Alcohol and Poverty

‘You fat ____ if you don't give her a _______ good hiding i'll give you one! You ____!’ Urged on by such stirring motivational speeches from her husband, a large drunken woman tore into her ‘scraggy opponent’ during a Saturday night catfight in a south-end court. Hours earlier the women had been happily drinking together but on the way home from the pub an argument turned violent: ‘Her ragged bodice was torn from her back, and the thin blood streaks showed the marks of her enemy's fingers on her naked chest. The further the combatants approached to nudity the greater was the delight of the bystanders.’

While touring the slums, middle-class social commentators were confronted with similar shocking scenes of vice, crime and rowdiness. In subsequent pamphlets, sermons and newspaper editorials the depravity was blamed on a variety of social ills such as poverty, insanitary housing, overcrowding, squalor and disease. The Irish temperament was another contributory factor. Yet perhaps the most important reason cited for the social breakdown of lower-class neighbourhoods was alcohol. Beer and spirits were the fuel that drove the poor to delinquency, debauchery, destitution, depravity and destruction.

As casual workers staggered between poverty and drunken oblivion, social commentators were left to debate whether heavy drinking was a result of pauperism or the very cause of it. The main purpose of the Liverpool Review series on slum life was to demonstrate over and over again that the major cause of poverty in Liverpool was alcohol.