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The Temperance Severn was no joke for furtive Sunday drinkers in Wales

SLOPING HAVEN: The Sloop Inn today

Drone columnists hug themselves with glee for thinking up the term Temperance Severn for the barrier that used to divide ‘wet’ England from ‘dry’ Wales.


It wasn’t so funny for those brought up in the fifties in a country where drinking alcohol in pubs on a Sunday was banned for 80 years.


The barrier that affected my teenage imbibing wasn’t the River Severn but the Wye which flows into it. The England-Wales border ran down the middle. (I regularly swam from one country to another).


It was possible, if you had a car, to drive over the border for a Sunday drinking in ‘wet’ England. But few then had that luxury. Instead, groups of drinkers, including me, would defy the law to enjoy a Sunday pint of Cheltenham&Gloucester brewery’s finest huddled, conspiratorially, in back rooms and the corridor of my local, the Sloop Inn in Llandogo. 


This is the village ‘a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ where Wordsworth wrote his iconic poem while staying at The Rectory.


Our local copper, PC Cawley, a brick shithouse lookalike from deep in the Rhondda, must have known. But so long as we weren’t playing darts and crib boisterously in the Public or singing Myfanwy or Counting The Goats loudly in the Snug he left us alone.


Then, in 1961, we had a referendum and the Sunday Closing (Wales) Act 1881 was no more. At least where we lived. It took another two years for mid Wales to follow us and the last district, Dwyfor in the north, lasted out until 1996.


Why did Wales go dry anyway? The temperance movement and the chapels set the bandwagon rolling and Gladstone’s Liberal government jumped aboard. According to historian John Davies, pubs in Wales had become ‘recruiting centres for the Conservative Party’.


Achyfi! That would never do, would it.


ROGER Ap WATKYNS


11 August 2024