Criminal Irish Drunkards E-Book

Conor Reidy

• Herausgeber: THP Ireland
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 397

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Offering a unique insight into the habitual inebriate offender class in Ireland, this book examines the inebriate reformatory system in Ireland from its foundation in 1900 until its closure in 1920 and the three institutions charged with punishing or rehabilitating habitual drunkards: The State Inebriate Reformatory, The Certified Inebriate Reformatory and The Voluntary Inebriate Retreat. Using registers of inmates, annual reports, court cases and institutional records, Conor Reidy presents a stark account of the ways in which alcohol addiction and lack of opportunity condemned countless Irish victims to lives of poverty, misery and crime in the early twentieth century. The author also looks at the ways in which institutional staff sought to exact reform over the inmates through education, training, religion and discipline. This book profiles a hitherto little‑known system, giving it a place within the historiography of Ireland's complex web of so-called reformative institutions.

Leseprobe

Dedicated to my wife Kathleen

Acknowledgements

Many individuals and organisations have assisted me through this journey. Professor Bernadette Whelan continues to be generous with her advice and unyielding in her support and I am grateful for her guidance. I thank the members and staff of the Department of History at the University of Limerick for their ongoing help.

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of a number of repositories. I am grateful to the National Archives of Ireland, particularly the Reading Room staff, for their patience. I remain indebted to Gregory O’Connor who was generous with his advice and time. Thanks are also due to the National Library of Ireland, the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, the Local Studies Centre at Clare County Library, and Waterford City Archives. Profound thanks are due to those who read and commented on various portions of the book, including Dr Odette Clarke, Dr Elaine Farrell and Dr Mary McCarthy. I am grateful to Beth Amphlet and The History Press Ireland for putting their faith in this book. Any mistakes are my own.

I greatly appreciate the kind support and affirmation provided by friends and colleagues who are friends, sounding boards and sometimes collaborators. Deep gratitude to Brendan Crawford, Dr Mary McAuliffe, Professor Anthony McElligott and as always to Ellen Murphy. To everyone I met along the way on Church Road, you know who you are and are too numerous to name, and you continue to provide distraction and laughter. I am indebted to the students with whom I have been fortunate to work during the past few years for their insights, their humour and for keeping me sharp. Deep and sincere thanks to Marian Dixon, Mary McGrath, Kismet Noonan and Emer Walsh. They know why.

To my parents John and Betty Reidy and my family to Gerard and Heather Reidy, Séan and Joanne Reidy and my niece Amy, thank you. To my wider family, Michael Healy, Maura Reidy, Ellen Healy, Cáit Healy, Kevin and Edel Copeland, Brendan Murphy, Nicola Mahon, Declan, Patricia and Cathal Fitzpatrick, my aunt Margaret Kennedy and my uncle Matthew Reidy, thank you also.

As always my warmest thanks go to my wife Kathleen for her continued strength, patience and work as an unpaid research assistant and full-time inspiration. Thank you.

Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Chronology

Preface

Introduction

1. Towards the inebriate reformatory: policy and progress 1800-1900

2. The State Inebriate Reformatory in Ennis: foundation, daily life and control

3. The certified reformatories in Wexford and Waterford

4. ‘The Little Retreat in Belfast’: The Lodge Certified Inebriate Retreat

5. The men of Ennis inebriate reformatory

6. The women of Ennis inebriate reformatory

7. ‘Drink-sodden and partially demented parents’: urban inebriate mothers and their child victims

Conclusion

Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

Chronology

1814

Dr Donald Dalrymple is born in Norwich

1834

Select Committee Inquiry into Drunkenness

1854

Directors of Convict Prisons (Ireland) is formed

1873

Dalrymple dies suddenly

1876

Society for Promoting Legislation for the Control and Care of Habitual Drunkards is formed in Britain

1877

The General Prisons Board for Ireland is established

1879

Act to facilitate and control the cure of habitual drunkards is passed

1884

Society for the Study and Cure of Inebriety is founded

1894

Irish Women’s Temperance Union (IWTU) is founded

1895

Publication of the Report of the Departmental Committee on Prisons

1899

The State Inebriate Reformatory for Ireland is established in Ennis

1900

The first inmate is received in Ennis on 7 June

1902

The Lodge inebriate home opens in Sydenham Avenue in Belfast

1903

The Lodge is certified under the Inebriates Act 1898 and becomes Ireland’s first inebriate retreat

1903

British Journal of Inebriety is first published

1906

St Patrick’s Certified Inebriate Reformatory for Roman Catholic Men in Waterford is certified on 29 March; the reformatory receives its first inmate on 1 August

1907

The Lodge moves to Irwin Avenue in Belfast

1908

St Brigid’s Certified Reformatory for Roman Catholic Women opens in the former local prison in Wexford

1910

After an almost 2-year delay, St Brigid’s begins receiving inmates

1913

The Lord Lieutenant accepts notice of the surrender of the licence for St Patrick’s in December

1914

The licence for St Patrick’s is finally surrendered on 31 March

1918

It is announced in January that St Brigid’s will surrender its licence; the reformatory closes down in May

1918

Military personnel are in partial occupation of the State Inebriate Reformatory during June and July

1918

On 4 October the last inmates are transferred from the State Inebriate Reformatory in Ennis to Cork prison

Preface

This idea for this book arose when I discovered the existence of the inebriate reformatories during my previous study of the borstal system. Like that work, this book aims to uncover something of the lives of the people who passed through these institutions and record their place in history. The book does not engage to a large extent with contemporary medical debates or the history of the temperance movements in Ireland. Instead it aims to understand the world of those who were unfortunate enough to find themselves at the mercy of an institutional system that was powerless to repair their broken lives.

