Now! Then! 2025! - Yorkshire On This Day

A Yorkshire Almanac Comprising 365 Historical Extracts, Red-letter Days and Customs, and Astronomical and Meteorological Data

20 April 1835: A teetotallers’ tea-party at the first, great, Wilsden Temperance Festival

Dead Weight, a wood engraving by Solomon Barr: three poor men burdened with barrels of alcohol are freed by a man from the Temperance Society, while a woman looks on

Dead Weight, a wood engraving by Solomon Barr: three poor men burdened with barrels of alcohol are freed by a man from the Temperance Society, while a woman looks on (Barr 1840).

Peter Turner Winskill. 1891. The Temperance Movement and Its Workers, Vol. 1. London: Blackie and Son. Get it:

.

Excerpt

One thousand four hundred cups and saucers, with all other necessary appendages, were distributed upon the tables. About five o’clock the sober but exhilarating liquor began to circulate; each seat found a ready occupant; every cup was in request; mirth, cheerfulness, and hilarity pervaded the vast assembly; and 1,400 persons might be seen at once revelling in the sweets of temperate pleasure, and enjoying without admixture or alloy “the feast of reason and the flow of soul.” No sooner had this goodly company received a sufficiency of the good things of this life for their present satisfaction, than with an orderly and simultaneous movement they made way for 1,400 others, who had been patiently waiting without, after the departure of whom, the conductors, waiters, servants, stragglers, and others, numbering 200, regaled themselves after the fatigues of the day at the principal table.

To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations

Comment

Comment

Ruth Strong:

At this time teetotalism was not part of the Wesleyan Methodist ‘package’. In fact, the Methodist Conference actually discouraged members of their Societies from becoming teetotallers. Until the mid 19th century the temperance movement was an almost militant working class movement, the converts’ evangelical fervour being viewed with apprehension by their ‘betters’ who they were obviously managing very well without (Roberts 2000).

Israel Roberts himself:

I can never forget many interesting incidents of the period [ca. 1841], especially in connection with what was called “The Potation.” For at least a month we had regular week night practice in singing and music to be ready and perfect for Whit Monday. There used to be beer brewed specially for the teachers and scholars, and I remember well old Ben Whitley who used to bring it to the week night practice of the singers and burl it out, as it was called, to all those who took part (Roberts 2000).

Erika Rappaport gives more context:

Many a temperance reformer had long advocated the moderate drinking of beer, wine, and cider, and such beliefs were remarkably long-lived. However, in the first half of the nineteenth century, several temperate groups with quite different political views and social backgrounds began to promote tea and coffee as antidotes to intemperance. Owenite socialists, Chartists, liberals, evangelicals, and missionaries served tea and coffee at soirées, bazaars, and tea parties to draw women to their cause and to inculcate a culture of sobriety within and beyond their communities. Tea and coffee were especially endorsed by the total abstinence or teetotal societies that emerged in the industrial communities in the north of England and in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales in the early 1830s and 1840s. “Teetotal” signified those who pledged to abstain from selling or consuming all alcohol, not an appreciation for tea per se. This branch of the temperance movement drank tea at home, but they also consumed what they viewed as sacred and useful pleasures in new public settings. They opened coffee shops and temperance hotels, and hosted, attended, and wrote about mass meals that came to be known as the temperance tea parties. In political debates about taxation and free trade, in sermons and tracts, through businesses and everyday practices, and in tea parties, temperance distinguished between productive and unproductive, moral and immoral, consumer behaviors and commodities. Believing in the power of education, moral suasion, and substitution as the best means to fight alcohol and the public house, temperance built a sober consumer culture of halls and hotels, coffee shops, and tea parties (Rappaport 2013/10).

She also points to a 1785 poem by William Cowper celebrating tea contra alcohol:

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,
That cheer but not inebriate
, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.
(Cowper 1899)

Ray Girvan points to earlier use by Bishop Berkeley, promoting tar-water as an ethanol substitute:

This safe and cheap medicine suits all circumstances and all constitutions, operating easily, curing without disturbing, raising the spirits without depressing them, a circumstance that deserves repeated attention. And experience sheweth this to be true. For the fermented spirit of wine or other liquors produceth irregular motions, and subsequent depressions in the animal spirits. Whereas the luminous spirit lodged and detained in the native balsam of pines and firs, is of a nature so mild and benign, and proportioned to the human constitution, as to warm without heating, to cheer but not inebriate, and to produce a calm and steady joy like the effect of good news, without that sinking of spirits which is a subsequent effect of all fermented cordials (Berkeley 1744).

