Bristol and
Inebriates
The early campaign
The
inebriate reformatory occurred as the result of a 40 year campaign for the
treatment of the habitual drunkard which brought together the religious and
moral thrust of the Temperance movement and the campaign of medical men and
others to see habitual drunkenness as a medical condition needing
treatment. The Temperance Movement had been around for longer than this but
pressed to close public houses as a cause of social vice and dens of
iniquity. Their pressure would continue until several attempts were made at
the turn of the century to introduce bills into parliament to restrict
public houses. The temperance movement saw drink as a moral problem, with
people too weak to resist and creating social problems. It concentrated on
the acute problems of alcohol and the acute temptations it produced. It
wanted to deal with the drink rather than the habitual drunkard. Its
campaigners were expected to be tee-totallers.
There were
however, other attitudes to alcohol slightly different to those of the
temperance movement. These people saw habitual drunkenness as a problem,
but did not advocate banning alcohol, and usually were not tee total
themselves. For example, in Bristol Mary Carpenter was working with
children and young adults, developing local reformatory schools as well as
writing about prisons. She repeatedly came into contact with drunks. She
advocated not the abolition of drink but "long incarceration and compulsory
abstinence from drink" for drunkards who repeatedly came to court.
Medical
men also became involved with the habitual drunkard. The pauper insane, who
in the past had also been seen as a social and moral problem, had started to
be confined in lunatic asylums and were now being studied by the medical
staff there. These asylum doctors started collecting statistics on their
cases and were soon stating that alcohol abuse was a potent cause of
insanity. The Norwich surgeon and asylum proprietor, Dr Donald Dalrymplebecame involved in the treatment of drunks and started to
advocate Retreats where a person could
shut themselves away to withdraw from using alcohol. For government though,
Habitual Drunkardswere a minor social
problem when compared with problems such as child labour and education. In
addition the compulsory treatment of Habitual Drunkards caused serious
questions of principle. As the Home Secretary stated:
"It was wrong in
principle: what would amount to an indeterminate sentence should not be
subject to the opinion of physicians. It was easy to tell when a lunatic
had recovered but how, once the drunkard had become sober, was the
physician to know whether or not he was cured? The idea of keeping the
"pests of society" in indeterminate confinement was a "new step … of a
most dangerous character." "
Dalrymple
died prematurely but his campaign was taken up by the British Medical
Association [B.M.A.]. In 1874 they set up a committee to continue his
work. The campaign continued to meet government opposition: in 1875 the
Home Secretary felt that any Bill dealing with such a poorly defined group
of persons who included both criminals and lunatics would be difficult to
implement and not worth pursuing. As another man remarked, 'man cannot be
made sober by Act of Parliament'. However, whilst the government and others
resisted any intervention, the message that this was a serious social
problem gained more weight. The number of arrests for drunkenness rose
dramatically in London.
The first
success of the campaign was an Act of 1879
- An Act to facilitate the
control and care of Habitual Drunkards
. This act described a
'habitual drunkard' as someone who 'cannot be certified as a lunatic, but
who due to habitual intemperate drinking is dangerous to him or herself or
incapable of managing their affairs'. It allowed that such a person could
voluntarily apply to two magistrates to sign away his freedom and be sent to
a Licensed Retreat for up to one year, once he had also convinced them he
could pay for his time in the Retreat. This Act was to expire after ten
years and was clearly seen as experimental. However, even this limited Act
was difficult to pass through parliament, and continued to meet resistance
in the press, with the Times noting that 'we have never yet
sanctioned the principle in this country that mere vice should entail the
loss of personal liberty'.
The Act
was clearly disappointing for the campaigners who wanted to be able to
impose compulsory detention. In 1884 the campaigning Society for the
Study and Cure of Inebriety was formed by a
potent group of eminent reformers including doctors and MPs. In 1888 the
1879 Act was made permanent and the title 'Habitual Drunkard' changed to
'Inebriate'. This change of name is symbolic of the growing success of the
drive to stop seeing the chronic alcoholic as a criminal but to see him as
medically ill and worthy of treatment. One of the active MP's in this 1888
Act was the Bristol MP Dr Alfred Carpenter,
who openly campaigned for the right of the State to interfere in society to
prevent disease.
The
campaign for compulsory detention continued, helped by the reports of the
Inspector of Retreats, Dr R.W.
Branthwaite, who had run Dalrymple House and now reported on the need for
more Retreats and the wonderful successes they produced. The campaigners do
not seem to have been bothered by the fact that these were mainly voluntary
places for a few self selected gentlemen and therefore could not predict the
usefulness of a wider provision of compulsory treatment. The campaigners
used the same fashionable worries that were also being used with the
feeble-minded: there were eugenic concerns that the craving for alcohol
could be passed on down families, and that it could corrupt the neighbours.
The newspapers publicised the cases of women who had multiple convictions
for drunkenness - for example Jane Cakebread
who passed 252 convictions by 1893 and Ellen Sweeney
who reached 279 convictions in 1895. It was reported that there were
250,000 prison sentences being handed out for drunkenness annually, with a
claimed core of 30,000 habitual drunkards. The corruption needed to be
stopped before it further weakened the national stock.
The result
was the 1898Inebriates Act
which
allowed for magistrates to compulsorily send 'Inebriates' to licensed
'Reformatories' for up to 3 years if their council funded such places.
These inebriates could be either people convicted of drunkenness four times
in a year, or they could be 'criminal inebriates': a person convicted of an
imprisonable crime who was drunk at the time of the offence and who the
court felt was a 'habitual drunkard'. As one peer remarked in the House of
Lords, the Act 'created crime'. It also created a new institution that was
closer to a prison than the previous 'voluntary' Retreats, as the people
were sent there against their will. It was the first attempt at a medically
run prison for people who were unwilling and rational, and was bound to be
an interesting experiment.