An examination of the sources of information on the State Inebriate Reformatory for Ireland provides the opportunity for a deep study of criminal drunkards in the early twentieth century. This includes a glimpse into their socio-economic background, criminality and a domestic life that was often marked by turmoil. It is important that I clarify a number of matters regarding the analysis in this book. It has been significantly easier to research the reformatory in Ennis than those in Belfast, Waterford and Wexford. The state institution in Ennis was administered by the General Prisons Board (GPB), an arm of the government and the generator of a mass of bureaucratic correspondence that survives in the National Archives of Ireland and provides an enormous opportunity for historians to examine the country’s penal history. Practically, from the point of view of the historian, the collection of correspondence presents a number of challenges that make research and referencing somewhat laborious. The GPB correspondence is unwieldy in its organisation, something that is in no way the fault of the National Archives but instead is a reflection of the way the material was originally filed by the authorities in Dublin Castle. This necessitates the adoption of a somewhat unique referencing system when citing documents from the GPB correspondence.

A further word on analysis and sources is necessary. Due to the rich nature of GPB sources, a fairly thorough analysis of Ennis and its inmates is possible. This is not the case for the other three institutions. No similar archive of sources for either the two reformatories or the retreat could be located. Registers of inmates for the certified institutions at Waterford and Wexford do survive in the National Archives but have not stood the test of time and are in poor condition. I have, therefore, sought alternative sources in an attempt to deepen our understanding of the three lesser institutions. How successful I have been is for others to judge, but I feel it is better to present an analysis with some unavoidable gaps than present none at all.

The events and lives chronicled in this book unfold in the midst of some of the most tumultuous events in pre-independence Ireland and in the context of the first fully global conflict of the twentieth century. Everything that takes place in the unhappy world of the inebriate and the reformatories in which he or she was detained seems to happen almost in isolation to wider events. None of the inebriates in Ennis were detained for offences related to political violence and the institutional records reveal no particular concern for the events that unfolded in Europe from the summer of 1914. It is unlikely that the lives of these individuals were totally untouched by the war, but its absence from the narrative suggests something else that became clear to me as a result of this research. The world of the inebriate and, to an extent, those around them was almost wholly consumed by two things. Firstly, there was the acquisition of alcohol and the lengths to which the individual was prepared to go to obtain it. Secondly, there were the many consequences of even a single bout of drunkenness. I have attempted, as far as possible, to convey something of the suffering that was inflicted upon the families of chronic drunkards. There are, however, often hints of some darker motivating factor within individual families and marriages. In relating the accounts of these lives, the book does not intend in any way to be judgemental because, despite exhaustive research, we cannot know with full certainty what drove any of these individuals to the extremes that they reached.

Despite the fact that the sources utilised in this book provide detailed accounts of the backgrounds and crimes of inebriates, no detained individual is identified by their real name.

Introduction

There are five reasons why men drink:

Good wine, a friend, or being dry,

Or lest you should be by-and-by,

Or any other reasons why.1

From the early nineteenth century onwards there was an accelerated effort in Ireland and England to understand the causes of and find a cure for habitual drunkenness. Perhaps the many social reformers, politicians and temperance advocates could have paid better attention to the above exposition from Dr Henry Aldrich, the Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, in 1700. The solution he offered to the age-old question of the motivations for drunkenness is outstanding for its simplicity and its accuracy. The over-consumption of alcohol and its social and economic consequences became a focal point for politicians, clergy, penal administrators and social commentators as each interest group sought to achieve a better appreciation of the problem and identify the most effective solutions. Lobdell identifies the popular view of why Irish drinking patterns emerged in the ways in which they did. He points out that ‘Irish Catholics regarded hard drinking as a consolation for 400 years of extreme poverty, shame, starvation, and persecution suffered by their forebears’. Alcohol consumption was, therefore, linked variously to poverty and proving masculinity through high levels of tolerance.2

One of the features marking the nineteenth century and alcoholism in Ireland and England was the evolution in attitudes towards the drunkard. As the decades passed and more enlightened thinking disturbed the long-held intolerance of the alcoholic as a social pariah to be defeated at all costs, more attention was paid to the notion of inebriety as a disease and the individual as a sufferer. In America, the century saw an ongoing clash of ideas between those who advocated an institutional solution and those who offered alternative paths to a cure. The prison populations of Ireland experienced a proliferation of criminal drunkards at various times as the gaol was the only institutional option during this period. The first legislative breakthrough came in 1879 with the passing of the Habitual Drunkards Act, but it was not until 1898 that Ireland and England saw ratification of a network of legally designated institutions for the punishment and treatment of the criminal inebriate.

