Historian Peter Holme discovered an old Westmorland Gazette report, which recalls the horrors of the gin shops

IN November, 1819, The Westmorland Gazette published a report about a servant woman finding a parcel containing five shillings with a note attached which stated: “If you find this, you may keep it. you had better have it than the public house.”

A few years later the following moving article appeared in the newspaper, highlighting the horrors of the gin shops.

“It is a strange sight to see one of those dens of wicked-ness throughout an evening. It is a strange, a melancholy, yet, to the meditative man, an interesting sight.

“There approaches a half-clad man, shivering even beneath the summer breeze. He comes with faltering step, downcast eye and an air of general exhaustion and dejection.

“He reaches his accustomed gin-vault, disappears for half-an-hour or less, and now comes forth a new creature. Were it not for his filthy dress, he could hardly be recognised, for his step is elastic, his eye is brilliant and open, his air animated and joyous.

“He inhales the breezes as a refreshing draught and he deems himself happy. His enjoyment is short-lived and purchased at an immense sacrifice for the ‘Price Is Death/It is a costly feast’.

“Now comes a woman, perhaps his wife, bearing a sickly and cadaverous-looking infant, wailing and moaning as is in pain or wanting nutriment. She is offering it the breast but it is as flaccid and cold as marble.

“She has no endearments for her child, it is held as a burden, passively and carelessly. She is thin, pale and badly dressed, is without bonnet and her cap is soiled and ragged. Her bosom is exposed, her gown filthy, her shoes one half on her feet and her aspect forlorn and forbidding.

“She too disappears for a time into the gin shop, remains longer than her husband, but returns equally changed.

“The child is now crowing in her arms, clapping its tiny hands and is filled with infantine mirth, while its mother views it with fondness, joins in its vociferations, tosses it in her arms and kisses it like a normal mother.

“She passes on cheerily her whole gait is altered, her cheeks are flushed and she thinks herself happy, for her maternal feelings are aroused and her inebriated child seems to her own disordered senses the paragon of beauty and delight.

“The pair have now reached home - night is far advanced and the fumes of their intoxication are worn off or become converted into sullenness.

“The child is in a stupor and the husband and wife meet without a single kindly greeting.

“There is no food, no fire. Bickerings arise, mutual recriminations, blows, curses till both at last sink into the stupefied sleep of drunkenness, worn out by toil, excessive stimulus and evil passions, leaving the child lying on a rickety chair from which it must inevitably fall should it awake.”

The ‘good old days’ were certainly not so good for some!