabitants of these districts to more outlying residential neighborhoods. While this trend had been evident in Dublin since at least the 1860s, according to Russell it had previously been confined to the middle class, “who only visited public houses during the day” – if they did so at all. Another related factor which contributed significantly to this

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trend, according to the secretary’s letter, was the rather sudden end to the “living-in system” in Dublin’s drapery shops. By this he meant the tradition of providing rooms for the employees of department stores in the center of the city’s two major shopping districts. Since the system of furnishing lodging had “practically been abandoned by the drapery houses of the city,” Dublin had experienced “a migration of thousands of these employees to suburban districts,” Russell wrote. As an example of the depopulation of the city center, he pointed specifically to the neighborhood of the Four Courts: “In this neighbourhood the Ormond Market, where formerly between 1400 and 1500 people lived, has been cleared, while such streets as Beresford, Greek, Jervis, Strand, and other thoroughfares show signs of decay.”102 In these neighborhoods Russell calculated that because of the exodus of the working-class population, over 20 public houses had gone out of business. In the same letter Russell complained that the markets in the city, which had once drawn so many individuals into Dublin, no longer played so great a role in the life of the metropolis. Since markets and fairs generally lifted the profits of publicans, according to Russell, their decline seriously depressed the public-house trade in the neighborhoods of James Street, Thomas Street, Smithfield, and North King Street, “where the pig and cattle markets were once held.”103 Of equal importance to the health of the trade was the emergence of counter-attractions to the public house. In his letter to the LGVPA’s solicitor, Robert Russell pointed out that “public houses are not now used at all to the extent that they were.”104 Both the LGVPA and the Guinness brewery identified “cinematograph theaters” as an important part of the problem, luring as they did otherwise pub-going crowds away from the taproom. In a letter to Guinness’s headquarters at St. James’s Gate, a trade analyst for a company named Shaper asserted that since this form of popular entertainment had swept much of the country, Guinness’s sales to public houses had suffered. Shaper reported that “numbers of the working classes visit them regularly,” and since the films themselves were changed twice per week, public houses were losing a significant amount of business; such entertainments “reduce the amount available for intoxicating liquors.”105 In Dublin itself 43 “picture houses” now served the entertainment needs of the city, and according to O’Byrne, a member of the executive committee of the LGVPA, “the damage to

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the trade has been very severe.”106 Taken together with the new tram and rail-transport systems that offered city dwellers inexpensive access to sights and scenes outside of the city itself, cinemas made the hold of the public house on the working class of Dublin appear tenuous at best to members of the LGVPA. On the eve of World War I the Irish drink trade, while not in a state of acute distress, faced a myriad of unprecedented challenges. The adverse political and social conditions, however, should not be overstated, for this period represents not so much a decline as a leveling of the upward trajectory of the drink trade’s political and social influence between 1860 and 1900. The publicans most vulnerable to external social pressures were those located deep within Dublin’s slums and the business districts of the city. For those more fortunate in their location, the new age of mass transit and consumerism heralded fresh opportunities which they seized by diversifying their services in order to cater to a more suburban, mobile, and affluent populace.

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7 World War I and the Trade

I The crisis of World War I was a time of unprecedented socio-political upheaval that profoundly recast the position of the drink trade in Irish society.1 While the wartime tumult encompasses the Home Rule crisis, the Easter Rising, the Anglo-Irish War, and the Civil War, this chapter will focus primarily on those issues which had a most significant impact on the operation of the public-house system in Dublin between 1913 and 1918. These were labor activism and reform within the retail trade, intensified police and military surveillance of the barroom, and the political strategies and alignments adopted by the LGVPA to fend off the extreme wartime restrictions on the drink industry. As in many other areas of political, social, and cultural life, the outbreak of war in Europe accelerated several trends that had been visible prior to the conflict. As a wide array of recent monographs has demonstrated, an examination of political and social life on the home front, far from the factory walls and the respective war-rooms of the belligerent nations, offers fruitful findings for appreciating the undercurrents of historical change during the Great War.2 In Ireland the public house – and the terms and conditions under which licensed houses would be managed and operated during and after the conflict became an issue that encompassed labor reform, wartime efficiency, and economic survival. In August 1914 the immediate necessities of combat prompted the British Government to look afresh at control of the drink trade as a

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principal means of strengthening the war effort at home. During the military conflict temperance reform attracted the attention of the materially minded wartime planners who wished to eliminate the supposed detrimental effects that drunkenness was having on industrial and military efficiency.3 Adding to the criticism emanating from Westminster, the pub in Ireland faced yet another threat from the wartime propaganda of advanced Irish nationalists. For many in the vanguard of this wing of the movement the public house represented, even more than it had before the war, a symbol of British colonialism and a danger to Irish culture.4 Yet the war also escalated other public controversies surrounding the public house – debates which had been a feature of the politics of drink in the years prior to the outbreak of hostilities. Trade unionism within the ranks of vintner assistants, resistance to the practice of women patronizing pubs, crackdowns on publicans serving soldiers, and the high toll of the increasingly heavy taxation of the drink trade all had been prominent issues during the prewar decades in Ireland, but in the context of wartime austerity the public house and the intoxicants served therein elicited fresh calls for reform – if not for complete prohibition. Since the LGVPA possessed experience in staving off threats of this sort, its organizational network was in a position at the outset of the conflict at least to formulate a vocal defense of its businesses. Even though the war was viewed by temperance reformers as a boon for their cause and seen by publicans as a time of mounting threats to their livelihoods, fresh trade restrictions did little to undercut the trade’s customer base and source of profits until 1917, when shortages of beer and whiskey supplies threatened to bring business to a halt. Certainly, greater police supervision, higher taxes, and restrictions on business hours complicated the conduct of business, but the exigencies of war presented the types of challenges which the LGVPA was well suited to meet. Admittedly, the demands were in many cases more extreme than in the past, yet the accommodations with local and parliamentary officials that Dublin vintners won during the war demonstrate the continued vitality of the LGVPA and its allies in the political world of the public house.5 In addition to the hostile political environment for the public-house trade at Westminster, the wartime measures that did pass parliament presented the LGVPA in Dublin with the difficult task of bringing its

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members into line with the strict regulations. As was the case across much of Europe, the conflict prompted the British Government to intervene in the daily lives of its citizens with a view to maximizing wartime efficiency. The passage of the Defence of the Realm Act in 1914 transferred many powers from parliament to the cabinet and the military in order to meet wartime demands. In this legislation and subsequent measures the drink trade loomed large as a target for wartime planners, and the sector of the economy associated with liquor production and retail trade quickly came under some of the most rigid restrictions experienced during the war. The steady criticisms that had been leveled over the past 50 years by temperance groups over the demoralizing and, more importantly, physically stultifying effects of alcohol on human vitality appeared at this time as not just a matter connected with industrial output, as they had in earlier decades, but rather as an issue of national survival. In short, the exigencies of war placed the members of the drink trade, including manufacturers and distributors, in an exceedingly vulnerable position. As the government identified reducing drunkenness as crucial to building up industrial output and military might, its officials moved first to control more tightly the retail businesses in and around military canteens and industrial centers. In order to combat absenteeism among industrial workers and drunkenness within the ranks of the armed forces, military and civilian police focused upon monitoring military canteens and public houses for inebriety. Female drunkenness and the sight of soldiers openly drinking while in uniform represented for civil and military authorities the most serious and demoralizing infractions peculiar to wartime. As the war progressed, however, efforts expanded to include the brewing and distilling industries in preventative measures. In 1915 the government established the Central Control Board (CCB), headed by Lord D’Abernon, to oversee the whole of this sector of the economy. In addition to the restrictions placed on the retail trade, many wartime proposals and regulations focused on curtailing output and lessening the draw upon supplies used in the brewing and distilling processes that could be used instead for nutritious foods. Although such restrictions did not have a direct impact on the oversight of the licensed houses of Dublin, the LGVPA interpreted these governmental actions as a threat to its businesses. Irish publicans claimed that by interfering with such a heavy hand in the manufacturing process, the authorities would likely degrade

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the products that brought customers to their public-house doors. In addition to controlling supply, the CCB also took an interest in wholesale management of the liquor-retail business. One month after its creation the board contacted one of the recently created private management groups, the Home Counties Public House Trust, to negotiate the terms by which it might operate public houses in certain “sensitive areas” of the country.6 Although placing the trade under the managerial control of a public-house trust was not a wholly new proposition, the unusual circumstances surrounding the war breathed new life into this notion of reform.7 The restrictions placed on the whole of the drink industry appeared, at the very least, to be short-term victories for the temperance movement. Emboldened by such “reforms,” the traditional foes of the public-house trade sought to sustain and accelerate this momentum by calling for complete prohibition during the war. A petition circulated in Dublin by temperance reformers encapsulated the blending of wartime efficiency and the perceived need to eliminate the drink traffic: We, the undersigned, being impressed with avoiding all waste, and of utilizing fully the moral and material resources of the nation, and being convinced that the present enormous consumption of intoxicating drink is the most dangerous enemy of national efficiency, health, and economy, hereby urge his majesty’s government to prohibit the manufacture, import, export, and common sale of intoxicating liquor during the war and for six months afterwards.8

At this time the calls on the part of the temperance movement for prohibition gained a new salience; for in the context of the national emergency and the need to eliminate inefficiencies and drags on the economy, completely prohibiting the retail sale of intoxicants appeared as a more reasonable and less radical type of reform than it had during peacetime. Publicans, however, emphasized the temporary aspect of the wartime measures. Since the strict military discipline on the streets reflected the short-term necessities for order and discipline, the special measures of wartime efficiency would last only as long as the conflict in Europe persisted. Additionally, the LGVPA underscored the unique political circumstances that defined the Irish case and warranted exceptional

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consideration during the war. For example, publicans touted the impending prospect of Home Rule, which was put off for the duration of the military conflict, as justification for leniency in the enforcement of wartime measures, especially when it came to the repression of the drink trade. Once again publicans pointed to the example of Charles Stewart Parnell, who had averred in 1886 that control of the drink trade was an issue that could only be resolved by the Irish people themselves. During the war the LGVPA would find ready allies within the Irish Parliamentary Party; John Redmond, John Dillon, and Joseph Devlin worked closely with the association to influence the government at Westminster. In putting the claims of the Irish trade before the government, vintners and their allies claimed that the absence (outside of Belfast) of heavy industries made Ireland largely irrelevant to the material calculations of war. Unlike the rest of the three kingdoms in the British mainland, Ireland possessed neither heavy munitions factories nor other war-related industrial sectors. Save for the shipyards located in Belfast, the country as largely unimportant to the military mobilization, so publicans argued. When putting their case before parliament, the LGVPA and its kindred associations across Ireland also appealed for leniency by stressing the fragile economic condition of the country and its dependence upon the drink industry for economic survival. Vintners protested that to crush the retail trade with taxes, summary closings of pub businesses, and unduly harsh police and military supervision would spell economic ruin for the nation and put an end to its contributions to the war effort. Yet not all of the war’s immediate effects were harmful to trade interests. The LGVPA benefited for at least the first two years of the conflict, for example, from the wartime truce that ended much of the industrial unrest so prevalent across the United Kingdom and terminated the campaigns by urban reformers to clear the slums of the plentiful numbers of public houses located therein.9 Following mobilization a motion for “industrial peace” was adopted by a joint meeting of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress, the Management Committee of the General Federation of Trade Unions, and the National Executive of the Labour Party. The governing clause of the resolution stated that an immediate effort [should] be made to terminate all existing trade disputes, whether strikes or lock-outs; and whenever new points of difficulty

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arise during the war period, a serious attempt should be made by all concerned to reach an amicable conclusion before resorting to a strike or lockouts.10

This spirit of inter-class cooperation brought a quick end to the labor strikes in Dublin which, although not directly affecting a majority of public houses in the city, had nonetheless entangled the retail traders in Dublin in a series of tense negotiations with their assistants.11 Since an aggressive strike by vintner assistants occurred in the spring of 1918, the wartime truce clearly marked only a temporary cessation of strife between public-house owners and their employees. Unlike the upsurge in pleas for fresh temperance legislation during the war years, the falling off of assistants’ calls for higher wages, longer holidays, and shorter working hours should be viewed more as an anomalous development associated with the overshadowing of workers’ concerns by the war and nationalist discontents than as a long-term trend. In fact, the war years saw the emergence of an emboldened movement by assistants to win improved working conditions within the licensed retail business, a movement that surfaced with unprecedented vigor and strength after the Easter Rising in Dublin and the end of hostilities in 1918.

II The fermentation of assistants’ grievances can be traced back to the years directly preceding World War I. Although the vintner assistants did not combine forces with Jim Larkin’s powerful Irish Trade and General Workers’ Union before the war, the considerable trade-union movement in Dublin certainly had a profound impact on their political demands. Inspired both by the local organizing of James Connelly and James Larkin at home and the labor reforms taken up by the Liberal Government at Westminster, the assistants’ union took an increasing interest in matters outside of its usual range of activities.12 Relations between the LGVPA and the assistants’ union had been under considerable strain since 1910 as support for legislation to place limits on working hours swelled within the ranks of public-house assistants.13 When it became apparent in 1911 that the LGVPA lacked the political support in parliament to stop the measure, Dublin vintners resigned themselves to the

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legislation, heeding the “agitation” organized by their assistants in support of it.14 One unnamed member of the LGVPA warned the association that it could not ignore the fact that assistants outnumbered publicans by at least three to one.15 Given the assistants’ popular supremacy, the LGVPA proceeded cautiously at first in its quiet opposition to the Shops Act of 1911. While the legislation was under debate in parliament, the assistants took advantage of the favorable political climate to press new demands upon their employers. According to a letter from the assistants’ union written by a member identified simply as “Terrant,” the union had voted unanimously for an 8 a.m. opening, three hours per day for meals, “half-holidays” every week (by which they meant time away from work from 2 until 11 p.m.), and a full two-week holiday annually.16 Initially the LGVPA, along with the Belfast Licensed Vintners’ Association (BLVA) and other vintner trade associations across Britain, balked at these demands, calling them unreasonable and unworkable.17 In a series of meetings designed to avoid a strike, however, a compromise between the LGVPA and the assistants quickly emerged. What most concerned the LGVPA were the mandatory restrictions on opening hours and the prospect of having to hire additional employees to meet the demands of daily business. Although both parties did agree to a six-point compromise, in coming to the agreement the LGVPA succeeded in softening several of the strongest demands, such as the length of mealtime breaks, special exceptions in case of an assistant’s illness, and the limiting of weekly time away from work to only one day.18 In contrast to the LGVPA in Dublin – and as an example of the tense class relations in Ulster – the Belfast vintners refused to concede “restrictions of hours of any sort.”19 In a last-minute amendment to the final accord, employers won a further victory by securing the adoption of a provision which, as a sop to those traders dependent upon business associated with fairs and markets, allowed for a local vote by publicans to determine whether any special exceptions to the 8 a.m. opening would be necessary. Since many public houses in the vicinity of markets opened early in order to accommodate the morning crowds, early-morning business comprised a considerable proportion of their overall trade. According to the agreement, if two-thirds of the publicans in any given district voted to alter the 8 o’clock rule for general opening, the houses in those districts would be free to open

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their doors earlier.20 Having secured such compromises, William Powell, the chairman of the LGVPA, proclaimed to a special meeting of the association that he “thought [ . . . ] on the whole they had made a bargain which would make it possible to continue to do their business without increasing the existing number of assistants.”21 While the LGVPA trumpeted the negotiations as a triumph, the agreement marked the first fundamental reform affecting the labor system under which assistants worked since the Sunday Closing Act of 1878 – and the first of a series of compromises that would reconfigure the terms by which assistants worked. As class tensions in Dublin intensified during the industrial unrest and general strikes of 1913 and 1914, publicans became embroiled, as they had been during the nationalist unrest, in the conflict. Beyond any feelings that publicans in working-class districts may have had toward the strikes, licensing magistrates took seriously charges that publicans were withholding services to individuals on the grounds of political allegiances. Even though it appears that most publicans within the LGVPA opposed the trade-union movement, its leaders, and its political agenda, some publicans – and more particularly their assistants – appeared to have sympathized with the strikers. In 1913 the LGVPA came to “an arrangement” with the undersecretary for Ireland, James Doherty, by which “oppositions arising out of the strike” would be dropped.22 Despite this assurance, the LGVPA continued to receive complaints by publicans that their support for the strike was used as evidence against them for renewals and transfers of their licenses. In one particular case a recently widowed woman, identified as “Mrs. Sheron,” had been denied the transfer of her husband’s license for a house in Inchicore because her foremen had “demanded increased prices from persons obnoxious to the strike.”23 Just as the LGVPA had contended during boycotts at the time of the Land War, the solicitor for the association defended this and other cases like it by arguing that “traders whose [houses] were picketed were justified in refusing to supply drink if they apprehended that a riot might take place on their premises.”24 Support for the strikers within the LGVPA appears to have been limited to certain establishments in working-class neighborhoods, and those few examples of public houses giving such moral support to the strike typically stemmed not from the publican but from the assistant working behind the counter.

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Although the LGVPA pleaded for leniency in cases wherein bartenders bent to the popular will of a working-class neighborhood, they also complained of the “unfair” picketing of certain houses by strikers for political purposes. In a letter written to John Redmond, the head of the Irish Parliamentary Party, by Martin O’Byrne, the assistant secretary of the LGVPA, the association decried the picketing of public houses by James Larkin’s Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. O’Byrne alleged that the publicans targeted by the strikers were being singled out for their political support of the United Irish League (UIL) and for their opposition to the “Larcon regime” and were for this reason alone “subjected to the most outrageous treatment.” James Vaughan, a town councilor and the owner of a public house on Dean Street, had had his premises picketed repeatedly, the letter alleged, “because he dared to keep in his shop window an election card of councilor Scully, a prominent member of the UIL, who [was] being opposed by one of the most advanced and extreme of the socialist and anti-party gang.”25 In addition, O’Byrne pointed to “several houses” in the St. Patrick’s district of the city that had received similar treatment from militant workers. Despite the picketing, O’Byrne claimed that the “nationalist press” had largely remained silent on the matter, and he implored Redmond to apply his influence in order to “alter” the situation.26 With the outbreak of hostilities in Europe the attention of assistants and employers alike shifted to the immediate concerns of war. Unlike their employers who were concerned at this time with the new restrictions placed on their businesses, assistants feared the loss of their jobs. On 9 September 1914 the assistants’ union wrote to the LGVPA to ask for leniency in the face of the trying circumstances that forced them to choose between their employment and service to their country. In the unsigned letter the exponent of the assistants’ perspective underscored the difficult position in which the war had placed them: “They must sacrifice their burning desire to be in the ranks of the volunteers or their employments.”27 To illustrate the point, the writer of the letter rhetorically asked the Chairman of the LGVPA if he “could expect that such a body of athletic young Irishmen could look longingly on while the rest of the youth and the manhood of the country prepare for defence of its property and its rights?”28 In order to participate in the Volunteer movement, assistants requested that their employers grant them all of

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Sunday to drill with the militias, a request that was quickly rejected by the association. Beyond this repudiation of the assistants’ demands by the LGVPA, publicans also took a more proactive tack with assistants who chose to break the terms of their apprenticeship. Several members of the association complained of apprentices, working as assistants, breaking their contracts of employment by deserting their posts without warning.29 In certain instances apprentices left their jobs only to resurface some months later in the service of another publican, several licensed traders claimed. These complaints by vintners point to the ways in which the war uprooted many Irish workers for service in both the imperial war effort in Europe and the nationalist struggle at home.30 At the same time the war and increased nationalist unrest after the Easter Rising served to bring assistants in contact with the trade-union movement, which before the war had been largely confined in Ireland to the cities of Belfast and Dublin. As was the case throughout Great Britain, trade unionism among vintner assistants burgeoned during the war years. As attitudes in nationalist Ireland hardened against British rule and the ongoing war on the Continent after the Easter Rising in Dublin, labor unrest and absenteeism became increasingly common within the public-house trade. In 1916 the Irish Vintners and Grocers Assistants’ Association in Dublin merged with the Irish National Union of Vintners and Grocers and Allied Trades’ Assistants to form one amalgamated national union, the Irish National Union of Vintners, Grocers, and Allied Trade Assistants.31 Celebrating this moment in their history, the new union proclaimed on 9 September 1916 that “the time has arrived when it is absolutely necessary that a strong national union of assistants engaged in the grocery and liquor trade throughout Ireland should be formed and become linked up with other labour bodies through affiliation with organized labour in Ireland.”32 In part prompted by the assistants’ strike in Belfast against their employers, the newly formed union noted at its initial meeting in Dublin the importance of “defending” their fellow members in Belfast, “where some tyrannical employers are making a determined attempt to smash the existing organisation of the assistants.”33 In fact, the strike in Belfast, according to the resolution passed by the assistants’ union, “threaten[ed] the liberty of every assistant throughout the country.”34 While disputes between publicans and assistants in Dublin never deteriorated to the level of mutual distrust and derision

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experienced in the north, the fury and violence in Belfast was publicized to union members as an example of how far employers might be willing to proceed to destroy the trade-union movement. Furthermore, the new trade unionism of the war years emphasized national solidarity as the most effective means of progress; cooperation with and sympathy for the workers in Belfast became a matter for discussion at every union meeting at this time. More than most of the individual claims made by the new union, it was this increased cooperation with the entire trade-union movement that alarmed members of the LGVPA. As popular opinion continued to turn against the ongoing war in Europe, the threat of conscription in Ireland, and the emblems of British rule throughout much of the country, Dublin assistants took up a decidedly more strident campaign for better working conditions and higher wages. In the winter of 1918 the assistants’ union in Dublin drew up a petition, which they voted to forward to the LGVPA. The most extreme claim made by the assistants was for a minimum salary for journeymen of £25 per week. While many union members had also called for an end to the living-in system, this claim was dropped for the time being.35 Because of the “drastic circumstances brought on by the Great War,” the assistants asserted that their demands were reasonable and necessary.36 The five demands, which the assistants presented to the LGVPA went far beyond any prewar claims and followed the template laid out by the vintners’ assistants’ movement in England. It was mainly the prospect of vintner assistants combining with the broader trade-union movement that the leadership of the LGVPA objected to most strongly. For publicans, the demands and requirements of the retail liquor trade were so different from those of other businesses that to apply the broad-based claims of the workers’ movement to the public house was irrational and, more importantly, would spell ruin for their livelihoods. In a meeting convened to discuss the memorandum sent to them by their assistants, many LGVPA members called for a firm stance against the workers; many LGVPA members believed that not to act at this initial stage of the burgeoning trade-union movement would insure the continuance of unreasonable and unworkable demands. The issues of restrictions on hours and a minimum wage alarmed many of the assembled publicans, who felt that the LGVPA should extend no recognition to the union whatsoever. The chairman

