On this day … 20 August 1859

The Preston Chronicle carried a report of a public meeting in the Temperance Hall on North Road, called to consider ways to block the opening of more public houses in the town.

The meeting had been prompted by the news that fourteen of the town’s beersellers were applying to the magistrates for permission to sell spirits on their premises – including the dreaded gin of Victorian melodramas.

That such a campaign should have been planned in Preston, the home of the teetotal movement, is no surprise. What is perhaps surprising is that many at the meeting wanted to go far further and close all the town’s pubs: a form of prohibition, urged years before its introduction in the USA.

The call for prohibition came right at the start of the meeting, when Robert Benson junior, who chaired the meeting, declared, to cheers:

‘I should have been glad had the inhabitants of the town had the opportunity of deciding the question themselves, without appealing to the magistrates, feeling sure that it would have been settled in a manner that would have been conducive to the happiness and comfort of the town, by not only denying or refusing any increase of the licenses, but eventually abolishing them all – shutting them all up.’

He was followed by a Mr Stephenson, who fulminated against the evils of alcohol:

‘If the drink trade was productive of so much evil, and of no good … the less they had to do with it the better – (hear, hear) – and if it was swept away entirely – if the … drinking of alcoholic liquors were entirely done away with, the better, the happier, the more moral, the more religious … would our country be … (loud applause)’.

One particular pub, the Shoulder of Mutton, on the corner of the Shambles on Lancaster Road, was singled out for criticism. The meeting was told that only recently a man had drunk so much there that it had killed him. One of the speakers, a Mr T. Edelston, declared that:

‘… excessive drinking at the Shoulder of Mutton was shameful, and he appealed to the meeting whether Mr Wilson, the landlord of that house, was the man to hold a license.’

The meeting was told that there were 432 public houses in Preston, one for every two hundred inhabitants, and one for every forty houses in the town. Preston teetotallers had been objecting to any increase in the number of public houses every year for the past twenty-three years.

The teetotallers may not have succeeded in bringing prohibition to Preston, but they seem to have succeeded in curbing any rise in the number of public houses. The Barrett’s trade directory for Preston for 1882 listed a similar number of drinking establishments to the 1859 count.

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Source

The Preston Chronicle, freely available on line to members of the Lancashire County Council library: https://www.lancashire.gov.uk/libraries-and-archives/libraries/digital-library/newspapers-old-and-new/