The setting up of the reformatory system provided under the Inebriates Act 1898 was the most ambitious government intervention in the century-long battle against alcoholism and its consequences. At least, this was the theory behind the plan. The act created three distinctive institutions that would treat and/or punish habitual drunkards at different stages on their journey in alcoholism. The least severe of these reformatories was the retreat, where inebriates could seek solace and a possible cure as long as they could afford to pay the necessary fees. These were voluntary institutions and were operated by a philanthropic body under licence from the government. The only such establishment in Ireland was The Lodge Inebriate Retreat in Belfast which was licensed in 1903 for the care of Protestant women.

Midway on the scale of severity were the certified inebriate reformatories. These were not voluntary institutions as inmates were committed by the court system, typically for a period of up to 3 years. Their crimes were fairly minor and the institutional regime was intended to reflect that fact. Again, the institutions were operated by voluntary bodies such as religious orders, with various county and borough councils permitted to opt into the system whereby the courts could commit inebriates from their districts for treatment. If such an arrangement was entered into, the local authority paid a ‘per inmate’ fee towards their upkeep in that reformatory. St Patrick’s Certified Inebriate Reformatory for Roman Catholic men began operating in Waterford in 1906 under the management of the Congregation of the Divine Pastor, a small religious order from Blackburn, England. This was followed 2 years later by St Brigid’s Certified Reformatory for Roman Catholic women which opened at the disused gaol in Wexford town under the management of the Order of St John of God.

In the top tier of the three institutions under the 1898 act was the State Inebriate Reformatory, to which the courts could send the worst of the country’s criminal inebriates, including those guilty of assaults, larceny, child neglect and ill treatment, and housebreaking among many other offences. All of these crimes had to be linked to the offender’s relationship with drink and even then, he or she could only be sent to the reformatory if they were also charged with being an habitual drunkard. The state institution had no legal link with the retreats apart from the fact that they were created under the same legislation. It was, however, directly linked to the certified reformatories in that inmates could be transferred between the certified reformatories and the State Inebriate Reformatory in the event of very good or bad behaviour. The State Inebriate Reformatory for Ireland was established at the disused prison in Ennis in County Clare and admitted its first inmate in 1900. It was open to both male and female inebriates.

The gradual emergence of the inebriate reformatory system on the Irish penal and institutional landscape probably had only a modest impact on the public consciousness. This has been mirrored by the scant attention given to the various reformatories by historians. A number of important studies have, however, cast some light on the workings of the system. Beverly A. Smith leaves the reader in no doubt as to the thrust of her argument by giving her article the subtitle ‘a nineteenth century example of failed institutional reform’.3 George Bretherton’s work provides a useful overview of the system and again highlights its almost discreet place in the collection of punitive and corrective institutions in Ireland.4 Elizabeth Malcolm is the author of a number of important works on the role of alcohol in Irish history, the most significant being her book on the temperance movement.5 Her most recent work focuses on women and the inebriate reformatories in Ireland under the 1898 legislation and provides a useful source of key information on the system.6 Elements from all of these works are employed to inform the arguments of this book.

This new study on inebriates is based on a number of sources. The voluminous archive of correspondence of the General Prisons Board (GPB) provides a fascinating insight into the day-to-day operation of the State Inebriate Reformatory. Held at the National Archives of Ireland (NAI) in Dublin, this repository contains significant correspondence between the board and its institutions. This includes material ranging from accounts of disciplinary matters to discharge plans, from dietary provisions to library contents, as well as matters as detailed as the number of vegetables produced in the institutional garden. There are also a number of written accounts from inmates to the GPB describing their discontent with aspects of their detention. Such letters are of enormous significance as they are generally the only way we can now hear the voices of inebriates from this institution. Perhaps the most significant source for this book is what the authorities termed the ‘casebook’ of before- and after-histories of all inmates at Ennis. From the beginning of the institution, the GPB instructed the governor to generate a set of documents for every inmate that would provide a standard account of their life prior to their conviction. This would record their background, a short written account of their criminal history with alcoholism, how they fell into criminality, and their physical and mental state as well as any family connections to alcohol. As part of this file, the GPB required the governor to generate an after-history for each inmate. This is an account of the inmate’s life from the day they left Ennis on licence, often being met off the train in their local city or town by an agent for a Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society, a police officer, a member of the clergy or their family. This was updated regularly on a yearly basis or less with reports detailing the progress of the inmate; the accounts were provided by any of the aforementioned interested parties and written into the casebook by the governor. This source is most significant because it allows background trends in the lives of inmates to be identified and most importantly, the success rate or otherwise of the treatment process at Ennis to be assessed. Newspaper reports of the court proceedings of inebriates, particularly those destined for the state reformatory, are particularly informative and offer considerable detail on their chaotic lives as they were overcome by the consequences of their addiction.