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of the association, Pierce Ryan, recommended that instead of granting higher wages, assistants should be given “a decent war bonus,” as other large employers had granted to their workers.37 At yet another meeting called to respond to the assistants’ demands, a publican named Fanning pointed to the growing influence of the eight-hour-day movement on assistants and spelled out the unacceptable hardship that it would bring to the public-house trade: “It will mean that an assistant will start work at nine o’clock in the morning, get off for dinner at one, and will cease at six in the evening.”38 Given the long business hours of the typical public house, the eight-hour day would necessitate most publicans adding one or even two extra employees to their payrolls, Fanning surmised.39 In another typical rejection of the workers’ demands, Ryan intoned that because of the strict governmental oversight of their line of trade, public-house businesses lacked the flexibility and “free and voluntary nature of other trades.”40 Ryan also referred to the traditionally warm and familial relations between publicans and assistants and claimed that the new trade unionism threatened to sweep away the goodwill that had so long existed within the public-house business: He feared and he felt that they were led astray at the present juncture by some other consideration or influences that arose than those which would be to their own ultimate benefit. It was well known that they as a class stood in different relations to their employers from any other class of workers. They in the vast majority of cases were treated as members of the family. They were trusted to an extent that did not apply to any other trade, and invariably, when the time came that a young man ambitioned getting into business for himself, his employer assisted him by securing him [ . . . ] in the bank. The proposal now put forward would end all those time-honoured relations and create an estrangement as between employer and employee which never existed in the past.41

The rules that governed the public house were, Ryan and others contended, fundamentally at odds with “the principles of trade unionism,” founded as the latter were on conditions within the factory and on the workshop floor.42 However, as the LGVPA remained firm in its refusal to recognize the new union, the assistants stepped up the pressure on their employers and began, on 12 February 1918, to picket public houses in Dublin and the

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surrounding suburbs.43 By 17 February the LGVPA softened its stance against its employees and voted to recognize the new union, though the demands for a minimum wage for upper-level assistants was roundly rejected.44 Following the official recognition of the union by the LGVPA, tensions remained high between employers and assistants. In fact, the assistants called for pickets to be stationed in front of several public houses because, the union alleged, the publicans who managed these shops had fired assistants because of their links with the movement. In an effort to coerce the union into recalling strikers from the streets and to drop its demands, the LGVPA took the preemptive step of calling for a lockout on St. Patrick’s Day, 1918.45 In setting the date on the national holiday, the LGVPA no doubt hoped to rekindle the solidarity within their own ranks that had proved so effective in defeating the movement a decade earlier to close public houses on that day. On hearing through the press that the LGVPA planned to close their houses and lock out assistants on the upcoming Sunday, the workers called for their own meeting on St. Patrick’s Day in the Phoenix Park to counter the actions of their employers. According to the minutes of the union meeting held after the demonstration, which are most likely exaggerated, between 3,000 and 4,000 people attended the protest in support of the assistants.46 On 19 March the union voted to appoint a “picket committee” to oversee the picketing of all “non-union houses” in the city.47 The union quickly broadened its strategy, however, targeting all houses that had taken part in the lockout on the previous Sunday. On 20 March the general secretary of the union, P. Hugh, announced to union members that the “splendid system of picketing” had singled out every public house that had participated in the lockout and claimed that “there were many signs of the rot that had set in amongst the publicans extending.”48 Under pressure from both civic and military authorities, employers and assistants came together on 21 March in a meeting arbitrated by the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House in Dublin to begin an official dialogue to resolve their differences. Through tense negotiations which lasted two days, the LGVPA and the assistants came to agreements on hours, terms of apprenticeships, and various other labor issues.49 The only impasse that remained was the claim of salary increases for journeymen. The two parties did agree, however, to submit the issue to an independent

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arbitrator in order to resolve the matter. Arbitration took nearly a year, and during that time relations between publicans and the assistants’ union warmed only slightly. Disputes continued to flare up over vintners terminating the employment of union members and over publicans, the assistants’ union claimed, replacing assistants with family members.50 Despite the efforts of the LGVPA, trade unionism during World War I had transformed much of the public-house business. Entangled in government regulations and annual licensing sessions on one side and buffeted by a confident assistants’ union on the other, vintners faced a myriad of regulations which, while not necessarily crippling their businesses, pushed the LGVPA toward a more conservative political identity. More than in the past, it seems, Dublin publicans, while still an internal part of working-class communities, identified increasingly with a brand of conservatism that separated them fundamentally from their patrons and assistants. Nonetheless, these changes should not be overstated: while relations remained tense between the LGVPA and assistants in 1919 and 1920, only one brief strike would occur during these tumultuous years. Following its resolution no more major strikes would occur in the public-house trade until the 1950s.

III Beyond contending with the growth of trade unionism, the LGVPA was quick to recognize at the outset of the war the immediate threat that the crisis posed to the daily operation of the public-house business. On the morning of 26 August 1914, at a special meeting convened by the LGVPA, William Powell, the chairman of the association, declared that “as they could see from the morning papers [ . . . ] an absolutely unprecedented situation had arisen as a result of the introduction on the previous night in the House of Commons of a war bill.” Gleaning what he could from the press, the Chairman explained to the concerned assemblage of Dublin vintners that the government intended to give “power to a local authority” to oversee the complete regulation of the sale of all intoxicating liquors across the entire United Kingdom. Referring to the local director of such a regulatory board, Powell warned those in attendance that the fate of the trade would lie solely in the hands of such an executive’s

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“discretion.” It would be left largely to this government-appointed commissioner, Powell continued, to decide what actions were necessary “to protect the public interest.”51 In parliament it was the Irish nationalist leader and political maverick Timothy Healy, MP for Wexford, who cast a skeptical eye on the new restrictions, warning that “the government was being acted upon by the group of temperance people who were taking advantage of the war to carry out their own particular views.”52 While the war may have had the immediate effect of deferring the homerule question, albeit temporarily, nationalist MPs, especially those with strong political ties to the Irish drink trade, increasingly expressed serious reservations about curtailing the rights of publicans and, as restrictions became more wide-reaching over the course of the war, breweries and distilleries as well. The leaders of the Dublin association acted quickly to begin the process of devising a strategy for managing the new wartime demands placed on their trade. At a special meeting called to discuss the exceptional measures contained in the Defence of the Realm Act, Powell foresaw the way in which the war would play into the hands of the temperance organizations: “No doubt the temperance people would move heaven and earth to take advantage of this crisis to serve their own ends, and [ . . . ] they should not be caught napping.”53 In order to head off criticism of the trade at this crucial time the Chairman warned LGVPA members that “in a crisis like the present, [when] it was customary for the people to be fraternizing with and treating soldiers to drink,” members needed to be vigilant in making sure there were “no abuses.”54 This message of cooperation with the authorities remained the public position of the LGVPA, though in its private meetings moderately dissenting voices against the authorities were, while not exactly frequent, more commonly heard. During and after the Easter Rising in the spring of 1916, and continuing at least until the termination of hostilities on the Continent, during which time several public houses were destroyed, the LGVPA held to this practical course of accommodation and cooperation with the authorities. Given the centrality of the public house to the discourse surrounding national efficiency and morale on the home front, the liquor trade was among the first sectors of society to come under government oversight, review, and, as it became increasingly clear, possible wholesale

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governmental management. The first step felt by Dublin publicans was a shortening of public-house hours: pubs in Dublin would be required to close by 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and by 5 p.m. on Sundays. The drastic reduction of public-house hours represented a direct attempt by the government to reduce drunkenness by limiting the use of the pub during those times when heavy drinking was most common and widespread. In this way government ministers hoped to tame public-house comportment by suppressing the use of the public house by laborers after their workday had ended – the traditional time and space most popular for working-class conviviality and leisure. Realizing the hopelessness of resisting these restrictions and the far more damaging prospect of being labeled uncompromising in a time of crisis, the LGVPA acquiesced in the wartime measures without protest. At the outset of the war the practice of serving departing soldiers or, worse yet, “treating them” by providing them with free alcohol, became a key topic of enforcement for military officials and the police. According to the Secretary of the LGVPA, within two weeks of issuing new restrictions on business hours, constables and military police issued “verbal warnings” to all traders across the city of Dublin against serving “any military or reserves who had any signs of having drink taken.” While the LGVPA had experienced similar crackdowns on serving soldiers in uniform during the Boer War, the military’s policing of Dublin after the beginning of the war on the Continent contrasted with the situation of the earlier military action in two important ways. First, the unmistakable presence of the military on the streets of the city dwarfed the earlier mobilization of soldiers for the war in Africa. Second, the wartime powers now granted to the military in overseeing public houses gave them unprecedented authority in shutting down houses deemed a threat to the war effort. In addition to the personal messages of caution delivered to the trade, however, the military repression relating to serving soldiers was both swift and harshly felt. Informed by military pickets and police in plain clothing, the constabulary immediately closed public houses that were brought to their attention as particularly troublesome. Shortly after the passage of the Defence of the Realm Act in the autumn of 1914, the LGVPA reported to its members that “several” pubs had been closed

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due to “irregularities” in trading. Two establishments, those managed by London and Murray, were forced to close only temporarily for a period of two weeks. Two others, run by Millea and Cusack, however, were closed indefinitely for breaches of the “military regulations.” When reviewing the publicans who were in trouble with the authorities, the Secretary marked for special reference those who were not members of the association. Murray, for example, was not a member of the LGVPA and had a checkered history in the licensing courts, the association Secretary alleged. Given the nearly 800 public houses in the city, the initial imposition of wartime discipline was moderate in its impact on the trade, affecting far fewer licensed houses than had some police clampdowns in the city after the passage of the New Licenses (Ireland) Act of 1902. As trade oversight moved into the hands of military commanders, the LGVPA made a flurry of telephone calls to the commanding officers of the Dublin military headquarters, General Hill and Major Maul, in order to schedule a face-to-face meeting in which they could place their case before them. In a manner similar to that used to deal with police and licensing magistrates in peacetime, the executive committee planned a report to the military that would demonstrate through statistics and recent licensing sessions the respectability and law-abiding character of the retail drink trade in the city. Also similar to earlier efforts, Martin O’Byrne, secretary of the LGVPA, emphasized the importance of “inducing” the military authorities to adopt a uniform “attitude” in their treatment toward all cases reported.” By enforcing regulations judiciously, O’Byrne speculated, “it might save the situation.”55 Through these efforts the LGVPA succeeded in scheduling a meeting between its executive officers and the high command of the military responsible for overseeing public houses in and around the city. At the subsequent meeting the Chairman, Vice-chairman, and Secretary of the LGVPA explained the “impossible position” in which the trade found itself. What the committee found most worrisome were those situations where a publican could be held liable for a soldier “under the influence of drink” entering his establishment. Even if the soldier was not served by the assistant or vintner on duty, the public house could still have its door closed immediately if the incident were reported by the military picket on duty. While the Chairman reported to the LGVPA that he thought their

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presentation had “impressed” the military commanders, no agreements over or alterations to the system of enforcement were promised. In another effort to smooth relations between the city’s publicans and the military authorities, the LGVPA issued cards that patrols could display to publicans when entering licensed houses. Despite the fact that many of the soldiers patrolling the city were Irish reserves, there was nonetheless a palpable fear within the LGVPA executive board that troops in uniform might receive a less-than-welcome reception from some publicans.56 Violence perpetrated against soldiers before the Easter Rising of 1916 was rare, but there was distrust in both military and publican camps.57 The messages on the cards themselves were straightforward and terse: “This card authorizes the bearer to visit licensed houses at any time during trading hours, and it is the earnest desire of the committee of the association that he be courteously received and afforded every facility for an inspection.”58 Whether these cards were ever distributed to the military police or used by them while on duty is impossible to say, but they certainly were also important as a symbol of the general acquiescence of the trade to the strict military authority that prevailed over the city after the outbreak of hostilities. Furthermore, given the threat of draconian crackdowns on individual publicans and the trade as a whole, the cards could act as a visible symbol – as well as a reminder – of the new need for accommodation and compromise with the authorities. For the military too, the certificates were meant as an assurance that the public-house trade sought to assist in the process of disciplining itself. Perhaps as a result of the distribution of these cards, no houses over the succeeding two weeks were closed by the military – an abatement, however temporary, in an otherwise weekly chain of announced closings in the autumn of 1914.59 As for those public houses that the military did single out, the LGVPA publicly downplayed these stories and denied that any widespread abuses were taking place in the city. In fact, the association chose to ignore many cases they deemed unworthy of, or counterproductive to, their overall defensive strategy. In an incident reported to the LGVPA and the Recorder of Dublin by the military, a house on Marlboro Street, owned and operated by Cassidy, had been identified by the authorities and the Women’s Vigilance Committee as carrying on business after hours on Sunday. According to an interview between the Secretary of

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the LGVPA and military commanders in the city, a drunken soldier had been seen entering Cassidy’s public house at 11 minutes past 5 o’clock on Sunday (11 minutes after the official closing time). After the picket had been alerted and had affected an entry, “up to fifty people” were found drinking inside.60 Because of the “circumstances of the case,” the Secretary of the LGVPA determined that “the case was a bad one” and did not “justify their interference.”61 The LGVPA at this time was very cautious about defending any blatant violations of the strict licensing laws, and in such instances as this one they understood that interference might only cause a larger public controversy that would damage their public standing overall. As had been its practice before the war, the LGVPA claimed that the “loopliners” of the city were those who most egregiously broke the law and promoted disorder. The LGVPA found it frustrating, for example, that the police and the Recorder of Dublin at licensing sessions failed to impose disciplinary measures against William Phelan, whose establishment was located at 28 Eden Quay, for the notorious underselling that took place there.62 In fact, it was even suggested in March 1915 by one LGVPA member identified simply as Cunningham that “with regard to the supplying of drunken women and soldiers by those loop-line houses and the scenes in the neighborhoods of those houses,” it would be “a good idea” to approach the police authorities in order “to have those houses more carefully watched.”63 Although the chairman quashed the proposal out of fear that the police might “resent” the association meddling in this way with the “discharging of their duty,” it was finally agreed to send out a circular to all members warning them to be vigilant in refusing to serve drunken women and soldiers in uniform: The trade of the Dublin garrison district [ . . . ] should take every possible precaution against supplying soldiers who show the slightest sign of drink, or soldiers accompanied by women [ . . . ] and also to guard against any indiscriminate supplying of liquor to women.64

Though the issue of female inebriety had certainly been a flashpoint of controversy in the decade prior to World War I, with the mobilization for war the matter became an even more salient one in the dialogue between the authorities, the LGVPA, and temperance reformers. Beyond the fear of loopliners endangering the position of the trade, the LGVPA was also

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reacting with this circular to the stepped-up activities of a “Women’s Vigilance Committee” that organized and carried out nightly patrols of public houses in the city. Formed at the outset of the war to monitor and record wanton drunkenness and the identity of those retailers guilty of supplying such revelers, the Women’s Vigilance Committee, headed by Sir P.F. Barrett, began in the winter of 1915 to publish reports compiled by its largely female members. These accounts, which appeared in several leading Irish newspapers, described the scenes in and around some of the notoriously raucous licensed houses in the city.65 Though the committee’s 20 April report drew a fairly detailed picture of both women and men drinking in three different unnamed public houses, the reports, beyond their emphasis on the inebriety of pub-goers, did not vary in any large degree from the more systematic counting of female drinkers undertaken by the police in 1908. In a private response to the report published by the committee, the LGVPA pointed out that the “worst” of the public houses described in the report was situated in a working-class district, in close proximity to the “poor man’s markets.”66 In such a neighborhood as this, the LGVPA suggested in its letter, it was common, even before the war, to happen upon such scenes of drunkenness and fraternizing. The preoccupation of temperance reformers and government officials with female drunkenness tended to increase as the war progressed. As the Liquor Control Board (LCB) in London received reports from across the United Kingdom alleging a considerable increase in the numbers of drunken women observed by the police and civilian groups like the Women’s Vigilance Committee, the board called for stronger measures to be taken by the police in 1915. Temperance advocates naturally praised the greater attention paid to the issue as a positive type of social reform and encouraged stronger police methods to coerce women back into traditional, prewar spheres.67 As Henry Carter has noted in his work on the wartime restrictions of the drink trade, instead of giving “warnings” to inebriated women the board recommended in 1915 that women found to be intoxicated should be arrested and charged with the offense.68 Given the absence of heavy industry in Dublin and the relatively few women relocating to manufacturing jobs during the war, Ireland quite plausibly may not have experienced significant numbers of independent female drinkers individually enjoying public life with their new-found wages, as happened in England and Scotland.69 Furthermore, Dublin

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had an established pattern of female drinking in working-class districts – in spirit-grocer shops and public houses in the vicinities of markets – which also suggests that the war represented not so much a break with the past as a continuation of an established trend. Nonetheless, the fear expressed by the authorities and others that women were squandering the military pensions they were receiving while their husbands were on active duty was rejected flatly by publicans.70 Though vintners did not publicly encourage a female clientele, women patrons during the war certainly helped to sustain the customer base of the licensed trade while men served in the military or volunteer movements.71 In the months leading up to the Easter Rising in April 1916, the military authorities tightened the rules controlling public houses. On 9 July 1915, for example, the LGVPA received orders that no licensed establishments, including both on- and off-license shops, would be allowed to sell drink to civilians for consumption off the premises while army troops were in the vicinity “route-marching” through the streets.72 Claiming that there had been incidents of civilians currying drinks to troops on duty, Major Maul ordered the LGVPA to forward the order immediately to all of its members to ensure widespread compliance. Despite the efforts of the secretary, Martin O’Byrne, and the chairman, Peter O’Hara, to explain the difficulties of enforcing an order of this type, the LGVPA heeded the major’s request and informed the association of the new restriction. On 2 August 1915 public houses in the North Wall section of Dublin, in the immediate neighborhood of Sheriff, Oriel, and Commons streets, drew the attention of the military authorities, who averred that soldiers in uniform had been served in these houses without question. Pointing out that the location of these licensed houses did not pose a threat to the war effort insofar as the houses were “not in close proximity to the boats or shipping,” an association member identified only as “Farelly” called for an objection to be made to the military for the unnecessarily harsh treatment of the traders in this district.73 Confrontational tactics of this sort, however, found few supporters at the meeting, and Farelly’s resolution garnered only four supporters and was “defeated by a large majority.”74 In yet another crackdown on 29 February 1916 the authorities notified the LGVPA that the serving of “convalescent soldiers” was punishable under the Defence of the Realm Act, and a fine of £100 would be imposed on any vintners in violation of the rule.

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When militants seized control of the General Post Office and other positions in the city during the Easter Rising, the military enforcement of martial law brought all public-house business to an immediate halt. For four days all official business ceased under orders from the military, and for two weeks public houses were allowed to open only for brief intervals. With the stationing of three additional regiments in the city, on 16 May regular wartime hours resumed. Following the rising the LGVPA made every effort to keep public houses clear of any links with the insurgency, though they were naturally quick to protest the destruction of 17 public houses and the serious damage done to seven others in the city. At their first official meeting following the rising, Pierce Ryan put forth a resolution that enjoyed unanimous support from all traders in attendance: We [ . . . ] hereby place upon record an expression of our very deep sympathy with those citizens whose property, through no fault of their own, has been destroyed in the recent unparalleled disturbances in the city; and we express a strong hope and belief that the government and insurance companies will take such action as will restore to those people their homes, their business, and their property.75

The collateral damage surrounding the Easter Rising highlighted for the LGVPA the pressing need for a fair government scheme for compensation. In fact, beyond the damage done to licensed property during the rising, remunerating those publicans whose licenses were terminated under orders from the LCB and local licensing authorities had become by 1916 one of the top demands put forth by the association. While an examination of the role of the public house during the rising is beyond the range of this work, during the crisis the LGVPA followed its usual policy of non-involvement in politics outside of the drink trade. In fact, the LGVPA followed the lead of most employers, including the government, in recommending that workers who had lost their jobs owing to their connections with the insurrection be reinstated in their posts. Aside from immediately advising publicans to open their doors to apprentices and assistants who had taken part in the rising, the LGVPA later sent a deputation on behalf of a group of coopers to Arthur Guinness and Sons in order to pave the way for their reinstatement at the brewery.76

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As had been the case in the years prior to the rising, the LGVPA politically occupied the moderate ground between nationalist workers and the conservative – if not unionist – forces like Guinness. Above all, the LGVPA continued to follow during the war years a middle-class course, which placed emphasis on property rights, restraints on government, and modest accommodations with both labor and nationalist demands. By 1916 the LGVPA had recognized that wage increases, war bonuses, overtime earnings, the multiplication of wage-earners, and war allowances from the state – although less pronounced generally in Ireland than in England – added to the ability of public-house patrons to spend freely upon intoxicants and other items sold in public houses. Though temperance accusations of gross “profiteering” during the war were exaggerated, public houses in Dublin managed to sustain their earnings with carefully regulated price increases and cautious negotiations with licensing authorities. Despite the military crackdown and the substantial shortening of hours during the conflict most publicans in Dublin appear to have weathered the chaos of war and insurrection without losing their businesses. Fundamental to the success of the LGVPA was a sophisticated diplomacy with local officials and military commanders, and its effective political management of parliamentary schemes for taxation, state control, and limits on public-house manufactures.

IV The war constituted a high water mark for the temperance movement and its political agenda. After 1915 the aims of both government and temperance supporters seemed in many respects to have merged.77 Although the war overshadowed many of the central tenets of the Liberal Party – labor and social reform, a voluntary military, Home Rule, and free trade – temperance alone survived and even flourished during the conflict. The need for temperance reform and greater control of the drink trade only grew as the war progressed. In desperate need of fresh revenue to pay for armaments and other war-related expenditures, the Liberal Government in London turned naturally in 1915 to that sector of the economy which they deemed dispensable to the militarizing of industry. Public houses, along with the breweries and distilleries that supplied them, constituted a natural target for Westminster at this time.

