History of Drink in the East Neuk (Part 2): Temperance & Rebellion in the Villages
By Jennifer Gordon
Over the course of the eighteenth century farm labourers and fishermen gradually drifted towards a preference for the more immediate, warming properties of whisky, over the subtleties of beer. Whisky was not new to Scotland, it is believed it was distilled here from the middle ages, but it is difficult to find written sources on distilling from this earlier period.
Like the preference for gin over more wholesome beer in London at this time, the increased consumption of whisky in Scotland worried those with a public voice and opinion on general moral order. Parish records and the press of the time does record a distinct wildness in the behaviour of the local fishing community here in the East Neuk, attributed in no small measure to the quantities of whisky being consumed by men and women.
At the end of the herring season the settling-up would often be conducted in Tammas Anderson’s pub amid noisy, drunken brawls which were the delight of small boys of neighbourhood.
It was believed that hard drinking lay behind many of the area’s ills. Following a series of tragedies and altercations, a faction of the community urged a change of direction for the town’s moral code. On New Year’s Eve 1857 Cellardyke Abstinence Society gave everyone a free copy of pictorial Temperance tracts, “Dissolving views” and “Who takes the sap out of us?”.
The movement claimed success but at end of season that year, men were still reeling in the street.
Eventually through the influence of religion, Temperance in the East Neuk won out and prayers and hymn-singing replaced whisky-swilling as an on-board soul-enricher. The Brethren church established itself in the fisher towns. St Monans was particularly receptive to the “the call” (later it was referred to as “The Holy City” by neighbouring villages) and found itself to be a dry burgh by 1900.
A second revival swept over the coastal communities following the Great War. A Gospel hall was established there in St Monans in the 1920s. Two plebiscites held in 1920 and 1934 to repeal the alcohol ban were unsuccessful and no liquor was sold in the town again until 1947.
The post-war era saw the fishing and agricultural industries restored with a gradual return to economic and social stability. Though the herring fishing never recovered, over subsequent decades, a new breed of ambitious trawler men could reap rich rewards from their brave forays into the North Sea and many local men toasted their bounty and safe return to shore with a visit to quayside hostelries.
Although not a new concept (the rise of the motor car, music hall and football after World War One all contributed to a decline in beer sales and pub footfall even then), never before have modern adults been faced with so much competition for their wandering minds and middling wallets and so many distractions (virtual or otherwise) from the previously ubiquitous Friday night march to the bar.
Pubs and breweries are taking fatal hits every year, but there remains a quivering grass roots resistance in the form of earnest, eager and expanding nationwide production of real ales and craft beers in microbreweries from the East End of London to the outer islands of the Hebrides, and of course, here in the East Neuk too.
You can read Part 1 of a History of Drink in the East Neuk here.
Jennifer Gordon is a Curator at the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther, and has published writing on the history of this area and its fishing fleets and communities in various forms. She is also one of our favourite singer-songwriters and has promised us that one day she will take up a mic again…