| Description Of Item | Press cutting of page 2 from the North British Daily Mail, published 15 January 1870.
Article titled ‘Pauper Lunacy and the Beer Trade, shocking disclosures by a brewer’. It reports on the weekly meeting of the Liverpool Workhouse Committee on the subject of pauper lunacy. A brewer, Mr Glover, had visited asylums where superintendents told him that drunkenness was seen as ‘the cause of the increase in pauper lunatics’. He then asked for an inspector to be appointed, to ensure the quality of the drink sold: ‘the Health Committee ought to […] see that good beer was given to the people’. For him, bad beer could cause lunacy. He explained how some dishonest people would add ingredients prohibited by law to be able to sell stale beer. ‘Honestly-brewed beer’, if it were good, ‘would neither kill [a working man] nor drive him mad’.
From the collection of Thomas Laycock. |