28 chapters
4 hour read
Selected Chapters
28 chapters
The Fiddlers Drink in the Witness Box
The Fiddlers Drink in the Witness Box
DRINK LEADING FAMINE IN The Drink Trade gave Germany her greatest weapon in the war by helping to make the bread famine. It was the wilful destruction of 4,800,000 tons of food, depriving the nation of her reserves, that led to the appalling gravity of the submarine menace. Drink, What did You do in the Great War? THE ALLIES AND PROHIBITION—STOPPING DRINK TO WIN THE WAR The Drink Map before the War and on the 1000th day of the War The time has come when it should be said that those responsible f
3 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
The Wages of Sin
The Wages of Sin
We are not going to lose the war through the submarines if we all behave like reasonable human beings who want to save their country from disaster, privation and distress. What are we to say of a Government that plays with war and drink and famine while these brave words are ringing in our ears? If the situation is so desperate that we must all go short of food, it is desperate enough for the Government to be in earnest. But what are the plain facts? No reasonable man who knows them can say that
9 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
Fiddling to Disaster
Fiddling to Disaster
One thing will be perfectly clear if disaster and famine come. It will be known to all the world that the Government knew the facts in time to save us. We are in the war because we would not listen in times of peace. We are in the third year of the war because we would not listen in the first. We are faced with famine because we would not listen in times of plenty, when drink was breaking down our food reserves. And we are drifting now, nearer to disaster every day, because the Government surren
9 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
The Drink Trade and Our War Services
The Drink Trade and Our War Services
On Lord Milner’s estimate of 19 barrels to the truck it would require 4,500,000 railway trucks to carry the 17,000,000 tons of beer manufactured in the United Kingdom during the war. It can be proved from official figures that the weight of drink-stuff carried about since war began has been equal to the weight of solid material carried by the Navy to all our fighting fronts. It is a crying shame that the strength of Britain should be destroyed like this in such an hour as this. There are hundred
1 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
The War-Work of the Food Destroyers
The War-Work of the Food Destroyers
Look at the actual facts about beer alone. We will ignore distilling, as it gives us munitions and yeast. Had the Government tried to solve the yeast question it could have solved it easily in these three years; it would have had no more trouble with that problem than Russia and Canada and America have had. But as the Government is still investigating the yeast question, we will confine our figures to beer. Brewers are destroying 450,000 4-lb. loaves a day. This year’s food destruction for beer
57 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
The Food Now Being Destroyed for Beer
The Food Now Being Destroyed for Beer
The Government came into office with the food shortage in sight; it was its first duty to build up the great reserve of food we might have had now in our granaries if the drink trade had not destroyed it. We could have laughed at submarines, for our barns would have been filled to overflowing, and we could have lived in comfort for a year if no ship reached us. Let us see how much food drink has destroyed during the war. We will take it from August 4, 1914, to April 30, 1917. It is 999 days of t
6 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
The Food Value of Brewer’s Sugar
The Food Value of Brewer’s Sugar
We do not, of course, use this dark sugar when white sugar is cheap and easily procurable, but during the war we have used it for coffee, cocoa, and tea; and for puddings where colour did not matter. We have used it a good deal in our bakeries for chocolate goods, where colour again does not matter. It is a good, pure sugar, and the colour is the principal drawback....
