“The Abstainer’s Companion” – some Temperance movements in Calderdale

What with pub culture being so prevalent in Britain, it’s easy to forget that the Temperance movement – think teetotallers, abstention, and sobriety – was for many years a cultural force for alehouses and breweries to contend with. The law made its own attempts to curtail drinking and the many crimes and abuses that stemmed from it through banning the sale of alcohol after certain times of day or on certain days, or over a certain amount, or in containers that weren’t sealed…but as we all know, people find ways of getting around laws they don’t agree with. Temperance societies understood that changing people’s thinking would be key to destroying what they saw as alcohol’s damaging and degrading hold on people’s lives, and some of the logic behind their activities or guidance on staying sober will be familiar to those in addiction recovery today. Here is a selection of items from various societies across Calderdale who tried their best to “fight the good fight”.

The Brighouse and Rastrick Temperance Society

A sample of their “Monthly Pictoral Tract”

In conjunction with the British Temperance League and the Scottish Temperance League, the Society distributed monthly illustrated tracts telling horror stories about what alcohol could drive people to, and sad tales with happy endings involving people learning the error of their ways and sobering up. The tone is quite wide-ranging, and we forget that print media in the mid to late 1800s could be just as graphic and sensationalist as media today – you only need to look at the cover of “The Story of a Clock” with the child whose hair is on fire, shown above, to see how even a Temperance society understood how to get people to pick something up and read it. Other tracts that we have here from the Society tell of people driven into poverty and near-death themselves before turning their lives around, and one (which may resonate with anyone who has been through AA and knows the value of a sponsor) tells the story of a young man who normally enjoys a responsible drink or two seeing someone at a dinner function who he knows used to be an alcoholic, who is struggling to turn down a drink being repeatedly offered to him, and deciding to also turn down a drink – and his solidarity helping the other man to rally himself and maintain his sobriety. Of course there is a happy ending – the other man stays sober, the first young man discovers that he doesn’t need a drink to have a good time, and the unattached young hostess who was offering the drink falls in love with him and also becomes a teetotaller. Inspirational stuff for young people who haven’t yet gone too far, or at least the Society would have hoped.

Just some of many more tracts in our collection which were distributed by the Brighouse and Rastrick Temperance Society

The Halifax Temperance Society

Halifax Temperance Society pamphlet from their 90th anniversary in 1925

An excellent article in the HAS Transactions from 2012, “The Temperance Movement in Halifax (1832-1966)” by Corrine D. McDonald, details the formation of the Halifax Temperance Society and its activities both local and national. It, like many other Temperance groups, was linked with non-conformist religious groups, and before its Temperance Hall was opened at Northgate in 1860 would sometimes use chapels and church halls to hold meetings. Interestingly, for the first few years the Society was more interested in encouraging abstention from spirits than other alcoholic beverages, but from 1835 onward the Society began to promote abstention from all types of alcohol. The Society put on events and made its presence known at various galas and celebrations to try and make it clear that sobriety was not only for the devout, old, or boring – it could be fun too. It also lobbied the local board, Watch Committee, and wrote to Parliament on numerous occasions over the next 100 years to try and bring about both more anti-alcohol laws and better enforcement of existing ones. By the 1960s, though, the strength of Temperance ideology worldwide had waned, and the Society reluctantly folded.

Band of Hope Unions

A Band of Hope pledge certificate from 1871

These Unions existed throughout Calderdale, Halifax and Todmorden being two areas which had particularly active memberships and public profiles. They were keener on activities than some of the other groups and were most strongly linked to Methodist and Wesleyan chapels as they took a more religious-based stance on sobriety and the need for faith and trust in a higher power to remain sober throughout life. Members drawn in by sports days, quizzes, or parade floats would sign a certificate declaring that they now intended to live a clean life – “by Divine Assistance I will abstain from all Intoxicating Drinks as Beverages and discountenance all the causes and practices of Intemperance.” The Temperance Society would have been appealing to the general public or those not necessarily interested in religion, but the Bands of Hope hoped to not just draw casual drinkers into a societally beneficious way of living but also into a devout one. Interestingly, it is the movement that has continued to exist, not as a society made up of individual local chapters but as the national charitable organisation Hope UK. The certificate shown here is not from the Halifax or Todmorden chapters but from the “Old Temperance Society” under the Lancashire and Cheshire Band of Hope Union, and was signed in 1871.

More than just a question of morals?

Preface and frontispiece of “Justice and Mercy”, 1870

Many Temperance movements were canny enough to realise that addiction is not purely an issue with character faults, atheism, or free will exercised improperly. The little pamphlet shown here which was produced by Halifax Town Hall in 1870, “Justice and Mercy, or Alice, the Young Orphan Wanderer reclaimed”, told of Alice W., a (probably allegorical) 15 year old Scottish girl arrested in Halifax who left home after having lost her parents at age 5 and 9 and being told the previous year that she would have to go out to work to help support her family, and while trying to travel south to start a new life was repeatedly plied with alcohol and taken advantage of by grown men until she “but for this timely captivity  … would soon have had to become an inmate of some hospital”. Disease, poverty, or unwed pregnancy? It is left to the reader’s imagination. But the tone is of sympathy for how Alice has found herself preyed upon purely because of her age, gender and lack of companion or protector, and how it was abusive behaviour that led her into drunkenness. Closer reading of many anti-alcohol tracts shows an awareness that the problem was not just alcohol leading people into bad lives, but external societal forces or imbalances of power driving people into seeking solace or distraction in drink. Other societies such as the Halifax Sons of Temperance not only recruited children as members but actually had a benefits scheme where contributions meant that families would receive a payout upon a member’s death, similar to a trade union or other benevolent fund – because poverty led to depression and desperation, which led to drinking. We may have an image in our mind of historical Temperance movements being about fire and brimstone or promoting Hogarthian imagery of depraved drunkenness being a symptom of those who were lesser beings or “the undeserving poor”, but the reality is that they were capable of taking, and often did take, a balanced view of the causes and prevention of alcoholism.

All these items and many more can be found in Pamphlet Box 100-199 in the Horsfall Turner Room in Local Studies – if you’d like to look at them in more detail then just ask at the desk.