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The poor man's drink?
Drinking in public houses
was an important social activity for the working classes in
1901. Middle-class observers claimed that the Edwardian working
classes often drank to excess. According to one 1900 estimate,
every male drinker consumed on average 73 gallons of beer
and 2.4 gallons of spirits a year. At 2d a pint, beer could
cost as little as milk.
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Drinking was seen as something men did. In The Classic
Slum, describing life in turn of the century Salford,
Robert Roberts commented that 'men who did not frequent public
houses or drink at home were usually sneered at by other males,
but not by women, as "tight-fisted", "hen-pecked"
or "not proper men at all"'. But women were also
drinkers. In Poverty: A Study of Town Life, Seebohm
Rowntree records his detailed observation of three York pubs
in 1900. He found that a quarter of the customers were women
- and just over 10% children, probably fetching jugs of beer
for their parents.
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In 1900, there were nearly 6,500 breweries operating in the
UK, a number that would fall to 142 by 1980. These breweries
served 102,000 pubs in England and Wales at the turn of the
century, a figure that would drop to 66,000 by 1967.
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The poor man's poison?
Between the summer of 1900 and early 1901, an epidemic
of arsenic poisoning caused over 70 deaths and was blamed
on adulterated beer. The cause was eventually found to be
accidental - arsenic had been used in the brewing process.
A Royal Commission on Arsenical Poisoning was set up in 1901,
and subsequently recommended a legal maximum of no more than
one hundredth of a grain of arsenic per gallon of liquid or
pound of food.
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Until the 1880s, it had been common for small brewers and beer-shop
keepers to add narcotics, such as strychnine, in small doses
to beer to compensate for diluting it with water. By 1900, dilution
was the main problem - one in five samples tested had been watered
down and sometimes salt would then be added to 'flavour it up'
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