A History of Gin 🍸
Gin is like beer; it comes from grain, and it is an alcoholic sedative rather than a stimulant. It was an antisocial and rebellious counter-blast against tea and coffee, the decorous and bourgeois beverages that were enabling the burgeoning civil service of late seventeenth-century empire to function during long days in the office. And yet, as we shall see, gin eventually acquired its own imperial associations.
In its simplest terms, gin is an ardent spirit distilled from grain or malt’. It derives its etymological and chemical origins from the Dutch spirit genever: ‘a clear alcoholic spirit from Belgium and the Netherlands, distilled from grain and flavoured with juniper’. Although Franciscus de la Boe, a Dutchman, is frequently named as its inventor in the mid-seventeenth century, usage of juniper-based spirits and tonics can be traced back much earlier. Indeed, juniper berries and bark often played a key role in the work of Ancient Greek physicians.
Medieval and early modern doctors also recommended them. Dutch genever was first produced by distilling wine, which was, however, often burnt in the process. To improve its taste, the spirit needed to be infused with spices and fruits; juniper berries were selected for their historic medicinal properties and the name genever was born.
British soldiers fighting in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century tasted the spirit for the first time, giving rise to the term ‘Dutch courage’. Bernard Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees (1714) satirically mocked the service of ‘genever for the military, noting that a ‘good-humour’d Man’ might argue that the social instabilities produced by the consumption of gin in Britain during the 1720s might be a small price to pay ‘in the Advantage we received from [gin] abroad, by upholding the Courage of Soldiers, and animating the Sailors to the Combat; and that in the two last Wars no considerable Victory had been obtain’d without’ 4 Mandeville’s reference to gin is credited in the OED as the first recorded usage. After the English got a taste of gin, imports rose to over 10 million gallons a year in the late 1680s, its heyday the result of being free of duty at a time when French brandy was heavily taxed, and subsequently banned, due to wars with France. The accession of William of Orange in 1688 led to further consumption.
By this time domestic production had begun to take off. Large landowners had a surplus of grain. The answer was distillation. There was virtually no regulation impeding the distilling industry, at a time when the beer industry was increasingly subject to government regulations and also duty. The result was apocalyptic. Distillers sprang up all across London. They produced gin of appallingly low quality, but they produced a lot of it.
Distillation is so ridiculously simple that people were able to do it in German prisoner of war camps. Water and alcohol have different boiling points, as do all the other compounds that are generated in the fermentation process. Begin fermentation with anything sugary, like raisins. Then slowly raise the temperature of the liquid, so that different molecules boil off at different tempera-tures. If you slowly boil your mixture, you can collect the different compounds one at a time by collecting everything that’s boiling off at a particular temperature in one tank, everything that boils off later in another tank; and everything that boils off even later (at an even higher temperature) in another tank. The compounds recondense back into liquid form as they cool. As an independent gin distiller explains: The stuff that comes off first smells horrible and poisonous, like a combination of nail polish remover, floor varnish, and green apples. This is called the heads and it smells poisonous because it is poisonous … What boils off next we call the hearts, and this is where most of the ethanol – the alcohol we’re trying to get – lies. It smells, unsurprisingly, like alcohol. Last comes the tails. Tails aren’t poisonous, but they’re full of heavier alcohols and oils that are stinky (a combination of barnyard, wet dog, and cardboard).
Purification costs more than serving the liquid without. Flavour could be added later; anything could be used to flavour gin, not only juniper, but also spices, fruits, flowers, or nothing at all. Gin belongs to a large family of flavoured spirits and liqueurs, shaped not by the raw material that they are made from but by supplementary flavours introduced at later stages of production. Any trace of origin is overshadowed by the botanical characteristics of fruit, vegetable, spice, grass or herb. The favour is produced in a variety of ways: simple maceration, where the flavouring matter is steeped in spirit – usually neutral – to extract its favour; a distillation, in which the vapours carry only a selected frequency of flavour through from the macerate and no colour what-soever; or the addition of off-the-shelf compounded flavours. It is likely that most of the gin drunk in Hogarth’s day was unrefined, and in all likelihood a mix of the tails and the hearts, with more than a dash of the heads. Flavouring would have disguised this. The gin of the eighteenth century was a throat-searing, eye-reddening, vomit-churning hell broth.
Nevertheless, by the 1720s, the consumption of gin had increased sevenfold among the London population. It was associated with promiscuity and with gluttonous self-indulgence. Hence stories such as that of Judith Defour, still fresh in every body’s Memory … a Woman who murdered her own Child, threw it into a Ditch, and strip’d it of the Clothes given that Day by a Charitable Person, to pawn for nine Penny-worth of Gin? There were many pamphleteers for whom her actions came to symbolise the evils of gin and gin drinking.
As slums sprang up and helpless people turned to prostitution or crime as a means of escape from the sheer ugliness of their situation, it was understandable for them to seek oblivion through the widely available gin. By the middle of the eighteenth century every fifth house in London catered to gin in some manner. The famous story of a dram shop with the sign drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, clean straw for nothing’ was discredited as apocryphal soon after it appeared. But increased death rates and declining birth rates marked gin’s progress among London’s population of 1½ million. A series of failing government measures sought to curtail consumption without upsetting the vested interests in wheat. They were ineffectual.
As thousands of men and women began to sell gin without a licence of any kind, a high percentage of gin sellers were to be found in the poorest backstreets, in the twisting lanes, courtyards and alleys of the East End, the areas with the lowest property values, the lowest rents, and the bulk of immigrants. A census taken in 1736 shows that one hundred and sixty-four gin shops were located on lanes in some of the capital’s most infamous neighbourhoods, places like Cock Lane, home to many prostitutes. Many of the gin shops were probably pop-ups: gin vendors could set up and move small stalls without taking out a licence. Some didn’t even set up a stall; petty hawkers often sold gin by the cupful while wandering the street. They did especially well at public hangings, catering to the watching crowd as well as to the felons en route to the gallows. Sometimes, even the hangman was drunk.”) Many of these hawkers were older women, the very poorest of the city.
The vast majority of gin shops consisted of nothing more than a spare room. They were set out for customers to drink quickly, standing up.
The quick cheap service they offered was in keeping with the way the poor ate and drank; without the space to prepare food at home, they often bought ready-made meals from cookshops, and washed them down with gin and water. They drank to get drunk; and it took no fewer than eight Acts of Parliament to bring consumption under control.
The anti-gin campaign quickly became an outlet for attacks on the poor that often involved expressions of disgust about the way they lived. Moralising pamphlets poured from the presses as fast as gin poured from the stills. ‘There is such a predominant bewitching of naughtiness in these fiery liquors, as strongly and impetuously carries men on to their certain destruction… To recover him from this condi-tion, he must be, as it were, forced into his liberty and rescued, in some measure, from his own inordinate desires; he must be dealt with like a madman and be bound down to keep him from destroying himself, wrote the Anglican clergyman and scientist Stephen Hales around the time Judith Defour was hanged. Daniel Defoe said by 1728 that England could now expect a fine spindle-shanked’ generation because of gin. Thomas Wilson, chaplain to King George II, claimed that female dram drinkers frequently gave birth to children who were ‘half burnt up and shrivelled’, a description which some have interpreted as an accurate depiction of foetal alcohol syndrome. Wilson was one of the campaigners who brought about the Gin Act of 1736.
What troubled the writers most was the risk that the labouring classes might be rendering themselves incapable of labouring. In 1735, when the London grand jury met at the Old Bailey to protest about public nuisances, the main complaint was that gin was robbing the lower kind of people of their will … to labour for an honest livelihood, which is a principal reason of the great increase in the poor.
The real reason that the lower orders had no will to labour, however, was not because gin had made them feeble, but because they were unwilling to work at hazardous jobs for long hours and low pay. Adam Smith noted that even the healthiest carpenters in London did not remain so for more than eight years, and at the height of their earning capacity, scarcely earned enough to buy a newspaper. Arthur Young, a gentleman, admitted that nobody but an idiot would expect them to work at such a rate, unless it was their only way of earning a living? The situation worsened because of the enclosure of common land, which meant that people left their rural homes for work in cities, especially London; the result was to depress wages, because the newcomers would work for less. Unwilling to work for very little, and left with nothing to do, the lower orders comforted themselves with cheap drams of gin. Gin, moreover, could actually provide calories at a lower cost than bread.
Throughout the 1700s, over 1,120 court cases at the Old Bailey feature crimes in whose commission gin played a central role.
Eventually, the justices of Middlesex petitioned Parliament for an Act that would curb consumption, and the result was the Gin Act of 1736, which aimed to stop the supplies of gin to small shop owners through the imposition of relentless duties. Grain farmers tried to force a repeal of the Act, and there was also a pamphlet campaign urging retailers to ignore it. Riots erupted in several parts of London. The Act failed. The law was impossible to enforce; the small dram-shop owners, very poor themselves, did not have the money to buy licences or pay taxes, so that the government could not collect on the money they owed it.
And vast and unpopular networks of informers sprang up, only to create further outbreaks of violence. Eventually, the Act was repealed and replaced with another in 1743. Gin sales did then decline, but the respite was brief; an amendment was forced through allowing distillers to sell directly through retail shops for a nugatory licence fee. Gin consumption shot up again.
The anti-gin campaigners hammered the image of the unfit mother: not just those actually hanged for murder such as Judith Defour, but also other ‘barbarous mothers’ who silenced their charges with detestable spitits’, an image versified in the anonymous An elegy on the much lamented death of Madam Geneva: ‘gin’s fiery juice the milky streams suppressed,/ And kindly dried the nurse’s cumbrous breast’. In the same work, other wet-nurses were accused of neglecting their duties altogether, and of using gin to sedate the infants in their care.
In 1753, after the ‘gin epidemic was supposedly over, a certain James Nelson indicates that some mothers and wet nurses were still buying gin and were still in the habit of giving it to infants to keep them quiet: ‘There is a practice among the vulgar still more shocking … that of giving drams to the children themselves, even while infants; they … pour the deadly poison down the poor babe’s throat even before it can speak.? When these overdosing deaths were investigated, the most common explanation was convulsions?'” Gin was depicted as destroying babies in many ways. In the anonymous Elegy, the poet explains that gin once provided women with the option of abortion:
In pregnant Dames gin cou’d Abortion cause, And supersede prolific Nature’s Laws:
Mothers cou’d make the genial Womb a Grave, And anxious Charge of Education save.
Wet-nurses who drank gin were also criticised because their own consumption threatened the health of the baby. ‘How many, exclaimed Thomas Wilson, ‘have unhappily drunk this deadly Poison with their Nurse’s Milk!’ Fielding in his Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers envisioned a dreadful future for tlhe infant ‘conceived in Gin’, poisoned first in the womb and then at the breast.
William Hogarth’s engraving Gin Lane, printed in 1751, the same year Fielding published his Enquiry, is set in the slum district of St Giles Parish, Westminster. The fact that Gin Lane and Fielding’s book were published the same year is more than a coincidence. Hogarth and Fielding were close friends. The engraving represents almost point for point the issues Fielding raised in his Enquiry, and it has been suggested that Fielding had urged Hogarth to provide a graphic representation of his arguments. The focal image in Gin Lane is a syphilitic and stupefied hag with the top half of her dress open and an infant tumbling out of her arms. Elsewhere in the engraving, another child weeps, as someone, presumably a parent, is being put into a coffin; another infant is shown skewered on a staff held by a man with a bellows on his head who is presumably senseless because of his drinking; and a baby is being forced to drink gin by a woman pouring the liquid into its mouth. The print was accompanied by a fiery verse from James Townley: Gin cursed fiend, with fury fraught;
Makes human race a prey;
It enters by a deadly draught;
And steals our life away.
Almost 70 per cent of all those charged under the 1736 Gin Act were women. While women were excluded from many alehouses, 40 gin shops did not have the same gender restrictions. Attitudes regarding the public consumption and sale of gin by females became progressively less permissive as women advanced from marriage to motherhood, and from motherhood to widowhood. As young men and women lived and worked in close proximity, as well as sharing the same social places, the public woman started to transcend traditional notions of female identity.” It is significant therefore that the image of the drunken woman forms the centrepiece of all campaigns against the trade and consumption of gin. Ironically, gin drinking and selling were markers of the progress in business of urban women: women could afford to drink gin because of increased wages and could sell the spirit due to the limited start-up costs.
Eager to shake off the image of the dram sold in the street, from the late 1820s gin began to be marketed in elaborately designed emporiums known as gin palaces. Surviving descriptions make them sound like a collage of very bad taste. ‘The primary symptoms,’ Charles Dickens noted, were ‘an inordinate love of plate-glass and a passion for gas-lights and gilding. Even very tiny gin palaces were divided into separate apartments by ground-glass plates to emphasise their palatial capaciousness. The English language was also ransacked to create names for the new drinks available: ‘The Cream of the Valley, ‘The Out and Out, ‘The No Mistake’, ‘The Good for Mixing’, ‘The real Knock-me-down, ‘The celebrated Butter Gin’, ‘The regular Flare-up, and a dozen others. But Dickens also noticed something odd. The glamorous gin palaces, he revealed, rising as they did among the cess-pits, ‘are invariably numerous and splendid in precise proportion to the dirt and poverty of the surrounding neighbourhood’: All is light and brilliancy. The hum of many voices issues from that splendid gin-shop which forms the commencement of the two streets opposite; and the gay building with the fantastically ornamented parapet, the illuminated clock, the plate-glass windows surrounded by stucco rosettes, and its profusion of gas-lights in richly-gilt burners, is perfectly dazzling when contrasted with the darkness and dirt we have just left. The interior is even gayer than the exterior.
The customers, however, were much less impressive. The people drinking the gin were the same as the ones Hogarth depicted, even if their surroundings had changed utterly. Most gin palaces in London were former taverns, and they aimed to attract all classes. Like the dram sellers of Hogarth’s time, they were the beneficiaries of drastic cuts in duties and licence fees. The spree did not last; the government reduced the taxes on beer, and pubs took advantage of the new demand to renovate themselves in styles borrowed from their old rivals.
Meanwhile, the obvious dependence of their poorer customers on gin remained a concern for everyone. In particular, writers fretted over the children, just as they had in Hogarth’s day: Women and children even are coming in with bottles; some of the latter so little … they are scarcely able to reach up and place the bottle upon the zinccovered bar … Even these young miserable creatures are fond of drink, and may sometimes be seen slily drawing the cork outside the door, and lifting the poisonous potion to their white withered lips. They have already found that gin numbs and destroys for a time the gnawing pangs of hunger, and they can drink the fiery mixture in its raw state.
Yet it is difficult to know how seriously we should take this; it is clearly motivated by the crusading agenda of the Temperance campaigners of the 1830s, which particularly focused on children. Of course, no such concerns applied to upper-class drinkers. Nor were they apparently prone to the sexual immorality which gin’s opponents ascribed to the gin palace. Indeed, when the British Navy actually introduced a weekly gin ration in 1860, only its officers were paid a portion of their wage in gin. The men were still paid in rum, or grog.
Pink gin is widely thought to have been created by members of the Royal Navy. Plymouth gin is a sweet’ gin, as opposed to London gin which is dry, and was added to Angostura bitters to make the consumption of bitters more enjoyable, as they were used as a treatment for seasickness from 1824. Gradually, without anybody appearing to notice, gin became a British drink, making its way back into bars and clubs by the end of the nineteenth century. The navy had already taken to citrus fruits as a way of combating scurvy, and this led more or less directly to the invention of the gimlet, made solely of the juniper spirit and a sweetened lime juice syrup usually known as lime cordial. Gin, originally a foreign product, became a vital munition of empire.
And yet its association with the navy also meant an ongoing connection with foreign parts. Just as gin came from abroad, so too do the favourite English ways to drink it. Gin and tonic was created by the army of the British East India Company. In India, malaria was a persistent problem. Europeans had understood for some time that the bark of the fever tree, or cinchona, could cure or prevent it; the Jesuits imported the bark to treat malaria in Rome from the mid-seventeenth century. By the 1840s, British citizens and soldiers in India were using 700 tons of cinchona bark annually, and they knew it as quinine.
Quinine powder kept the troops alive, allowed officials to survive in low-lying and wet regions of India, and ultimately permitted the British to survive in tropical colonies. However, there was a problem; quinine was so bitter that British officials took to mixing the powder with soda and sugar: a lot of sugar. ‘Tonic water’, of a sort, was born.
Erasmus Bond introduced the first commercial tonic water in 1858 – the very same year the British government ousted the East India Company and took over direct control of India, following the
‘Mutiny’. As a reliable and palatable source of quinine, it enabled the British Army to increase its numbers enormously and reduced its reliance on ‘native sepoys. Bond’s new tonic was soon followed in 1870 by Schweppes’ introduction of ‘Indian Quinine Tonic, a product specifically aimed at the growing market of overseas British who had to take a daily preventative dose of quinine. Schweppes and other commercial tonics proliferated both in the colonies and, eventually, back in Britain itself as the soldiers and officials of the empire retired with chronic malaria.
It was only natural that at some point during this time an enterprising colonial official should combine a daily dose of protective quinine tonic with a shot (or two) of gin. Rather than knock back a medicinal glass of tonic in the morning, why not enjoy it in the afternoon with a gin ration?
Like curry, the gin and tonic made its way home to Britain from the far-flung lands of empire. And like those foods, it came to count as British because it had been seen as British in those foreign lands. A national food that wasn’t really national in origin had been created. There would be others.
Source ~ ‘English Food A People’s History’ by Diane Purkiss