Limited access to primary sources for the certified reformatories and the inebriate retreats means that chapters 3 and 4 on the certified reformatories in Wexford and Waterford and the retreat in Belfast do not benefit from the detailed analysis that is possible for the institution in Ennis. This is due to the different bureaucratic structures that governed the four institutions, with the powerful GPB machine providing a consistent and rich crop of documentation for Ennis for harvesting by historians. However, this was not the case for Belfast, Waterford or Wexford and so the analysis is more dependent on the annual reports of the Inspector for Ireland under the Inebriates Act. These reports are detailed to a point but their reliability is sometimes doubtful.

Chapter 1 discusses the nineteenth-century background to the problems of drunkenness in society. It sketches out some of the societal problems and political headaches that were caused by the habitual drunkard and the strain he or she placed on economic and social life. The chapter also identifies some of the key legislative moments, particularly during the second half of the century, that led to the passing of the Inebriates Act 1898 and the establishment of the reformatories. It uses contemporary commentary, newspaper reports and the finer detail of the aforementioned legislation to better describe the evolution of political and social thought as the inebriate moved from being an outright pariah to something less abhorrent in the public mind. Chapter 2 makes use of the GPB correspondence archive to present an analysis of the State Inebriate Reformatory in Ennis. This discussion includes accounts of the education, training, discipline and medical care of the inmates as they sought to overcome their addiction to alcohol. Chapter 3 introduces the certified inebriate reformatories in Waterford and Wexford and highlights the contrasting fortunes of both institutions and the challenges faced by their respective managing religious orders. The chapter make extensive use of the reports of the inspector of inebriate reformatories as well as newspaper coverage of their work. Chapter 4 examines the work of The Lodge Inebriate Retreat in Belfast, possibly the institution with the lowest profile but still the most enduring. This institution was the only one under the 1898 act to emerge from within a temperance organisation, but because of its small size and unobtrusiveness it is perhaps the most difficult to document. Nonetheless, although it was a small retreat, it was vibrant and continued to admit a constant flow of new patients during the First World War when other institutions were fading away. Chapter 5 considers the lives of the male inmates at the state reformatory in Ennis. Using the casebook of before- and after-histories along with contemporary newspaper reports, it offers detailed case studies on a random selection of men, and describes the socio-economic conditions from which they emerged and how successful the authorities were in achieving reform. Chapter 6 sees similar lines of analysis applied to female inmates. The women profiled in this chapter were convicted of a range of offences, none of which relate to children, and included both violent and passive, urban and rural, and married and single women. Chapter 7 examines perhaps the most controversial and tragic groups of inmates to be detained in any inebriate institution. As the chapter shows, a disproportionate number of the inmates in Ennis were women and a large number of these were mothers convicted of habitual drunkenness and of harming their children. The chapter makes use of the casebook, newspaper reports, GPB correspondence and contemporary commentary on what was the most vilified cohort of inebriates in Irish society.

This book is intended as a history of the inebriate reformatory system in Ireland. It does not pretend to offer an account of the temperance movement or the wider history of alcoholism in Ireland. Such themes have been well covered in the aforementioned works by Malcolm, as well as studies by Ferriter, Kerrigan and Townend.7 While temperance and its advocates do have a role to play, mainly in relation to the retreat in Belfast, their influence and input into the other reformatories cannot be fully measured as they are not mentioned to any great extent in the primary sources, although there were some temperance lectures at the state reformatory in Ennis and presumably in Waterford and Wexford. Instead, this book is intended to throw some light on a hitherto neglected sub-category of offender. The criminal inebriate populations in detention in Ennis, Waterford and Wexford may have been small in size compared with the large number of habitual drunkards in early twentieth-century Ireland, but they are no less worthy of their place in history. While the book examines the treatment processes applied in the four institutions, it also focuses on the lives, motivations and turmoil that seemed to dominate the lawless lives of these tragic individuals.

NOTES

1 Cited in Stanley B. Atkinson, ‘Reasons for drinking’, in British Journal of Inebriety, 6, 1 (July 1908), p. 6.

2 Jared C. Lobdell, ‘Irish Americans and alcohol and drugs’, in David M. Fahey and Jon S. Miller (eds), Alcohol and drugs in North America: a historical encyclopedia: 2 volumes (Santa Barbara, 2013), p. 339.

3 Beverly A. Smith, ‘Ireland’s Ennis inebriate reformatory: a nineteenth century example of failed institutional reform’, in Federal Probation, 53 (1989), pp. 53–6.

4 George Bretherton, ‘Irish inebriate reformatories, 1899–1920: a small experiment in coercion’, in Contemporary Drug Problems, 473 (1986), pp. 214–32.

5 Elizabeth Malcolm, ‘Ireland sober, Ireland free’: drink and temperance in nineteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 1986).

6 Elizabeth Malcolm, ‘Between habitual drunkards and alcoholics: inebriate women and reformatories in Ireland, 1899–1919’, in Margaret H. Preston and Margaret O’hOgartaigh (eds), Gender and medicine in Ireland, 1700–1950 (New York, 2012), pp. 108–22.