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Yet heavy taxation on alcohol, summary closing of public houses near munitions plants and armories, and interference in the manufacturing process to limit and weaken supply met with considerable opposition from all sectors of the drink trade. It was the Irish Parliamentary Party, however, under the leadership of John Redmond, which proved to be one of the most consistent allies of the LGVPA in opposing these restrictions. Although Prime Minister H.H. Asquith achieved a major political victory when the Irish Parliamentary Party swore its allegiances to the military support of the British crown in the autumn of 1914, Irish MPs nonetheless broke ranks and opposed much of the government’s plans for taxing and controlling the drink trade. The LGVPA was at the political center of resistance to these government schemes. As in other times of crisis in the history of the licensed trade in Ireland, World War I witnessed a marked increase in trade organization and political action. To meet the increased political threat – as news spread in February and March of 1915 of a large tax increase on intoxicants and of closings of public houses near industrial and military centers – the LGVPA canvassed the most influential members of parliament to gain support in defense of their businesses. In March 1915 circulars along with fliers rebutting incriminating temperance reports were sent to all Irish Parliamentary Party members. On 13 April 1915 the executive committee singled out Waterford, the home constituency of John Redmond, as “the principal place to work [ . . . ] since anything coming from his constituents would have a great effect on Mr. Redmond.”78 In addition, groups of LGVPA representatives (usually two in number) were sent to Cavan, Leitrim, Longford, Sligo, Wexford, and Wicklow to lobby the local trade associations. The LGVPA executive committee strategized that with such an approach the associations would press their political representatives and local governments to oppose any further restrictions or taxation upon public houses.79 Smaller provincial towns warranted less attention, but still the executive committee recruited individual members to visit many less politically significant communities, especially in the environs of Dublin; sole emissaries of the association paid visits, for example, to Dundalk, Navan, and Roscrea.80 In the follow-up report on the deputation’s work, only one negative account was registered: in Navan a member named White informed the association that because of “some little local differences amongst the traders there,” no meeting

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could be organized. Yet this report represents the exception; otherwise, canvassing appears to have succeeded in making face-to-face contact possible with a large portion of the trade within a few days.81 Simultaneously with this grass-roots campaign, another deputation, headed by Peter O’Hara and a representative from the Belfast association, traveled to Westminster to meet with members of the war cabinet. Reporting by telegram back to the association, O’Hara alarmed some members when he informed them that the chancellor, David Lloyd George, intended that the government would “buy up” those houses near the docks and shipyards of Dublin.82 In a subsequent meeting with Asquith, the prime minister confirmed the Dublin traders’ fears when he admitted that “the government were compelled by circumstances to take certain action in war munitions areas to secure a steady output of the necessary materials for the forces at the front.”83 Explaining the position of the association to members who feared that the executive committee was caving in too easily to government plans for state control of the trade, Anthony O’Grady laid out the goals and challenges facing the deputation at Westminster: What they wanted was the exclusion of Ireland from any scheme contemplated by the government, and were told by John Redmond that that was impossible, as he understood the opposition would support the government in any scheme. They were face to face with the danger of being closed except for four hours each day, and it was a question of whether compensation or trading for four hours daily was the better. Personally, he thought the trade would prefer compensation on a fair basis. They should not forget that if Lloyd George’s scheme was defeated, they had still to deal with Lord Kitchener’s who would not be very sympathetic, and who certainly would close the houses if he thought it necessary to do so, without even considering the question of compensation. He is determined to make the war a success and nothing else will trouble him. They had the advice of Mr. Devlin that if they did not accept the scheme of compensation, they would come under the heel of Lord Kitchener.84

At this political juncture defeat at Westminster and a political resolution to the issue appeared preferable – at least to O’Grady and a majority of those on the executive board – to the coercive closing of public houses. On 2 May 1915 the LGVPA held a demonstration in the Phoenix Park

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to protest the government’s plans, having invited all members from the Irish Parliamentary Party to attend. Employing a professional advertising campaign to bolster attendance and to build an image of popular opposition to the government’s measures, the LGVPA ran daily newspaper advertisements, distributed advertising posters throughout the city, and designed protest placards to be displayed at the rally. As a result of the united front waged against the proposals by the Irish Parliamentary Party, the government’s plans for taxation of the drink trade went down to political defeat. Furthermore, Dublin public houses near the docks were excluded from any government takeovers or closings. After hearing the “glorious news” through Joseph Devlin, MP while at the Westminster Hotel, the Irish delegation made arrangements for their return to Dublin to celebrate the political victory.85 Although Ireland would not avoid incremental tax increases on intoxicants throughout the war, the Irish Parliamentary Party would remain staunchly opposed to substantial tax increases and schemes to weaken the strength of beer and whiskey during much of the conflict.86 In the autumn of 1915, for example, the Irish trade won another political victory when the cabinet rejected Edward Carson’s budget proposal for an additional 5s. 3d. per gallon tax on spirits. “All the Irish unionist members were for more taxation on beer and spirits,” the Secretary’s parliamentary report to the LGVPA claimed, “with the two-fold object of punishing the trade and at the same time straining if possible the relations between Mr. Redmond and the Irish party with the chancellor [Reginald McKenna].”87 In this aim, the parliamentary report avowed, Carson had failed. But the LGVPA faced political ramifications stemming from their victory. In summing up the political results of the machinations within the war cabinet, O’Byrne noted the fact that Carson’s “having to drop his proposals created a permanent severance with the nationalists.”88 Yet the unionists were not, according to O’Byrne’s interpretation, the only group irritated by the defeat of Carson’s spirit tax; he also observed that “our escape from taxation, we have good reason to believe, has also been a keen disappointment to another small section in the House, and those are the followers of Mr. O’Brien.”89 The one political tenet that advanced nationalists and unionists could agree on at this time was a marked antipathy to the drink trade. With their links with Protestant temperance organizations in the north, unionists possessed an inherent affinity for

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temperance legislation and a distrust of the organized licensed trade in the counties outside of Ulster, while advanced nationalists also adhered to a puritanical nationalist ideology that emphasized non-indulgence. During the course of the military conflict in Europe, the justifications of the war cabinet for control of the drink trade expanded beyond the matters of wartime morale and industrial efficiency.90 With the passage of the Beer Output Control Act in 1916 and powers granted to the office of the Food Controller in 1917, government planners turned to managing the output and strength of intoxicants as a means to streamlining domestic food production. With these measures control of the drink trade had become a matter of food economy, as German blockades threatened to cut off imports into the British Isles. One program adopted by the Food Controller was to require that breweries lighten the gravity of beer in order to minimize the amount of barley and hops used in the brewing process. Yet the war cabinet faced a considerable dilemma when it came to including Ireland in these austerity measures. Following the Easter Rising the managing of internal dissent in the country became a top priority of the war cabinet. For three months after the rising the cabinet spent a considerable amount of time and effort on devising a plan to quell any further unrest in Ireland. The goal of the government, following the dismay in Ireland over the executions of leaders of the Easter Rising, was to prevent moderate Irish nationalists from defecting to the ranks of the ´ movement.91 While the new measures designed to control the Sinn Fein output of breweries and distilleries did not directly affect the management of the public-house trade, the LGVPA viewed the proposals as a threat to supply and increasingly aired its dissent publicly in nationalist terms. In the final two years of the war the cabinet could ill afford to antagonize Irish publicans and the broad – and generally moderate – political constituencies that supported them.92 It was the proposed plan of the Food Controller in 1917 to limit the gravity of Irish beers that drew the most intense fire from the LGVPA. Since Irish beers were of a higher gravity than either English or Scottish beers, the Irish trade claimed that by mandating a lower gravity during the brewing process the government action would unfairly affect their products. Reacting to shortages of beer in the spring and summer of 1917, the LGVPA criticized the plan to permit increases in brewing output as

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long as the additional output was of a light gravity. The association began a concerted effort, in conjunction with the Irish brewing interest in May 1917, to oppose the plan in the Freeman’s Journal: It would be a case of adding insult to injury, for it would mean that a concession which might give some relief at the other side would be of no use whatever in Ireland. Owing to the peculiar brewing conditions in this country and the superior quality of the articles made by practically all the brewers in Ireland, it appeared [ . . . ] that the suggestion to deprive this country of the privilege of brewing the increased quantity at the strength and gravity which have given a world-famed name to the Irish manufactures had [ . . . ] a very sinister complexion.93

While the LGVPA applauded the collapse of the scheme of the Food Controller on 22 July 1917, this turn of events at Westminster did not allay fears within the association. After the breakdown of negotiations between the government and brewing and vintner delegations, Joseph Devlin informed the LGVPA that because of the failure to arrive at a satisfactory settlement, “Lloyd George had himself again taken charge of the entire question.”94 Placing little trust in the judgment of the Prime Minister, the LGVPA redoubled its efforts in the usual fashion by calling for a “monster meeting” in the Phoenix Park and by sending its own deputation to London.95 Additionally, on 31 July the LGVPA sent a circular to its members and all Irish MPs that invoked the words of John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, and spelled out the insensitive nature of the proposal.96 The controversy surrounding the issue was no doubt deepened by distress over the shortages, which by mid-summer had galvanized publicans who had run short of supply. On 24 July the Secretary reported “a large body of correspondence” from such traders all across the country. “Many traders have been for a fortnight, and some even longer,” Martin O’Byrne reported, “without having any porter in their shops.”97 One consequence of the shortage, O’Byrne warned, would only be intemperance, for according to the Secretary’s report, “in a number of cases porter drinkers had turned onto spirits,” creating a trend that “before very long would make things intolerable.”98 In the context of the growing temperance activism in Dublin and throughout the United Kingdom at this

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time, O’Byrne’s assertion most likely came more as a rebuke to the temperance politics of the day than as a fair representation of complaints by publicans. Nonetheless, the insufficient provisions affecting “small traders” in the country brought the LGVPA a level of popular support which only added to its influence upon the government. News of the decision of the Food Controller pleased the executive committee of the LGVPA. On 7 August the Secretary of the LGVPA informed the association that the government had met, at least in part, Irish demands for allowing additional output at a gravity level sufficient for producing an Irish porter.99 Granting an increase in production of 20 percent, the Food Controller succeeded in quieting, at least for a time, the shrill complaints from the Irish trade. With political support in Ireland slipping away from the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1917, the LGVPA would be forced to retool its political ´ won 73 seats and the strategies. In the 1918 general election, Sinn Fein Unionists 26, while the Irish Parliamentary Party was reduced to a rump, with only six remaining MPs seated in the British House of Commons. Yet this situation did not incline the government to alter its tendency to exclude Ireland from the more extreme limits on the drink trade. At the close of 1918, Martin O’Byrne could boast to the association that it was a “moral certainty” that Ireland would be left out of the plans of the Food Controller for limiting the gravity and quantity of output of the brewing industry.100 By 1918 internal matters had refocused the trade on politics within Ireland, although shortages of spirits in 1918 and 1919 led to another outcry by the LGVPA for the relaxing of restrictions.101 Though the strategy of appeasing Irish drink interests failed to shore up the sinking fortunes of the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1918, there remained a consensus within the London government that interfering heavy-handedly in the drink business during this tense period of relations between the Crown and Ireland was an unworkable proposition. The drink trade constituted a matter of local concern that, because of more pressing needs for conscription and a settlement to the Home Rule question, was largely beyond the interest of the British Parliament by 1918.

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Conclusion

This study has sought to elucidate the impact of the public-house trade on political and social life in Ireland from the Great Reform Bill of 1832 through World War I. Based upon the abundant archival sources of the drink trade itself, temperance journals, newspaper accounts, British intelligence reports, and parliamentary investigations, the predominant analysis has focused naturally on the inner workings and political machinations of the trade, the contested cultural definitions of the public house, and the discursive relationship between the contrasting rhetorics of temperance reformers and publicans. Reacting to the innovations of the various Irish temperance organizations, which have been so thoroughly examined by scholars in recent years, the organized licensed trade employed advanced forms of trade protection in the halls of parliament, in the courtrooms of the local magistracy, on the streets with protests and counter-demonstrations against temperance, and in the public press. In this multifaceted movement the LGVPA united much of the Irish trade outside of Ulster, forming a consolidated block of retail businesses that stood in distinct counterpoint to the brewer-dominated English retail trade. Despite declining alcohol consumption and an increasingly wellorganized temperance movement in Ireland between 1832 and 1918, the drink trade nonetheless managed, through adept public relations and an efficient political machine, to consolidate the public-house sector of the trade into a largely united block of licensed vintners, to stave off most temperance legislation during this period, and to refashion the image of its businesses as an asset rather than a threat to national prosperity. 219

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It was this last-mentioned success, combined with the advanced political structure of the LGVPA and its provincial allies, which arguably gave most weight to the vintner cause in the decade and a half preceding the founding of the Irish Free State. Although the Irish distilling and brewing industries employed a relatively small number of industrial workers, the LGVPA helped to create a potent image that conflated Irish prosperity (presented as resting on an organic link between Irish farmers and vintners) and a freely trading retail drink trade. Led by a phalanx of traders tied to the LGVPA in Dublin, many of whom were influential leaders in their local communities, the LGVPA participated in the politicizing of the barroom by invoking the intrinsically personal and Irish nature of the public house. Therefore, control of the Irish public-house system was a matter, the Irish trade contended, about which the British parliament was unfit to legislate. This strategy, which would serve vintner interests so well, contrasts sharply with earlier political efforts in the first half of the nineteenth century. Following the Act of Union in 1800, Dublin vintners lobbied for equal treatment under the terms stipulated by the legislation. The leadership of the LGVPA held – at least until the economic nationalism of Isaac Butt became the political doctrine of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the 1870s – that the political and legal union would promote economic growth by loosening the eighteenth-century restrictions placed on the trade.1 It was further hoped that the union would result in a simplified legal code and curtail the dizzying array of laws relating to the sale of spirituous liquors. Yet, because of the multiplicity of stakeholders with entrenched interests in both the control and ongoing prosperity of the trade in Ireland, these goals were never realized. More than was the case in England, persistent fears of unrest within the rural populace, the rapid growth of temperance politics during Father Theobald Mathew’s generation before the Great Famine, and the social uncertainties of transforming a trade so varied and multifunctional in its composition all served to limit the degree to which the trade could effectively be changed. The most profound victory of the temperance movement arguably occurred in the 1840s, when Father Mathew’s campaign helped to close nearly one-third of all the public houses in Ireland.2 Though the movement led by Mathew lies outside of the scope of this work, his colossal

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reputation and international following continued long after his death to be the yardstick by which subsequent movements would be judged. Despite the recent explosion of scholarly interest in Mathew, more research still needs to be done on the reactions of the drink trade to this unprecedented temperance campaign, which claimed more success, both in the enormous number of pledge takers and in the reduction of facilities licensed for the sale of drink, than perhaps any similar wave of reform in the modern history of alcohol.3 Though Mathew’s impact on consumption and the well-being of the trade was admittedly brief, his other, more lasting success was to curtail, if not to neutralize altogether, the popular link between militant Protestantism and temperance. As early as the late 1840s, nationalists would claim Mathew as a great Irish patriot. By the closing decade of the century even vintners had co-opted Mathew, pointing to his campaign as an example of the responsibility of every individual for adhering to temperance principles. By emphasizing the need for individual responsibility, the LGVPA minimized the culpability of vintners when plying their trade. In a political triangula´ with moderate and occasional tion, which drew together pub habitues drinkers, the LGVPA sounded a tone of conciliation similar to the platforms of the centrist temperance reformers who rejected teetotalism in favor of a moderate and rational form of indulging in alcohol. This was the political triumph of the drink movement in Ireland: By striking a stance that placed the respectable trade in a distinct position between the habitual drunkard and the radical teetotaler, the LGVPA could claim to be fighting the “national vice” of drunkenness while concomitantly labeling such stereotypes as slander against the Irish nation. The reforms of the licensing system in the 1860s and 1870s, when the LGVPA spearheaded the counter-offensive of the Irish drink trade against the beerhouse and spirit-grocer trades, featured contested definitions of the vintner. For temperance reformers, who were coalescing in Ireland under the umbrella of the Sunday-closing and permissive-bill associations, vintners were neither respectable nor law-abiding owing to the socially destructive trade which they conducted. In its reaction to this temperance campaign the LGVPA rhetorically employed the popular image of the beerhouse and its neglectful managers as a foil that served to deflect civic concern away from the contribution of the licensed house to working-class drunkenness in the city. As the LGVPA succeeded in

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bringing beerhouses under markedly stricter regulations and police oversight, the association then employed a similar strategy against the spirit grocers and working men’s clubs. In this campaign it was the respectable and independent nature of the Irish trader on which the drink trade based its defense. Since licensed houses in Dublin were not tied to large brewing interests, as they were in England, publicans contended before parliament and in public demonstrations against temperance that the “substantial interest” which Dublin vintners had invested in their houses induced traders in the city to follow the licensing laws strictly. Unlike the unregulated beerhouse and spirit-grocer trades, publicans, along with many individuals in the constabulary, pointed out that these establishments could not be properly overseen as long as a license could be revoked only after a breach of the licensing laws was proven. Prior to the reforms of the 1870s, the reputation of a spirit grocery or beerhouse rarely disqualified a licensee from conducting business. As a result, the LGVPA alleged that beerhouse keepers and spirit grocers threatened orderly and respectable society by disregarding the conventions of the trade that discouraged such evils as female drunkenness, prostitution, and seditious or criminal plotting. The invention of the habitual drunkard also served to minimize the culpability of the public-house trade in enkindling destructive passions for intoxicants among chronic tipplers. According to the popular image, women hailing from the lower strata of the working class (mostly prostitutes), owing to their inherent physical weakness, were most vulnerable to this morally and physically stupefying condition. The LGVPA contributed to this characterization of the habitual drunkard, defining the public house as a distinctly male space and rebuking vintners who catered to female drinkers. For defenders of the pub-going tradition, the public house played an indispensable role in the lives of workingclass males since it provided a refuge from the cramped working-class home. Similarly, vintners held that the public house offered men a separate sphere in which they could indulge a modest taste for drink without introducing such legitimate masculine behavior into the domestic realm. In this way the rich debates over the uses of public houses expose the evolving conceptions of gender and the family in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a complex of ideas which revolved around domestic privacy and female chastity.

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Hidden behind LGVPA reticence to acknowledge either women’s involvement in the trade or female patrons as frequenters of licensed houses was a far different world than the propaganda of the licensed trade could admit. Women played an important role in the drink trade as publicans in their own right, barmaids, and patrons. Though newspaper accounts and parliamentary testimonies suggest that female publicans frequently owned and managed public houses throughout Ireland, there is no recorded evidence of women attending LGVPA meetings or participating publicly in association activities. Yet many women worked behind the counters of licensed groceries and public houses, especially in the countryside, and the assistants’ association may have played a role in limiting female employment in the Dublin trade. On the eve of World War I the question of female participation in the publichouse trade had become one of the fundamental issues surrounding public-house regulation. Matters as diverse as the acceptability of female pub patronage and employment, the transfer of licenses to male publicans’ widows, and the responsibility of the government in intervening to protect habitual female inebriates and their families all evidence a narrowing scope, if not in the choices available to female publicans, then in the social acceptance of women’s presence in and around licensed establishments. Police records that point to a substantial number of female drinkers inside licensed houses in Dublin suggest that beerhouses and spirit grocers, in addition to licensed groceries, may have helped to establish a distinct social patterning of behavior in the city. This strong female presence within licensed houses in Dublin also helps to explain the growing crackdown by magistrates and police, armed with new legislative reforms after 1900, on unsuitable or unprofessional licensed premises. It was often the interior geography of the public house that attracted the attention of licensing authorities and the constabulary. This concern was part of an official effort to reduce the number of unsupervised spaces inside or directly adjoining licensed property. Official anxiety extended to children who, according to this potent strand of the ideology of domesticity, required protection from the polluting environment of the public house. Labor activism in the decade prior to World War I also hastened the process of separating licensed houses from the domestic sphere, when the assistants’ union called for the abolition of

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the labor custom whereby publicans furnished sleeping accommodation on the premises for their employees. Though rarely acknowledged by historians, assistants also played a pivotal role in the politics of drink. Even prior to the rise of militant trade unionism in Dublin in the years after 1900, the assistants’ association was at the center of licensing-reform movements that sought to curb public-house privileges. During the hotly contested debates over Sunday closing in the 1860s and 1870s, for example, assistants slowly etched out a position distinct from that of their employers, staking a claim to the right for Sunday leisure time. The political agenda of the assistants’ union remained limited, however, focused as it primarily was on the issues of Sunday closing and ad hoc battles over securing certain days away from work to facilitate participation in nationalist demonstrations. Equally concerned with nationalist as well as labor issues, the assistants’ union served as a thinly veiled mechanism for nationalist organization. More research is necessary in order to uncover the degree to which vintner assistants used the public house as a stage for nationalist recruitment. However the union itself, at least in the period between the 1860s and 1880s, spent a great deal of its time and effort preparing for nationalist marches and demonstrations, and it often found itself at loggerheads with the LGVPA over the right to secure time off to participate in such events. By the early 1880s, however, the LGVPA had yielded to the assistants’ demands for time away from work on special occasions and for support of the home-manufacture movement. The cordial and synergistic relationship between vintners and assistants would last only as long as temperance, labor, and nationalist concerns remained distinct issues, for when nationalist concerns again appeared to meld with temperance in the late 1890s, relations once more soured. At the turn of the century the assistants’ demands that publicans close their doors on St. Patrick’s Day, coupled with a host of legislative claims for reforms to the labor system within the licensed trade, unraveled the goodwill that had prevailed over the previous two decades. While the assistants’ union increasingly embraced the trade unionism of James Larkin and James Connolly, the LGVPA promoted market principles in its ranks. This shift found vibrant expression during the 1890s in the campaign launched by the LGVPA to eradicate the tradition of offering Christmas boxes to both regular patrons and employees. Similarly, publicans accused of “looplining” by

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the LGVPA (defined as selling drinks at special prices to regulars) were singled out for expulsion from the association, if not referred to the police for criminal proceedings. With the outbreak of war on the Continent in 1914 the attention of the LGVPA immediately turned away from labor unrest and toward the freshly minted government plans for restricting the licensed trade in the face of wartime necessities. While the LGVPA quickly recognized that the military conflict would provide temperance reformers with a powerful justification for shutting down the retail business altogether, the trade successfully tapped into nationalist resentment against such unpopular measures as the heavy wartime taxes in order to fuel public protest against British interference into the public-house system. Following the Easter Rising in 1916, Irish nationalist resentment of heavy-handed British tactics during the insurrection led British planners to take a restrained position toward the public house in Ireland, though ´ after the execution of the rebel leaders of the the rapid rise of Sinn Fein 1916 uprising quickly presented a new domestic challenge to publicans. In their public campaigns and on their political platforms advanced nationalists generally held the publican in contempt for allegedly placing narrow economic interests above those of the nation and for the stultifying effects of the trade on national morale. During the closing years of the war in Europe a wide gulf opened between the culture of advanced nationalists on the one hand and that of the entrenched drink trade and ´ on the other. Irish society became divided along public-house habitues lines defined by the hardening allegiances of the often puritanical na´ and a more moderate and commercially oriented tionalism of Sinn Fein strain of Irish patriotism advocated by groups like the LGVPA.4 Largely because of the strength of the political machine of the LGVPA and the popularity of pub culture among artisans, laborers, and the bulk of the lower classes, few temperance-inspired legislative measures for Ireland passed the House of Commons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite the extensive resources of the temperance movement. Though this outcome did not necessarily separate the Irish case from the situation in the rest of the United Kingdom, Ireland was distinct in another way. From the time of the Sunday-closing debates through World War I the Irish parliamentary delegation was far more evenly split between pro- and anti-drink forces than were other regional

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delegations, which proportionally held smaller minorities of MPs pledged to temperance reform. Following Charles Stewart Parnell’s dictum that the public-house trade was so closely tied to Irish national interests that it could only be dealt with by an Irish parliament, the LGVPA adopted a policy of forestalling most licensing reforms until Irish Home Rule had been established. The reforms that did pass through parliament between the era of Parnell and the outbreak of World War I were, by and large, measures friendly to trade interests, and they served to protect publicans from competition and the public criticisms raised by temperance reformers. The lower-class suspicion of strident temperance reformers in Ireland indicates the centrality of the public house in the everyday lives of Irish men and women. Though Irish temperance groups also found zealous recruits within working-class communities, the long-established social magnetism of the public house – and its reputation as a target for British repression – muted the appeal of the crusade against Irish publicans. It is evident that the public house was not a static institution, nor was it steered solely by its most visible leaders within the LGVPA. The Irish public house instead is best understood as both a social network and a politicized space guarded by an increasingly ambitious and upwardly mobile coalition of vintners.

