Introduction

The previous chapters have explored the emergence of temperance attitudes to alcohol in England and Wales and analysed their influence over the development of a model of governing alcohol consumption based around legal restriction and moral compulsion. It has been argued that the law, particularly the Licensing Acts 1872 and 1921, as well as public attitudes, as evidenced through public discourse, were profoundly affected by the temperance movement's project to morally regulate alcohol. The First World War provoked this social movement into a furious assault on the consumption and trade in alcohol, but these events proved to be something of a ‘last hurrah’ for mass, organised temperance campaigning. The public profile and political clout of temperance groups declined significantly in the first half of the 20th century. Concomitantly, the prominence of alcohol as a public issue waned after the First World War and, as Greenaway comments, ‘drink had a low political salience in mid-20th century Britain’. A brief trawl through news coverage relating to drinking from the 1920s to the 1950s corroborates this conclusion by yielding a quantity of results that is significantly smaller than for preceding or succeeding years. Moreover, there were few significant reforms made to laws affecting alcohol between 1921 and 1960. Legislation, demonstrations, exhortations, lobbying and pledging were not as frequent or as forceful as they had been a generation earlier.

It is feasible that the decline in public anxiety about alcohol during this period is indicative of the rise of popular permissiveness. The interwar and post-war years are often viewed as periods of secularisation. S.J.D. Green documents how, in the inter-war years, church attendance lessened, Sunday School enrolment dropped markedly and the divorce rate increased. Valverde describes how the belief that morality consists of purification through the suppression of desire fell out of fashion as Freudian ideas recast pleasure-seeking as normal behaviour. By the 1960s, proscriptive religious-based attitudes towards sex (outside of wedlock) were publicly questioned, recreational drug use expanded in popularity and drink laws began to be relaxed. The 1960s have thus been described as an ‘age of permissiveness’ and, given these earlier related trends, the period stretching back to the 1920s might be interpreted as revealing a similar demise of active, regulatory interest in the behaviour of others.