Gin considered

Some amusingly odd bits from a review of a book about the history of gin:

All the horrors of 18th-century Gin Lane are here, including instances of child alcoholism. In an effort to stop the entire population of London reeling with gin, successive governments tried different restrictions. But the determined always found a way. Captain Dudley Bradstreet set up a secret distillery in Holborn in 1736; in the street outside the door he placed a wooden cat, with a leaden pipe concealed under its paw. Customers would approach and whisper “puss”; if they heard a “miaow” in reply, they would then whisper their order, put coins in the cat’s mouth and the gin would be funnelled through the pipe. 

Williams lavishes loving detail on the evolution of gin’s manufacture, as well as its slow Victorian ascent of the social scale. Tonic wasn’t far behind; at the Great Exhibition of 1851, a 27ft (8.2m) fountain flowed with Schweppes. The 20th century brought glamour: the swish cocktail bars of London’s smartest hotels and the advent of James Bond’s gin/vodka martini. The publicity-loving diabolist Aleister Crowley claimed to have invented a gin cocktail called the Kubla Khan number 2, which involved the addition of laudanum.

How were the chronic alcohol problems of urban England in the 18th and 19th centuries actually overcome,  I wonder?  Can't say that I know of the answer to that.  Surely it wasn't just the moral example of Queen Victoria?

Also, I didn't recall this:

Their 16th-century predecessors in Holland – gin, or “genever” as it was called there, was thought to have been invented medicinally by one Dr Franciscus Sylvius – would recognise the process now. So how did the beery British get a taste for it? Williams blames William of Orange, noting that the phrase “Dutch courage” is thought to have originated with soldiers taking slugs of gin in the Thirty Years War.

 Sounds like an entertaining book.

Update:  OIC - the "gin epidemic" was mainly a feature of the 18th century.  Interesting article all about it here.

And as for what happened with drinking in England in the 19th century, try this:

They offer evidence of how cost and access effect consumption:

"(T)he 18th-Century gin craze was linked to the government's encouragement of gin production and restriction of brandy imports; the rise in consumption in the 19th Century was associated with rising living standards."

However, that nose-dive in alcohol consumption you can see on the graph in 1914 was the result of "the most sustained attempt to come to grips with drink in British history":

"Measures included shorter opening hours, higher duties on beer, and significant reductions in both the production and strength of beer. The amount of beer consumed in 1918 was nearly half of the pre-war total, despite rising incomes, and arrests for drunkenness in England and Wales fell from 190,000 to 29,000 between 1913 and 1918."

The historians also point to important cultural effects. One observed a decline in drinking in the late 19th Century and suggested that this was due to "many counter-attractions for working-class consumers (music halls, football, cigarettes, and holidays)".