End of the Gin Craze
The Gin Act of 25 June 1751 finally succeeded where previous legislation had failed and banished ‘Madam Genever’ from Georgian London.
The accession of the Protestant William of Orange lost England its two million annual gallons of brandy from Catholic France. Parliament liberalised the distilling laws to promote the new Dutch spirit ‘Madam Genever’.
Some 1,500 stills sprang up in London. By 1735 they were pumping out over six million gallons of raw spirits a year. In the city’s poorer districts one in every four or five houses was a dramshop. And those were just the ones the constables could find: it was sold from stalls and wheelbarrows, in back rooms, cellars, and garrets.
It was in the workplace too, sold by dyers and carpenters, barbers and bootmakers. In Bethnal Green, 40 weavers sold it to their employees; one drunken executioner nearly hanged the priest attending the condemned.
‘Girls of twelve and thirteen … drink Geneva like fishes’, one report said. The problem was both moral and economic, said another: gin ‘never fails to produce a strong aversion to work and labour’.
One Act aimed at curbing the spree was met with mock funerals. It wasn’t until the fifth piece of legislation, the Gin Act of 25 June 1751, which raised duty and imposed strict licensing controls, that the craze abated and rites for ‘the most truly beloved and universally admired’ Madam Genever might be said.
