Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get my cancerous scrotum looked at coughs up chimney dust
The lower photo is a BTS from the Great Train Robbery movie, from 1978:
The photo of alleged drunken sailors, titled “Actors ‘Sleeping’ Draped Over Ropes” in the Getty Images archive, actually stems from the production of the film The Great Train Robbery (1978):
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hangover-drunken-sailors-ropes/
BTS?
Behind the scenes.
Ha funny to see that referenced in the wild. A podcast I used to produce did a big two part series on that heist.
The rope trick sounds like a good idea to put on a plane
Oh great, thanks for that suggestion. 6 months from now when airlines bring out the “no seat just a rope” economy option, we’ll know who to blame.
Well sitting is bad for your health anyway! Human body wasnt meant for sitting [/sarcasm]
The human body however was definitely meant to be slung over a rope and then flown thousands of miles through the air to land in a tropical country and get plastered.
It’s how nature intended
People don’t want to work anymore, they just want to lay in wooden boxes all day.
I wanted to lay in a wooden box all day before it was cool
I pulled up the Wikipedia article for the 4 penny coffins and found that George Orwell is one of the references for it. Thought that was interesting. Here’s the page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_penny_coffin
The reference is from his first book which was all about his experiences living with the downtrodden in Paris and London. In fact that’s why he used the pen name George Orwell - he didn’t want to risk harming the reputation of his middle class family.
… the coffin house was popular because it offered an economical and mid-range solution for homeless clients …
Another great source is Henry Mayhew’s “London Labour and the London Poor”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Labour_and_the_London_Poor
If you let capitalism go unrestrained and unregulated and uncontrolled.
Capitalist would be more than be happy to reintroduce slave labour, child labour and farming humans for slavery much like they do cattle or horses.
And do you own a house? A car? Property? … even if you think you do, are you paying a mortgage or loan payments for these things? … then you are not a capitalist. Even if you do own these things without any loan, chances are that if you are not a millionaire, you will eventually lose these things anyway.
You and I would end up being one of those people that would end up as slaves to be bought and sold.
When he was a serf, they said to him, “Let me find you in this field: I will hang you if I find you in anyone else’s field.” But now he is a tramp they say to him, “You shall be jailed if I find you in anyone else’s field: but I will not give you a field.” They say, “You shall be punished if you are caught sleeping outside your shed: but there is no shed.” If you say that modern magistracies could never say such mad contradictions, I answer with entire certainty that they do say them. A little while ago two tramps were summoned before a magistrate, charged with sleeping in the open air when they had nowhere else to sleep. But this is not the full fun of the incident. The real fun is that each of them eagerly produced about twopence, to prove that they could have got a bed, but deliberately didn’t. To which the policeman replied that twopence would not have got them a bed: that they could not possibly have got a bed: and therefore (argued that thoughtful officer) they ought to be punished for not getting one. The intelligent magistrate was much struck with the argument: and proceeded to imprison these two men for not doing a thing they could not do. But he was careful to explain that if they had sinned needlessly and in wanton lawlessness, they would have left the court without a stain on their characters; but as they could not avoid it, they were very much to blame.
The desperate man to-day can do nothing. For you cannot agree with a maniac who sits on the bench with the straws sticking out of his hair and says, “Procure threepence from nowhere and I will give you leave to do without it.”
(GK Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils)
Remember, kids!
Unregulatedcapitalism is not your friend!This lead me down a rabbit hole an introduced me to “Mother’s Ruin” of the cheap gin sold at the time:
It gets even more wild the more you read of that article. One guy pawning his wife for a quart of gin…then the government crackdown when things started getting even worse!
That was a nice read. Thanks for sharing!
14 gallons per year? Rookie numbers! I drank more than that on a single 7-day binge!
That 14 gallons number raised all kinds of questions for me:
- What potency was this gin that could be consumed in this quantity but without killing so many more of its consumers?
- How can they possibly produce gin this cheap? Slave labor from the Caribbean?
- What would the logistics look like to move this much gin to a population consuming this much? This is the days before motor vehicles so everything would have had to be moved by human or horse/donkey/mule/cow pulled cart. Steam engines wouldn’t arrive for another 100 years. So it was likely animal cart the number of barrels of gin must have been a river of full carts moving into the city and a river of empty ones headed out all the time.
- Public sanitation didn’t really exist. Public sewer systems wouldn’t arrive for another 100 years or so so the entire city must have smelled like urine all the time.
- With the sheer number of gin containers needed for this volume, did they have a “deposit” on bottles like we have sometimes today? Did they have an underground economy of people collecting empties to trade back in?
Well your going to wish you weren’t so curious with this one. Source of this information: several museum visits around 30 years ago after a pint or three, so the info might be warped.
Gin is a double-distilled 40% or higher spirit flavored with juniper + other flavors.
The source of the alcohol was any carbohydrate or starch source. Whatever was cheapest. It was mostly wheat and barley at the time but just about anything else cheap could be used like rye, turnips, etc. For the cheapest rotgut the ingredients was stuff considered unfit for animal feed (rodent feces, insect damage, molds, water damage, etc).
Since their ingredients were highly questionable, their input cost was minimal. Heating was from coal. They also started making larger batches which further reduced down the cost.
Logistics - Canals at this time period was the most important logistic. One donkey pulling a barge could move as much as 50 wagons. Tons of goods were transported cheaply and efficiently on the barges. The gin was shipped in casks/barrels like beer/ale. Bottles were very expensive and reserved for the elite.
Public sanitation consisted of a gutter on the side of the road. The entire city smelled like the open sewer it was.