7 Diarmaid Ferriter, A nation of extremes: the Pioneers in twentieth century Ireland (Dublin, 1999); Colm Kerrigan, Father Mathew and the Irish temperance movement, 1838–1849 (Cork, 1992); Paul A. Townend, Father Mathew, temperance and Irish identity (Dublin, 2002).

1

Towards the inebriate reformatory: policy and progress 1800–1900

The nineteenth century was marked by a series of political actions and religious movements which demonised alcohol and isolated the criminal drunkard. The century gave rise to a range of social, political and policy developments concerning the consumption of alcohol and its influence on criminality in Ireland. A number of discourses dominated the social and political classes as Irish society sought to understand the problem of excessive drinking and devise appropriate remedies. The chapter will open by identifying the state of political awareness of alcoholism in early nineteenth-century Britain. The work of the Select Committee on Inquiry into Drunkenness (1834) provides a starting point as this was the first coherent enunciation of ideas on the causes and effects of excessive alcohol consumption on the so-called labouring classes, and by extension, society as a whole. Many members of Irish political, social and administrative life held strong views on the effects of alcohol, particularly its consequences for the prison system. Accounts of alcohol-related problems and their potential solutions were widespread both in the bourgeoning penal system and in the hallowed forum of the Dublin Statistical Society. This contemporary commentary will also be considered here. Although the temperance movement did not directly lead to the creation of the inebriate reformatory system, it was no doubt influential in providing an outlet for those with ideas on change. The second half of the century in particular gave rise to legislation that eventually led to the passing of the Inebriates Act 1898 which criminalised and detained habitual drunkards who committed offences related to their alcoholism. This manifested itself in the state inebriate and certified reformatory system whereby courts were empowered to detain the newly formed class of habitual criminal drunkard. In Ireland, the State Inebriate Reformatory was established in the west of the country in the town of Ennis in County Clare in 1899.

THE DRUNKEN COMMITTEE

One of the first significant public efforts to assess the state of alcohol consumption in Britain came in 1834 with the Report of the Select Committee on Inquiry into Drunkenness, known in short as the ‘Drunken Committee’. The committee was established and chaired by James Silk Buckingham, a recently elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Sheffield with an appetite for social reform. The report described its remit as being ‘appointed to inquire into the extent, causes and consequences of the prevailing vice of intoxication among the labouring classes of the United Kingdom’.1 This was with a view to establishing whether legislation could or should be devised to counter any problems identified. Buckingham became interested in the field of intemperance as a social ill after returning from a decade overseas. On arriving home, he found a country that he believed possessed certain attitudes and institutions which accepted higher levels of drunkenness. His idea for a parliamentary inquiry was met with some derision in the House of Commons, however, as it was only in the 1830s that alcoholism was first seen as a condition that could be cured or prevented.2 Although it may have been ridiculed from the outset by various parties, the committee and its report were nevertheless significant as this was the first occasion that ideas about the consumption of alcohol as a social problem were drawn together in a formal expression for public discussion.

The first finding of the committee declared that intoxication had decreased during previous years among the upper classes of society but had increased ‘among the labouring classes’ of England, Scotland and Ireland. Men, women and children were described as its ‘victims’. The presence of alcohol at every significant family event, including baptisms, marriages, funerals, anniversaries and holidays, was seen as a factor promoting its use and further spreading drunkenness. The committee also criticised the wider availability of alcohol, claiming that temptation was now more prevalent than ever with one retail outlet for every twenty families throughout the United Kingdom.3 Some of the most significant conclusions were presented in the committee’s analysis of the effects of drunkenness on the person.

Referring again to the lower classes, the report listed many health-related problems that were caused by excessive alcohol use. These included ‘premature decrepitude in the old; stunted growth, and general debility and decay in the young; loss of life by paroxysms, apoplexies, drowning, burnings, and accidents of various kinds’. The list included violence and different forms of madness. Indeed, mental health was singled out as being particularly affected by drunkenness given that one’s aptitude for learning could be reduced, and this was linked to the ability to engage in any ‘useful art or industrious occupation’. The moral fibre of the individual was also undermined according to the report. Hatred, anger, revenge and the ‘extinction of all moral and religious principle, a lack of truth and an absence of shame would all come to the fore’.4 The language of the report was uncompromising as it sought to emphasise the notion of alcohol consumption as a damaging activity, particularly among those who could least afford it.

The final part of the report of concern to this study is its commentary on the effects of excessive alcohol consumption on the national interest.5 Curiously, the first such point focussed on the impact on the grain crop ‘given by a bountiful Providence’ only to be converted ‘into a poison’. It was also pointed out that as a result of the consumption of this ‘poison’, there was a loss of ‘productive labour’ across every sector of the economy. The report claimed that £1 million out of every £6 million that was produced was either ‘retarded or suppressed’ because of drunkenness. The effects were particularly difficult for the agricultural sector which depended on skilled and sober labourers. The navy and army were also weakened by the over-use of alcohol according to the evidence of senior officers from both branches of the armed forces. The reputation of the kingdom overseas was damaged by the vice of alcohol, and the collective bodily strength of the population was diminished due to the ‘loss of personal beauty, the decline of health and the progressive decay’ of the person.6 The inquiry and its subsequent report were ridiculed at the time, largely because of a somewhat bemused and elitist attitude towards Buckingham. As Harrison correctly points out, however, many of the report’s findings were ‘remarkably imaginative for their day’.7 Much of the analysis of this committee was revisited in various forms by future temperance campaigners and social reform inquiries, the difference being that Buckingham’s report was much more balanced and empirically rather than morally based.

