hunck
Antediluvian
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Dead Drunk for Two Pennies: The Story of the London Gin Craze of 1720-1757
Some snippets:
The Puss & Mew Machine still Outside the Old Tom Distillery Today
Some snippets:
The London Gin Craze lasted for over three decades and spanned, roughly, the years 1720-1757, though most historians today believe that the Gin Craze really began much earlier, sometime in the late 1690’s. In 1720, in an effort to essentially reduce Great Britain’s trade deficit when it came to liquor, Parliament passed legislation that made domestic spirit production both cheaper and less regulated than it had been before. This act of Parliament led to the proliferation of countless gin distilleries throughout Great Britain, particularly in and around the city of London.
The London Gin Craze of 1720-1757 was an epidemic of addiction and despair perhaps only rivaled in the annals of history by the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980’s which ravaged America’s inner-cities.
And just like crack, the masses of London’s poor in the 1700’s became hooked on drinking gin because it was cheap, stilled hunger pangs and produced a quick escape into oblivion.
Between 1720 and 1750 the death rate in London far outstripped the birth rate each and every year in an era prior to any effective contraceptives. Rampant alcoholism, which for the first time in history affected the female population in large numbers led to widespread prostitution, child neglect, starvation and even infertility.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century cloth, which had to be spun and woven by hand, was much more expensive than it is today, and therefore, the most valuable possession that most of London’s poor had was literally the clothes on their back. In order to obtain money to buy gin many of London’s destitute took to selling and pawning nearly all of their own clothing and this led to masses of mostly naked men and women stumbling drunk, or passed out on street corners, throughout the city’s poorer neighborhoods.
One such new and creative way to sell gin was something called the Puss & Mew Machine which was introduced by the Old Tom distillery of London around the year 1740. The Puss & Mew Machine was a sort of rudimentary manpowered vending machine. The Puss and Mew Machine was an iron cat mounted on a wall of the distillery building. A man would sit behind the iron cat and anyone wishing to purchase gin would hand a penny through the cat’s eye and then the man behind the cat would pour an ounce worth of gin through a spigot in the cat’s mouth. Of course, the Puss & Mew Machine was effective because it was part of the distillery itself and not, technically, a drinking establishment.
Finally, in 1751 another more effective Gin Act was passed by Parliament. This Third Gin Act essentially dictated that all merchants must obtain a liquor license to sell gin through the British government and that distillers could neither sell gin independently nor sell it to unlicensed merchants. Licences to sell gin were limited and prohibitively expensive, and since gin could only be gotten through what amounted to government run distilleries, the Third Gin Act of 1751 effectively eliminated the underground selling of penny gin and made it far less attainable for London’s poor.
Slowly, over the next several years in the 1750’s, beer and ale would once again supplant gin as the cheap alcoholic beverage of choice among the masses of London’s poor and the Gin Craze would gradually dissipate.