War, Peace & whiskyfad - Blog post by Jonas Stengaard Jensen
Read this blog post about War, Peace & Whiskyfad and get a historical look back at the influence of whisky on World War 1 written by Jonas Stengaard Jensen
Posts by Jonas Stengaard Jensen
At half past five on the morning of May 9, 1915, the fatal whistles wail across no man's land. After 40 minutes of intense bombardment, row upon row of khaki-clad figures rise like ghastly ghosts from mud and slime to meet their fate. About half a kilometer further on, the flower of British youth is buried under an avalanche of fire, steel and despair. The Battle of Aubers cost the British Expeditionary Force close to 11,000 casualties and barely secured no territorial gains for the Allies.
On the home front, there was no hesitation in identifying the cause of this disaster. Lack of will to win? Absolutely not! The incompetent generals with an absurd faith in Napoleonic tactics in the face of the high-tech horrors of the modern battlefield? Don't be absurd! Drink! Drink was the culprit. To quote Minister of Munitions and later Prime Minister David Lloyd George, "Druk is doing more harm to us in this war than all the German submarines put together. We are fighting Germany, Austria and drink, and to my mind the greatest of these three deadly enemies is drink".
This excited rationalization should be understood to mean that the failure of the offensive was attributed to the lack of artillery shells. In a striking parallel to a current conflict in Eastern Europe at the time of writing, the generals swore that if only supplies had been sufficient, enemy positions would have been pulverized and the brave footsoldiers would have waltzed into Berlin without so much as a heel spur. The following year, this claim was tested at the Somme, where the guns blazed away for a full week before the infantry advanced to much the same tragic and self-evident result.
Nonetheless, the ammunition shortage became a political cudgel with which teetotaler, Chancellor of the Exchequer and prominent advocate of national prohibition David Lloyd George beat his way into the Ministry of Munitions, from where he continued his lifelong crusade against alcohol consumption of any kind, under the guise of increasing productivity in the country's factories and thereby solving the shell shortage. It was far from the first time Welsh wunderkind Lloyd George had sought to curb drinking, but with the war as a backdrop, his authority and influence was almost unbridled. A series of harsh tax hikes were imposed on alcohol producers and severe restrictions on opening hours were placed on numerous licensed premises, especially if they were unfortunate enough to be within range of a shell or weapons factory.
Most of these measures were rolled back after the war, but for whisky, World War 1 was a turning point. World War 1 was a crucial turning point. It had long been known that ageing in wooden casks had a beneficial effect on the quality of distilled alcohol. As a result, rum in particular was considered a luxury product, due to the long time required to ship the sweet drops from Britain's Caribbean possessions back to old Albion. Whisky, on the other hand, was often drunk more or less as clear aquavit straight from the kettle. If cask aging was involved, only the largest and most established producers could afford to leave the precious drops in cask for any significant period of time.
With the shell crisis as a backdrop, Lloyd George put an end to this practice and in 1915, he pushed the The immature spirits act through parliament. This made it illegal to sell whisky younger than initially two and later three years. The argument was that this aging period would mellow the spirit and thus soothe the intoxication of its unfortunate victim. To a certain extent, this can be supported by science, which, as we all know, shows us that a few percent of alcohol, depending on climate and weather conditions, evaporates from a cask every year, the so-called angels share. The underlying logic, of course, was that in the short term, due to the ageing requirement, whisky would be so expensive to produce and the supply so limited that you could hardly afford to get drunk on it if you worked in a factory.
According to the plan, the number of Scotch whisky distilleries fell from just around one and a half hundred in the early 1900s to just over a dozen in the interwar years. However, as Darwin wrote, it was the strongest that survived. Because of this minimum ageing requirement, whisky became an unequivocal luxury product whose image could no longer be tarnished by unscrupulous back alley distillers who filled acetone and fusel into bottles labeled with fancy names and adorned with borrowed feathers. In one of fate's more exquisite pieces of irony, one of whisky drinking's fiercest opponents succeeded in elevating it to the lofty position of king of all alcohol, from which it still stands proudly to this day.