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Appendix

Liquor Consumption for England, Scotland, and Ireland, 19011

I. ENGLAND Liquors

Quantities Consumed

Per Expenditure Head (in £)

Per Head

Spirits (gallons) Beer (barrels) Wine (gallons) Other Liquors (gallons)

32,239,522 32,219,818 12,704,055 14,000,000

1.00 33,694,284 1.00 86,993,509 0.40 11,433,650 0.35 1,400,000 Total 133,521,443

£1. 1s. 0d. £2. 14s. 3d. £0. 7s. 1d. £0. 0s. 10d. £4. 3s. 2d.

Quantities Consumed

Per Expenditure Head (in £)

Per Head

2.00 8,790,922 0.35 4,035,733 0.37 1,429,206 0.11 50,000 Total 14,305,861

£2. 0s. 9d. £0. 18s. 9d. £0. 6s. 7d. £0. 0s. 3d. £3. 6s. 4d.

II. SCOTLAND Liquors

Spirits (gallons) 8,623,092 Beer (barrels) 1,494,716 Wine (gallons) 1,588,007 Other Liquors (gallons) 500,000

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III. IRELAND Liquors Spirits (gallons) Beer (barrels) Wine (gallons) Other Liquors (gallons)

Quantities Per Consumed Head 5,068,414 2,362,307 1,588,000 500,000

Expenditure (in £)

1.10 5,206,979 0.52 6,378,229 0.35 1,429,206 0.11 50,000 Total 13,064,414

Per Head £1. 3s. 1d. £1. 8s. 4d. £0. 6s. 4d. £0. 0s. 3d. £2. 18s. 0d.

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Notes

Introduction 1. The Guild of Cooks attained its first charter in 1444. In 1565 the guild incorporated the Society of Vintners into its ranks, becoming the Corporation of Cooks and Vintners. Its charter was eventually confirmed by James I. After the amalgamation the corporation met regularly at the Eagle Tavern, Eustace Street. 2. There are no works within the broad body of Irish scholarship that have examined the history of the Licensed Vintners’ Association or its predecessor, the Guild of Cooks and Vintners. For a brief account written for trade professionals, see Yvonne Scott, “A short history of the Licensed Vintners’ Association,” Licensing World (1986): 41–4. For a more extensive review of the history of the trade, written in collaboration with the Vintners’ Federation of Ireland, see Cian Molloy, The Story of the Irish Pub: An Intoxicating History of the Licensed Trade in Ireland (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2003). 3. The Irish licensing system recognized a variety of retail and wholesale licenses. Each of these licenses (there were as many as 20 following the Irish Licensing Act of 1833) conferred on the trader different rights and privileges. Some of them, most notably the spirit-grocer license, applied only to Ireland. In the years prior to the 1860s, the Licensed Vintners’ Association primarily concerned itself with defending the licenses of simple publicans and licensed grocers, though the latter group possessed its own trade association before merging with publicans in 1857. 4. During the 1830s and 1840s the Licensed Vintners’ Association funded and oversaw an orphanage for vintner children at considerable expense to the organization. The orphanage was closed in the early 1850s as attention became ever more focused on parliamentary politics and trade protection. Signifying

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notes to pages 2–6 its new role, for example, in 1862 the association hired a full-time and “permanent” secretary to, among other duties, act as the political mouthpiece of the association, setting his salary at £70 per annum. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 29 May 1862). The terms “licensed grocer,” “publican,” and “vintner” will be used interchangeably throughout this work and will connote any individual with a license authorizing the retail sale of beer and spirits on his premises. Spirit grocers and beerhouse keepers will be distinctly identified due to their unique liquor licenses. Beerhouse keepers and spirit grocers represented opposite ends of the social scale: beerhouse traders came largely from the lower classes, since a beerhouse license was relatively inexpensive to obtain, while spirit grocers came from the upper middle class and catered to a more elite customer base. Shebeens were unlicensed houses that sold drink beyond the purview of the law. Authorities and the press often used terms such as “shebeen,” “shebeening,” and “shebeener” when describing the various elements and functions of the underground trade. See Chapter 1 for a detailed discussion of the topic. While the most extreme cases put forth in parliamentary reports stem from the late 1890s and 1900s, numerous testimonies before parliament in the 1860s and 1870s during the Sunday-closing controversies also suggest that Dublin possessed an inordinate number of shebeens. For the most damning report, see Appendix A. John Quinn has noted in a recent study of Mathew’s movement that publicans in the 1840s, though perhaps privately alarmed by the success of temperance-pledge drives across much of the country, offered little opposition to these campaigns. See John Quinn, Father Mathew’s Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth-century Ireland and Irish America (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 79. Most of the literature on Fr. Mathew originates from within the temperance movement. Although these works provide an abundance of information about Mathew, they naturally lionize the temperance leader in the tradition of Catholic hagiography. See John Francis Maquire, Father Mathew: A Biography (Dublin: Eason and Son, 1863); Fr. Augustine, OFM, Cap., Footprints of Father Theobald Mathew (Dublin: M.H. Gill, 1947); Frank J. Mathew, Father Mathew: His Life and Times (London: Cassel and Co., 1890); Rogers Patrick, Father Theobald Mathew (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1943). Over the last decade, however, Fr. Mathew has received considerable attention

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13. 14. 15.

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from historians. Colm Kerrigan has argued that the evidence attesting to the social legacy of Mathew is largely inconclusive. See Colm Kerrigan, Father Mathew and the Irish Temperance Movement, 1838–1849 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1992). John Quinn has taken a more comprehensive approach to the subject, focusing not just on Mathew’s achievements in Ireland but also on his ties with the American temperance movement. See John E. Quinn, Father Mathew’s crusade. Finally, Paul Townsend analyzes the contribution of Mathew to Irish nationalism and cultural identity. See Paul A. Townsend, Father Mathew, Temperance, and Irish Identity (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003). The founding of the United Kingdom Alliance in 1853 signaled the growing political agenda of temperance. At its creation the alliance established the political reform of the public-house system as its top priority, lobbying for both permissive and Sunday-closing legislation. The Catholic clergy in Ireland, however, remained aloof from this powerful organization until the latter half of the 1860s when, following the public embrace by Cardinal Maning of its political platform in 1867, the clerical distrust of politically focused temperance organizations began to break down. See A.E. Dingle and Brian Harrison, “Cardinal Maning as temperance reformer,” Historical Journal, 12:3, 485–509. James Haughton, “The use of alcoholic liquors economically, socially, and morally wrong: a paper read before the Dublin Statistical Society,” Dublin Statistical Society Transactions (1847–49): 11. See George Bretherton, “The battle between Carnival and Lent: temperance and repeal in Ireland, 1829–1845,” Social History, 27:54 (1994): 295–320. Elizabeth Malcolm, Ireland Sober, Ireland Free: Drink and Temperance in Nineteenth-century Ireland (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986). Malcolm cites Samuel Clark, Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 128, in “The rise of the pub: a study of the disciplining of popular culture”, in James S. Donnelly and Kerby Miller (eds), Irish Popular Culture, 1650–1850 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), 53. For a full discussion of English shopkeepers and their economic and social position in English society, see Geoffrey Crossick and Rines Gerhard Haupt (eds), Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-century London (London: Methuen and Co., 1984). This strict Irish statute makes comparisons with the English, Scottish, and Welsh rates of arrests for drunkenness extremely difficult. Since individuals in Ireland could be prosecuted simply for being in a state of physical

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notes to page 8 intoxication, the generally higher numbers of arrests for drunkenness and breaches of the licensing laws by those other than publicans and shebeen keepers in Ireland during the mid-nineteenth century are problematic to interpret in a comparative framework. Brian Harrison and Barrie Trinder point out in a case study of a small English village that publicans in rural regions did not depend solely on public-house profits for their livelihoods. According to the authors, vintners often turned to such trades as baking or butchering to supplement their incomes (Drink and Sobriety in an early Victorian Country Town: Banbury, 1830–1860 [London: Harlow, Longmans, 1969], 3). In many regions in Ireland the tradition of a publican working in an additional vocation to that of the public-house trade was even more common than in England, and persisted well into the twentieth century. The records of the LGVPA indicate, for example, that public houses in Ireland commonly served as general stores as well as mortuaries and post offices during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This unique situation in Ireland helps to account for the popular image of the publican as autonomous businessman, not beholden to large business interests, and for the high regard generally granted to vintners by the Irish public outside of temperance circles. For an unusually detailed example of this popular characterization of the publican as a resourceful entrepreneur, see George A. Birmingham, Irishmen All (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1913), 63–84. Michael Carey, the prominent president of the LGVPA through the 1860s and 1870s, in testifying before the initial parliamentary inquiry into Irish Sunday closing in 1867, claimed to be well acquainted with the laboring classes, despite his middle-class credentials as the full-time chairman of the association. Describing himself as having once been “a working tradesman,” Carey emphasized the social mobility that, according to the popular image promoted by the drink trade, uniquely characterized the public-house business: “I served my apprenticeship to a trade, worked at it as a journeyman, and a foreman, and as master before I went into the public house business, and I am perfectly conversant with [working-class] manners, being myself often on their boards in conducting their society.” See Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1867–68 (402), xiv, 74. The Licensed Grocers and Vintners Assistants’ Association was founded in Dublin in 1861. Assistants guardedly supported the movements for closing public houses on Sunday and St. Patrick’s Day. See Chapter 2, section IV, and Chapter 5, section III.

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22. For a biographical account of the way in which the retail liquor trade offered Irish Catholics in post-Famine Ireland a means by which to attain middleclass status in Dublin society, see Michael Cullen, Thomas Synott (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), 1–18. Cian Molloy, has also chronicled the ´ ´ from the United States who, following return to Ireland of three Irish emigr es the economic revival of the trade after the Famine, re-established businesses in the counties of Kerry, Donegal, and Galway; see The Story of the Irish Pub, 210, 271, and 133, respectively. 23. Out of an estimated population of 3,000 assistants only about 300 belonged to the organization. See Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1867–68 (402), xiv, 59. 24. “Report of the National Licensed Victuallers Defence League” (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 2 August 1862). 25. Michael Dwyer, Licensing Act and Ireland, 1874, with Abstracts of Previous Licensing Acts Still in Force in Ireland (Dublin: McGlashan and Gill, 1874), 2. 26. In criticizing the proposed licensing bill, parts of which would be incorporated into the Liquor Licensing Act (Ireland) of 1872, Martin Kelley, a vintners’ assistant and member of the assistants’ association, declared at a union meeting that it would be “the means of destroying the only remnant of trade left in this country” and would only increase the “flow of emigrants from Irish shores.” See Secretary’s minutes (LVAA, assistants’ minute book, 12 March 1871). 27. Unlike similar nationalist movements in Europe at this time, the nationalism of leading cultural revivalists of fin-de-si`ecle Ireland did not emphasize “the rarefied and abstract areas of intellectual culture” of Ireland’s past. Instead, advanced nationalists like Douglas Hyde stressed the importance of the “racial customs” of the Irish and the necessity for arresting the decline of the Irish language. See Thomas Duddy, “Thinking Ireland: cultural nationalism and the problem of Irish ideas,” New Hibernia Review, 7:1 (2003): 14. The adoption by many cultural nationalists of temperance principles was in part a reaction against the stereotype of the overindulgent Irish, but temperance also represented one of those everyday and practical subjects most likely to spark a broad-based cultural regeneration. This embrace of temperance flowed naturally from such an agenda of national reform. 28. See Diarmaid Ferriter, A Nation of Extremes: The Pioneers in Twentiethcentury Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999).

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29. Ireland possessed at the end of World War I one of the strongest temperance movements in Europe. Arguably, the Irish temperance organizations, popularly rooted in the nationalist temperance culture of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association, were comparable only to the temperance movement in the United States.

Chapter 1 Reform and Secret Societies 1. In the years immediately preceding the Great Reform Bill of 1832, parliament had first begun consolidating the complex liquor licensing laws in Britain with the Ale House Act (1828) and the Beerhouse Act (1830). After 1832 the legislature would focus its attention on the drink trade, especially in the case of social control, revenue, and temperance in Ireland. 2. Low publicans and shebeen keepers received the lion’s share of blame from the vintner trade associations for unbridled drunkenness, crime, and threats to public health and social order. Middle-class publicans as well as constables often made little – if any – distinctions between public houses at the bottom of the social ladder and shebeens. The bourgeois vintners considered publicans who possessed only minimal accommodations for carrying on the business of a publican to be nearly as suspect as their entirely underground counterpart, the shebeen keeper. In this chapter, low publicans and shebeen keepers will be categorized in the same historical sense – as a group of establishments within the trade viewed by contemporaries as the most potent threat to society. 3. See Charles Haliday, Inquiry into the Influence of the Excessive Use of Spirituous Liquors in Producing Crime, Disease, and Poverty in Ireland (and into the causes which have tended to render malt liquor the more general drink of the laboring Classes of England) (Dublin: Richard Milliken and Son, 1830), 10. 4. For a full discussion of the licensed trade and the beerhouse controversy, see Chapter 2. 5. John Cooke, Temperance Legislation (Dublin: Humphrey and Armour, 1890) 19. 6. “Report from the London Deputation, 20 May, 1863,” (LVA minute books, 29 June 1833). 7. “Petition sent to Parliament of the Licensed Vintners of the City of Dublin to the Imperial Parliament as forwarded for presentation to Daniel O’Connell esq. MP, London 14 June 1833” (LVA minute books, 19 June 1833). 8. Ibid.

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9. The family of Daniel O’Connell had made its fortune in Irish distilling. 10. “Account of meeting of magistrates at Cabinteely”, 19 October 1836 (British in Ireland Series 1 CO904), Reading, England; Woodbridge, CT: Primary Source Media, 19990. Dublin Castle Records, part 1, anti-government organizations, 1882–1921, reel 1. 11. Kwasi Kwarteng has shown how the Colonial Office in London granted overseas administrators within the British Empire a great deal of latitude in forming their own individual social policies. Known by the British authorities as their “men on the spot,” these representatives of the British Crown developed, as Drummond did in fighting Ribbonism in Ireland, their own law-enforcement strategies in the colonies. In this way, Drummond resembled a common type of figure in the British Empire: a largely autonomous executive reacting with ad hoc measures to developments on the ground. For a revealing analysis of the individual improvisations that shaped the Empire and beyond, see Kwasi Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World (New York: Public Affairs, 2012). 12. “Ribbonism in Belfast,” Freeman’s Journal, 12 October 1839. 13. “Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords appointed to inquire into the State Ireland in respect of crime . . . ”, Parliamentary Papers (1839), p. 139. 14. “State of crime in Ireland,” Freeman’s Journal, 16 August 1839. 15. John Ferguson McLennan, Memoir of Thomas Drummond, R.E., F.R.A.S., Under Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 1835–1840 (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1867), 221–2. 16. Testimony of Thomas Drummond, “Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords appointed to inquire into the State Ireland in respect of crime . . . ”, Parliamentary Papers, Number 72, Vol. I, p. 9. 17. Compared with the rest of the United Kingdom at this time, this law was an anomaly and must be considered in any statistical analysis of arrests for drunkenness. 18. Testimony of Thomas Drummond, “Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords appointed to inquire into the State Ireland in respect of crime . . . ”, Parliamentary Papers, Number 72, Vol. I, p. 9. 19. Secretary’s minutes (LVA minute books, 26 July 1839). 20. Secretary’s minutes (LVA minute books, 9 August 1839). 21. “Vintner Society,” Freeman’s Journal, 10 August 1839. 22. Ibid. 23. R.V. Comerford is one of the preeminent scholars of the Fenian movement. Comerford has consistently downplayed the military and political significance of Fenians, emphasizing instead their importance only to Irish social

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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notes to pages 23–28 history. R.V. Comerford, “Patriotism as pastime: the appeal of Fenianism in the mid-1860s,” Irish Historical Studies, 22 (1981): 247. “Notes on old Irish taverns and inns and latter day public houses,” 26 January 1942 (NLI, J.J. Bouch Diary) [MS 8728]. Return Relating to Habitual Drunkenness, H.C., 1871, XVIII, 227. Comerford, “Patriotism as pastime,” 248. See Chapter 1 for a detailed account of the policing of drinking in the city of Dublin. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1867–68 (402), xiv, 81. Michael De Nie has demonstrated how the British press, especially the more conservative newspapers and journals, fixated on the Irish-American influence upon the Fenian movement and perpetuated traditional stereotypes of the Irish. These representations included moral corruption, a tendency to violence, and a proclivity towards superstitious belief. See Michael De Nie, “‘A medley mob of Irish-American plotters and Irish dupes’: the British press and transatlantic feminism,” Journal of British Studies, 40:2 (April 2001) 213–30. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1867–68 (402), xiv, 5. Ibid., 76. Ibid., 8. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 18 June 1863). Newsclipping, “Licensed vintners,” Freeman’s Journal (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 7 October 1863). Temperance reformers were drawing from a rich current of British thought, which condemned Fenianism as unsophisticated and centered around lower-class criminality. Unlike other national movements on the Continent, Fenianism lacked legitimate political thought and moral authority, British critics held. Without such intellectual and ethical underpinnings, the movement, according to this widespread British interpretation, could carry weight only within the shebeens and lower-class public houses of Ireland. “The Fenian head,” The Irish Temperance Star (Dublin and Belfast) vols. 1–2 (1866–7): 6. Ibid. Philip Bagenal, Parnellism, or the Land and Labour Agitation Unveiled (Dublin: Hodges, Foster, & Figgis, 1880): 6. Freeman’s Journal, 2 Aug. 1872.

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40. Fredric Richard Lees, An Argument for the Legislative Prohibition of the Liquor Traffic (London: William Tweedie, 1856): 67. 41. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1867–68 (402), xiv, 107. 42. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1877 (198), xvi, 46. 43. Ibid., 37. 44. Toast heard by Constable Richard Senior of County Meath, read during Despard’s testimony, 10 May 1839, p. 331. 45. The polarity between pub and Church in Irish society is a prominent theme explored in literature by many of Ireland’s most notable poets and novelists: James Mangon, James Joyce, and Flann O’Brien, among others, have explored throughout their oeuvres the tensions and cooperations between these two popular institutions. 46. For a detailed look at the role of the public house in Irish secret societies in the mid-nineteenth century, see the transcript of John Boyle O’Reilly’s trial before a military tribunal for Fenianism. James Jeffrey Roche, Life of John Boyle O’Reilly (London: Castle Publishing Company, 1891) 28– 58. 47. “Seditious meeting on 4 April 1866” (NIA: Fenian Papers, unlabeled folder).