24 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
The Food Value of Brewer’s Malt
The Food Value of Brewer’s Malt
Malt flour can be used to make excellent cake with 50 per cent. wheat flour. It is sweet and pleasant to taste without the need of any sugar. Good scones can be made with 25 per cent. of malt flour. Its use in bread made with yeast causes too much fermentation in the bread, but it has no effect on baking-powder. The Food Controller’s Department is aware of the practicability of using malt flour, but the sale is restricted in order to limit its use for making beer. Brewers and maltsters are too p
5 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
The Tunes They Play
The Tunes They Play
We must eat less and eat slowly —so that brewers may waste more and waste quickly. We must keep back famine —but not by using malt, says Captain Bathurst: that would cost three times as much as letting famine come. But why not keep the malt till bread is as dear as gold? Let all heads of households abstain from using grain except in bread , says the King’s Proclamation. But let the brewers waste 8,000 tons a day for beer, says the Government. God speed the plough and the woman who drives it —yes
7 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
How the Allies Did It
How the Allies Did It
And how did Paris take this prohibition that men said would cause a revolution? Let us ask Mr. Philip Gibbs, whose splendid letters home have made his name a household word. Mr. Philip Gibbs: Absinthe was banned by a thunderstroke, and Parisians who had acquired the absinthe habit trembled in every limb at this judgment which would reduce them to physical and moral wrecks. But the edict was given and Paris obeyed, loyally and with resignation. And now we come to Russia, to these mighty Russian p
26 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
Mothers and Children
Mothers and Children
It is easy to understand the pitiful appeal of 500 women out of Holloway Prison who begged the Duchess of Bedford to help to close all public-houses during the war. They know in their hearts of tragedies such as these, in which mothers and children die while the fathers fight and the Drink Trade goes on merrily. A soldier’s wife in Sunderland drew £12 arrears of Army pay, and she and her mother began to drink it away. She drew her pay on Friday, was carried home drunk on Saturday, gave birth to
13 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
The Ruined Wives
The Ruined Wives
Who does not remember the terrible rush for the last drop of drink when Prohibition seemed to be coming with the New Year? Long queues of women besieged the whisky shops in Glasgow. There were women of all ages, said the Daily Mail , tottering in grey hairs, young wives with babies in their arms, and men of the loafer type. “There was not a respectable citizen,” says the Mail , “who did not deplore this discreditable scene, but the remarks of passers-by provoked only torrents of insult.” The pro
8 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
The Roll of the Dead
The Roll of the Dead
In the Scottish Express, between Doncaster and Selby, a drunken corporal of the Coldstream Guards was showing his rifle to a friend when it went off, the bullet killing a munitions works director in the next compartment, and narrowly escaping a lady in the compartment beyond. The corporal had in his pocket a bottle of whisky, which was freely handed round. A soldier who had been drinking heavily was placed in the guard room, and died after a night of groaning, evidently as the result of a fall.
8 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
The New Drinkers
The New Drinkers
When the Scottish Horse Brigade were at Perth whisky was literally forced down the men, and they were inundated with floods of bad women. A teetotal household had two boys in an officers’ training camp, and they gave pitiable accounts of drinking. Boys from school had a drunken sergeant put over them, and a canteen in the midst of them. “Our boys never saw drink before,” one father wrote. A boy of 17, discharged from the Navy, spent 8 s. one night on beer and rum, and created a disturbance in a
11 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
Back to the Homeland
Back to the Homeland
Drunkenness among soldiers and sailors is appalling. Unoffending travellers are delayed by drunken sentries. Sailors landing after weeks of arduous toil in the North Sea find it easy to get so drunk that some are drowned, some die from exposure, and many return to their ships in a condition of helpless inebriety. Two drunken soldiers entered the parish church at Codford, set fire to the vestry, threw down the altar cross and candlestick, broke a stained-glass window, and tore leaves out of a Bib
14 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
Into the Firing Line
Into the Firing Line
So drink finds its way to the front, to weaken our troops, with all their matchless heroism. Let us call the witnesses who have seen the work it does. Soldiers at the front, tried for drunkenness, have declared that they have received drink from home. Men sometimes receive flasks in the trenches. They are exhausted, the stimulant revives them for a minute or two, and the harm is done. “And then (says Col. Crozier) they get about two years’ hard labour.” As a result of a Court-martial investigati
13 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
Drink and the Red Cross
Drink and the Red Cross
A soldier, aged 29, with a gunshot wound in his arm, died from alcohol at Oxford. One Sunday night he and two other wounded soldiers consumed four bottles of rum brought into the hospital. Three soldiers in hospital uniform were found lying helplessly drunk on the tramlines of Sheffield. Two were back from the Dardanelles. Seamen on a ship bringing wounded to England from Boulogne were so drunk that they interfered with the stretcher bearers, and one fell across a wounded soldier lying on deck.
