‘Liverpool’s temperance lesson to the nation’? The challenge of compensation

Liverpool’s approach to licensing was presented by the social reformers Joseph Rowntree and Arthur Sherwell as the limit of what could be achieved by acting within the frameworks providing by the existing licensing laws. This chapter situates their assessment against legislative changes and local challenges, looking at the way the Liverpool licensing bench responded to new guidelines in 1902 and 1904. The former empowered their work, progress largely achieved by issuing conditions on publicans at the time of the renewal of a licence. The latter, more controversially, mandated the introduction of compensation in instances where the magistrates cancelled a licence. These challenges were compounded in 1911 by a general transport strike and the return of sectarian tensions.

Mapping drink: The spatial logic of social reform

Having established a political turn in temperance agitation, chapter four examines a prominent group in local Liberal politics: the Popular Control and Licensing Reform Association (PCA). By analysing a series of distinctive maps of public houses produced by the PCA this chapter argues that social reform was rooted in an importantly spatial imagination of problem drinking. The PCA mapped an area of largely Irish north Liverpool, as well as the districts around the Sailors’ Home, St John’s Market and the Town Hall. As such, the group called out a strong connection between the distribution of licensed premises and problems such as prostitution and drunkenness that were associated with alcohol consumption.

Liberty on licence

This chapter examines the different approaches to alcohol licensing that shaped Victorian debates about problem drinking and drunkenness, from free trade in licences to models of public ownership of drink interests. It offers a critical review of the politicisation of alcohol in this period, and examines competing political theories and ideologies that shaped approaches to regulating alcohol. It concludes with a theoretical model for alcohol licensing.

Conclusions: Liberalism’s local logic

The concluding chapter brings together the central themes of the book, emphasising that policing and licensing were local, discretionary tools of government. The central contention is that the developments in licensing exemplify the localism – a localism of the pub and street corner – at the heart of British liberalism. As definitions of, and indeed the spaces associated with, problem drinking change, the book concludes by asking whether licensing can respond to contemporary challenges.

Women and the public house

Victorian attitudes to drinking reflected a series of double standards. This chapter looks at the way in which gendered attitudes to drink shaped the relationship of women to the public house – as workers and as customers. It focuses on the way in which the layout of pubs was manipulated in order to shape behaviour on and off the premises. It also considers the importance of age, and restrictions on child messengers who were sent to pubs to buy beer. By considering the movement of drink in this way, it argues that licensing was taken outside of the public house and into the city: the licensed city of the book’s title.

The licensed city at war

This chapter continues the examination of challenges to licensing by scrutinising the work of the Central Control Board on the regulation of drinking and drunkenness during the Great War. It analyses the introduction of new restrictions, which again had in view problems associated with women’s drinking. As such, it examines how Liverpool’s licensing system responded to the trials of war.

The reformed licensing system: Slum clearance and social reform

This chapter situates licensing against the broader politics of urban reform in Liverpool. It begins by profiling the work of the Corporation in reforms to slum housing and the attempts by the licensing magistrates to reduce the numbers of pubs in these areas. Drink maps formed an important part of this work, helping the magistrates to identify areas that looked over-provisioned. It then turns to investigations of this Liverpool system that were written by magistrates from Glasgow and Dundee in order to assess the status of Liverpool as a pro-active and exemplary model of reform of and by licensing.

Attacking the licensing system: The ‘twin evils’ of drunkenness and prostitution

It was, in the end, the alleged alliance between the pub trade and prostitution that put Liverpool civic structures under pressure to reform. These included the organisation of licensing. This chapter examines the energies of a purity crusade in objecting to the renewal of particular pub licences, and argues that this was decisive in shaping reform to the city’s licensing system.

Between teetotalism and free trade: The rise of temperance politics in Liverpool

Liverpool’s licensing magistrates innovated in 1861 by introducing a version of free trade to the system for granting alcohol licences. This chapter provides a detailed analysis of their decision and its outcomes. It begins, however, with an examination of the rise of temperance in the city, and argues that there was a broad shift from a temperance outlook that was based on personal betterment and salvation to a more publicly political temperance that targeted the civic structures that regulated the sale of alcohol.

Liverpool: The making of a licensed city

This chapter establishes Liverpool’s unenviable statistical record for drunkenness. It examines the nature of municipal comparison, interrogating the reasons for Liverpool’s record and critically assessing the nature of the available evidence. It established that the pressure for reform came as much from vocal campaigners within Liverpool as critics looking on from outside the city. It considers the place of drink in Liverpool’s complex and changing politics, and establishes how reform to policing and licensing emerged as a politically practical option for the city to tackle its reputation. The final section provides a chapter outline of the remaining book.