Chapter 2 Consolidating the Trade 1. “Report of the committee of the United Towns and National Victuallers’ Defence League” (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 2 August 1862). 2. Madelon Powers identifies this period in American history as the high point of the cultural and social influence of the saloon. According to Powers, the barroom formed a cohesive male society bound by a common ethic, distinct laws, and shared traditions. The research does not, however, extend to rural and frontier regions and instead focuses largely upon the Northeast United States, where the impact of Irish immigration was most acute. Indeed, much of the evidence interwoven throughout the study demonstrates the influence of the Irish-American public-house and shebeen tradition, which, according to Powers, facilitated the organization of labor and other forms of collective action in the USA during the Gilded Age. Powers, Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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3. James Haughton, “On the necessity for prompt measures for the suppression of intemperance and drunkenness,” Dublin Statistical Society Journal, 2 (1857): 169. 4. “Report of the committee of the United Towns and National Victuallers’ Defence League” (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 2 August 1862). 5. Freeman’s Journal, 28 August 1862. 6. The Property and Liberty Defence League in Belfast tended to coordinate its activities with trade organizations in England during the last quarter of the nineteenth century rather than with the increasingly nationalist LGVPA in Dublin. As the LGVPA turned to nationalist politics in the 1870s and 1880s, the Property and Liberty Defence League acted in concert with groups like the Licensed Victuallers’ National Defence League, which had been formed in 1873 to meet the rising legislative tide in support of Sunday closing at Westminster. 7. Freeman’s Journal, 28 August 1862. 8. David Gutzke, Protecting the Pub: Brewers and Publicans against Temperance (London: Woodbridge Boydell Press, 1985). 9. Freeman’s Journal, 4 April 1862. 10. Freeman’s Journal, 17 April 1862. 11. Arthur Guinness and Co. had shown by the substantial expansion of its trade in the first half of the nineteenth century that advances in the areas of transportation, the respectability of the retail trade, and the offensive of the temperance movement upon whiskey could all help to boost profits during a time of general decline in alcohol consumption. See Robert Shipkey, “Problems in alcoholic production and controls in early nineteenth century Ireland,” Historical Journal, XVI, 2 (1973): 291–302. 12. Morgan Butler Kavanagh and Albert W. Quill, Licensing Acts, 1872–74 (Dublin: Bonsonby, 1875), 2. 13. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 4 June 1862). 14. Ibid. 15. Robert Shipkey, in “Problems in alcoholic production,” describes the Department of Excise as “an organization of commissioners and revenue officers riddled with the placemen of limitability and questionable authority,” 296. Going further, Shipkey contends that the officers of the Excise were, in official correspondence and at parliamentary inquiries, frequently charged with “corruption, dereliction of duty, and gross misconduct.” While Shipkey quotes sources which date from the first half of the nineteenth century, his characterization of this beleaguered department also matches the complaints leveled against the Excise later in the second half of the century.

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16. In contrast to the beerhouse, police had enjoyed the legal right since 1854 to enter public houses for regular inspection at any business hour. At the time, the LGVPA voiced little opposition to the change in the law, viewing the modification as a way to keep good order inside licensed houses and improve the overall respectability of the trade. 17. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1867–68 (402), xiv, 134. 18. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 9 September 1862). 19. The low cost of the beerhouse license had, at the time of its creation in the 1830s, been thought of by its English proponents as a form of social reform that would allow working-class individuals, with little access to capital, a rare opportunity to profit from the wholesale trade of beer in lower-class communities. See Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815–1872 (New York: Faber & Faber, 1994). 20. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 20 February 1863). 21. Minutes of evidence taken before the select committee on sale of liquors on Sunday (Ireland) bill, H.C. 1867–68 (402), xiv, 134. 22. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 28 August 1862). 23. Regrettably, the majority of these letters have not survived, aside from the few which were recorded directly in the LGVPA minute books or published in the Freeman’s Journal. 24. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 27 July 1863). 25. Freeman’s Journal, 19 April 1862. 26. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 19 June 1862). 27. Ibid. 28. Freeman’s Journal, 12 December 1862. 29. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 28 August 1862). 30. Newsclipping, Daily Mail, n.d., “Beerhouses of Dublin, deputation to Sir Robert Peel” (NLI: MS 7587 Larcom Papers, 1863–65). 31. Freeman’s Journal, 24 April 1863. 32. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 1 December 1863). 33. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1867–68 [402], xiv, 133. 34. Ibid. 35. Newsclipping, Morning News, n.d. (LVA, LGPVA minute book, 22 May 1862). 36. Freeman’s Journal, 11 June 1863. 37. Freeman’s Journal, 23 April 1863.

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38. Newsclipping, Morning News, n.d. (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 11 September 1862). 39. Ibid. 40. Rathfarnam petty sessions, 31 January 1871 (NAI, CSORP 3070, “Beerhouses,” 1871). 41. Women had long been associated with the shebeen trade in Ireland. In a letter written in July 1837, by the ardent Protestant missionary, Charlotte Elizabeth Browne Phelan Tonna, the prolific pamphleteer described the moral and political dangers of the shebeen in Ireland: “Many a respectable female dates her ruin and disgrace from them; and here political offences are plotted and ripened.” See Charlotte Elizabeth Browne Phelan Tonna, Letters from Ireland (London: R.B. Seeley & W. Burnside, 1838), 311. 42. Elizabeth Malcolm cites the Freeman’s Journal, 7 October 1872, in Ireland Sober, Ireland Free, 211–12. 43. Overt advertising of intoxicants may have been more common to the beerhouse than the public house. In a collage of personal memories and historical pieces describing life and commerce on Cook Street – the traditional street associated with the guild of cooks and vintners – James Collins pointed to a humorous sign etched upon a whale bone, which overhung the entryway of a beerhouse on nearby Marlborough Street: “Under the blade bone of a whale, You may find good beer and ale; He in sea was sent to swim, so froth your pots up to the brim.” See James Collins, Historical Associations of Cook Street: Three Centuries of Dublin Printing, Reminisces of a Great Tribune (Dublin: James Duffy and Co., 1913), 19. No similarly colorful forms of advertising were recorded by Collins as adorning any Dublin public houses. 44. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1877 (198), xvi, 17. 45. Ibid. 46. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 28 August 1862). 47. Newsclipping, “The Dublin beerhouses” (NLI: MS 7587 Larcom Papers, 1863–65), 25 May 1864. 48. Freeman’s Journal, 13 May 1863. 49. Freeman’s Journal, 3 April 1862. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Newsclipping, Freeman’s Journal, n.d. (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 17 June 1871). 53. Brian Harrison has illustrated in great detail the philosophical thought which underlay the creation of the beerhouse license in England. See Harrison,

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54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

241

Drink and the Victorians, chapter 3 “Free trade and the Beer Act: 1815– 1830,” 38–63. Free traders advocating an open licensing system had first appeared on the political scene in parliament in 1815. The licensed trade, suffering from internal divisions and relying upon its customary brewer allies for trade protection, proved incapable of organizing an effective coalition for the measure. See Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 76. Irish publicans were probably aware that Liverpool was hardly a model on which to base a recipe for public-house prosperity. This city, thronged with recent immigrants from Ireland, possessed even more licensed houses per capita (including beerhouses) than Dublin. In just over ten years after the creation of the beerhouse trade, Liverpool in 1841 featured approximately 2,600 establishments licensed for the sale of intoxicants. See Robert James Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 208. Newsclipping, Freeman’s Journal, n.d. (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 25 September 1862). Freeman’s Journal, 5 December 1862. Ibid. Newsclipping, Morning News, n.d. (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 8 January 1863). Freeman’s Journal, 9 September 1863. John Paton, “Concerning supply and demand,” Irish Temperance League Journal, 4:9 (1 September 1866): 97. J. James, Temperance Legislation and Licensing Reform (London: Simpkin Marshall, and Co., 1883), 6. “Is alcohol a creature of God?” Temperance Star (August 1866): 6. Terry Eagleton has noted that Dublin possessed an unusually high number of medical professionals. This group, though almost completely composed of Protestants, would represent an important constituency for the temperance movement, which would increasingly legitimize their campaigns with scientific evidence. The ready availability of medical professionals within the Dublin intelligentsia helps to account for the considerable foothold that temperance established within the middle class in Dublin. See Terry Eagleton, Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-century Ireland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 76–7. “Is alcohol a creature of God?” Temperance Star (August 1866): 6. “The licensing laws,” Temperance Star (October 1866): 166. Ibid.

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75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

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notes to pages 56–60 Malcolm, Ireland Sober, 173. Newsclipping, Daily Mail, n.d. (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 25 May 1864). Ibid. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 3 July 1864). Freeman’s Journal, 30 June 1864. The beerhouse license was referred to in the licensing law as a retail beer license, which was distinct from a wholesale beer-dealer license. Despite its shortcomings, the law did have the intended effect of authorizing magistrates to levy fines of £12 10s on several troublesome beerhouse keepers. As a result of the fines, according to the LGVPA, “six or eight” beerhouses had been forced out of business, though the secretary also voiced concern that beerhouses, operated by the very same licensees, might crop up in another out-of-the-way neighborhood of the city. See newsclipping, Morning News, n.d. (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 17 August 1864). Newsclipping, Morning News, n.d. (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 17 August 1864). Newsclipping, “Beerhouses of Dublin” (NLI, Larcom Papers, 1863–65) [MS 7587]. Return of the Number of Excise Licenses Issued in the Year Ended 31 March 1869 for the Manufacture or Sale of Malt, Beer, Spirits, Wine, Cider and Sweets, H.C. 1870 (105), lxi, 389. Rathfarnam petty sessions, 31 January 1871 (NAI, CSORP 3070, “Beerhouses,” 1871). Ibid. Ibid. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1867–68 (402), xiv, 134. Ibid. The spirit-grocer license permitted only off-sales, barring licensees from accommodating on-site drinking altogether. Sales of strong spirits in amounts of no less than one quart were permitted, in addition to tea, sugar, and groceries of all sorts. In testifying before parliament in 1868, John Ralph, the president of the Association of Spirit Grocers in Dublin, could not cite the exact number of spirit grocers operating in the city, but instead offered an approximation of between 200 and 300 such license holders. In the light of his position and demonstrated familiarity with the trade, this estimation stands out in his testimony, which otherwise evidenced a detailed knowledge of the trade. Given the concerns of the committee with the number of licensed facilities

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85.

86. 87.

88.

89.

90. 91. 92. 93.

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in the city, Ralph’s lack of clarity may have been an attempt to circumvent answering the question. See Report from the Select Committee, H.C. 1868 (362), ix, 487, 32. Third Report from Royal Commissioner on Liquor Licensing Laws; Together with Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, and Index, H.C. 1898 (c.8,693; c.8,694), xxxvi, 1, 9. Molloy, The Story of the Irish Pub, 43. The cost of a spirit-grocer license in 1868 was between £14 and £15, while a beerhouse license cost a mere £1. See Report from the Select Committee, H.C. 1868 (362), ix, 487, 82. It is altogether plausible that the rank-and-file membership of the LGVPA did not share Carey’s positive assessment of the spirit-grocer trade. As parliamentary testimonies demonstrate, spirit grocers were not exclusive to middle-class neighborhoods and shared many of the popular associations with drunkenness and misconduct that characterized the beerhouse. Gilligan’s comments were in fact anachronistic, since the beerhouse license had not yet been created at the time the Irish Parliament created the spiritgrocer license. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 28 August 1862). Ibid., 122. Report from the Select Committee, H.C. 1868 (362), ix, 487, 170. Spirit grocers retained a reputation for serving women until at least World War I. In the Dublin Leader, 11 December 1915, the following text accompanies a cartoon representation of the Ballyslough Emporium, a spirit grocer in Ballyslough: “Close up against naggins, and pewters, and flagins, Are hairpins, too shoddy for people to wear, Jug, pan, broom and kettle, wood, china and metal, Are up against Guinness in Harmony there. The remnance and fractions from purchased transactions O’er chaney, jug, leather, pan, neck tie, or pot, Soon find a disappearance in Bung’s House of Clearence – The Guinness department doeth smuther the lot.”

94. Report from the select committee, H.C. 1868 (362), ix, 487, 144. 95. Ibid. 96. Police testimonies before parliament also point to the clandestine modus operandi of the spirit-grocer business. Superintendent Richard Corr of the Dublin Metropolitan Police detailed the usual order of business for the trade when he alleged before parliament that spirit grocers “always have

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97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

107. 108.

notes to pages 63–70 a door inside the shop,” making “two divisions” inside it. As such, in the front compartment spirit grocers attended those customers interested only in purchasing drink for consumption off-premises, while in a room behind the main store area patrons could drink privately. Many of these back rooms, Corr pointed out, possessed an additional exit, making it possible for patrons to quit the shop secretly in the event of a police inspection. See Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1867–68 (402), xiv, 81. Freeman’s Journal, 21 Jan. 1877. Ibid. There are no records of the Spirit Grocer Association in the public archives in Dublin. The group was only active in the city during the 1860s and early 1870s. Following the reforms to the liquor licensing laws in 1872 and 1874, the association quite likely disbanded with little public fanfare. Through the Sunday-closing debates of the latter half of the 1870s, no reference to spirit-grocer meetings appear in the Freeman’s Journal; nor did representatives from the association appear before any of the parliamentary inquiries established after 1868 to investigate Sunday closing. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 2 February 1871). Ibid. Newsclipping, Freeman’s Journal, n.d. (LGVPA minute book, 16 January 1872). Ibid. Newsclipping, Freeman’s Journal, n.d. (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 25 January 1867). Freeman’s Journal, 20 January 1872. For an overview of the 1872 and 1874 Licensing (Ireland) Acts, see Morgan Butler Kavanagh and Albert W. Quill (eds), Licensing Acts, 1872–74 (Dublin: Bonsonby, 1875). Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 27 September 1883). See Chapter 4, below.

Chapter 3 Sunday Closing and the Trade 1. The Sunday Closing Association was founded in Dublin in 1866 and was most notable for its ambitious petition drives and public demonstrations. 2. Report delivered by Dominic J. Corrigan at a business meeting of the Sunday Closing Association on 20 October 1874 (NLI: The report of the association for stopping the sale of intoxicating liquors on Sunday in Ireland for the years 1873–1874): 13–14.

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3. Ibid., 15. 4. Newsclipping, Daily Express, 6 May 1875 (NLI: 1873–1874): 20. 5. Newsclipping, Manchester Guardian, 7 May 1875 (NLI: The report of the association for stopping . . . 1873–1874): 21. 6. John Dooner, “The only way to make the working classes sober,” Dublin Builder (1 February 1871): 26. 7. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 1 April 1863). 8. The legislation (an act to amend the laws relating to the sale of wine, spirits, beer, and cider by retail in Ireland) was passed on 28 July 1833 and legalized the hours quoted above, though in 1836 legal trading hours were further restricted to the hours of 2 until 9 o’clock on Sundays. 9. LGVPA minutes, 1 April 1863. 10. The aim of permissive legislation was to hold plebiscites in local parliamentary constituencies on the question of prohibition of the trade in intoxicants. 11. Newsclipping, Morning News (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 6 April 1864). 12. Newsclipping, Freeman’s Journal (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 3 March 1870). 13. Newsclipping, Freeman’s Journal (LGVPA minutes, 19 May 1864). 14. Newsclipping, “Licensed Vintners’ Association,” Freeman’s Journal (LVA, 21 April 1870). 15. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 26 March 1872). 16. For a succinct example of such work, see Gerald W. Olsen, “Temperance and society: class in Victorian England and Ireland,” Alcohol in History, 11 (Spring 1985): 5–7. 17. John Dooner, “The only way to make the working classes sober,” Dublin Builder, 1 February 1871, 27. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 76. 20. Ibid. 21. John J. Repcheck, Jr., Father Mathew’s Irish Temperance Campaign, 1839– 46 (unpublished MA thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1984), 2. 22. See E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968). 23. Ibid., 64. 24. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1867–68 (402), xiv, 69. 25. “Good health and bona fide travelers,” Freeman’s Journal, 21 September 1872. 26. “The licensed trade and bona fide travelers,” Freeman’s Journal, 8 April 1882.

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notes to pages 80–95

27. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1867–68 (402), xiv, 331.1. 28. Malcolm, Ireland Sober, 200. 29. Newsclipping, Freeman’s Journal (LVA minute book, 6 February 1871). 30. Secretary’s minutes (MTU, LGVA minute book, 4 February 1872). 31. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1867–68 (402), xiv, 58. 32. Secretary’s minutes (MTU, LGVAA minute book, 22 November 1869). 33. Secretary’s minutes (MTU, LGVAA minute book, 4 July 1869). 34. Secretary’s minutes (MTU, LGVAA minute book, 3 October 1869). 35. For a full discussion of nationalism and the liquor trade in Ireland, see Chapters 3 and 4. 36. Secretary’s minutes (MTU, LGVAA minute book, 6 February 1870). 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Secretary’s minutes (MTU, LGVAA minute book, 3 July 1870). 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. This count also occurred during the heart of the winter, a time when pub traffic was generally lighter than during summertime business. 44. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1877 (198), xvi, 106. 45. Ibid., 7. 46. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 15 April 1878). 47. Ibid. 48. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 20 August 1878). 49. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 1 October 1878). 50. As quoted in Maurice Dodd, “The drink problem; the magistrates; and the people,” New Ireland Review, XVI (1901–2): 353. 51. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 7 March 1878).

Chapter 4 Irish Nationalist Politics and the Drink Trade 1. D.P. Conyngham, Ireland Past and Present (New York: James Sheehy Publishers, 1884), 207. 2. Dairmaid Ferriter, A Nation of Extremes: The Pioneers in Twentieth-century Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), 5. 3. Terry Eagleton, Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-century Ireland (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999) 102.

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4. Isaac Butt, A Voice for Ireland: The Famine in the Land; What Has Been Done and What Is to Be Done (Dublin: McGlashan, 1847), viii, p. 59. See detailed review of same, in Dublin University Magazine, XIX, 172 (April 1847), pp. 501–40. 5. Newsclipping, Evening Post (LVA minute book, 11 June 1871). 6. Newsclipping, Freeman’s Journal (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 1 July 1871). 7. Newsclipping, “New licensing bill,” Freeman’s Journal (LGVAA minute book, 12 March 1871). 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Secretary’s minutes, quarterly meeting of the LGVPA (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 1 May 1870). 13. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1867–68 (402), xiv, 89. 14. Newsclipping, “New licensing bill,” Freeman’s Journal (LGVAA minute book, 12 March 1871). 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Newsclipping, Evening Post (LVA, LVGPA minutes, 6 November 1871). 18. Newsclipping, Freeman’s Journal (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 23 June 1870). 19. Ibid. 20. Newsclipping, “Letter from N.D. Murphy”, (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 28 August 1878). 21. N.D. Murphy, MP had served an important role for the LGVPA earlier in the decade when he introduced amendments authored largely by the association that later passed into law as part of the Liquor Reform Bill of 1872. In July 1871 the LGVPA worked to generate support among nationalist MPs and their constituents for the pro-vintner amendments fought for by Murphy (LGA, LGVPA minute book, 5 July 1871). 22. N.D. Murphy, “Sunday closing (Ireland) bill: correspondence between Mr. N.D. Murphy, M.P. and his constituents,” The Nineteenth Century [microfiche] (London: Chadwyck-Healey in association with the British Library, 1878), 3. 23. Ibid., 8. 24. “Letter from P. J. Smythe, M.P.” (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 28 August 1878). 25. Ibid.

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33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

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notes to pages 104–108 “Sunday closing meeting,” Freeman’s Journal, 24 December 1877. Newsclipping (MTU, LGVAA minute book, 1 August 1875). Ibid. Secretary’s minutes (Mandate, Assistants Association minute book, 5 March 1882). Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England (New York: Ryburn Publishing, 1998). Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 5 June 1884). It was Michael Davitt who first drew the distinction between constitutional and revolutionary nationalism. See Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, or the Story of the Land League Revolution (London and New York: Harpers Brothers, 1904), 121. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Parnell and His Party, 1880–90 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957) 87–8. K. Theodore Hoppen has argued in Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 1832–1885 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) that the Repeal and Home Rule movements reflected a superimposed politics upon the deeply rooted tradition of local political life in Ireland. As such, Irish voters reacted most avidly to local issues, personalities, and political factions. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 31 March 1880). In the 1880 general election, both Maurice Brooks, Home Rule Party, and Dr. R.S.D. Lyons, Liberal Party, garnered the most votes and won election to the House of Commons; Maurice Brooks polled 5,763 votes, while Dr. Lyons polled 5,647. See Brian Walker (ed.), Parliamentary Election Results in Ireland, 1901–1921 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978), 272. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 31 March 1880). The Guinness family was among the most powerful political dynasties in nineteenth-century Dublin. Benjamin Lee Guinness, the father of Sir Edward Arthur Guinness, had been the first lord mayor of the city, a Tory MP, and the benefactor of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It was his contribution of £160,000 to the construction of St. Patrick’s that drew the fire of the temperance movement. His son, Sir Arthur Guinness, also represented Dublin in parliament (1868–69 and 1874–80) but was defeated in the 1880 general election when temperance and nationalist supporters undermined his electoral support. Through the 1880s and 1890s the LGVPA and Guinness parted ways over such issues as the amount Arthur Guinness and Co. would pay in subscription fees to the vintners’ association, the rights associated with the Guinness bottle label, discounted prices for regular customers of the

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40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

249

brewery, and Guinness’s lack of cooperation in helping to eradicate looplining in the city. Later in the 1880s the association would attempt to promote smaller Dublin breweries to oppose the growing dominance of Guinness. In contrast, the brewing and retail trade interests in England and Scotland had become increasingly intertwined by this time as the tied-house system transformed the English pub business. See David W. Gutzke, Protecting the Pub: Brewers and Publicans against Temperance (London: Boydell and Brewer, Inc., 1989). For the English politician, W.S. Caine, the taking up of Home Rule by Gladstone completely derailed his primary political goal, temperance reform. In the post-1886 climate, when Liberals sought a strategy for reclaiming a parliamentary majority under a single issue, such sectional reformists found it nearly impossible to retain and assert the political reform for which they were best known. See D.A. Hamer, “The Irish question and liberal politics, 1886–1894,” The Historical Journal, 12:3 (1969): 523. Freeman’s Journal, 1 April 1880. Ibid. Ibid. Secretary’s minutes (LVA minute book, 12 April 1881). Ibid. T.W. Russell, “Drunkenness in Ireland,” Freeman’s Journal, 16 September 1881. In the 1886 general election the LGVPA would campaign vigorously to keep T.W. Russell from winning a parliamentary seat as a Liberal candidate for South Tyrone. In its unsuccessful opposition to Russell, the Dublin association appointed a group of members to compile a dossier of his unpatriotic actions and statements to be sent to local trade leaders in Belfast and then distributed “in leaflet form” in South Tyrone. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 26 June 1886). “Sunday closing,” Freeman’s Journal, 2 February 1882. London Times, 13 July 1887, 15. “A significant record,” London Times, 31 August 1887, 5. See Section V of this chapter for a discussion of the Dublin publicans’ reaction to distressed rural publicans during the Land War. Newsclipping, Freeman’s Journal (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 27 September 1881). James S. Donnelly, Jr., has noted in The Land and People of Nineteenthcentury Cork: The Rural Economy and the Land Question (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), that it was “townsmen [ . . . ] especially

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54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

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notes to pages 111–115 shopkeepers and publicans” (252), who gave their backing to the Land League and also furnished much of the “local leadership and organization” for the group during the first phase of the Land War. Newsclipping, “Memorial to the Chief Secretary,” Freeman’s Journal (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 27 September 1881). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Newsclipping, Carlow Nationalist (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 18 June 1886). Ibid. Newsclipping, Carlow Nationalist (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 18 June 1886). Even the generally conservative Freeman’s Journal, which had boldly published William O’Brien’s portraits of the wretched living conditions on some of the more notorious landed estates in the late 1870s, tended to give a fairly balanced account of the plight of nationalist publicans. Indeed, more often than not, the Freeman, possessing a long and mostly cordial relationship with the LGVPA, corroborated the popular view in Ireland of a corrupt constabulary and a self-motivated Dublin Castle. Among the most frequent charges leveled at the administration were “corruption, severe miscarriage of justice, bribing witnesses to give false statement in order to obtain a verdict, ‘jury-packing’ heavily in favour of protestants, and the shady ‘private character’ of various named Crown employees in Ireland.” See Sally Warwick Haller, William O’Brien and the Irish Land War (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1990), 70. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 23 September 1884). The resolution passed at this special meeting of the LGVPA reads: “we most respectfully remonstrate against the harassing and, as the result proves, perfectly futile course of making a special raid upon licensed houses and subjecting their customers to needless hardships and annoyances.” Resolution passed at a special meeting of the LGVPA (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 18 December 1882). Newsclipping, Freeman’s Journal (LVA minute book, 29 February 1888). For a more complete discussion of modernization and the bona fide traveler clause in the Sunday Closing Act, see main text below. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1888 (255), XIX, 436.

