Drink Trade And Education Case Study

In addition to issues of church government and belief, two political topics dominated Conference discussions: the drinks trade and education. Conference supported numerous attempts to restrict the sale of alcohol on Sundays or to children, increased control on licensing arrangements, including enhanced rights for those making objections to the granting of licenses. All these Private Members’ and government promoted attempts failed, except for an increased tax on whisky, The Children’s Act of 1909, which restricted the sale of alcohol to minors, and the Temperance Syllabus of the Board of Education. Gambling, while often condemned in combination with drink, does not appear to have elicited demands for prohibitive legislation.
The Church’s
Kirtlan and Hind were not alone in their view. As a ten year old in 1903, when visiting absent Sunday school scholars who were ‘living in poverty and squalor’, Jim Simmons, a lifelong teetotaller, ‘began to question the dictum of the time – that poverty was caused by drink’. Similarly, although George Edwards recognized that alcohol was a significant factor in the majority of the cases that he presided over as a magistrate, he acknowledged the comfort the public house afforded the hard-pressed agricultural labourer: a factor in rural deprivation and depravity, but not
In 1905, the Leader condemned gambling as ‘a mad haste for money’. The Primitive publications echoed a common Liberal view that gambling winnings were undeserved, an ‘unearned increment’. Typical of many Primitive Methodist converts, John Wilson, previously wedded to the vice, repudiated gambling. Shackleton considered that there ‘were no greater evils in this country than … gambling and intemperance’. Gambling was ‘fastening like a vampire’ on to football and ruining the ‘noble national game’. According to his daughter, his objection to the triple vices of drink, gambling and smoking, became ‘a matter of principle’ but originated in the unpretentious reason that, as he expressed it, he ‘simply wanted the money for something else’. His antipathy to gambling manifested in several Private Members’ Bills and parliamentary speeches, as it did with Arthur Richardson and Mansfield. Shackleton and Arthur Richardson both supported the introduction of a Street Betting Bill in 1906 but regretted that the final Act, which some regarded as discriminatory against working class gamblers as it only prohibited unregulated street bookmakers, leaving racecourse untouched. However, unlike Shackleton, Fenwick, and Taylor, when the Bill was in committee, Richardson voted for the half measure offered; he believed that street betting wrought untold misery on working men and had to