A literary intervention: writing alcohol in British literature 1915–1930

Abstract

This article provides a contextualized analysis of the representation of alcohol in British war literature published between 1915 and 1930. It examines the domestic debates surrounding alcohol pre-war, as well as the controversial history of the rum ration, before providing a taxonomy of alcohol's representation in a range of literature in which it features significantly in both its official and unofficial forms. The literature consulted includes examples of the early popular wave of fiction, and the later wave of disillusionment literature, as it came to be known. Following this thematic examination of the representation of alcohol in war texts, the concluding discussion argues that the patterns in the representation of alcohol across this 15-year period can themselves be interpreted contextually, economically and politically, as a progressive intervention in a wider debate.

Keywords::

• alcohol
• First World War literature
• the UK
• rum ration
• temperance

Notes

^1. This is the third of the four novels that make up Ford'sParade's End (1924–1928); Ford, A Man Could Stand Up-, 93.

^2.Read, ‘Killed in Action’, 264.

^3.Jünger'sIn Stahlgewittern was first published in a private print run in 1920. Sales went into six figures in the 1930s. It was translated into English in 1929. See Jünger, Storm of Steel, 213 (‘the noise was coming from a subaltern in the regiment on our left who wanted to line up with us, and seemed inflamed by a berserk fury. Drink seemed to have tipped his innate bravery into a towering rage’), as well as pages 13, 89.

^4.Le Feu, which won the Prix Goncourt, was published in 1916 and in English as Under Fire in 1917, 29, 20. Its horrific representation of the experience of war was widely read and reviewed.

^5. The longer study is one I am planning, though I do note some important national differences later in this article.

^6.Hynes, A War Imagined, 43, writes that by the middle of 1915 there were enough war novels coming out at once to mean they were reviewed in batches in, for example, the Athenaeum in July and the Times Literary Supplement in December. The year 1929 was perhaps the high point in the war books boom: Goodbye to All That; Death of a Hero; and All Quiet on the Western Front were all published.

^7. See, for example, the trade paper ThePublisher and Bookseller on 31 May 1929, which stated in an advertisement that the ‘bestsellers of recent months have been about the war’.

^8. See Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 186–95.

^9.Sournia, A History of Alcoholism, 3.

^10.Brewer, The Sinews of Power, xx–xxi.

^11. Temperance crossed the Atlantic when the British and Foreign Temperance Society was formed in 1831. Father Mathew (1790–1856) was the key figure in Ireland, under whose influence 20,000 took the pledge on one day in Nenagh. In England, Joseph Livesey (1794–1884) was the noted early writer and campaigner.

^12.Nicholls, The Politics of Alcohol, 80.

^13. Quoted in Haydon, An Inebriated History of Britain, 170.

^14.Nicholls, The Politics of Alcohol, 130.

^15. The speech was published by the Church of England Temperance Society (London) in 1901 under the title ‘Possible Legislation on the Points in Common Between the Majority and Minority Reports’, 4–5.

^16.Nicholls, The Politics of Alcohol, 130.

^17. Quoted in Haydon, An Inebriated History of Britain, 222.

^18. See Murray, Drink and the War, 8.

^19.Haydon, An Inebriated History of Britain, 228.

^20.Sournia, A History of Alcoholism, 111.

^21. See Howard, ‘British Jackets and Red Noses’, 38.

^22.Jones and Fear, ‘Alcohol Use and Misuse Within the Military’, 166.

^23. Lord Panmure became Secretary of State for War in Palmerston's cabinet on 8 February 1855. Soyer was born in France in 1810 and became the first chef at the Reform Club in London. He was also a food campaigner, setting up soup kitchens in Ireland during the potato famine before travelling to the Crimea. He died in 1858.

^24.Soyer, A Culinary Campaign, 74–5.

^25. H.J.W. Bentinck had the rank of major general by the time of the Crimea, and was in command of 28th (North Gloucestershire) Regiment of Foot in October 1854; Lieutenant General H.R. Montague, 6th Baron Rokeby, was Commander of the 1st Division of the British Armed Forces during the war.

