Whisky's awa'

Andrew varley reviews
The Scottish Nation: 1700 - 200
by T.M. Devine,
published by Allen Lane, the Penquin Press

From Tam O'Shanter to Rab C. Nesbitt, the caricature of the drink-sodden Scotsman is well established. How far does this conform to reality? T.M. Devine's The Scottish Nation: 1700-2000 traces the development of North Britain since the time of the Union. During the intervening centuries the Scots have had the fun of running the Empire and exercising political and commercial power far out of proportion to their numbers. At the same time, and despite the admonitory presence of the Kirk, they have gained the reputation of world-class drinkers. I used to stay with a clan chief, a delightful and lovable man with a deserved reputation for unrivalled genealogical scholarship - he also wrote wonderfully entertaining and discursive essays masquerading as book reviews. He drank like a fish and so, unless they were exceptionally strong-minded or weak-headed, did the friends with whom he filled his house ("Rule One: always help yourself to a drink; rule two, never put that drink down on a book"). On one occasion I asked a fellow guest, a Maharaja who spent his time between Switzerland, New York, and the Côte d'Azur, what he considered his nationality to be. "Scotch, by absorption," he replied.

As a boy I considered myself Scotch (although, until I accepted that by paternal descent and domicile I was English, I would have said Scots)* and my earliest memories of Scotland involve my grandfather, to other people a terrifying figure, to me a benign companion, who used to boast that he had prevented any pubs being opened in Rothesay. That must have been when he was the minister there, sometime in the late twenties, I assume. Whether his success in repelling the brewers had any measurable effect on how much the islanders drank is open to debate. Highlanders, whoever has had theoretical authority over them, have always had an independent outlook on life. It was largely they who introduced whisky as a popular drink in the Lowlands at the latter end of the eighteenth century. It was their skill, acquired in remote and chilly glens, which was needed to establish the huge number of illegal shebeens which proliferated in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and the other towns of the industrial revolution. One of the two peculiarities of the drink culture of Scotland noted by Professor Devine is that whisky came to be preferred to beer and was responsible for the huge increase in drunkenness recorded by many observers. Professor Devine's work is wide in scope and its section on drink is necessarily brief. Nevertheless, the story he tells indicates the profound effect alcohol had on life in Scotland - and still has, I dare say.

In 1850 a leader in The Scotsman said: "That Scotland is, pretty near at least, the most drunken nation on the face of the earth is a fact never quite capable of denial." The second distinct feature of drinking in Scotland, says Professor Devine, was the easy availability of alcohol compared to England, where, for example, it was illegal from 1830 for ale-houses to sell spirits. There were huge numbers of public houses in the growing towns and countless illegal dram shops, many selling a noxious mixture of whisky and methylated spirits. In 1903, when it was necessary to be 16 to buy alcohol in England, in Scotland the legal age was still 14. In the 1830s official figures showed that in Scotland the annual consumption of spirits was two and a half gallons per head of the population. This was not only seven times the quantity recorded a hundred years later, it was clearly, given all those illegal shebeens, a considerable underestimate.

There was more to drinking in Scotland than simple availability and Professor Devine discusses its social and cultural roots. Drink was part of the ritual which marked most significant occasions, weddings and funerals, of course, but also the end of an apprenticeship, the completion of a business deal, and many more of life's milestones. Industrial growth - and, of course, the Highland clearances - brought tens of thousands of migrants into the towns. The pub was the centre of social life, the source of companionship, the place to find work, and a brief opportunity to escape the squalor of the tenement.

Commentators often found it extraordinary that a country so given to intoxication should also be clerically dominated. The same could have been said of Ireland, but in Scotland the Kirk not only had a more puritanical cast of mind than the Catholic Church, it had the power of the establishment behind it. Until the nineteenth century, however, there was little identification between temperance and Christianity. The growth of evangelicalism in the Presbyterian church, influenced by Methodism south of the border, changed all that. Following the quartering of the duty on spirits in 1828, consumption trebled. The reaction was led by men like John Dunlop, who had written on Scottish drinking habits, and William Collins, the founder of the publishing house. In 1842 the great Irish temperance advocate Father Theobald Mathew addressed an audience of 50,000 in Glasgow and later induced 40,000 Irish immigrants to take the pledge. The Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland took up the temperance cause. Social reformers and clergymen alike saw drink as the curse of the working classes but, as elsewhere, were often divided as to cause and effect. Teetotalism was an important strand throughout the nineteenth century in Scottish radical politics, affecting both the co-operative movement and the Independent Labour Party. Partly as a consequence of this upsurge of feeling, spirit consumption had fallen dramatically by 1860 but then stabilised at a level where it remained until the 1900s.

Professor Devine has the breadth of vision of the genuine historian. Whilst analysing Scottish society with meticulous scholarship, he illuminates his subject with entertaining detail. How many who have drunkenly bawled out "The Wild Rover" know that it was composed as a temperance song. And Harry Lauder first made his name in the Saturday evening concerts organised by the Glasgow Abstainers Union. This was all part of a practical attempt to provide alternative entertainments to the pub. At a time when the the steamboats of the Clyde were known as floating drinking dens - hence, explains Professor Devine, the Scots term 'steaming' for drunken - there was a teetotal paddle-steamer provided as a rival attraction.

Organisations like the Band of Hope and the Catholic League of the Cross provided a sober focus for a wide range of the population and temperance became fashionable among the middle-classes. It was, however, by no means a bourgeois phenomenon. Labour leaders like Keir Hardie and Willie Gallagher received their political formation in temperance lodges. These lodges, like the Primrose League, and with comparable success, drew on Masonic ritual and their popularity stemmed in part from the colour and spectacle they provided.

Professor Devine notes an interesting variation in working-class drinking in nineteenth century Scotland. There was a move among respectable artisans towards drinking at home and a tendency for pubs to become the haunts of rougher elements. This went along with the virtual exclusion of women from the pub, a phenomenon which continued in Scotland right down to the 1960s. Professor Devine traces the commercialisation of leisure in Scotland, the improvements in travel, and the increasing opportunities to have fun without getting drunk. Trips to Loch Lomond, or "down the water", were available to all but those at the very bottom of the social pile, and were often sponsored by temperance organisations.

Professor Devine devotes equal care to every significant aspect of Scottish life during his chosen three hundred years. The Scottish Nation: 1700-2000 is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in the development of the United Kingdom. Drink is a small part of this history but it has had a profound effect.

* A lost cause, I suppose, but, in the embers of the 'scotch', 'scots', 'scottish' argument, I am with Miss Nancy Mitford and Mr A.J.P. Taylor. 'Scotch' is the English adjective. Fowler is uncharacteristically pusillanimous on the subject.