Temperance
The Temperance and Teetotal Movements
The Temperance Movement was extensively promoted by British Friends. They were opposed to “intoxicating liquors”, but there were very few reports of acts directed
against brewers and publicans. The few hostile episodes were clearly provoked. Norman
Longmate (The Water-Drinkers, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1968) cites “the battling
Quakers of Bristol”, fined on one occasion for being too tough on hecklers.
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The Joseph Rowntree Foundation recently published an enquiry into the present-day
relevance of nineteenth-century temperance campaigning: (Virginia Berridge,
Temperance: Its history and impact on current and future alcohol policy, 2005).
This study has lessons for campaigning today on other social and political issues.
Although the British cocoa and chocolate industry was almost entirely Quaker in origin,
the notion that it was motivated by opposition to alcoholic drinks turns out to be a
Quaker myth. |
Consider other early Quaker Boycotts, and the tensions between conscience and coercion and between Prophets and Reconcilers.