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68. Newsclipping, Evening Post (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 4 November 1887). 69. Ibid. 70. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1888 (255), XIX, 419. 71. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 8 April 1886). 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. LGVPA circular (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 15 May 1886). 76. LGVPA circular (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 13 December 1886). 77. Newsclipping, Carlow Nationalist (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 18 June 1886). 78. LGVPA minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 5 February 1887). 79. Ibid. The article claims that Parnell’s secretary had been in communication with “his correspondent,” a Connemara publican who allegedly orchestrated “crime in the disguise of a priest.”

Chapter 5 Trade Growth and Modernization 1. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1888 (255), XIX, 420. 2. Ibid., 248. 3. Ibid., 230. 4. Mary Daly in Dublin: The Deposed Capital: A Social and Economic History, 1860–1914 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1984) tabulates figures for publicans and grocers in Dublin Corporation. Out of a total representation consisting of 60 members, Daly finds the following numbers of publicans and grocers sitting in the corporation: 1850 (4); 1860 (7); 1870 (12); 1880 (9); 1890 (16); 1900 (19); 1910 (19) (see p. 205). 5. Committee of the LGVPA of Dublin, Annual Report of 1891 (Dublin: Waller & Co., 1891), 3. 6. Ibid. 7. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 16 April 1889). 8. Ibid. 9. Newsclipping, “Licensed vintners,” Freeman’s Journal (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 19 February 1890). 10. Committee of LGVPA of Dublin, Annual Report of 1890 (Dublin: Waller & Co., 1890), 9.

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notes to pages 127–134

11. Brian Harrison’s study of temperance in Britain, Drink and the Victorians (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), and Elizabeth Malcolm’s account of the movement in Ireland, Ireland Sober, Ireland Free: Drink and Temperance in Nineteenth-century Ireland (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), both conclude with the active decade of the 1870s. More recent histories of the “drink question” have tended to focus on Father Matthew’s temperance campaign or later developments in the twentieth century. See John F. Quinn, Father Mathew’s Temperance Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenthcentury Ireland and Irish America (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Colm Kerrigan, Father Mathew and the Irish Temperance Movement, 1838–1849 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1992), and Paul A. Townend, Father Mathew, Temperance, and Irish Identity (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002). 12. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 16 March 1889). 13. Committee of the LGVPA, Annual Report of 1901 (Dublin: Dollard Printinghouse, 1901), 6. 14. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, CCLT minute book, 4 June 1897). 15. Newsclipping (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 19 November 1897). 16. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, CCLT minute book, 4 June 1897). 17. Committee of the LGVPA, “Licensed trade interests in parliament,” Annual Report of 1892 (Dublin: Waller & Co., 1892), 13. 18. Ibid., 13–14. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 2 July 1880). 22. The LGVPA in the 1890s ran regular columns, in addition to brief accounts of its weekly meetings, in such papers as the Freeman’s Journal and Irish Times, and in other popular magazines and journals with a decidedly middleclass readership. 23. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 2 July 1880). 24. “Letter from Mr. Hewson, Chairman of the Liberty and Property Defence Association” (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 5 July 1889). 25. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 9 July 1889). 26. “Paradise for publicans,” Irish Society, 22 June 1889, 399. 27. “Conspirators in session,” Irish Society, 16 November 1889, 7. 28. “Chairman’s address to the CCLT” (LVA, CCLT minute book, 22 November 1900). 29. “Speech by the vice-chairman of the CCLT, James Kavanagh” (LVA, CCLT minute book, 25 August 1893).

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30. For a detailed account of middle-class suburban growth outside of Dublin, and for the economic advantages that such growth offered publicans near rail and tram stations, see Liam Clare, Victorian Bray: An Administrative Perspective (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999). 31. Dublin Builder, 1 February 1871, 37. 32. Report of the Select Committee on Habitual Drunkards; Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, and Index (2 August 1872), H.C. 1872 (242), ix, 417. 33. Joseph Brady, “The heart of the city: commercial Dublin, c. 1890–1915,” in Joseph Brady and Anngret Simms (eds), Dublin through Space and Time, 900–1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), 297–98. 34. As Joseph Brady notes in “The heart of the city,” “time [ . . . ] contradicted the author” of this statement (297). Rippingale’s Temperance Hotel soon became the Ivanhoe Hotel without any association with temperance. 35. Sport, 23 January 1886. 36. Ibid. 37. Secretary’s minutes (Mandate Union, LGVAA minute book, 17 June 1888). 38. Sport, 10 April 1897. 39. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 19 November 1897). 40. Freeman’s Journal, 10 April 1899. 41. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on Sale of Liquors on Sunday (Ireland) Bill, H.C. 1888 (255), xix, 7. 42. Royal Commissioner on Liquor Licensing Laws; Together with Minutes of Evidence, Appendices, and Index, Arthur Wellesley Peel, H.C. 1899 (c.9075), xxxiv, 441. 43. Ibid. 44. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 30 September 1873). 45. The Dublin trade also borrowed strategies for synchronizing prices from their English counterparts. 46. Patrick Duff, “The Publican’s Christmas Charity Fund,” Irish Temperance Banner, January 1874, 1.1: 6–7. 47. “Letter from M. Moynihan, Upper George’s Street” (LVA, CCLT letterbook, 5 December 1900). 48. Draught and bottled porter appeared to be the most important, high-profile products, the prices of which the LGVPA targeted in its campaign of the 1890s and 1900s. 49. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 17 January 1888). 50. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 7 February 1888).

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notes to pages 145–151

51. Letter from Arthur Guinness Sons and Co. to Robert Russell, secretary of LGVPA, n.d. (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 30 October 1907). 52. “Over-measure” refers to the practice of serving drinks in inordinately large vessels. For example, a publican who served a customer with a glass or bottle that measured well over a pint, while only charging the price for the pint, would be guilty of serving “over-measure.” 53. Letter from Belfast Liberty and Property Defence League to Robert Russell (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 12 March 1904). 54. “Looplining,” Freeman’s Journal, 13 March 1914. 55. A Solicitor, “The licensing system,” New Ireland Review, 8 (November 1897), 185–86. 56. Ibid. 57. “Conference of Limerick magistrates,” Freeman’s Journal, 29 May 1901. 58. “Action of Limerick magistrates,” Freeman’s Journal, 9 January 1901. 59. Statement by Daniel Fallon, chairman, at annual meeting of CCLT (LVA, CCLT minute book, 19 March 1901). 60. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, CCLT minute book, 25 February 1904).

Chapter 6 New Challenges, 1902–14 1. R.B. Weir in “Obsessed with moderation: the drink trades and the drink question (1870–1930),” British Journal of Addiction, 79 (1984): 93–107, demonstrates that firms and trade associations in the Scotch whisky industry placed their support firmly behind the Conservative Party only after the “People’s Budget” of 1909, which substantially increased the excise duty on spirits. Though in Ireland both the retail trade, and the brewing and distilling industries staunchly opposed the Liberal Party’s fiscal policies, in Ireland a similar realignment of support behind the Conservative opposition was complicated by the Irish Parliamentary Party’s political dominance across much of nationalist Ireland. 2. As early as 1893, D. O’Brien put forth a nationalist vision of a “new Ireland” in his article “The Irish drink disease: some causes and a cure,” Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 3rd ser., 14:2 (July-December 1893), 614–18. There O’Brien looks to the “social reformer” and the “man who plans material and industrial development” to build this new Ireland, though his primary emphasis is on the need for a transformation in the moral disposition of the Irish people. O’Brien calls upon the “cultural idealists” of his day, who celebrate the “songs, literature, and music” of Irish history, to remember the “moral morass” in which the greater portion of the Irish people live.

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255

3. James Cullen, untitled, Irish Catholic, 9 December 1905. 4. See David W. Gutzke, “The cry of the children: the Edwardian medical campaign against maternal drinking,” British Journal of Addiction, 79 (1984): 71–84. 5. Annual Report of the Committee of the LGVPA, 1899 (Dublin: Waller & Co., 1899), 10. 6. Ibid., 11. 7. Letter from the Executive Committee of the LGVPA to Lord Herschell, private secretary to the Lord Lieutenant (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 28 April 1906). 8. Letter from Robert Russell to J.J. Clancy (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 3 May 1901). 9. Ibid. 10. Annual Report of the Committee of the LGVPA, 1903 (Dublin: Dollard Printinghouse, 1903), 9. 11. Ibid. 12. Letter from W. Wilkenson to Robert Russell (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 15 September 1903). 13. Letter from Robert Russell to W. Wilkenson (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 15 September 1903). 14. In 1902 and 1903 the LGVPA minute books show that a series of letters was exchanged between the LGVPA and these two English trade associations to discuss the planning of joint deputations to the exchequer and the lobbying of individual MPs in parliament. 15. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, CCLT minute book, 25 February 1904). 16. Unsigned column, Irish Vintner and Grocer (5 December 1904), 6–7. 17. Untitled, Temperance Yearbook, 1901, 5. 18. Unsigned column, Temperance Yearbook, 1900, 7. 19. Freeman’s Journal, 3 August 1900. 20. Daly, Dublin, 238. 21. Report by Lord Advocate, privately circulated to the Select Committee on Local Taxation (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 7 August 1903). 22. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 22 September 1903). 23. Statement from the Court of Appeals (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 7 March 1905). 24. Daly, Dublin, 238. 25. Ibid. 26. Parliamentary report from the Secretary (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 11 October 1909). 27. Ibid.

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notes to pages 161–169

28. See Daly, Dublin, table entitled “Occupations of Dublin Corporation members, 1850–1910,” (p. 205). She finds that in both 1900 and 1910 the number of publicans serving on Dublin Corporation was 19, out of a total of 60 aldermen. 29. James Connolly in 1916 implored Irish men and women to honor St. Patrick’s Day for “the spiritual conception of the separate identity of the Irish race – an ideal of unity in diversity, of diversity not conflicting with unity” (Workers’ Republic, 18 March 1916). In addition, Connolly saw the “national holiday” as an “emblem” of the “noblest thoughts” of the “Irish race,” a time for celebration of the “spiritual conception of religion, of freedom, of nationality.” 30. See Chapter 4, above, for a more detailed account of the ways in which temperance organizations, the LGVPA, and its assistants reacted to and participated in the early stages of the nationalist movement. 31. Father Peter Coffey, “Students and temperance reform,” Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 14 (July-December 1903), 122. 32. Leader, 12 March 1904. 33. Ibid. 34. Letter from Liam O’Maoileoin to the LGVPA (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 20 February 1904). 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. “Dublin Trade Report” (GA intelligence report, March 1904). 38. Freeman’s Journal, 18 March 1906. 39. “St. Patrick’s Day closing,” Irish Vintner and Grocer (March 1906), 19. 40. Newsclipping, “Letter from Licensed Grocers and Vintners’ Association” (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 16 February 1904). 41. “Letter from Limerick,” Irish Vintner and Grocer (April 1905), 22. 42. “Dublin archbishop’s Lenten pastoral” (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 7 March 1905). 43. Ibid. 44. Letter from Myles N. Ronan, secretary to Archbishop William Walsh (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 11 March 1905). 45. Letter from Robert Russell, secretary of LGVPA, to Archbishop Walsh (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 13 March 1905). 46. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 18 April 1905). 47. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 6 February 1906). 48. Ibid. 49. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 6 February 1906). 50. Secretary’s minutes (Minutes of Dublin district of Coisde an Timthireachta of Coisde Ceanntair, 7 April 1906), NLI [MS 9794].

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257

51. An Claidheamh Soluis, 25 February 1905. 52. Report of the parliamentary subcommittee (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 12 March 1906). 53. Letter from Edward Coerton, secretary of Belfast and Ulster Licensed Vintners’ Association, to Robert Russell (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 8 March 1906). 54. Letter from Frederick Millar to Robert Russell (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 9 March 1906). 55. Ibid. 56. Letter from Joseph Nolan to Robert Russell (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 9 March 1906). 57. Parliamentary report (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 12 March 1906). 58. Letter from J.J. Nagle (Minutes of Dublin district of Coisde an Timthireachta of Coisde Ceanntair, 16 February 1906), NLI [MS 9790]. 59. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 13 March 1906). 60. Ibid. 61. Newsclipping, (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 22 Jan. 1909). 62. “St. Patrick’s Day,” Irish Vintner and Grocer (April 1911), 13. 63. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 22 January 1909). 64. Timothy McMahon, in “The Social Bases of the Gaelic Revival, 1893– 1910” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2001), demonstrates from data gathered from the earliest days of the league that smallbusiness owners, such as licensed grocers and vintners, represented a substantial portion of the members of the Gaelic League. McMahon traces the occupations of some 191 members from Dublin, Belfast, and Cork, of whom 37 fell into the occupational category of “employers and managers.” This group comprised 19.4 percent of all occupations included in his analysis. Within this category 13 of them (or 35 percent) were licensed grocers, vintners, or publicans. While in general these employers tended to be small businesspeople, a few were fairly substantial. The Dublin grocer and licensed wine merchant J.J. Boland, for example, owned two shops, one on Grafton Street with a £120 valuation, and another on Johnson’s Court valued at only £18. The other vintners in this category owned shops valued at between £20 and £40 – modest, yet still middle-class establishments. 65. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 27 October 1903). 66. Solicitor’s report to the LGVPA (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 2 August 1904). 67. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 8 November 1904). 68. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 20 March 1906).

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notes to pages 173–181

69. Annual Report of the Committee of the Licensed Grocers and Vintners’ Protection Association, 1901 (Dublin: Dollard Printhouse, 1901), 19. 70. “Police report,” Irish Vintner and Grocer (June 1906), 9. 71. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 8 May 1906). 72. Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925: A Study in Urban Geography (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998), 309. 73. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 6 April 1909). 74. Newsclipping, (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 1 January 1902). 75. Letter to Robert Russell from Edward Commerto, secretary to Belfast and Ulster Licensed Vintners’ Association (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 24 September 1910). 76. In the two detailed local studies of public health in and around Dublin at this time (see Prunty, Dublin Slums), little mention was made of offenses against public-health legislation by publicans. 77. Letter from G.W. Howe, Superintendent’s Office, A Division, 4 March 1902 (NAI, CSORP 22701); “Licensing sessions,” Freeman’s Journal, 14 January 1914. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 81. Letter from Robert Russell to Chief Commissioner of Police (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 26 October 1912). 82. Newsclipping (LVA, LVGPA minute book, 21 July 1908). 83. Irish Vintner and Grocer, 5 December 1904. 84. K.L. Montgomery, “Child drunkards,” New Ireland Review, 9 (July 1899), 270–75. 85. Ibid, 271. 86. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 20 July 1909). 87. Information Obtained from Certain Police Forces as to the Frequenting of Public Houses by Women and Children Relating to Ireland. H.C. 1909 (cd.4,575), lxxiii, 93. Number of Children

Name of City Dublin Belfast Cork Limerick Londonderry Waterford

Number Between Total Number of of Period of Number Seven Number Children Houses Observation of Under and of Brought to Observed (Days) Women In Arms Seven Sixteen Children the Door 22 22 10 6 8 6

14 14 14 14 12 14

46,574 5,963 1,995 6,493 856 5,441

5,807 2,630 1,274 659 489 695

8,767 1,667 759 1,891 444 651

13,425 2,152 200 2,033 42 1,359

27,999 6,449 2,233 4,583 975 2,705

328 122 74 73 7 23

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88. Ibid., 5. 89. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 12 January 1909). 90. According to the minutes of the LGVPA, the “Belfast representatives” had “broken away from an arrangement” made between Irish MPs and the government that would have left Ireland largely unaffected by the Children Act. See Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 12 January 1909). 91. Ibid. 92. One card, colored red, warned that children under 14 years of age were no longer allowed on the premises of licensed property; the other card, colored blue, informed the public that children would continue to be allowed to visit the licensed house for picking up groceries or intoxicants, provided that the liquor or beer was sold in a sealed vessel. 93. Irish Vintner and Grocer (April 1907), 9–10. 94. Irish Vintner and Grocer (January 1907), 15. 95. Ibid. 96. Irish Vintner and Grocer (September 1914), 15. 97. Irish Vintner and Grocer (July 1912), 5. 98. Ibid. 99. Statement from the Secretary of the LGVPA (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 16 April 1910). 100. The statistics referred to above appear here as the secretary, Robert Russell, recorded them on loose-leaf in the minute book of the LGVPA. Note that the letters on the left appear to represent the various police districts of the city, though no mention of this is made by the author of the report. Since no exact addresses or street names are given, it is difficult to determine how closely the letter labels adhere to the police-district boundaries. A. and B. – Two houses owned by the same proprietor, situated in a working-class district – reduction as between April and May, 78%. C. and D. – Two houses similarly owned, one directly opposite a mainline railway terminus, the other in a densely populated working-class neighbourhood – total reduction for May, 60%; for June as compared to April, 50%. E. – House situated on the North Wall in the busiest section of the shipping traffic, reduction in May, 48%; in June, 49% as compared with April. F. – House situated in immediate vicinity of cattle market – reduction 60%. G. – Eight houses all situated in the principal business thoroughfares – a. 75%, b. 80%, c. 60%, d. 80%, e. 33%, f. 75%, g. 45%. In the case of (e)

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notes to pages 186–191 three houses are embraced. They are owned by a company and there is no mixed trading. They are the most luxuriously equipped in the whole city, and the best known to visitors, and are largely frequented by this class. H. – Suburban [houses] – a. 25%, b. 40%, c. 33%, d. 33%, e. 30%, f. 51%, and g. 40%. All these houses are situated in the best residential districts and carry on a large family trade in addition to the public-house business.

101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106.

I. – Two houses owned by the same proprietor and situated in one of the most populous neighbourhoods in the outskirts of the northern part of the city, leading to the Catholic cemeteries, the Botanic Gardens, the Phoenix Park, and the Cattle Market – reduction 55%. Letter from Alderman O’Connor to the commissioner of valuation, Sir John Barton (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 26 March 1913). Letter from Robert Russell to John Barton (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 4 March 1912). Ibid. Ibid. Telegram to Messrs. Guinness and Son from Shaper, 29 March 1913 (GA, Guinness: trade analysis, 1912, Ireland correspondence, third and fourth quarters). Statement to Sir John Barton by O’Byrne (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 28 April 1914).

Chapter 7 World War I and the Trade 1. For a wide-ranging collection of works on the war years in Ireland, see Joost Augusteijn (ed.), The Irish Revolution, 1913–1923 (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 2. For an overview of recent trends in the historiography on World War I, see Belinda Davis, “The legacy of World War I,” Journal of Modern History, 75 (March 2003): 111–31; and Jay Winter, “Catastrophe and culture: recent trends in the historiography of the First World War,” Journal of Modern History, 64:3 (1992): 525–32. 3. Temperance reformers hailed the elevation of Lloyd George to the position of prime minister in 1916 as a boon to their movement. With his nonconformist Welsh religious credentials, Lloyd George’s almost impeccable temperance background, though praised by those with an anti-drink agenda, tended during the war only to increase the LGVPA’s suspicions about his real motivations when it came to negotiations over wartime control of the drink trade.

