Dead Drunk: A Girls’ Night Out During The Gin Craze

Today’s guest post is courtesy of the lovely Paul Smith, who blogs at Public Grief Junkie.com.

Whichever way you dress it up, gin is horrible. All neat spirits are horrible, but gin is the worst. The fact that you have to put tonic water, which is also horrible, and lemon – which is a principal ingredient of oven cleaner – into the same glass to cheer it up tells you something.

Not only is it a horrible drink, but it became popular during, and as a result of, horrible times. Quite often, the London of yestercentury is portrayed as a plague ridden freak show, which is often a lazy perpetuation of historical stereotypes. However, London during the Gin Craze – roughly speaking 1740-50 – was a hundred thousand acre running sore. Widespread economic migration into the city combined with a shortage of anything for anyone to do once they got there meant that people were poorer than they had ever been. Among other pleasantries, it had no public sanitation or police force or fire brigade or anything. It already wasn’t much of a giggle, but if you chuck cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis and that old favourite Black Death – the Twist and Shout of lethal pathogens – into the mix, it was grim indeed. Everyone was very poor and very miserable. You couldn’t even kill yourself, as it was a sin and you’d go to Hell.

What you could do, though, was drink. Well, sort of. In order to annoy everyone, import taxes had been placed upon all the more sophisticated boozes – wine, vodka and so on – making them incredibly expensive. The theory was that if you stop people drinking, everything will be alright. In order to extend this train of thought to domestically-produced spirits, a licence was required to distil gin, and made so expensive as to render the activity economically unfeasible. While it was indeed impossible to distil gin legally, it was entirely possible to do so illegally, and ‘gin shops’ popped up all over the place. In some parts of London, every third residential property was selling gin. The government countered this by offering a bounty to members of the public who snitched on these illegal gin distilleries. In turn, the public countered this by lynching anyone who looked a bit dodgy. What the authorities had failed to grasp was not that the public had a drink problem, but that this drink problem had arisen as a response to a simple need to escape the grinding horror of everyday life by getting completely out of your face by any means possible.

Modern gin is not a delicious beverage, but Gin Craze gin would be literally unpalatable to the contemporary alcohol fan. It was pretty much anyone’s guess as to what went into it, for a start. The conditions in which it was produced were not exactly whistle-clean, with rodents and the cats kept to hunt them regularly falling into the gin vats and adding to the fun. One positive aspect of the beverage was that it was so strong as to have antiseptic qualities: you could lob a horse in and no one would be any the wiser. Not by chance, the phrase ‘blind drunk’ emerged at this time. It wasn’t just your eyesight you could lose. The phrase could easily have been ‘teeth drunk’ or ‘larynx drunk’ or ‘central nervous system drunk’. The ominous ‘dead drunk’ also come to the fore during the Gin Craze, for reasons that need no explanation, but that we shall nonetheless dwell upon.

Of all the unfortunates in London in the 1740s, among the most unfortunate of all were the competitively priced and aggressively syphilitic prostitutes who operated in the poorer areas of the city. Among this doomed class arose a particular drinking game, for which you needed the following: three prostitutes, a jug of gin, a table, and a chair for each player. The table and chairs are not strictly necessary, but help to make the occasion more sociable. Why the number of prostitutes is set at three is something of a mystery, but it is probably traditional, like changing ends at half time. Gin was usually served warm to make it even more unpleasant, and a jug would hold about a gallon measure. The rules were simple. You down a large glass of gin – about a quarter of a pint – then hand the glass to the next player. They do the same, and the glass is handed on again. Play continues until two of the participants have died. The remaining player is declared the winner. Like backgammon, it’s an easy game to learn, but a difficult one to master. Unlike backgammon, however, winning is less fun than losing, as a loss at backgammon does not entail probable organ failure.

There are many sad things about willfully drinking yourself to death for a laugh, although perhaps none are sadder than the circumstances that make your life not worth living in the first place. Uniquely in history, the majority of people in inner city London had nothing to live for except a rapid decline into the most vile and degrading poverty, and valued themselves very cheaply as a result. Death by gin was considered spiritually purer than outright suicide, because technically it was the gin that was the cause of death, not the drinking. Incidentally, this was the same kind of logic that pirates of the time called upon when making prisoners walk the plank: it was the falling off that did you in, not the walking. If caught, the pirates could not be tried for murder, in the same way that the souls of absolutely hammered prostitutes could not be classed as suicides when applying to get into Heaven.

Happily conditions did improve, of course. Gin became less lethal, the economy turned round, and people cheered up a bit. Things have never been easy for those at the bottom of the pile – that’s what being at the bottom of the pile is all about – but the next time you’re a bit hacked off after a heavy night because someone’s jumped the queue at the kebab shop and you’re in danger of missing the night bus say ‘It could be worse – I could be a prostitute in the mid eighteenth century’ out loud in strident tones, and remind yourself how lucky you are.