Whilst crime in London fell between 1870 and 1910, the story north of the border wasn’t quite as rosy.
As the Daily Express reported at the turn of the century:
“The most notable fact of the statistics for 1899 is the immense increase of the criminal work of the country”. Thus opened the report on Scotland’s prisons and court for the past year, which was an unenviable record.
No fewer than 176,524 persons were apprehended or cited, a figure which has never before been reached by 10,000. Drunks and disorderlies alone totalled 112,033.
South Queensferry holds the proud position for 1899 of being the most drunken Scottish town, 1,424 in every 10,000 of its population being charged.
An alarming precoiousness was shown in the fact that there were forty-two convicted house-breakers under twelve years of age and ninety-two between twelve and sixteen years.
When you consider the number of children and elderly people in the population, having one in seven people charged with drunkeness in a single year is pretty impressive.
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One Comment
Good point. Of all the stupid things being said about alcohol at the moment, none are more stupid than the suggestion that this is a new problem in Britain.
It goes back even further than the late nineteenth century and the era of the Temperance Movement. Hogarth’s famous caricature ‘Gin Lane’ depicted the widespread abuse of alcohol in the mid-eighteenth century. Before that, the problem was sufficiently bad for the Elizabethan scholar Thomas Nash to write about ‘The Eight Kinds of Drunkennesse’ and, in 1606, parliament passed ‘The Act to Repress the Odious and Loathsome Sin of Drunkenness’.
Even earlier, in the eighth century, the missionary Saint Boniface wrote to Cuthbert, Archbishop of Canterbury, to report how “in your diocese, the vice of drunkenness is too frequent. This is an evil peculiar to pagans and to our race. Neither the Franks nor the Gauls nor the Lombards nor the Romans nor the Greeks commit it”.
Excessive drinking is a British trait going back at least 1,300 years. I doubt anyone can change such a deep-seated culture. Politicians would do better to focus on saving pubs from closure, so that people may drink socially in civilised surroundings instead of sitting alone at home guzzling a bargain six-pack from Tesco.