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4. Ben Novick, “Advanced nationalist propaganda and moralistic revolution, 1914–18,” in Augusteijn (ed.), The Irish Revolution. 5. The war years represented the high water mark for the political viability of prohibition, though both the English and the Irish liquor trades successfully fended off this extreme reform during and after the war. 6. John R. Greenway traces the development of the public-house-trust managerial system in Great Britain from its beginnings in the 1890s to the interwar years. This scheme, based upon “disinterested” managerial oversight, aimed to promote “counterattractions” to drinking by eliminating the natural tendency of private owners to promote their houses as “drinking shops” first and foremost. According to Greenway’s analysis, however, there were ambiguities inherent within the system that proved difficult to overcome. Were the austere surroundings promoted by such a trust simply intended to discourage overindulgence, or were public houses to be used more as community centers where drinking would be replaced by more “wholesome” and “sober” activities? In Greenway’s view these issues made the scheme’s adoption difficult after 1915. According to Greenway, World War I transformed the idea of a public-house trust from a moral issue to an industrial one, while later in the interwar years it would be transformed yet again into a commercial project. Greenway, “The improved public house, 1870–1950: the key to civilized drinking or the primrose path to drunkenness?” Addiction, 93:2 (February 1998): 173–81. 7. H. Carter, The Control of the Drink Trade: A Contribution to National Efficiency (London: Greenway and Co., 1919); M.E. Rose, “The success of social reform? The Central Control Board (Liquor Traffic) 1915–21,” in M.R.D. Foot (ed.), War and Society (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1973), 71–84. 8. “Petition in support of prohibition during the war” (loose document found in LGVPA minute book, 1914–18). 9. As demonstrated in Chapter 5, the growing movement for urban renewal included attacks upon the considerable numbers of public houses clustered in the slums of the city. The generally conservative Irish Times took aim at the wretched conditions within the Dublin slums and the stultifying effect of the public house, which was, according to the author, responsible for workers “turning a ready ear to anyone who promises to improve their lot.” If it were not for the horrible living conditions within the city, the writer speculated, “the city would not be divided into two hostile camps,” Irish Times, 4 September 1914. 10. Carter, Control of the Drink Trade, 2. 11. The Licensed Grocer and Vintners Assistants’ Association (LGVAA) never officially authorized a strike before 1914, but several public houses were

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12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

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notes to pages 195–197 picketed by assistants because of their employers’ political opposition to the industrial strike and their support of politicians deemed by the union movement to be unfriendly to labor interests. Although most of the internal records between 1883 and 1915 of the Licensed Grocers and Vintners Assistants’ Association have been lost, it is clear from newspaper reports and the records of the LGVPA that the assistants before 1909 focused largely upon issues surrounding pension funds, insurance, terms of apprenticeship, and protocols for finding employment within the licensed trade. With the alliance between the Liberal and Labour parties and the emergence of labor issues into popular politics, the vintners’ assistants in Dublin turned away from such internal matters of mutual benefit and moved instead toward the more active political labor movement spearheaded in Dublin by James Connolly and James Larkin. It was John Clancy, MP for North Dublin and a close ally of the trade, who took a leadership role in parliament on behalf of Irish publicans in guarding against the Shop Act interfering with the Sunday retail traffic in public houses. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book 10 April 1911). Ibid. Terrant to Robert Russell (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 19 April 1911). Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 19 April 1911). The following list is the LGVPA’s secretary’s record of the actual compromise which the employers and their assistants reached; Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 19 April 1911): 1. 8 a.m. opening be made statutory. 2. The working hours set at 73 hours per week, exclusive of meal times. 3. Fortnight holiday (meaning 14 clear days given where the period of employment reaches 12 months). 4. Weekly half holiday means a period of seven hours. 5. Two hours daily allowed for meals. 6. In cases of illness, or in cases where either the fortnight holiday or half holiday is in operation in regard to one or more assistants, the proprietor shall be relieved from responsibility if the working hours of the remaining assistants are exceeded.

19. 20. 21. 22.

Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 6 May 1911). Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 15 May 1911). Ibid. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 4 November 1913).

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23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Martin O’Byrne to John Redmond (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 7 January 1914). 26. Ibid. 27. The assistants’ records during the Anglo-Irish War and Civil War suggest ´ and other advanced widespread involvement by members in the Sinn Fein nationalist groups. More research is necessary in order to determine the degree of assistants’ involvement in militant activities and to identify how the split in the Volunteer movement may have played out within their ranks. 28. Unsigned letter from the Licensed Grocers and Vintners Assistants’ Association (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 9 September 1914). 29. Kennedy to LGVPA (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 13 October 1914). 30. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 13 October 1914). 31. Owing to the difficulties of abbreviating this title, the Irish National Union of Vintners, Grocers, and Allied Trade Assistants will be referred to in this chapter simply as “Assistants’ union.” 32. Secretary’s minutes (Mandate Trade Union, LGVPA minute book, 9 September 1917). 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. The living-in system refers to the custom in the public-house trade of boarding assistants on the premises of their shops. Assistants increasingly objected to this arrangement because it was used by employers as a justification for keeping wages low. Furthermore, assistants felt that the living-in system compromised their personal freedom since they were under the eye of their employer almost constantly during their employment. After some considerable debate, however, it was decided to exclude this particular claim from the list of five grievances, though following the termination of the war the issue would again surface as a leading demand. 36. The secretary recorded the following list of demands in the minute books of the Irish National Union of Vintners and Grocers and Allied Trade Assistants, September 1917 – January 1921 (23 September 1917): 1. To demand from the employers in the grocery, liquor, and allied trades recognition of our union. 2. Apprentices in the aforementioned trades shall serve a term of apprenticeship of not less than two years. 3. That no more than one apprentice shall be employed in the same establishment.

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notes to pages 200–202 4. Where only one hand is employed, he or she must be a paid assistant. 5. That journeymen assistants [i.e., those who had completed two years’ apprenticeship] shall be paid for their service a wage of not less than 25s. weekly. Managers and chargehands to be paid a wage not less than £3.

37. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 8 February 1918). 38. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 13 February 1918). 39. Presumably, Fanning referred here to normal, peacetime business hours and not to the wartime restrictions which were still in effect in Dublin at this time. 40. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 19 March 1918). 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Newsclipping, Freeman’s Journal (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 13 February 1918). 44. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 17 February 1918). 45. Circular giving instructions for a lockout on 17 March 1918 (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 15 March 1918). 46. Secretary’s minutes (MTU, LGVAA minute book, 17 March 1918). 47. Secretary’s minutes (MTU, LGVAA minute book, 19 March 1918). 48. Secretary’s minutes (MTU, LGVAA minute book, 20 March 1918). 49. The following list represents the terms agreed upon; Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 22 March 1918): 1. It being mutually agreed between the LGVPA and the I.N.U.V.G. and Allied Trades Assistants that there shall not be any extension of the hours of work at present obtaining in on-licensed premises, (this is not to apply to houses for which special market exemptions have been or may be granted) and that the Assistants Union accepts and undertakes to work the existing trading hours. 2. That only actually vintners’ assistants shall vote on questions affecting the interest of the licensed trade. 3. That the assistants shall cooperate in obtaining the rules and regulations of employers in matters of prices and other matters of a kindred nature. 4. That employers shall have absolute freedom as to whom they may employ but all persons so employed shall have served a proper apprenticeship and shall become members of the union. 5. In the event of any strike in other trades, the assistants shall not take any action calculated to jeopardize the legal interests of the trade or bring

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the licensed holders into conflict with the authorities or the licensing laws. 6. That apprentices shall serve a term of apprenticeship of not less than two years. 7. Not more than one apprentice shall be employed in the same establishment. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 28 May 1918). Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 28 August 1914). “Intoxicating liquors,” Freeman’s Journal, 28 August 1914. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 28 September 1914). Newsclipping, “Licensed Vintners’ Association” (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 8 September 1914). Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 6 October 1914). According to Timothy Bowman, Irish reserves patrolling garrison cities like Dublin were poorly trained and suffered low morale. Bowman, The Irish Regiments in the Great War: Discipline and Morale (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Ibid., 198. Authorizing certificate (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 13 October 1914). Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 22 October 1914). Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGPVA minute book, 16 March 1915). Ibid. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 6 October 1914). Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 9 March 1915). Circular sent to the trade (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 9 March 1915). “Women’s vigilance committee report,” Freeman’s Journal, 20 April 1915. Letter signed by Pierce Ryan and P.J. Walsh to Sir P.F. Barrett (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 21 April 1915). Henry Carter blended religious and labor activism and contributed substantially to the European conception of Christian socialism. Following in the tradition of William Booth, Carter was a devout Methodist who saw the working-class use of alcohol as a multi-layered social phenomenon linked to the capitalist debasement of the proletariat. Though his brand of temperance and socialism did not have a significant following in Ireland outside of Ulster, he was one of the more important advocates for stricter restrictions of the whole of the drink trade in the United Kingdom during the war. Later he would be appointed to several British commissions charged with investigating the alcohol problem. His work on the ramifications of government restrictions lauded the benefits that stemmed from the state’s

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68. 69.

70.

71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

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notes to pages 209–214 tight grip on the drink trade during World War I. See Henry Carter, The Drink Trade in Britain: A Contribution to National Efficiency during the Great War (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1919). For the general position of the British Labour Party on the liquor question following World War I, see Labour and the Liquor Trade: Report of the Special Committee Appointed by the Labour Party to Enquire into the Question of the Liquor Trade (London: Labour Party, 1923). Carter, The Drink Trade in Britain, 231. There is no study of female drinking patterns for this period of Irish history. For an account of the transformation of British drinking customs during the Great War, see David W. Gutzke, “Gender, class, and public drinking in Britain during the First World War,” Social History, 27:54 (1994): 367–92. Arthur Marwick argues that the various British government reports exaggerated the numbers of women drinking publicly during the war. Such wartime information as the reports of the LCB fit naturally into the wartime propaganda that was released in order to bolster public morale and sobriety. Marwick, Women at War: 1914–1918 (New York: Fontana, 1977). David Gutzke contends that English publicans actively sought out female patrons during the war. In Dublin this may not have been so necessary since working-class pubic houses already possessed a substantial body of women regulars. Gutzke, “Gender, class and public drinking,” Social History, 27:54 (1994): 367. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 7 September 1915). Resolution (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 17 January 1916). Ibid. Newsclipping, “Licensed Grocers and Vintners’ Protection Association,” Freeman’s Journal (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 9 May, 1916). Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 17 October 1916). Lloyd George kicked off the government’s new campaign against intoxicants when he warned on 28 February 1915 in a speech at Bangor, Wales of the “lure of Drink” which threatened the nation. Carter, Control of the Drink Trade, 18. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 13 April 1915). Ibid. Ibid. Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 18 April 1915). Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 21 April 1915). Parliamentary report to the LGVPA (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 25 April 1915). Secretary’s minutes (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 25 April 1915).

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85. Parliamentary report (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 15 May 1915). 86. Due to taxation and other war-related circumstances, in fact, the price of beer and whiskeys tripled during the four years of war. LGVPA records show that a pint of porter went from approximately 1d to over 3d between 1914 and 1918. 87. Parliamentary report (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 23 September 1915). 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. For a time in 1916 Lloyd George even considered a scheme to convert distilleries into munitions factories. The plan was eventually dropped when engineers rejected the idea as unworkable, finding that distilleries could not be easily transformed into plants for the production of explosives. Still the plan demonstrates Lloyd George’s wide-ranging commitment to harness the infrastructure of this sector of the economy for the war effort. 91. For a survey of the Liberal Party approach to Ireland during the war, see Patricia Jalland and John Stubbs, “The Irish question after the outbreak of war in 1914: some unfinished party business,” English Historical Review, 96:381 (October 1981): 778–807; and John M. McEwen, “The Liberal Party and the Irish question during the First World War,” Journal of British Studies, 12:1 (November 1972): 109–31. 92. For a survey of popular opinion in Britain and Ireland during the war, see David G. Boyce, “British opinion, Ireland, and the war, 1916–1918,” Historical Journal, 17:3 (September 1974): 575–93. 93. Newsclipping, Freeman’s Journal, 2 July 1917 (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 7 July 1917). 94. Parliamentary report (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 17 July 1917). 95. The LGVPA also worked with the provincial trade to organize rallies in Mulingar, Kilkenny, Enniscorthy, Galway, Sligo, and Tullamore. To all these protests the LGVPA planned to send speakers and organizing representatives. 96. “The action of the government is either a deliberate attack on the brewing industry in this country or is the result of criminal ignorance of the conditions attaching to the brewings of the two countries. The Irish brewers [ . . . ] have unanimously declined to brew the light beer, but this country is of course thereby deprived of the advantage of the order which can be availed of by brewers on the other side. The average gravity of the Irish product is enormously higher than that of the English or Scotch, and it is therefore palpably unjust to Ireland to apply the same conditions. We claim that Ireland should get her share of the increased brewing at the gravities which

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97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

notes to pages 217–221 have made the product of this country world-famous, and respectfully ask you to throw your weight and influence in on our side.” Circular sent to the trade and Irish MPs (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 31 July 1917). Secretary’s report to the LGVPA (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 24 July 1917). Ibid. Parliamentary report (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 8 August 1917). Parliamentary report (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 19 December 1918). The shortage of spirits in 1919 was worsened, the licensed trade claimed, by the outbreak of flu in the winter of 1918–19. On 26 November the LGVPA passed a resolution calling on the government to release additional spirits from bond “to meet the abnormal demand caused by the very serious epidemics.” LGVPA resolution (LVA, LGVPA minute book, 26 November 1918).

Conclusion 1. Return of Memorials and Petitions of Licensed Victuallers of Ireland to Treasury, Claiming Licenses in Same Manner as Fellow Traders in England and Scotland, H.C. 1841 (275), xxvi, 209. 2. Prior to Mathew’s temperance movement in 1836 there were 21,326 public houses in Ireland; following his crusade in 1844 the number dropped to 13,514. From approximately 1850 until 1901 the number slowly, though unevenly, rose. See Final Report from Royal Commissioner on Liquor Licensing Laws, H.C. 1899 (c.9,379), xxxv, 1, 39. 3. Kerrigan, Quinn, and Townsend have all given only passing reference to the reaction of the drink trade itself to the revolutionary movement of Fr. Mathew. Though these scholars acknowledge, with varying degrees of emphasis, the familial connections of Daniel O’Connell with the brewing industry, they have largely downplayed or overlooked altogether the response of the drink trade to the popular campaign that resulted in the destruction of substantial numbers of public-house businesses. Despite Mathew’s profound impact upon the landscape of the drink trade in the short term, however, his impact upon the per capita alcohol consumption rate remains a matter of debate. Colm Kerrigan, “The social impact of the Irish temperance movement, 1839–45,” Irish Economic and Social History, 14 (1987): 20–38; John E. Quinn, Father Mathew’s Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth-century Ireland and Irish America (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Paul A. Townsend, Father

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Mathew, Temperance and Irish Identity (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002). 4. Referring in the title of his history of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association to this cultural divide, Dairmaid Ferriter labels twentieth-century Ireland “a nation of extremes.” See Dairmaid Ferriter, A Nation of Extremes: The Pioneers in Twentieth-century Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999).

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Bibliography

I. Manuscript Material A. Licensed Grocers and Vintners’ Archival Sources (Archives located at Angelsea Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 6) LGVPA letterbook: 24 Sept. 1900–13 Nov. 1901. LGVPA minute books: May 1862–Apr. 1871, Apr. 1871–Jan. 1878, Feb. 1878– Jan. 1880, Jan. 1880–Feb. 1882, Feb. 1882–Jun. 1886, Jun. 1886–Apr. 1889, Jun. 1897–Apr. 1899, Apr. 1903–Mar. 1905, Apr. 1906, Jan. 1909–Apr. 1910. Liquor Control Board minute book: 1890–1906.

B. Licensed Grocers and Vintners Assistants’ Association Manuscripts (Archives located at Mandate Trade Union, 9 Cavendish Row, Dublin 1) Irish National Union of Vintners and Grocers and Allied Trades’ Assistants minute books: Sept. 1917–Jan. 1921. LGVAA minute books: 1864–72, 1872–78, 1878–1884.

C. Guinness Brewery Archives (Archives located at St. James’s Gate, Dublin? [district no. – as above]) Guinness intelligence reports, 1904. Guinness trade analysis, Ireland correspondence third and fourth quarters, 1912. Scrapbook of newspaper cuttings regarding Irish label, 1895. Town and vicinity trade report, 1914–1915.

D. National Library of Ireland, Dublin MS 797: Lectures on temperance delivered by Henry Russell to the Society of Friends, Dublin, late nineteenth century.

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MS d832 (Belfast public record office): Title deeds to several public houses in Belfast. MS 2092 (MS Q.8.4): “The minute book from the Dublin University temperance society, 1877–9.” MSS 2097–9 (q.8.6–8): “The Dublin University association for the promotion of purity of life: account book, minute book, 1884–90, and Dublin University temperance society members rule book, 1887–8.” MS 7587 (Larcom Papers): Newscuttings, including beerhouse bill, 1863–5. MS 8586 (Harrington Papers): Warrants for the Arrest of Timothy Harrington, 1881, and William O’Brien, 1887, together with Court Actions Against Catherine Woods of Ballygawly for breach of the Licensing Laws, 1889, and Against Jane McCabe of Dublin, 1910 under public health act. MS 8728 (J.J. Bouch Papers): Notes by Joseph J. Bouch on Irish newspapers, Dublin directories, and Dublin taverns. MS 11205 (Mayo Papers): Ten documents relating to the closing of public houses on Sunday bill, 1867. MSS 11663–11665: Cuttings and notes complied by R.D. Walsh relating to Dublin city and county taverns and clubs, after 1900.

E. Trinity College Library Manuscripts, Dublin MS 797: Lectures on temperance delivered by Henry Russell to the Society of Friends. MS 2092: Minute book from the Dublin University Temperance Society, 1877– 79. MS 2097–9 [q.8.6–8]: Dublin University Association for the Promotion of Purity of Life: account book, minute book, 1884–90, and Dublin University temperance Society member’s role book, 1887–8. MS 8623 (Dineen Papers): Essays on temperance.

F. Chief Secretary’s Official Registered Papers, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin NAI, CSORP 20266, “Jude memo: publican’s license,” 1870. 10529, “Orders for closing public houses for specially proclaimed districts, circular to RMS,” 1870. 22394, “Public house of M. Slattery closed,” 1870. 5129, “Pub license of Duffy,” 1872. 9592, “Memorial of P. McGuinness’ pub license,” 1872. 9655/74, “Licensing bill: for instructions,” 1874.

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15232, “Application of hotel and tavern keepers to open later,” 1874. 5302, “Case of Ms. Bradley, publican’s license,” 1874. 8721, “Intoxicating liquors bill,” 1875. 17617, “Purcell, publican, for instructions,” 1875. 6441/76, “October licensing sessions for crown sol.,” 1876. 15407, “For crown sol.: case of J. Finn, publican,” 1876. 23905, “Opposed publican licenses,” 1880. 33179, “Sale of liquor on Sunday,” 1880. 18690, “Publicans displaying flags in Wicklow,” 1885. 22701, “Opposition to publican’s license, J.J. Ryan,” 1902. 23117, “Publican’s certificate, M. O’Brien, Kingstown, for aid of CCS,” 1902. 2979, “Publican’s license, John Loughsey,” 1902. 13392, “Publican’s license, John Moore,” 1902. 1290, “Theatre royal case of selling drink to a drunken man,” 1910. 7254, “P. Brien, publican, convicted of betting on his licensed premises,” 1910. 3234, “Returns: licensing laws prosecutions,” 1912–14. 20111, “O’Mahony application that conviction be not recorded on license,” 1915. 16954, “Renewal of publicans’ licenses,” 1916.

G. Fenian Papers, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin Fenian papers r series, 5179R, “Joseph Murphy H.C. Liverpool reports on a surveillance of Frank Kerr at a fenian meeting at William’s public house Liverpool,” 6 December, 1864.

H. Outrage Papers, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin II. Printed Material A. Parliamentary Papers Abstract of Number of Persons Taken into Custody for Drunkenness and Disorderly Conduct in U.K., 1841–51. H.C. 1852–3 (531), lxxxi, 295. Account of Number of Persons in U.K. Licensed as Brewers and Victuallers, 1842– 3. H.C. 1844 (121), xlv, 141. 1845–6. H.C. 1847 (154), lix, 299. Account of Number of Persons in U.K. Licensed as Brewers and Victuallers, Oct. 1849–50. H.C. 1851 (174), liii, 225.

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B. Newspapers Freeman’s Journal Irish Sport Irish Times

III. Contemporary Works Augustine, Fr. OFM, Cap., Footprints of Father Theobald Mathew, Apostle of Temperance (Dublin: M.H. Gill, 1947). Bagenal, Philip, Parnellism, or the Land and Labour Agitation Unveiled (Dublin: Hodges, Foster, & Figgis, 1880). Birmingham, George A, Irishmen All (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1913). Butt, Isacc, “A voice for Ireland: the famine in the land,” Dublin Magazine, 29 (April 1847): 501–40. A Voice for Ireland: the Famine in the Land; What Has Been Done and What Is to Be Done (Dublin: McGlashan, 1847). and John Bright, The Permissive Bill (Dublin: Irish Permissive Bill Association, 1864). Carter, Henry, The Control of the Drink Trade in Britain: A Contribution to National Efficiency during the Great War (London: Greenway and Co., 1919). Church of Ireland Temperance Society, Dublin, Glendalough and Kildare Diocese, Association Annual Report, 30 September 1893. Coffey, Fr. Peter, “Students and temperance reform.” Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 14 (July-December 1903). “The people, the state and the drink problem.” Studies 6:23 (September 1917): 353–68. The Christian Family and the Higher Ideal (Dublin: CTSI, 1931). Collins, James, Historical Associations of Cook Street: Three Centuries of Dublin Printing, Reminisces of a Great Tribune (Dublin: James Duffy and Co., 1913).

