Those years of prohibition

Jacqui and I moved to New Zealand straight after our marriage, in 1959, and when we arrived there we found a country suffering the evil hardships of prohibition! I know the hours of opening in the UK were pretty stupid too, but at least they were organised so that you could get a drink with your lunch, between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, and again for evening pleasures, from six until about ten thirty.

But in New Zealand, (and, I believe Australia too), the pubs opened at something like eight in the morning, were open for the whole working day and then had to close at six in the evening, just when people actually wanted to start enjoying themselves; it was totally illogical! These hours led to men missing work during the day, boozing hard before going home (more on that later), and littering the streets with drunks from six o’clock until about seven when most of them managed to stagger off home, often carrying a carton of Dominion Bitter under their arms to see them through the evening. It was a frightening time for women to be about too, they were likely to be accosted by some lush who thought, because of his state, that he was God’s gift to women, and it can be quite hard to get rid of a romantically inclined drunk!

Another of the problems with prohibition was the fact that it encouraged otherwise perfectly innocent people to break the law. For instance, if you went out to a nice restaurant in the evening you had to illicitly, because the restaurant couldn’t supply it, take a bottle of wine or beer with you, which you hid in a small cupboard thoughtfully provided by the restaurant, at the side of your table. You would then be given tea-cups to drink from instead of wine glasses, which you were supposed to gulp down quickly, should the law arrive at the door. The fact was, of course, that no-one ever got caught unless they created a disturbance anywhere, because the police were as much against the silly rule as anyone. After all, they liked to go out somewhere with their wives or girlfriends after duty as much as anyone else!

Now I’ll be the first to admit I was as much a part of this rush to the boozer as anyone, just on a Friday afternoon, when the firm we worked for closed at four for the weekend. Several of us crammed into one of the blokes’ cars and off we went as fast as possible towards the city, fourteen kilometres away, (we had to go there, New Lynn where the office was, was a ‘dry area’), then into our favourite bar, packed with earlier arrivals. The room was more like a public toilet than the gentle, homely bars I was used to in an English pub, (those who have been over there will know what I mean), there were no tables or chairs, all the walls and the floor were covered in glazed white ceramic tiles and the bar, along one wall dispensed beer into large jugs which each of us held in one hand with a schooner glass in the other.

The barman walked up and down the bar with what looked exactly like a petrol pump in his hand, though perhaps a little smaller, and every time you held your jug out he would fill it with that. By the time the place closed at six o’clock my mates and I were quite drunk and we then had to stagger off and find an appropriate bus to get to our homes, except the driver of the car – I have no idea what he did!

In retrospect it really was awful and I’m very glad the hated and unworkable prohibition was eventually done away with and now a lot of pubs are open twenty-four hours a day. At least you don’t get the streets full of drunks at six in the evening any more, in fact, because people can now spread their drinking time more, a lot fewer of them get noisy-drunk anyway, plus of course there is the new prohibition we have to put up with, the dreaded ‘point O-five’, but this one I agree with, it does save a lot of lives.