Something to say? Get in touch

Original

As the time approached for holding the annual festival of the Wilsden societies, the committee and active workers determined to make it something far exceeding any previous effort in this direction, and arrangements were made for a temperance demonstration on a large scale.

This monstre festival was held on the 20th and 21st of April, 1835, a full report of which was given in the Bradford Observer of April 25th, 1835 The parish church had been kindly placed at the disposal of the committee for the public meetings, and extensive preparations had been made for the accommodation of visitors. A large tent for refreshments had been erected in an adjoining field, the decorations being unique, and best described in the words of the Observer:

On Monday the proceedings commenced with a grand procession of the following societies, each being headed with a small white banner: Wilsden, Bradford, Keighley, Bingley, Thornton, Baildon, Cullingworth, Northowram, Shipley, Manningham, Hallas Bridge, Denholme, Clayton, Morton, Frizinghall, Cottingley, Allerton, and Harden.

Although these societies were mostly connected with the British and Foreign Temperance Society, and as yet only adopted teetotalism as an additional pledge, yet it is remarkable that almost the whole of the advocates present were very prominent total abstainers, and included J.S. Buckingham, M.P., Messrs. Edward Parsons, William Pollard, agent of the Yorkshire Union, Joseph Livesey, Henry Anderton, the Preston poet and orator, Thomas Swindlehurst, king of the Preston reformed drunkards, R. Broughton, the brothers Nichols, and others.

In a field adjoining the church a splendid booth had been erected, which was forty-five yards in length, eighteen yards wide, and supported by three rows of pillars, eight in a row, adorned with branches of evergreens, natural and artificial flowers, arranged so tastefully as to cheat the beholder into a belief that they were real trees. Along the length of the booths were seven large tables, parallel to each other, for the accommodation of the members of the various societies; an aisle was left across the middle, intersecting the long straight aisles between the tables. On each side of this aisle stood a row of pillars decorated as before described, and between every two pillars an immense bouquet of artificial flowers.

At the upper end of the booth an elevated table was placed, at which sat the chairman (the Rev. J. Barber, vicar of Wilsden), the speakers, and other invited guests. The chair was covered with pink, and overhung by a profusion of artificial flowers, shrubs, and trees, arranged with so much skill and elegance as form a delightful alcove, having all the appearance of a natural bower, which was much assisted by the artifice of placing a number of stuffed birds amongst the branches. The interior of the booth was hung with blue and crimson, decorated with garlands of artificial flowers, imitating nature in every possible variety of form and hue.

At the bottom of the booth, opposite to the chair, was an artificial column tastefully painted and decorated, and having on its various compartments the inscriptions ‘Loyalty,’ ‘Philanthropy,’ ‘Morality,’ ‘Christianity,’ on each side of which hung hieroglyphic paintings, tending to exhibit the baneful consequences of intemperance.

One thousand four hundred cups and saucers, with all other necessary appendages, were distributed upon the tables. About five o’clock the sober but exhilarating liquor began to circulate; each seat found a ready occupant; every cup was in request; mirth, cheerfulness, and hilarity pervaded the vast assembly; and 1400 persons might be seen at once revelling in the sweets of temperate pleasure, and enjoying without admixture or alloy ‘the feast of reason and the flow of soul.’ No sooner had this goodly company received a sufficiency of the good things of this life for their present satisfaction, than with an orderly and simultaneous movement they made way for 1400 others, who had been patiently waiting without, after the departure of whom, the conductors, waiters, servants, stragglers, and others, numbering 200, regaled themselves after the fatigues of the day at the principal table.

About 1000 persons took tea in the booth on the second day. Four meetings were held in the church, capable of holding 2000 persons, at which a deep impression was made.

718 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

All tags.

Search

Donate

Social

RSS feed

Bluesky

Extwitter