The gin was not served in bottles. It was served like beer or ale into cups/mugs/communal tankards etc … mostly earthenware, leather or wood.
Great info on the process of manufacturing. I know that some spirits have to come from some specific carb sources, but it makes sense that if its just goal of mass production of ethanol, then I suppose they weren’t picky about their carb source.
Canals makes a lot of sense for higher volume cargo, thank you.
The gin was not served in bottles. It was served like beer or ale into cups/mugs/communal tankards etc … mostly earthenware, leather or wood.
Would the gin be consumed exclusively in bars/taverns where it could be dispensed into mugs? Even then, the gin had to be in a larger container to be delivered to the tavern, a barrel I presume? Were coopers in crazy high demand always making new barrels or were the empty barrels turned around and refilled?
Barrels were reused until they could no longer be repaired or salvaged. Cooper’s had steady guaranteed work for their skills.
Consumption was mostly at the public houses/taverns for the lower/middle classes.
Slave labor from the Caribbean?
You’re thinking of rum on that one.
I am, you’re right. Where did England’s gin come from?
Never looked into making gin, but juniper berries are plenty plentiful!
Not that I’m going to follow through with this, but this has got me thinking about all the waste streams from food production with excess carbs that could be used to make alcohol.
- stale bread
- skins/peels of various fruits and vegetables from processing to other products like apple juice, baby carrots, potato chips/crisps.
- excess dairy milk production/near expiry dairy milk
- stale popcorn that gets thrown away from movie theaters/sporting events
- everyone uses nearly black bananas for banana bread. Why not use those carbs for fermenting into alcohol?
Damn, that rope’s pretty posh by 2025 standards…
George Orwell wrote about his experiences with those in Down and Out in Paris and London. It’s a decent book and an interesting look at poverty of the day.
Is that true? Did they really sleep on the ropes like that?
I find that hard to believe. The ground would be more comfortable.
except, the ground is outside in the freezing london winter, during an age with draconian ‘move along’ laws that mean you’d be hassled by cops all night. ground would be more comfortable, that’s why the coffin costs 4 pennies.
There would be blood loss to the limbs and nerve damage from any appreciable time strung out like that.
No, it’s a scene from a movie.
Not like the picture. The rope was more to stop you falling off the bench where you were sitting up asleep.
For an extra penny [than a one penny sit up] you could pay to sleep literally hanging over a rope. This was possibly marginally more comfortable, as if you fell asleep the rope would prevent you from slipping onto the floor or head-butting the bench in front of you.
https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Two-Penny-Hangover/
Edit - none of the sites mentioning it have any sources. The closest to a source I’ve found quickly is this passage from Dickens Pitwick Papers, which to me doesn’t sound like the arrangement as described in the photo but perhaps something more akin to hammocks. Especially given the part that says “down falls the lodgers”
And pray Sam, what is the twopenny rope?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick. ‘The Twopenny rope, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller, ‘is just a cheap lodgin’ house where the beds is twopence a night!’ ‘What do they call a bed a rope for?’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Well the advantage o’ the plan’s obvious. At six o’clock every mornin’, they lets go the ropes at one end, and down falls all the lodgers. Consequence is that, being thoroughly waked, they get up very quickly, and walk away.’”
This site https://www.geriwalton.com/victorian-four-penny-coffins-penny-beds-homelessness/ says that the coffins were actually 2 pennies, or 4 with a meal. So why would someone sit over a rope for the same price? Again a hammock type arrangement here seems more logical to me.
This was basically like Victorian pre-mobility (trains/metro) for this class, so people could commute only as far they could reasonably walk in a day. And offerings & prices prob varied.
Libs: Is this Abundance™?
This is an example of capitalism providing an economical solution where no one else did.
Sure it sucks, but at least they can get a minimum level of safety while on the 10 year wait list for government housing.
What the fuck? This is an example of the extreme commodification of poverty and the state’s failure to protect its citizens.
It’s neither. I don’t remember the context exactly but none of the text on the picture is true.
As compared to today, where we humanely let homeless people sleep under bridges instead
The states didn’t fix anything, they only legislate against its visibility when its exploitation becomes troublesome to them
It appears to me that we actively made the problem worse by removing shelter options from the market. It seems like you USED to be able to pay a small fee to sleep somewhere with a roof over your head, and now your only options are $1800/mo in rent, or sleeping on the street.
No, I fail to see how the image shows a failure of capitalism. I think the lack of affordable options today is a failure of our own fucked up form of government
Its a states failure to protect its citizens but its not a commodificaton of poverty. Poverty has always had value and always been a commodity. They aren’t creating the poverty or the circumstances that would perpetuate it. They’re just fulfilling a need so its really no harm.
What?
A modern circumstance would be refusal to raise min wage to a reasonable wage. That’s absolutely a circumstance abetting poverty. If you don’t believe in that, then unfettered capitalism is commodifying poverty and increasing disparity.
You either maximize rules and services to prevent poverty, or you allow exploitation to increase it.
Unless they were in cahoots with the government to ensure housing prices remain high. I’m not saying that was the case back then but the incentive was always there.
You’re getting massively down voted. I really feel like this is a huge obstacle to mitigating poverty in the first world. People focus on appearances; getting rid of things that look poor even when they actually help people.
Yes, it’s upsetting to see people taking such desperate measures. But those measures were taken in response to desperate need. If you fixed the need, then they would go away on their own. If you need to apply force to remove them, then you have not.
It’s the same reason people oppose public transit, dense housing, and informal businesses. Things that are just part of life in the third world. But wealthy and middle class westerners have decided on behalf of poor westerners that poor westerners are too good for them.
nice try comrade!