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Index

Abraham, William, 127 abstinence, 151 Act of Union, 1, 61, 97, 220 advertising, 49, 240n43 Africa, 157–58 alcoholism, 55 Ale House Act (1828), 234n1 Allied Trades’ Assistants, 199 Anglo-Irish War, 190 armories, 213 Arnold, Foster, 132 Arthur Guinness and Son, 144–45, 188–89, 238n11, 248n39 Asquith, H. H., 213 assistants, 195–203, 224–25, 233n23, 261n11, 262n12, 263n27. See also LGVAA athletics, 78 Bagenal, Philip, 28 Banbury, Frederick, 169 barmaids, 183–84 Barry, Garrett, 98 Barton, John, 187 Beer and Cider Act, 15 Beerhouse Act of 1830, 51, 234n1 Beerhouse Act of 1860, 15

Beerhouse Act of 1864, 43, 56, 57–60, 66 beerhouses, 5, 10, 37–38, 40, 230n6 in Dublin slums, 60 ease of restrictions, 15 as form of social reform, 239n19 hours of sale, 44–45 increase in numbers, 58–60 public opinion against, 51–53 rise in drunkenness, 56–57 Sunday closings, 73–74 temperance movement, 54–56 as threat to publicans, 41–51 women, 46–48 Beer Output Control Act, 216 Belfast, Ireland, 7, 21, 129–30, 132–33, 145, 181–82, 194, 199–200 Belfast Licensed Vintners’ Association, 196–97 Belfast and Ulster Property Defence League, 145 Billy Welters, 18, 19 Black Rabbit, the, 31 Blackrock, 139, 140, 169 boarders, 172

295

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Boer War, 157–58 bona fide travelers, 41, 114–16, 139–40 Botanical Gardens, 76 bottled stout, 164–65 Brady, James, 19 brass fitters, 26 Brennan, M., 140 Bretherton, George, 11 brewery labels, 49–50 brewing, 192–93 Briscoe, Joseph, 62 British Empire, role of Ireland in, 70 British Parliament, 3–4, 14–17, 190–92 Brooks, Maurice, 248n36 Butt, Isaac, 95, 220 Byrne (constable), 47 Cabra district, 187 Caine, W. S., 249n40 cards, 183, 207, 259n92 Carey, Michael, 25, 26, 41, 42, 45, 73–74, 232n20, 243n88 Carson, Edward, 215 Carter, Henry, 209, 265n67 Catholics, 1, 21, 22, 39, 89, 94, 233n22 Central Committee of the Liquor Trade (CCLT), 128, 131, 132–34 Central Control Board (CCB), 192–93 Central Temperance Legislation Board, 154 character of publicans, 53–54 stereotypes about Irish, 28–29 charity funds, 142 chastity, 183–84

children, 16, 119, 152–53, 172, 179–83 Children Messenger Act, 119, 155, 172, 179–80, 183 Childrens Act (1909), 179, 181, 259n90 Christmas boxes, 124–25, 140–44, 146, 224–25 Christmas Day, 162, 164, 167 Church, 167–68 Church of St. Francis Xavier, 151 cinematograph theaters, 188–89 Civil War, 190 Clancy, J. J., 155, 262n13 class legislation, 81 Clontarf district, 187 Coffey, P., 162–63 Collins, James, 240n43 colonialism, 191 Colonial Office (London), 235n11 Comerford, R. V., 23, 95, 235n23 Connacht, treatment of publicans in, 109–11 Connolly, James, 195, 224, 256n29 constabulary surveillance, 17–23 consumerism, 185, 189 contagion, 152 Conyngham, D. P., 94 Cork, Ireland, 181 cork cutters, 26 Cork Total Abstinence Association, 5–6 Corporation of Cooks and Vintners, 1–2 Corr, Richard, 24, 243n96 Corrigan, Dominic J., 70 country life, romanticization of, 77 Craig, G. G., 169 crime, 19–20 Cullen, James, 12, 151

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index Cullen, Paul, 124 Cunningham (LGVPA member), 208 Cusack (manager), 206 D’Abernon (head of CCB), 192–93 Daily Express, 70 Daily Mail, 45–46 Daly, Mary, 159, 251n4 Dawson, Charles, 112–13 Defence of the Realm Act 1914, 192, 204, 205–6, 210 De Gernon, C., 25 De Nie, Michael, 236n29 Dennehy, Cornelius, 95–96, 99–101 Dennehy, Joseph, 50 Department of Excise, 42, 43, 57 department stores, 185 depreciation, 185–89 Devlin, Joseph, 194, 215, 217 Dillon, John, 116–17, 194 distilleries, 5, 39, 192–93 Doherty, James, 197 Dolphin Hotel Co., 171 Donnell, W., 137 Dooner, John, 71, 75–76 Drake, John, 16 dram drinking, 16 drapery shops, 188 “drink question”, 3–4, 8, 14, 108, 110, 118, 122, 252n11 Drumcondra district, 187 Drummond, Thomas, 2–3, 10, 18, 20–23, 30, 83, 235n11 drunkenness arrests, 231n17 arrests for, 24, 56–57, 59, 174–75 hours of sale, 44–45 increases, 135 laws against, 4, 8, 174–76 on St. Patrick’s Day, 163–67

297

Sunday closings, 87–89 threats to society, 11, 20–21, 152–53 war effort, 191–93 women, 61, 63–64, 208–10 Dublin, Ireland, 5, 9, 18, 21 beerhouses, 42–44 bona fide travelers, 139–40 environmental improvements, 123–24 LGVPA and, 124–31 number of publicans, 36 police, 173–79 slums, 29–30, 261n9 trade association, 4–5 See also specific topics Dublin Castle, 2–3, 109 Dublin Corporation, 124–25, 159, 160, 161, 171–72 Dublin Metropolitan Police, 24, 42, 49, 243n96 Dublin Statistical Society, 6 Duff, Patrick, 142 Dwyer, Michael, 10, 65, 66–67, 88, 109–10 Eagleton, Terry, 241n64 Easter Rising of 1916, 12, 190, 199, 204, 207, 211–12, 216–17 Excise Department, 60, 64, 238n15 excise licenses, 50 fairs, 19–20, 39–40 Fallon, Daniel, 157–58 Family Grocers and Purveyors’ Association, 142 Fanning (politician), 201 Father Mathew, 5–7, 12, 39, 68, 77–78, 108, 220–21, 230n10, 268n3

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Faulkner, F. R., 77, 78–79, 123 “Fenian Head, The,” 27 Fenian movement, 3, 11, 15, 23–25 link to prosperity, 95 relationship with publicans, 30–35 temperance movement, 26–27, 59 Finucane, Edward, 178 Fitzpatrick, William, 178 Five Cases Circular, 179 Flynn, J. C., 127 Food Controller, Office of, 216–17 food service, 134–35, 137–39 Forbes MacKenzie Act, 72 Forster, Edward, 112–13 fraternization, 204 free trade, 54, 56 Freeman’s Journal, 26, 47, 48, 52, 54, 57–58, 63–64, 72, 74, 100, 108, 165, 217, 250n62 Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), 11, 104, 115–16, 161 Gaelic League, 12, 151, 163–72 galas, 39–40 games, 173 gas fitters, 26 General Federation of Trade Unions, 194–95 General Post Office, 211 George, David Lloyd, 214, 217, 260n3, 267n90 Gilligan (secretary), 44, 62 gin, 15 gin palaces, 62 Gladstone, William, 39–40, 108, 117, 249n40 Glasnevin district, 187 good character certificates, 22 Gore, George, 140 Grafton Street district, 135–36

Great Famine, 6, 7, 36, 95, 220 Greenway, John R., 261n5 Grey, George, 38–39 grocers, 4–5, 15–16 Guild of Cooks, 229n1 Guinness (company), 144–45, 188–89, 238n11, 248n39 Guinness, Arthur, 211–12, 248n38 Guinness, Benjamin Lee, 248n38 Guinness, Edward Arthur, 108 Gutzke, David, 266n71 hand signals, 30–31, 33 Hatton, John, 33 Haughton, James, 6, 37 Haven, Peter, 178 Healy, Maurice, 116–17, 123 Healy, Timothy, 204 heavy industry, 11 Henry, Mitchell, 110 Herbert (trade analyst), 164–65 Herschell (Lord), 154 Higgins, Patrick, 48 Hill (General), 206 holidays, 161–72 Home Counties Public House Trust, 193 home-manufacture movement, 26 Home Rule, 32, 69, 83, 106–7, 109–10, 117–20, 151, 194, 249n40. See also nationalism, Irish hot lunches, 134–35, 138–39 hours of sale, 16, 44–45, 65–66, 165–66, 196–97, 200–201. See also Sunday closings House of Commons, 9–10, 127, 156–57 Howe (superintendent), 177 Hugh, P., 202

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index

299

Hughes, John, 16 hurling matches, 77, 79 Hyde, Douglas, 233n27 Hyde Park, 74

Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, 198 Irish Vintner and Grocer, 158, 166, 171, 173–74, 184–85

illegal distillation, 5, 39 Inland Revenue Department, 5, 18, 23, 42, 59, 110 inns, 81, 135, 136 Irish-Americans, 23, 236n29 Irish Association for the Prevention of Intemperance (IAPI), 129–31 Irish Builder, 134 Irish Catholics, 1, 21, 22, 39, 89, 94, 233n22 Irish Licensing Act, 2, 242n74 Irish nationalism, 4–5, 11, 25–27, 84, 93–121, 225 LGVPA, 95–106 popularity in late 1870s, 106–7 role of publicans, 93–95 St. Patrick’s Day, 162–72 violence, 29–30 Irish National Union of Vintners and Grocers and Allied Trade Assistants, 199–203, 263n36 Irish Parliamentary Party, 61, 155, 160, 194, 213, 215, 217–18, 254n1 Irish Society, 129, 131 Irish Sunday Closing Act (1878). See Sunday Closing Act (1878) Irish Sunday Closing Association, 69–70 Irish Temperance League, 157 Irish Temperance League Journal, 54 Irish Total Abstinence Society (ITAS), 7, 84 Irish Trade and General Worker’s Union, 195

James, J., 54 Jude’s of 13 Grafton Street, 23 Kavanagh, James, 133–34 Kavanagh, Morgan Butler, 40 Kawarteng, Kwasi, 235n11 Kelly, Martin, 97, 233n26 Kennedy, Charles, 16 Kenny, M. J., 127 labor activism, 12, 190, 223 labor strikes, 195, 201–2 Labour Party, 194–95 Land League, 104–5, 107, 119, 161 Land War, 109, 111–12 Larcon regime, 198 Larkin, James, 195, 224 Lawson, William, 9–10, 73, 120 Lees, Frederic Richard, 28 legislative restrictions, 5–6, 9–10 leisure movement, 76–80, 83 Lenten pastoral, 166–67 LGVAA, 199–203 Irish nationalism, 96–97 protecting against monopolies, 136–37 role in Sunday closings, 80–86 social mobility, 137 LGVPA, 4–6, 9–12, 34 actions on parliamentary level (1902–14), 150–51, 153–61 assistants’ union and, 195–203 beerhouses as threat, 41–51 Christmas boxes, 141–44, 146

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drink and culture in nineteenth-century ireland

conclusions about, 219–26 drunkenness, 44–46, 57–58 in Dublin, 124–31 endorsement of candidates, 128–29 expansion of vintner politics, 107–17 food service, 138 Irish nationalism, 25–27, 95–106, 117–21 new challenges (1902–14), 150–53 organization for economic advantage, 36–41 Parnell and, 119–21 police surveillance, 25–27 political effectiveness, 124–31 possible demolition of pubs, 66–67 property valuation, 160–61 reform of beerhouses, 57–59 spirit grocers, 60–63, 64–67 St. Patrick’s Day, 161–62 Sunday closings, 71–76, 91–92 threat of Liverpool bill, 52–53 trade growth, 124–31 works with temperance movement, 155–56 World War I, 191–212, 213–18 Liberal Party, 68, 117, 150, 184, 212–13, 254n1, 267n91 licensed grocers, 4–5 Licensed Grocers and Vintners Assistants’ Association. See LGVAA Licensed Grocers and Vintners’ Protection Association. See LGVPA Licensed Victuallers’ National Defense League, 157–58

Licensed Vintners’ Association (LVA), 2, 3, 16–17, 229n4 Licensing Act of 1874, 66 licensing laws, 16–17, 39–41, 49–51, 52–53. See also Sunday closings; specific laws licensing system, 11–12, 229n3 authorization of new licenses, 116–17 basic principles, 53–54 condemnation of, 119–20 drunkenness, 57 enforcement, 172–79 overhaul in 1902, 146–49 spirit grocers, 60–67 transfer of licenses, 41, 177 Linen Hall Barracks, 40 liquor, 122, 204 efforts to consolidate trade, 131–32 licensing laws, 2, 52–53, 96–97, 172–73 reducing use, 15 respectability of trade, 72–73 role of trade in nationalism, 94–95 Liquor Licensing Act of 1833, 14–17 Liquor Licensing Act of 1836, 20–21 Liquor Licensing Act of 1872, 10, 176–77 Liquor Licensing Act of 1874, 10 Little Green Street, 144–45 Liverpool, England, 9, 38, 42, 241n55 Liverpool bill, 52–53 living-in system, 188, 263n35 local governance, 161 London (manager), 206 looplining, 140–41, 144–46, 208, 224–25 Lords of the Treasury, 17 Lord’s Prayer, 31

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index lower classes, 10 drunkenness, 20–21 limiting access to drink, 14–15, 16–17 “low” public houses bias against, 22–23 as meeting places for secret societies, 3, 23–24, 34–35 LVA. See Licensed Vintners’ Association (LVA) magisterial surveillance, 17–23 Malcolm, Elizabeth, 11, 56, 80 Manchester Guardian, 70 Manning (Archbishop), 28–29, 76–77 Mansion House, 45, 50, 74–75, 202–3 manufacturing, 192–93 markets, 19–20, 39–40 martial law, 211 mass transit, 189 Mathew, Theobold Father see Father Mathew (“apostle of temperance”), 5–7, 12, 39, 68, 77–78, 108, 220–21, 230n10, 268n3 Maul (major), 206 Maxwell, Joseph, 91 McDonald, Andrew, 176 McDonald, Peter, 127, 137 McKenna, Reginald, 215 McMahon, Timothy, 257n64 McManus, M., 65–66 McMullen, E. M., 83–84, 86, 98 Meath, County, 23–24, 33 medical professionals, 241n64 Meldon’s Act of 1877, 60 Members of Parliament (MPs), 4, 14–17, 20–22, 29, 63, 68, 101, 126–27, 167–68, 213

301

middle classes, 69–71, 90–91, 187 respectability, 53 weakening ties to public houses, 152 military repression, 205–6 Millea (manager), 206 Miller, Frederick, 169–70 minimum wage, 200–201, 212 modernization, of trade practices, 140–46 Molloy, Cian, 61 Monahan, James Henry, 42 monopolies, 15–16 Montgomery, K. L., 180–81 Mooney and Co., 136–37 Mount-Street (neighborhood), 65 movie theaters, 188–89 Moynahan, M., 143–44 Mr. Carol’s Public House, 34 munitions plants, 213 Murphy, N. D., 101–2, 126–27, 247n21 Murray (manager), 206 Nagle, J. J., 163, 170 National Defence League, 113–14, 126 national holidays, 161–72 nationalism, Irish, 4–5, 11, 25–27, 84, 93–121, 225 LGVPA, 95–106 popularity in late 1870s, 106–7 role of publicans, 93–95 St. Patrick’s Day, 162–72 violence, 29–30 National Trade Defence Association, 157–58 National Victuallers’ Defence League, 38–39, 42–43, 168 New Irish Review, 147–48

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drink and culture in nineteenth-century ireland

New Licenses (Ireland) Act, 149, 156, 172 Nolan, Joseph, 127, 170 North Circular Road district, 187 oaths, 19, 30 O’Brien, D., 254n2 O’Brien, P. J., 127 O’Brien, William, 250n62 O’Byrne, Martin, 198, 206, 217–18 O’Connell, Daniel, 7, 16–17, 97, 105, 268n3 O’Connor (Alderman), 187 O’Connor, John, 127 O’Donnell, Hugh, 82–84 O’Donnell, J. C., 50 O’Farrell, John Lewis, 18–19, 62 Office of the Food Controller, 216–17 O’Grady, Anthony, 168, 214–15 O’Hara, Peter, 214 O’Hare, Frank, 178 O’Maoileoin, Liam, 164 O’Mara, James, 169 O’Reilly, D., 127 orphanages, 229n4 over-measures, 145, 254n51 park riots, 29–30 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 108, 117–19, 127, 194, 226 Parnellism, 117 passwords, 30–31 Paten, John, 54 Pembroke district, 187 Permissive Bill, 73 Permissive Bill Association, 7, 96, 99 Phelan, William, 208 Phoenix Park, 19–20, 76, 138, 202, 214–15 picture houses, 188–89

Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart (PTAA), 12, 151, 162–63 pledge drives, 5 police, 17–23, 62, 65, 111, 152, 172–79 political candidates, 128–29 poteen, 50 Powell, William, 202–3 Power, James Talbot, 138 Power, Richard, 127 Powers, Madelon, 237n2 private rights, 56 Property and Liberty Defence League, 38, 238n6 property rights, 212 property valuation, 159–60 prostitution, 61 Protestants, 7, 21, 48, 104, 106, 111, 224, 240n41 Prunty, Jacinta, 174, 187 publicans, 7, 110–11 additional vocations, 232n18 beerhouses as threat, 41–51 challenge of discrediting, 7–8 character, 53–54, 232n19 expanding markets, 134–40 legal penalties against, 2–3 magisterial and constabulary surveillance and, 17–23 possible demolition of pubs, 66–67 protection of livelihoods, 1–3 relationships with secret societies, 30–35 resistance against temperance movement, 94–95 role in nationalism, 93–95, 113–15 St. Patrick’s Day, 161–72 Public Health Amendment Act of 1890, 176–77

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index public houses, 66–67 association with sedition, 14–15, 23–30 authorization, 115–16 challenges in 1902–14, 150–53 depreciation, 185–89 magisterial and constabulary surveillance, 17–23, 199–200 middle classes, 152 physical state, 177–78 role in liquor trade, 36–37 social nature, 71 Sunday closings, 68–71 women, 181–82 World War I, 190–95, 202–3 public spaces, 134–35 quarreling symbol, 33 Quay, Eden, 208 Quill, Albert W., 40 Quinn, John, 230n9 races, 19–20 racial customs, 233n27 railway stations, 134, 136 Rankin, Owen, 82 Rathmines district, 187 recruitment, 33–34 Redmond, John, 194, 198, 213, 217 Reform Act of 1832, 2 reformers. See temperance reformers refreshment houses, 136 Repeal movement, 7 retail locations, 53–54 Ribbon societies, 2–3, 11, 15, 18–19 relationship with publicans, 30–35 violence within group, 32–33 riots, 74 Rippingale’s Hotel, 135 Roberts (Earl), 158–59

303

Ronan, Myles N., 167 Rossa, Jeremiah O’Donovan, 23 royal commission reports, 154 Royal Irish Constabulary, 48 Russell, Robert, 155, 167, 186, 188, 259n100 Russell, T. W., 27, 63, 91, 105–6, 109–10, 135, 249n47 Ryan, Eugene, 178 Ryan, Jeremiah J., 176–77 Ryan, Joseph, 178 Ryan, Pierce, 201, 211 sabbatarians, 115–16 Sale of Intoxicating Liquors, 128 Sawyers’ Arms, 19 Scottish element, 105–6 Scully (councilor), 198 secret societies, 2–3 recruitment, 33–34 surveillance of, 23–30 use of public houses, 8, 23–30 sedition, 21 Shaper (company), 188 Sharp vs. Wakefield, 125 shebeens, 5, 18–19, 230n7, 234n2 association with sedition, 14–15 licensing laws, 49–51 relationships with secret societies, 30–35 Sunday closings, 73–74 women, 240n41 Shipkey, Robert, 238n15 shopping districts, 188 signage, 49 ´ 218, 225 Sinn Fein, Slattery, William, 91 Smith, J. T., 88 Smythe, P. J., 101–3, 126–27 social discipline, 2–3

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drink and culture in nineteenth-century ireland

social experimentation, 117–18 social order, 4, 18 social rights, 56 soldiers, 204–6, 207–8, 210 Spirit Grocer and Beer Dealer (Ireland) Act, 147 Spirit Grocer Association, 65–66, 244n99 spirit grocers, 5, 39–41, 47, 179–80, 230n6 description, 243n96 LGVPA, 60–63, 64–67 licensing system, 60–67, 242n84 temperance movement, 63–64 women, 243n93 Sport, 129, 136–38 sports, 78 Spratt, John, 84–86 Stapleton, William, 65 stereotypes, 28–29 Stirling, James, 108 St. Patrick’s Day, 161–72, 202, 256n29 St. Stephen’s Park Temperance Hotel, 135 strikes, 195, 201–2 Sullivan, William, 80 Sunday Closing Act (1878), 89–92 Sunday Closing Association, 7, 24, 82 Sunday closings, 10–11, 27, 68–92 drunkenness, 87–89 Irish nationalism, 102–4, 115–16 leisure movement, 76–80, 83 LGVAA, 80–86 LGVPA, 71–76 negative consequences, 71–72 passage of bill, 89–92 public debate about, 68–71 riots in Hyde Park, 74 temperance reformers, 109–10

Talbot, George, 29–30, 49–50, 89 taxes, 14, 158, 159–60, 161, 191 tea chests, 16 teetotalism, 54–55 temperance hotels, 135–36 Temperance Party, 154 temperance reformers, 5–9, 24–25, 234n29 campaign of Father Mathew, 220–21 Fenians and, 26–27, 236n35 influence of Boer War, 157–59 Irish nationalism, 95–96, 99–101 nature of alcohol, 54–56 new threats by in 1902, 150 Scottish element, 105–6 spirit grocers, 63–64 St. Patrick’s Day, 162–72 use of language, 56 women, 208–10 World War I, 191–94, 212–18 See also Sunday closings Temperance Star, 27, 55 tenant farmers, romanticization of, 28 Tierney (beerhouse keeper), 47 toasts, 30–31 trade growth, 122–49 cooperation with English trade societies, 125–27 in Dublin, 123–31 modernization of trade practices, 140–46 need for umbrella organization, 131–34 new markets, 134–40 role of LGVPA, 124–31 Trades Union Congress, 194–95 trade unionism, 199–203. See also specific unions transportation, 115–16

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index travelers, 17, 41, 79–80, 111, 114–16, 135–40, 162 Troy, R. Patrick, 115–16 underage drinking, 154, 172 unfiltered water, 55 United Irish League (UIL), 198 United Kingdom, 125–27, 160, 179, 181, 194, 203–4 United Kingdom Alliance, 231n11 United States, 7, 12, 237n2 United Towns, 9, 38–39 valuation, 159–60 Vaughan, James, 198 vintners. See LGVPA; publicans violence, 19–20, 29–30, 32–33 Wakefield, Sharp vs., 125 wakes, 39, 180–81 walks, country, 77 Walsh, William, 166–67 watch committee (1890), 127 Weir, R. B., 68 Wellington Monument, 29 Welsh Chartists, 106

305

Westminster, 12, 14–17 whiskey, 15, 50, 254n1 White, William, 28, 135 Wigham, Henry, 24 Wilkenson, W., 157 Wine Merchant and Grocers’ Review, 143 Wolseley (Viscount), 158–59 women, 16, 46–48, 152–53, 172, 223, 240n41, 243n93, 266n70 drunkenness, 61, 63–64, 208–10 temperance reform in early 1900s, 179–83 Women’s Vigilance Committee, 207–8 working classes, 69–71 drunkenness, 87–89 leisure movement, 76–77 self-determination, 86 Sunday closings, 90–92, 103 Workmen’s Temperance Committee, 168 World War I, 12, 190–218, 225 trade unionism, 195–203 war effort and drink trade, 190–95