SOME CONTEMPORARY PERCEPTIONS OF ALCOHOL AND CRIMINALITY

Many nineteenth-century prison reports made little reference to the presence of alcohol in penal institutions, instead focussing on gaols as places of punishment for drink-related criminality. Prison officials in Ireland, however, had identified the problems of alcohol in gaols since the eighteenth century. Kilmainham was Dublin’s county gaol and one of Ireland’s landmark penal institutions. Design flaws in the building ensured that prisoners were kept in a continued state of drunkenness because the windows of the cells opened directly onto the street. Those on the outside were also able to smuggle in a constant flow of alcohol as well as ‘instruments’ to help the inmates escape.8 An early official report on the nineteenth-century Irish prison system reveals a startling fact about its relationship with alcohol.

Published in 1809, the Report from the Commissioners appointed to enquire into and inspect the condition and government of the state prisons and other gaols in Ireland was essentially a critique of the existing prison system with a primary focus on institutions in Dublin. In the section dealing with the Sheriff’s Prison for debtors in Dublin, the commissioners pointed out that previous legislation on the presence of taps (presumably for the distribution of alcohol) in such establishments was not necessarily clear. Taps remained in use in debtors’ prisons, resulting in ‘riots and disorder of every species’. The report warned that only the complete removal of taps from prisons would be adequate. Further, it highlighted the need for clearer regulations ‘restraining the consumption of wine and malt liquors within reasonable bounds’.9 The commissioners went on to offer the regulations in operation in Gloucester gaol as a possible template for Ireland. In Gloucester no prisoner was permitted to send for or consume more than 1 pint of wine or 1 quart of beer in any 1 day or 24-hour period. Non-adherence to these rules, including using another prisoner’s name to obtain alcohol, could lead to the withdrawal of a certificate of good behaviour.10 A decade later, the Sheriff’s Prison was again singled out in the Inspector General’s report on the state of prisons in Ireland. ‘Much disorder frequently prevails in this prison’, claims the report, ‘from the smuggling in of spirits’. It declared that this can only be stopped by removing the individuals doing the smuggling from the prison altogether.11 Nothing was officially reported about further sanctions imposed on those in receipt of illicit alcohol or indeed the smugglers themselves, but it can be assumed that over-worked and often corrupt gaolers and turnkeys had little interest in the further administrative headaches involved in such potential prosecutions.

Incarcerated criminals were not the only members of the prison community under scrutiny for illicit alcohol consumption. In 1854, the newly formed Directors of Convict Prisons (Ireland) revealed that an unspecified number of warders had been dismissed during the previous year because they were intoxicated while on duty. This was an offence, they stated, that could ‘not be tolerated for an instant in a prison where a good moral example should operate as one of the principal elements of reformation’.12 The Directors of Convict Prisons was established in 1854 to oversee the country’s convict prisons such as Mountjoy and Spike Island in Cork harbour. The local prisons did not yet come under its remit, but this was, nonetheless, a significant move towards the centralisation of the penal system.13 As Prior points out, the second half of the century was one of political and social turbulence in Ireland and noted for an increasing level of bureaucratic regulation from London.14 In the same 1854 report, it was mentioned that up to that point, officers found guilty of drunkenness on duty were sent to do duty at Spike Island. This sanction was ‘calculated to degrade the character of the officers generally, to lower them in the estimation of the convicts, and lessen their authority and control’.15 This might now seem to have been counter-productive, given that a penal institution would surely function more effectively if the officers commanded the respect of the prisoners. It was a manner of thinking that appears to reflect the sometimes unenlightened approach that was actually uncharacteristic of nineteenth-century Irish penal administrators. Apart from the following 2 years, subsequent reports from the directors made little or no reference to the alcohol-related dismissal of officers. Perhaps their public pronouncements on alcohol-related problems became less significant than their pioneering ‘ticket-of-leave’ system which was attracting much attention at the time. In addition, it was possible that the newly centralised system for convict prisons meant that a better class of officer was being recruited and a uniform set of standards implemented across the different institutions. Of course, by far the most significant social problems with alcoholism occurred outside the controlled environment of the prison.

