Introduction

The previous chapter identified certain frameworks of moral compulsion that, in addition to purely legal measures, governed the consumption of alcohol under a system established primarily the Licensing Act 1872. This chapter applies the same concern for extralegal, normative forms of regulation to the period 1914–21. Harrison and Shiman describe how temperance societies were in decline by the turn of the 20th century; memberships were falling and influence was waning. Congruously, historians studying drink during the First World War tend to overlook the issue of public attitudes or morality and their historical precedents. The temperance movement is thus largely removed from studies of drink debates during the First World War and the consensus opinion is captured by Greenaway's argument that ‘[t]he outbreak of war in 1914 transformed the whole issue of liquor control … now it was primarily redefined in terms of national efficiency’. Greenaway's discussion focuses largely on the rise to dominance of the secular issues of industrial productivity and military discipline. Older moral positions on drink were regarded as of limited relevance; 20th-century drink debates were largely seen as rational and secular.

But were these ‘rational’ concerns for national efficiency really the primary drivers of public discourse on alcohol from 1914 to 1921? Had the British temperance movement and the moral regulation project it initiated ceased to be a significant feature of public attitudes towards alcohol? Interestingly, Greenaway describes drink debates during the First World War as a ‘moral panic’. On the one hand, this is entirely fitting; a new or redefined social problem, which Greenaway identifies, is the typical subject matter of moral panic theory. In Cohen's classic theoretical formulation, moral panics are short-term, temporary phenomena, which rise up ‘every now and then’ before submerging again as some form of equilibrium is reached or restored. In this classic episodic approach, each panic appears, essentially, as an independent event with little or no causal relation to preceding or succeeding historical events. On the other hand (and as described in Chapter One), this classic approach has been criticised; Critcher defines moral panics as high points within established currents of moral regulation and Hier presents them as manifestations of volatility within longer-term processes of moralisation.