^26.Dunbar-Miller, ‘Alcohol and the Fighting Man (Part I)’, 13.

^27. See Mercier, ‘The Rum Ration’, 489–90, as well as the way in which the Official History of the War narrates the rum ration as part of a ‘“warm” drive’, for example, Brigadier-General J.E. Edmonds' account in France and Belgium 1915, 5–6.

^28.Weeks, Tea, Rum and Fags, 22. The regulation is quoted in full later in this article.

^29.Moore-Bick, Playing the Game, 123.

^30. In Jones and Fear, ‘Alcohol Use and Misuse Within the Military’, 166.

^31. See Regulation 34 [1914] as quoted later in the article. There are, however, accounts of variations in this norm, as I go on to discuss. The national variations are of note too. In the French army in 1914, absinthe, vodka and raki were banned, but consumption of beer and wine was still encouraged – wine as part of the ration, as Herringham notes in A Physician in France, 246. The German ration included up to a pint of beer, half a pint of wine and a quarter of a pint of spirits. In Russia there was an increasingly severe restriction of the sale and provision of alcohol domestically and militarily throughout September 1914. The state monopoly on vodka, which had produced a huge income for the state since 1894, was ended at the same time as the general mobilization order was given and the sale of vodka was banned. See Murray, Drink and the War, 6–12; Jones and Fear, ‘Alcohol Use and Misuse Within the Military’, 167.

^32.Murray, Drink and the War, vi, vii.

^33. This speech was delivered to the Shipbuilding Employers Federation in January 1915.

^34.Dunbar-Miller, ‘Alcohol and the Fighting Man (Part 1)’, 14.

^35. This gave good press, but Trevor Wilson notes in The Myriad Faces of War, 163, that it did not actually mean the King gave up alcohol completely: under ‘doctor's orders’ he drank a certain amount, but only in private.

^36.Horsley, ‘On the Alleged Responsibility of the Medical Profession’, 203.

^37. Ibid.

^38. Indeed, the temperance movement received a conspicuous shot in the arm on the declaration of war because of the legislation that did begin to restrict consumption, especially domestically. The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) was enacted in August 1914 and repeatedly strengthened thereafter. Public opinion was behind it at first, but it caused an increasing uproar over time. See, for example, Taylor, The Oxford History of England, 18, on the way DORA, an ‘elderly lady’, became ‘the symbol of restriction’; Ford, It Was the Nightingale, 84; and Pankhurst, The Home Front.

^39. These are housed at the Bodleian Library, which also bound them.

^40.Bodleian Library, The Nation and Alcohol, 22.

^41. Ibid., 27.

^42. Ibid., 4.

^43. Ibid., 3.

^44.Horsley, ‘On the Alleged Responsibility of the Medical Profession’, 203.

^45. Ibid., 205.

^46. Ibid.

^47.Weeks, Tea, Rum and Fags, 23, claims that the navy rum dispensed during the first weeks of the war was stronger still. For the Navy statistic, see Dunbar-Miller, ‘Alcohol and the Fighting Man (Part II)’, 119.

^48.Aldington, Death of a Hero, 314.

^49. ‘It's impossible to get intoxicated’ on the weak beer, complains the narrator of Hay'sThe First Hundred Thousand, 303.

^50. In Tea, Rum and Fags, 154–5, Alan Weeks also describes how the New Armies of 1915 became ‘resigned’ to the lack of ‘decent beer’. And Manning's protagonist in The Middle Parts of Fortune, 188, notes that ‘French beer is enough to make any reasonable man pro-German’.

^51.Graves, Goodbye to All That, 127–8.

^52. Ibid., 196.

^53.Holmes discusses this incident and its effect on troop morale in Part IV of Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. See also Siegfried Sassoon's poem ‘The General’ for more on Major General Reginald Pinney (Sassoon, Collected Poems 1908–1956, 75).