Excessive consumption of alcohol was suggested as a principal cause of criminality during the nineteenth century in both Ireland and Britain. Indeed, many of the campaigns to prevent unnecessary fatalities in the British manufacturing, mining and fisheries sectors in the 1840s saw drunkenness and the resulting criminality as an obvious target of their lobbying.16 Radzinowicz and Hood highlight the reports of a number of nineteenth-century select committees on drunkenness which attempt to establish links between alcohol and crime, some, they argue, using ‘shaky evidence’.17 The majority of commentators were convinced of the relationship between drunkenness and criminality, and social reformers, politicians and temperance advocates repeatedly theorised on the subject. One such figure was James Haughton, an early member of the Dublin Statistical Society. In an address to the society in 1849, Haughton relied heavily on evidence from Britain to support his claim that Irish criminal statistics were strongly influenced by the over-consumption of alcohol. He cited figures from 1847 which showed that of 38,354 people taken into custody, 10,926 were accused of drunkenness, while a further 1,312 were arrested for ‘tippling in unlicensed houses’.18 Drink-related criminal acts account by far for most offences in this analysis. Haughton described ignorance as a principal characteristic of the criminal classes, which by extension deprives those same individuals of education and the desire to acquire greater knowledge.19 His analysis made the ambitious claim that although only one third of all those detained were ‘drunkards’, it can be assumed that most crimes are caused by alcohol because ‘they are committed when the passions are violently excited’.20 Haughton used the evidence of comments by such figures as the Commissioner of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, a police magistrate and the former governor of Richmond Penitentiary, to support his view that alcohol and intemperance are at the root of all criminal arrests and detentions in prison.21 For judicial corroboration of his theories, he turned to the words of some British magistrates with no comment from those in Ireland. While this somewhat undermines Haughton’s opinions, his theory, nonetheless, gives a strong indication of the prevailing ideas on the relationship between crime and alcoholic drink in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland.

Many of those commenting on alcoholism were primarily concerned with its effects on the public domain. Also addressing the Dublin Statistical Society, the barrister David Ross pointed out that the public sphere was not the only arena threatened by excessive alcohol consumption. He argued that society gives serious attention to public offenders engaged in drunk and disorderly conduct or endangering human life. However, this moral outrage should also be directed against the individual drunk in his home as he tends to cause misery to his own family. That home, though his own, was also the home of others who deserve equal protection.22 Ross belonged to a generation of social commentators and advocates who repeatedly sought reform measures to deal with the problems associated with drunkenness and crime. By ‘making excess disgraceful’, he concluded, we ‘strengthen the hands of those who rely on moral appeals to their fellow men in favour of temperance, in addition to the positive good they may effect in reforming drunkards’.23 In 1878, one of the founders of the Dublin Statistical Society, the lawyer and economist Neilson Hancock, also expressed concern regarding the effects of drunkenness on the wives and children of drunken men. He believed that intervention in the form of reform or punishment should occur at a much earlier stage. This would reduce the number of aggravated assaults on women and children, as well as other serious criminal acts that result from ‘unrestrained habitual drunkenness’.24 The ideas of Hancock and Ross appear typical of ideas evolving as the nineteenth century progressed, whereby publicly expressed concerns about the habitual drunkard extended from the somewhat narrow focus on the threat to public order towards a greater emphasis on the family.

Emsley noted that the popular explanation for criminal behaviour underwent an evolution from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century. The moral weakness of the criminal was seen as the primary cause of his or her problem, with poverty, alcohol or neglectful parents all playing their part. Underlying this scenario was the avoidance of honest labour by individuals who wanted a luxurious lifestyle. By the end of the century, ‘the usual suspects’, as Emsley describes them, continued to be identified as the principal criminals in society: ‘beggars, vagabonds, prostitutes, the day-labouring poor of the cities, and their children’ were still the main targets for condemnation. The explanation for their behaviour had now given way to a new theory which saw the criminal as ‘social wreckage’. The notion of moral weakness was replaced by one which envisaged some type of corrective approach.25 As MacLeod pointed out, it was not until the second half of the century that a scientific approach to alcoholism became prominent.26 This progression of thought underpinned the influence of psychology and science on penal policy during the 1890s and the eventual creation of institutions that sought to address not only moral weakness but also mental incapacity.

MOVEMENT FOR REFORMATORY TREATMENT

It was not until the late nineteenth century, however, under the leadership of a small but elite group of medical practitioners and reformers, that the public perception of the drunkard as a disruptive and lawless element evolved into one of a ‘neglected patient suffering from a mental disease with well-marked clinical features’.27 International progress towards an institutional answer to the problem of inebriety pre-dated the temperance crusade by several decades. The early attempts were patchy at best and did not merge into a coherent movement. In America, reformers described inebriety as a ‘genetic and biological predisposition, pharmacological tolerance and toxicity, symptom progression and the erosion of human will’. This definition emerged in the context of a trebling of alcohol consumption and associated problems in America between 1780 and 1830.28 Writing in 1901, R.W. Lee credits an American doctor, Benjamin Rush, with first advocating the establishment of institutions specifically dedicated to curing drunkards as early as 1809. Lee claims that the first practical expression of a change in attitude towards drunkards in the USA came in 1846 with the setting up of an institution by Dr J.E. Turner in Maine.29 As far as activism was concerned, a type of temperance movement was organised in the form of the Martha Washington Societies during the 1840s. Named in honour of the former US first lady, ‘Washingtonianism’ represented the first participation of low-rank American women in high-level reforming positions. Upper-class women joined the societies but uniquely, it was those from more modest backgrounds who assumed leadership positions.30 It appears, however, that the first organised institutional strategy came in 1854 with the formation of a committee for the promotion of the US inebriate asylum; the first such inebriate home was founded in Boston in 1857.31 A State Inebriate Asylum was also established in New York in 1857 for both voluntary and involuntary patients. Involuntary patients were those committed by magistrates for repeated drunkenness as well as those also detained by the courts at the urging of relatives.32 Further ‘Washingtonian’ homes were established in Boston in 1857 and in Chicago in 1863 with the aim of providing a combination of moral-religious reformation and mutual surveillance and support as the best way to reform the alcoholic. The homes offered temporary respite for ‘non-medical detoxification, isolation from drinking subcultures, moral suasion and enmeshment in new sobriety-based social fellowships’. The first medical inebriate institutions in the USA were modelled on existing state-managed insane asylums and differed from inebriate ‘homes’ with their emphasis on legal restraint, prolonged institutionalisation and more physical treatment processes.33

