Last updated 19:38, Thursday, 12 June 2008

SPEAK these words out loud! “Fetch the washed vetch bush.” And again!

So how did you get on? Did you stumble, slur or stutter?

You did! Then it’s a good job you weren’t stopped back in 1894 by a member of the constabulary on suspicion of being seriously and anti-socially drunk.

Failure to read out these words from his pre-printed card would probably have earned you a free bed for the night in the nearest police station.

Or, how about chanting, at speed, “Shibboleth” or “truly rural” a dozen times.

These were all on-the-spot verbal tests used by the police when they wanted to prove drunkenness when the person arrested appeared before the magistrates.

Those of us of a certain age (ie before the breathalyser) would have been familiar with the phrase “The Leith Police dismisseth us.”

Being able to correctly enunciate these words was supposed to be proof of sobriety. So the story goes.

But was anyone ever asked by the police to declaim this sibilant tongue twister? Or is it just another myth?

Drunkenness was a problem in 1894. Indeed, it’s been a publicly acknowledged problem for at least 200 years.

It made the newspapers, largely because of the activities of the various anti-drink organisations.

It’s all too easy to mock the concerns of Victorian temperance workers and caricature them as humourless moralising busybodies.

But the country was faced with a serious drink problem and anti-drink organisations were springing up everywhere.

Like Maryport’s St Benedict’s Total Abstinence League of the Cross.

Their 1889 annual tea, held in the Co-operative Hall, was a well attended event, as “the room was crowded almost to suffocation.”

During the proceedings Father Cummings gave a talk, in which he touched on the subject of the problem of drunkenness.

He told his listeners that “the law said no one had to be served with intoxicating liquors when it was considered he had already had enough, but on Saturday nights they could not help seeing that many broke the law on this point; and he did not know why magistrates and policemen administer the law better.” As relevant a query today, under the 2003 Licensing Act, as it was back in 1889.

Temperance crusades were held in our area almost every year. In 1892 at Workington, a major concern was the increase of drunkenness among women. One speaker, Mrs Vause from Whitehaven, wondered what would happen to the rising generation if more and more women went into the pubs.

James Duffield presided over a similar meeting in Cockermouth in 1894.

He said that it broke his heart to see so much misery and poverty, much of it due to drink.

He’d noticed that the publicans had hit on a new ploy to get men into their pubs - placing “girls at the door just about five o’clock when were returning from work.”

He continued: “The girls were nicely dressed, prettily set out with a nice little white apron and a flower in their breast . . . they began to laugh and joke with the workmen as they passed.”

Result, some men were persuaded to enter the pub and spend their hard earned money.

Duffield was appalled that publicans could so take advantage of the men’s human weaknesses and called on them to put a stop to their devious ways.

I’ve mentioned police carting drunken women off to the cells before, a quite common occurrence in late Victorian times.

It was, to more sober Workingtonians, a source of great amusement.

One correspondent was disgusted and thought something should be done to help “these poor creatures.”

To do so would, of course, cost money. But he’d thought of that.

Being 1887, money was being collected to celebrate the Queen’s jubilee – so why not use that.

After all, “the Queen has no need at all for all this money, but it would found and maintain many a “Woman’s Home” and rescue many a fallen one from the mire.”

He objected to having his taxes spent on Jubilee junketing when it could be more usefully spent.

In conclusion, the “vetch bush” verbal test was eventually ditched by the police.

When they brought one unfortunate drunk to court, not one of the five magistrates on the bench managed to pass the test.