^54. These writers (with the addition of Sassoon, for example, and Wilfred Owen) are now taught on University courses, are regularly reprinted and helped to establish the ‘disillusionment’ story of the war in the main. On this version of the war see, for example, David Trotter's essay ‘The British Novel and the War’ in Sherry, The Cambridge Companion, 34–56.

^55.Sherriff, Journey's End, 123.

^56. Ibid., 10.

^57. Ibid., 83.

^58.Keable, Simon Called Peter, 60.

^59. Ibid., 44.

^60.Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 47.

^61.MacGill, The Great Push, 66. This is described as one of a series ‘of successful autobiographical novels’ that MacGill produced, written in the immediate aftermath of frontline experience in 1915 and completed when he was wounded after Loos (introduction, p. x, and foreword).

^62. Though Frederic Manning was born in Australia in 1882, he had travelled to England by 1898 and moved in literary circles before joining the King's Shropshire Light Infantry as a private in 1914. The Middle Parts of Fortune was first published (privately) in the UK in 1929 (expurgated and published in 1930 as Her Privates We) and so the novel is treated here as part of the British tradition of war literature (Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, 223).

^63. Thus, it offers one way of crossing the experiential divide that existed between those who fought and those who did not (Nicholls, The Politics of Alcohol, 2).

^64.Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, 3.

^65. Nicholls, The Politics of Alcohol, 25.

^66. ‘Stretcher Case’ in Collected Poems, 29–30, ll. 18–23.

^67.Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, 33.

^68. Ibid.

^69. Ibid., 35. Though official enquiries had been suggesting for decades that alcohol and good marksmanship were not compatible; see, for example, Dunbar-Miller, ‘Alcohol and the Fighting Man (Part I)’; and Horsley, ‘On the Alleged Responsibility of the Medical Profession’.

^70.Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, 32.

^71. Harrison quoted in Nicholls, The Politics of Alcohol, 101.

^72.Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, 34.

^73. MacGill, The Great Push, 10.

^74. The relevant speech is delivered by a character called Major Hardy at Gallipoli; Raymond, Tell England, 200.

^75.Ford, No More Parades, 89.

^76. All of these claims could be productively addressed in comparison with other national literatures.

^77.Graves, Goodbye to All That, 106.

^78.Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, 4.

^79.Aldington, Death of a Hero, 329.

^80.Keegan, The Face of Battle, 187.

^81. Ibid., 221–2.

^82.Rutherford, Soldiering with a Stethoscope, 158, testifies to the ‘constant worry’ regarding men's feet, and the need to prevent frostbite or trench feet.

^83.Corcoran, ‘Wilfred Owen and the Poetry of War’, 89.

^84. In Gardner, Up the Line Unto Death, 87–90, ll. 1–17.

^85.Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 46.

^86. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first use of ‘aqua vitae’ as 1471; ‘elixir’ has Latin and Arabic roots and relates to alchemy, with recorded uses in the late sixteenth century. ‘Elixir of life’ referred to a drug or essence supposedly ‘capable of indefinitely prolonging life’.

^87. Martin Howard quotes Lieutenant John Carss, writing in 1809, that he drank ‘two quarts’ of wine every day, though he could little afford it, ‘to put flesh on his bones’; Captain Rees Howell Gronow was advised to drink brandy or rum every morning to ‘prevent rheumatism, dysentery and other camp disorders’ (Howard, ‘British Jackets and Red Noses’, 38–9).

^88.Howard, ‘British Jackets and Red Noses’, 40.

^89.MacGill, The Great Push, 27.

^90. See Central Board of the Licensed Victuallers' Central Protection Society of London, An Examination of the Evidence Before the Royal, 117, 132, 139.

^91.Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, 59–60.

^92. In Collected Poems, 18, ll. 3–5.

^93.Manning, MiddleParts of Fortune, 213.

^94.Ford, No More Parades, 78.

^95.Aldington, Death of a Hero, 314.

^96.Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, 41.

^97. Ibid., 56.

^98.MacGill, The Great Push, 123.

^99.Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, 62–3.