America clearly became a world leader in the understanding and treatment of alcohol addiction and its consequences during the nineteenth century. In 1870, an American Association for the Cure of Inebriates was founded under the leadership of Dr Joseph Parrish. Among its founding principles was an acknowledgement that intemperance was a disease that was curable in the same way as many others. The association called for legal recognition of this claim and the establishment of homes and asylums. Such institutions flourished during the 1880s and early 1890s but received little public or scientific support. White claims that out of the ‘hundreds’ of treatment institutions that emerged in the USA during the 1800s, few survived the first two decades of the twentieth century.34 This was similar to the later situation in Britain and Ireland. America meanwhile, not for the last time, would provide inspiration for new departures in British penal reform.35 One of the features sought by asylum supporters was the power of commitment to enable reputable and distressed families – particularly wives and parents – to control unruly members, and so they lobbied for the authority to detain such patients on an involuntary basis and at length.36

One of the key figures in advocating for British legislative reform for inebriates during the late nineteenth-century was Dr Donald Dalrymple, a Liberal MP for Bath. Donald Dalrymple was born in Norwich in 1814 and received his medical education at Guy’s Hospital in London as well as in Paris. He was a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and retired from medical practice in 1863.37 Dalrymple’s campaign began in earnest in 1870 when he introduced a bill to parliament, with another the following year, calling for drunkards to be incarcerated for long enough to repair their broken morals and restore their physical health. His parliamentary efforts were unsuccessful. Dalrymple moved a motion which called on the government to introduce powers to detain habitual drunkards until they were cured; this was rejected by the Home Secretary, Henry Bruce, as impractical.38 Dalrymple’s interest in this particular problem appears to stem from his former profession as a surgeon in Norwich and proprietor of the Heigham Lunatic Asylum.39 It was his work with lunatics that persuaded Dalrymple of the links between alcoholism and psychological frailty.40 Dalrymple travelled to the USA where he witnessed first-hand the complexities, successes and failures of the inebriate reformatory system. His account of the visit was reported by the Select Committee on Habitual Drunkards in 1872, but according to Radzinowicz and Hood, the American system, although inspirational, was not as helpful as anticipated. Dalrymple found nine working reformatories in the USA which between them had admitted almost 6,000 patients, of whom one third were ‘cured’, although some claimed a success rate of 50 per cent. He reported that ‘no hotel room in New York has better bedrooms, or [is] more handsomely furnished’.41 This was actually the unhelpful aspect of the American method because Dalrymple and the select committee would have been aware that British public opinion would not tolerate anything approaching luxury in an institution for the habitual drunkard, particularly of the criminal variety. Nonetheless, progress towards some method of reform was inevitable in Britain. During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, ‘reforming discourses’ became fundamental to penal development as administrators sought to devise new institutions for habitual offenders.42 It was this that allowed the ideas of Dr Donald Dalrymple and others to come to the fore.

A range of other measures were also proposed, including the creation of two categories of habitual drunkard and a repeated test of public drunkenness for criminal commitment to an institution. His bills were rejected by the House of Commons, but Dalrymple received much support outside parliament and won several concessions from the government, notably a recognition that there should be two categories of habitual drunkard and two types of institution.43 Although he died suddenly in 1873, Dalrymple’s ideas far outlived him, finding their way into later legislation. Perhaps his most notable accomplishment was that his name was later given to a new type of inebriate home established in the 1880s.

In 1878, an Act to Facilitate and Control the Cure of Habitual Drunkards (hereafter the Habitual Drunkards Act) defined an inebriate as ‘a person who, not being amenable to any jurisdiction in lunacy, is notwithstanding, by reason of habitual intemperant drinking of intoxicating liquor, at times dangerous to himself or herself, and his or her affairs’.44 The act provided the penal-social lexicon with its first definition of an inebriate and also described a new type of institution to be known as a licensed retreat. This made the compulsory treatment of non-criminal inebriates available only to those who could pay.45 In many respects, this meant the act was redundant because not only was it a fee-paying provision but admission could only be instigated by the inebriate themselves or their family. Among the poorer classes there would have been reluctance to take this path given that the individual in question might support the family, either as a breadwinner (albeit occasional) or carer of children.