MORE ON TEMPERANCE AND ABSTINENCE

My Father, who himself drank very rarely, called strict teetotallers ‘blue ribbon men’. This was, I am told, because a man who ‘signed the pledge’ would sometimes advertise the fact by wearing a piece of blue ribbon in his coat lapel.

A maxim of the temperance movement seems to have been to ‘catch ‘em young’. My father also recalled how, as boys in the first years of the present century, he and his friends used to attend the weekly Band of Hope, whose joint aims were apparently to provide the young with various innocuous indoor entertainments and to indoctrinate them on the evils of the Demon Drink by the singing of such rousing verses as:

‘My drink is water bright, water bright, water bright,

My drink is water bright from the crystal spring.’

Or ‘Daniel’s Band’ with its challenging refrain:

‘Dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone,

Dare to have a purpose firm and dare to make it known.’

Sometime the Demon hit back with verses of his own. There was, for example, a scurrilous rhyme in circulation among the disrespectful:

‘Teetotal band it is so grand

We’ll ne’er get drunk no more.

We’ll save our brass to buy an ass

And ride past the alehouse door.’

As recently as my own childhood, an itinerant lecturer visited the schools round here and with the aid of boldly coloured charts, explained to the largely uncomprehending pupils the havoc wrought by alcohol. Sometimes a prize was offered to the child who afterwards wrote the best essay on this subject. One such prize winner was my father’s brother, uncle Fred, who, I should add, was not sufficiently won over by his own eloquence to forego an occasional drink in later life."

Margaret Otley

(Hoyland, Barnsley)

Following on from that we learn of another target (information gleaned in Canada):

TOBACCO OH! OH!

"Every Sunday afternoon, and more especially on an evening, gangs of men may be seen congregated at the Arlington corner …. Whose sole occupation appears to be to spit and make coarse remarks about every woman who passes."

"Perfect floods of vile nauseous tobacco juice are launched upon the sidewalks, and even on the ladies’ dresses: and as can only be expected from the filthy mouths of the spitters, filthy words, lewd remarks and coarse insinuations are poured forth, so that a self-respecting woman can only pass under the protection of an escort, or perforce take to the middle of the street, where the mud would be preferable to the reeking pavement."

The Paris Star

Transcript 1903

Need we say more?

Tell me ye winged winds that round my dwelling blow

Do ye not know some place where smokers do not go?

Some quiet pleasant dell, some valley in the west

Where freed from pipes and smoke, a soul in peace may rest

The loud winds dwindled to a whisper low

And sighed for pity as they answered … No

Tell me thou ocean deep whose billows oft I see

Knowest thou some island home to which our sex may flee

Ejected from men’s mouths, O’ what a vile abuse

The wild waves rolling in perpetual flow

Stopped for a while and sighed to answer … No

And thou bright silver moon when on the nightly round

Thou look’st adown on earth, hast thou not somewhere found

A spot yet undefiled by those who use the weed

And where mankind the rules of neatness heed

Behind a cloud the moon withdrew her face

A voice in sadness answered … Not a place

Tell me ye spirits bright that now are hovering o’er

Must we endure this curse forever, ever more

O search beyond this earth, search regions of the blest

Can ye not find some place where we unsmoked may rest

Faith, Hope, and Trust, best boons to mortals given

Waved their bright wings and whispered .. Yes in heaven.

 

From the "Canadian Musical Fountain and Prohibition Singer"

Toronto circa 1867