^100. Ibid., 63.

^101. Ibid., 189.

^102. Ibid., 197.

^103. Ibid., 239.

^104.Ferguson, The Pity of War, 351.

^105.Raymond, Tell England, 192.

^106.Ford, No More Parades, 107.

^107.Graves, Goodbye to All That, 68.

^108.Hay, The First Hundred Thousand, 20–35. The need to find one's limits, with regard to alcohol, is considered by Captain Blaikie to be a fundamental one for a man (p. 34).

^109.Murderous Tommies is by Julian Putowski and Mark Dunning. The Belgian town of Louvain was sacked in August 1914. The published account of the atrocities mentioned excessive drunkenness among the troops, and the sanction of the violent and murderous behaviour by officers (see http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/louvain-judicial-report.htm). See also Horner and Kramer, German Atrocities, 240–1; and Zuckerman, The Rape of Belgium, 27, 55–61. The Bryce report is also discussed by Zuckerman, including its flaws, but he notes the ‘sound conclusion’ of the Bryce Committee as to the way in which drunkenness ‘had aggravated the violence’ (The Rape of Belgium, 135).

^110.Sassoon, Sherston's Progress, 240.

^111. In Hibberd and Onions, Poetry of the Great War, 76–7, ll. 50–4.

^112.Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, 3.

^113. Ibid., 162.

^114.Collected Poems, 19–20, ll. 41–2.

^115.Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, 59–60.

^116. He never seems to consider the fact that drunkenness can be a state-deployed tool – a means by which oppressed peoples are kept in their place. This was a common element of nineteenth-century temperance arguments, perhaps more suited to peace than war.

^117.Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, 84.

^118.MacGill, The Great Push, 27.

^119.Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 47.

^120. Ibid.

^121.Manning, The MiddleParts of Fortune, 3.

^122.Ferguson, The Pity of War, 351.

^123. See Central Board of the Licensed Victuallers' Central Protection Society of London, An Examination of the Evidence Before the Royal, 116.

^124.Sherriff, Journey's End, 31.

^125. Ibid., 9.

^126.Horsley, ‘On the Alleged Responsibility of the Medical Profession’, 205.

^127.Jünger in his memoir, Copse 125, 144.

^128.Moore-Bick, Playing the Game, 123.

^129.Graves, Goodbye to All That, 144.

^130.Ford, A Man Could Stand Up-, 144–8.

^131.Sherriff, Journey's End, 32, 29.

^132.MacGill, The Great Push, 136.

^133.Ford, A Man Could Stand Up-, 106.

^134.Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, 13.

^135. Ibid., 85.

^136.Ford, No More Parades, 89.

^137.Reid, Broken Men, 108.

^138.Aldington, Death of a Hero, 27.

^139.Brereton, With French at the Front, 50.

^140. Hynes, A War Imagined, 43–7.

^141.Brereton, The Great War and the R.A.M.C., 77, 181.

^142.Raymond, Tell England, 151.

^143. Ibid., 172.

^144. Ibid., 309.

^145. Ibid., 192, 223, 300.

^146.Keable, Simon Called Peter, 175.

^147. Examination of the Evidence before the Royal Commission, pp. 33, 85, 102, 108, 104.

^148.Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 38.

^149. Ibid., 104.

^150.Dewey, ‘Economic Mobilization’, 79. There was a huge drop in expenditure on alcohol and tobacco, as the figures he provides demonstrate. In 1913, consumers spent £993,000,000 on food, while in 1918 they spent £829,000,000. In 1913, consumers spent £605,000,000 on alcohol and tobacco, while they only spent £382,000,000 on the same products in 1918 (p. 80). Tax provides another important aspect of these changes, of course, and Noel Whiteside covers this in his essay in Turner's book, ‘The British Population at War’.

^151. She was the first woman elected to the House, and gave her maiden speech on 24 February. It was published by W.H. Smith, London, in 1920.

^152.Horsley, ‘On the Alleged Responsibility of the Medical Profession’, 203–4.