HOW THEY HELD THEIR LIQUOR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 769, 15 April 1954, Page 8

HOW THEY HELD THEIR LIQUOR

(From ROUGH ISLAND STORY: A Social History of New Zealand in the 20th Century, a Report published 2054 A.D. by the Department of Internal Affairs.) OOKING back, we find it a matter for regret that the old-time "pubs" were either destroyed, or ruined by renovation during the ‘fifties and *sixties. One initial cause of ‘this was perhaps the curious linking of the business of providing lodgings for travellers with that of purveying beer, wine and spirits to the general public-an irrational survival from the old horse-and-buggy, bona-fide traveller days of New Zealand’s infancy. It led, on the one hand, to the ordinary drinker having to subsidise the commercial traveller and the tourist (for every hotel relied on its bar trade for most of its takings, and ren its accommodation service at a heavy ‘!oss); and on the other hand to a sustained effort, on the part of. the Licensing Commission of the day, to "improve" hotels for tourists by compelling them to provide luxurious bedrooms and other amenities, and to reconstruct their bars so that they iooked like scientific laboratories. In this process of "improvement" (carried out, one must reiterate, at the expense of the ordinary bar-drinker, who obtained no benefit from it), most of the ‘historic

pubs, With their friendly atrhosphere and ‘pleasant associations, ‘were either abolished, or so changed by vulgar and pretentious "modernisation" that today the few that remain are unrecognisable. But this was merely part of a larger process. During the period from about 1950 onwards, the drinking of alcoholic liquor in hotels became increasingly so expensive and so unpleasant that it was only the reforms of 1984, which made liquor available in restaurants, cafes and grocers’ shops, that prevented the nation-wide adoption of mescalin, the cactus drug popularised by the novelist Aldous Huxley, in place of the traditional stimulants, As for, the drinking habits of that generation when they were in their own homes, an interesting sidelight on. the customs of the day is supplied by that grand old man Lord Heathcote (formerly Sir Denis Glover) in_ his. re-cently-published book of memoirs, Arawata and After: or, From Bowyang to Bell-topper. He writes: " ‘Parties,’ as we used to call them, were an almost nightly occurrence in those days, and gay affairs they were. For my own part, I found myself much too busy during the ‘Nifty Fifties’ to pursue an active social life-I was, during that period, working almost uninterruptedly on my biographies of Walter D’Arcy Cresswell and Hector Bolitho. But I can remember being told of many occasions when, on leaving such a convivial gathering, a guest was compelled to step over the recumbent figures of a dozen or twenty revellers in order to get to the door. Those were rollicking days." Another writer of the period, a traveller from the, at that time, somewhat uncivilised continent of North America, gives a vivid description of a native ceremony he inadvertently interrupted one Saturday afternoon: "The public bar, as they call it, was packed with men, but no women were present. They stood _ stock-still, their heads bowed in reverence, each holding a glass of liquor, while (as it seemed) the voice of a priest was heard intoning the service. His nasal monotone, which was amplified to fill every cranny of the building, rose in a slow crescendo to a crisis of religious. emotion, and then sank again quickly and ceased. Glasses were applied to the lips in anact of devotion. Attitudes were relaxed, and soon there was a babel of animated conversation. The intense concentration of all present while the service was in progress, and the eager discussion of it that followed, were strong evidence of the devoutness of these New Zealanders."

A. R. D.

Fairburn