Spirited opposition

Introduction

Victorian Bournemouth (132) analyses attitudes towards increasing the resort’s licensed establishments during the 1870s. Before 1869, a trader might obtain a licence to sell alcohol by paying a fee to the local excise officer. Thereafter, magistrates, sitting in session, controlled the supply of such licences. Their annual ‘brewster courts’ provided good copy for press reporters. The hearings offer insights into the perceptions of alcohol’s use and the role it played across different sections of Bournemouth’s society at this period. 

Victorian Bournemouth (132): control of alcohol 

Class control

Controls on the amount and strength of alcoholic beverages for sale to the public provided ways for affluent and respectable people during the early Victorian period to manage their working counterparts. According to their stereotype of working people, other types believed that drunkenness threatened order, property, and the social structure. Opposition to grocers’ off-licences at Bournemouth lay in fears that ‘wives of working men’ might succumb to temptation. Protective of her model village in Winton, Miss Talbot’s group resisted a licence for the Fitzharris Arms because more than a hundred working men passed the building each day. Sir Drummond Wolfe, sometime M. P., illustrated this prejudice at the opening of his Boscombe Spa Hotel. He drew ‘an amusing picture before the magistrates’ present at the event ‘of what might happen to themselves if a rigid application of the more stringent provisions of the Licensing Act were enforced’ that day.

Acceptance and opposition

Bournemouth’s Brewster Courts during the 1870s varied their behaviour according to an applicant’s licensing history. Press accounts made brief reference to the numbers of licences renewed. Each year they renewed more than a hundred licences for public houses, refreshment houses, wine sales, and grocers. If the licence owner avoided stains on his personal character and prevented disorderliness in his establishment, then renewal appeared to face little difficulty. Detailed scrutiny, however, including opposition, occurred when people applied for new licences or transfers. Opponents appeared to accept the established base of outlets but sought to prevent its increase. Some opposition occurred because licence-holders in the applicant’s locality wanted to avoid competition. Other opposition occurred for social reasons. Nevertheless, in more than a hundred such applications listed during the 1870s about three quarters succeeded. Magistrates came to recognise standard lists of opponents to a licence, used irrespective of where they lived.

Victorian Bournemouth (132): courts at work

Transfers and renewals

Most of the renewals appeared to succeed without further detail in the press reports. A handful of applications, however, did receive press attention. The magistrates passed half, a mixture of licences for grocers and for public houses. Half failed, for the most part public houses. The reason for failure consisted of reported bad character statements or convictions concerning the applicant. This happened for the notorious Fitzharris Arms in Winton as well as the Palmerston Arms in Boscombe. Licence transfers accounted for about a fifth of all the cases found reported for Bournemouth’s Brewster Courts during the 1870s. Almost all these applications succeeded, many concerning family members. For example, the Pembroke Hotel, the Westbourne Hotel, and the Dolphin Inn moved between family members without apparent difficulty. A technical problem with her late husband’s will prevented Caroline Coles from taking on his licence, but she appears to have succeeded later. 

New applications

About three quarters of the cases concerned new applications for a licence. Compared to the transfers and renewals, these applications failed more often. The magistrates refused about a third of applications for new licences. Applications for outdoor licences had the best chance of success. Most of those wanting an off-licence also succeeded. Failures occurred for technical reasons: unfinished building, a query about a design feature, a mistake in the application. In contrast, the chances for obtaining a new on-licence only ran about evens. Local opposition accounted for most of the failures, but, in one case, the magistrates judged that too many licences existed within the applicant’s area. Most of the failures occurred in either Boscombe or Winton, where local opposition overturned the applications. Repeated failed attempts occurred to obtain a licence for the Fitzharris Arms in Winton. Joint applications for licences at the East Station also experienced protracted failure.

Victorian Bournemouth (132): pressure on brewers

The Dolphin Brewery

During the 1870s, Winton resembled Springbourne, in that it housed a growing number of labourers and construction artisans. A key difference, however, lay in the presence of Georgina Talbot’s model village, built to accommodate working people in comfort, but also temperance. The Fitzharris Arms, a Winton pub, owned by Godwin, a Blandford brewer, lost its licence in 1870 due to its tenant’s bad character. They sold it to the Dolphin brewery, Poole. Dolphin tried each year to regain the licence. They chose as tenant Ephraim Ford, a local beer-shop keeper. A former policeman, married to the daughter of a prison warder, even Ford at first could not persuade the court against Miss Talbot’s opposition. The brewery changed the name to the patriotic Queen Victoria. This appears to have contributed to Ford’s success in 1877. The Fords did not, however, stay long, choosing to emigrate to Australia in the 1880s.

Eldridge Pope

At the same period, Eldridge Pope, a Dorchester brewery, experienced opposition at two of its sites: the Prince of Wales and the South-Western hotel. Its tenant expanded the Prince of Wales, located off Commercial Road, into the adjoining building. Opposition claimed that the licence did not apply to the extension. The case involved much legal attention, the tenant going bankrupt. Supported by the brewery, the tenant of the Excelsior Dining Rooms, located at East Station, Springbourne, wanted to extend his licence to the nearby South-Western Hotel. A complicated sequence of events occurred, including opposition from another licence holder at the station. In the end, Eldridge Pope offered to close the Excelsior if they obtained a licence for the hotel. This succeeded but only if the building’s design had a restricted access. To win, the brewery accepted this limitation but later tried to change this.

Takeaway

Victorian Bournemouth (132) has examined press reports of the annual Brewster Court’s decisions on licence applications during the 1870s. Tenants of establishments already licensed, provided they avoided charges of bad character, tended to renew their licences without much opposition. Temperance supporters, but also some competitors, concentrated their attention on trying to prevent the spread of new licences. Their efforts forced the breweries involved into extended action and legal cost.

References

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