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 Cakebreadwho passed 252 convictions by 1893 and Ellen Sweeneywho 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 1898
Inebriates 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.
