Golden days when Gin Lane led to Clarence House
PAUL JOHNSON
The most endearing thing about the Queen Mother, and the real index of her demotic appeal, was her association in the popular mind with gin. She thus joins a select company: Falstaff and sack, Dr Johnson and tea, Burns and whisky, Pitt the Younger and port, James Bond and dry martinis. How the relationship became celebrated I do not know, but it figures in numerous anecdotes, such as the 'Four Old Queens of Clarence House', a royal family classic which has yet to reach printed form.
Public attitudes to gin have always been ambivalent. This compound of distilled grain flavoured by juniper (hence ginevra, contracted to gin) is said to have been invented by an illegitimate son of the jovial Henri Quatre of France. A taste for it was brought back to England by the soldiery of Marlborough's campaigns. It had reputed medicinal qualities, but it was seized on by the agricultural interest as a valuable by-product and distilled in vast quantities, untaxed and sold without licence.
The London magistrate (and novelist) Henry Fielding, in his Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers (1751), blamed gin-drinking, 'a new kind of drunkenness'. He calculated that one in five houses in London sold it, and that it had become 'the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than 100,000 People in the Metropolis'. Fielding wanted Parliament to act, and indeed it did on numerous occasions. But, as with drugs today, gin was so popular that it proved resistant to control. What Mandeville called 'the infamous liquor' and Fielding 'diabolical' remained cheap and universally available. As late as 1839, in his book Chartism, Carlyle called it 'liquid madness sold at ten pence the quart'.
From the start it was generally supposed to be, above all, a woman's drink, 'mother's ruin'. In Hogarth's Gin Lane, published the same year as Fielding's Enquiry, the central figure is a drunken woman who lets her baby fall to its death while she takes a pinch of snuff. This was the first print to register with me as a child, and I recall being puzzled by the stress on women. In the background a woman pours gin into her baby's mouth, and two pre-teen girls are supping glasses of the stuff. A generation before (1728), Swift had written:
Their chatCring makes a louder din Than fishwives o'er a cup of gin.
And, nearly a century and a half later, in Fors Clavigera, Ruskin wrote of 'bad old women' who 'want gin-and-bitters for breakfast'. The other reputed consumers of gin were boys, such as the Fat Boy in Pickwick and Flashman in Tom Brown's Schooldays who 'regaled himself on gin punch'. This tradition was valiantly upheld by the late Auberon Waugh, about whom and a bottle of Gordon's gin his father relates a scorching anecdote in his Diaries.
Americans, who originally exceeded with the help of home-distilled whiskey or bourbon, got into the gin stakes in the second decade of the 19th century, when cocktails, originally imported into South Carolina from Barbados, seeped up into the North, gin soon becoming the chief ingredient. I don't know when the dry martini was invented or by whom, but I suspect that it was in the 1870s, a decade of strong liquor, when absinthe first became popular in Paris as a result of the horrors and privations of the Commune. The English responded with gin-and-tonic. Tonic water, a Jesuit invention, was a cure for malaria and had become popular in officers' messes in the Indian army as a mixer that took the moral sting off hard liquor. Schweppes, I think, first began to mass-produce it in England in the 1870s, where, to some extent, it was the equivalent of American cola drinks.
The importance of wars (and politics) in the evolution of drinking habits is determinant. In the 19th century, drinking gin was about the worst sin a lady could commit. I suspect that some of the female members of the Souls indulged, and I'm pretty sure that their daughters, members of the Corrupt Generation, did, just as (amazingly) some of them used fourletter words in their intimate correspondence. But it was the first world war that made gin a polite drink and soon the normal tipple of the Bright Young Things. That was when it became acceptable for well-brought-up girls such as Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon to have an occasional gin cocktail, and she remained faithful to the custom of her youth. Indeed, you could say that the 30 years between 1920 and 1950 were the Golden Age of gin, as opposed to its brutal Stoned Age in the mid18th century. When, in 1920 or thereabouts, Ernest Hemingway coined the phrase 'Have a drink', he meant a gin-based one, whether bathtub gin of the Prohibition variety or refined European stuff.
Gin came in a variety of guises, in addition to the classic cocktails. There was a 50/50 mixture with sweet vermouth, a nauseating shot known as 'gin-and-It'. Even worse was a potion I remember from the late 1940s, gin
and-orange, made with artificial stuff, horribly sweet. The French rightly would not touch it, preferring the gin fizz made with fresh lemons: the Deux Magots served it as late as the 1950s — I saw Jean-Paul Sartre drink it there with Arthur Koestler. The army and navy preferred pink gins, made with Angostura bitters, another bat-squeak of medicinal propriety. I was introduced to a variation on this, orange bitters, by Osbert Lancaster — the colour was luminous, the taste less agreeable. From New York during the 1920s, English visitors brought back the dry martini, and Noel Coward was to give it its literary apotheosis in the opening exchange of Blithe Spirit: 'How are the martinis?' Dry as a bone.'
Gin was the drink of women, but of young male writers too — Dos Passos and Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Sean O'Casey, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Graham Greene. It impregnates the pages of novels and plays, and features largely and sometimes crucially in the crime novels of Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler, as indeed it did in their lives. Did it inspire poetry as Keats's 'beaker full of the warm South. . With beaded bubbles winking at the brim' did in around 1820? Certainly it did so on one occasion. T.S. Eliot's widow told me that 'Journey of the Magi', that noble and evocative work, was composed on a Sunday morning after church, to the accompaniment of a half-bottle of gin; she implied, I think, that it was emptied as the poem was finished, and she was particular in specifying that the brand was Booth's. I remember this gin well, and associate it with Oxford and the army — quite a different flavour and colour from Gordon's.
Again, it was a war that ended the golden age of gin. For, in the second world war, gallant deeds at Stalingrad made vodka popular, first in America, then here. Gosford Park got many things wrong in its shooting sequences, but not least the idea of serving Bloody Malys at lunch in 1932. No one would have heard of them then, or for many years after. I suppose that they might have drunk a perilous concoction known as 'stag's breath'. The vodka invasion here I date from the 1960s. Until then the dry martini ruled supreme at such gatherings of sophisticated taste as Jock Murray's parties in Albemarle Street or Pam Berry's lunches in Westminster. And now vodka, too, is vanishing, as the elite drink wine or spritzers or just water. The Queen Mother stuck to her gin, as to all the things she knew when she was a catch even for a royal duke.
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