The relationship between a Scotsman and his tipple has long been ambivalent. The genial, positive stereotype has old Jock lovingly nursing his “wee doch-an-dorris” or taking “a right gude-willie waught for auld lang syne” and beaming benignly. Not only the language is impenetrable to the neighbouring Englishman, but he sees a different, rampaging Scot, crazed with booze, head-butting all and sundry and delivering fetid Technicolor yawns upon the streets of London or worse, on top of our Englishman’s polished boots. Do the Scots have a problem?
Well clearly something is amiss. Although Scotsmen only rate 8th in the world for alcoholic consumption (11.8 litres of pure alcohol per year), this is 25% higher than the English and Welsh (9.9), despite Dylan Thomas and Richard Burton, and higher than the wine-soaked French (11.4), the morosely drunken Russian (10.3) and much higher than the boasting Australian (9.0) or loud American (8.6) and far eclipses the gloomy Swedes (6.0). Mind you the convivial Germans drink more (12.0) as do 4 other Mittel Europa states, the bibulous Irish get to 13.7, but top of the league bizarrely is obscure Luxembourg (15.6), surely a statistical oddity generated by constant Eurocrat champagne-swilling at the taxpayers’ expense. Statistics need proper analysis but we all know in our water that we Scots have a tendency to drink too much and this is the cause of many social evils and human tragedies.
The expression “the Demon Drink” was coined by the Temperance Movement which prospered in Victorian and Edwardian Britain especially in non-conformist circles. The Movement totally opposed the culture of drink, supported strict licensing laws, sponsored temperance hotels and in the USA won Prohibition in 1919. My paternal grandfather was teetotal, provoked to a righteous fury when his “demonic”, alcoholic father stole the funds of the bicycle club of which grandfather was treasurer and drank them away.
My father, as a boy of 12 in 1916, in common with many other children, signed the Pledge of Total Abstinence at a meeting of the Band of Hope in Aberdeen. The Band of Hope was supported by the Scottish Presbyterians, the Baptists and the Methodists. Their crusades were noisy and rather gaudy entertainments, with temperance anthems sung, organs rumbling, tambourines a-jangling, feet stamping and bawling revivalist ministers inviting the youngsters to “take the pledge!” My father only drank lemonade until he was married at 30 in 1934. His brother Dick stayed on lemonade until he died in 1993.
But times were changing. The churches were losing their influence. After the Great War, women were emancipated; they smoked, they certainly danced and why not sip a fashionable cocktail or two? My maternal grandfather was an Ulster Presbyterian, straight-backed and virtuous, but tolerant of an occasional sherry. After mother and father married they graduated slowly to gin and tonic, whisky and ginger ale and even Highballs and dry Martinis. A pre-prandial sherry became a daily landmark. These drinks were taken at home or in the cocktail bar of up-market hotels: they never darkened the door of a public house, then considered disreputable.
Disreputable they remained, for at least a generation. You still see in Glasgow and other cities the garishly painted squalid drinking shops, so well depicted in the Rab C.Nesbitt comedies. Scotland somehow failed to adopt the agreeable local pub arrangement of the English, where the different social classes mingle, drink and converse in a generally civilised way. Only in a planner’s fantasy could the Scots have embraced the 24-hour Continental café culture – the tables would be vandalised, the waiters assaulted, the pavements desecrated, the drinking hours abused.
By the 1960s the drink industry was prospering mightily. Some improvements were made, with the drink and driving laws sharpening the consequences of misbehaviour. Reform of the licensing laws in Scotland swept away the peculiarities of Sunday drinking whereby a bona fide traveller could be refreshed at any time on Sunday, bringing a boom to out of town hostelries and making everyone a traveller that day. People began to drink more at home, with cheap booze freely available at off-licences and supermarkets. The Scottish street drunk cradling his bottle of fast-acting Buckfast became a common sight.
The problem of over-consumption remained. It was not just a proletarian phenomenon. Even as early as the 1830’s Henry Brougham, the Scots Lord Chancellor of England disgraced himself in his ceremonial robes, roaring drunk at Musselburgh Races. Who can forget Highlander Charles Kennedy, erstwhile Lib Dem leader, sweating profusely as he stumbled through a speech in the Noughties? Many professionals and middle-class stalwarts succumbed to addiction to drink, dying prematurely to their families’ and society’s loss.
The Scottish government tinkers with minimum booze prices and other restrictions, probably easy to evade. What are the root causes? It is not the weather (c.f. the Swedes) or Calvinism (c.f. the Irish). Perhaps the buttoned-up Scot, not naturally a bundle of fun, finds himself more agreeable after a drink or three and cannot stop. The great Dr Johnson talked of “the gust of sinning,” that additional thrill from knowingly doing wrong while doing something pleasurable. This may explain the Scottish psyche when the glasses gurgle and the bubbles dance. Let the bottles be opened, but educate and police the Scot with compassion and understanding.
SMD
30.11.10
Copyright Sidney Donald 2010
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