8 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
Stabbing the Army in the Back
Stabbing the Army in the Back
Those are unchallenged statements made in the House of Commons itself; they stand as a terrible indictment of this disease, and it is not to be denied that this evil could never have reached its present frightful proportions if Parliament had followed the King. Let us look at a few examples of the ravages of this vice allied so closely to the public-house. It is not possible to tell the whole truth about drink; the language in which it must be written would be offensive in a civilised country. I
24 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
Those Who Will Not Go Back
Those Who Will Not Go Back
It is the great consolation of Canada that, though their sons may fall before this tempter’s trade in Britain, they will go back to a Canada free from drink. But some will never go back, and they are not on the Roll of Honour. They have been destroyed by the enemy within our gate, this trade that traps men on their way to France and digs their graves. A young Canadian who had never tasted alcohol came from a Prohibition camp in Canada, came to England on a Prohibition ship, and was put in a camp
4 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
The Men From the Prohibition Camps
The Men From the Prohibition Camps
Again and again we have seen the peculiar temptations of drink among Canadians. Officers, chief-constables, chaplains, newspapers, the men themselves, have all borne witness that to these men from Prohibition Canada the sudden temptations of our drink trade come with terrible power, and often they fall not knowing. The finest manhood of the Empire our tap-rooms and canteens destroy, not in isolated cases, but in a host we dare not number. Of the soldiers who first came over from Canada, says a g
3 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
In Camp and On Leave
In Camp and On Leave
Everywhere we find the trail of drink among Canadians—in camp and on leave. A Canadian corporal, wounded in the Battle of Ypres, was found terribly drunk after being missing all day from hospital. Confronted with the surgeon after violent acts of insubordination, the corporal broke down and cried like a child. In the first weeks of the war 42 Canadian soldiers disgraced themselves, by excessive drinking, insubordination, and disorderly conduct, to such an extent that they had to be sent back to
1 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
The Rising Storm in Canada
The Rising Storm in Canada
The thing cannot be justified. It is the blackest tragedy of this whole war that, in fighting for freedom in Europe, the free sons of the British breed have to face this war-time record of waste at home, with its inevitable toll of debauchery and crime. While this book was being written one of the greatest meetings ever held in Manchester was cheering a Canadian in khaki who declared that he was not going hungry while brewers were destroying food, and he went on to say, this soldier and sportsma
13 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
PLAY THE GAME
PLAY THE GAME
The Great Pyramid of Egypt, the biggest construction in stone ever made by the hands of man—80,000,000 cubic feet of masonry The Great Pyramids of Food, the biggest wilful destruction of food ever known—180,000,000 cubic feet of food destroyed for the Drink Trade during the war It is easy to talk of a mine-sweeper. I wish the whole nation could understand what these men are doing. They are feeding the whole population, battling with the elements as well as with the enemy, battling with dangers o
2 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
THE MEN WHO BRING IT
THE MEN WHO BRING IT
It is easy to talk of a mine-sweeper. I wish the whole nation could understand what these men are doing. They are feeding the whole population, battling with the elements as well as with the enemy, battling with dangers overhead and dangers under the sea. The mine-sweeper is like the soldier daily over the parapet—he carries his life in his hand....
20 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
THE PEOPLE WHO WAIT FOR IT
THE PEOPLE WHO WAIT FOR IT
A London caterer ordered a quantity of sugar from the Philippines. The mine-sweepers cleared the way for it and it reached the docks. The caterer sent for it, and was informed that it could only be delivered if it was for a brewer. A provincial caterer ordered sugar and paid for it , but was told by the Food Controller that it could only be released if it was sold to a brewer . A working man was discussing rations with his minister in the street. “It is very hard,” he said, “to keep to your rati
46 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
THE PRICE WE PAY FOR IT
THE PRICE WE PAY FOR IT
Immense quantities of food are used for beer and spirits. All this grain is lost for food purposes. If this grain were available for food, the prices of bread and meat would be lowered....
13 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
THE POOR WHO SUFFER FOR IT
THE POOR WHO SUFFER FOR IT
“Rationing bread could not be undertaken without grave risk to the health of the poor.” use our mine-sweepers to bring in food for brewers to destroy? allow brewers to increase the cost of living for every household? and allow the willful destruction of food supplies to imperil the health of the poor? We do not want to be amused by fiddlers while our heroes fight and die. What are the things we see? We see the Government silent in the presence of what the greatest paper in our greatest overseas
3 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
The Way for the Government
The Way for the Government
That the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages be totally prohibited in the United Kingdom for the period of the war and demobilization, and that a committee be appointed to deal with all the private and public interests concerned; and that it be resolved upon, here and now, that reconstruction be accompanied by universal local option. There would be no opposition the Government need count to a proposal like that....
21 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter