Poor men wasting all their money on drink?  Drunken teenagers – boys and girls – lying about in the streets? Drunk bridegrooms?  Yes, Edwardian Britain had them all.

Here’s a contempory account of the problem:

“Beer drinking is no less than a religion to the average East Ender.”

In these words, the Rev Richard Free of St Cuthberts, Millwall epitomises a terrible indictment of the condition of the East End of London.

[At Christmas] the working man will go to public houses and lay his golden sovereigns on the counter, with instructions that he is to have drink as long as the money lasts.

When he becomes incapable, he reels home, or is carried home, and sleeps it off.  On returning to consciousness back he goes and repeats the process.  If there is still a balance on his deposit account he will go at it again and again until it is exhausted.

Worse still, mere children from thirteen to sixteen years old will be seen in the open streets, in the glare of the morning, maudlin and utterly helpless.

On Christmas Eve the factory girl will draw out of her wine club every penny she has been saving for weeks past, and will spend the whole of it on cake (a little) and liquor (much).  I have known her to knock off work at one, and be dead drunk by five.

It is not unusual, says Mr Free, for the bridegroom to present himself at the alter railes ‘fuddled’, and funerals are ‘frequently scenes of sottish revelry, forcibly reminding one of those Irish wakes of which we used to read in childhood, and the drink on these occasions, ‘not infrequently degenerating into swinish debauchery, goes far into the morning’.