The Great Liquor Day

On March 25th, International Waffle Day is celebrated in many homes. Maybe you make waffles at home yourself, or buy one in a cozy café, or in a stall for income for a charity? But March 25th also marks something completely different, admittedly nothing is usually done about this day in the thousands of homes, but that is perhaps not so strange, when you hear what it is about.

So what is the Great Liquor Day? What is it about? And where does it come from? There are several different versions of the story of Liquor Day. It has been said that the Lofoten fishery was over on 25th March. A history of origin for the Great Liquor Day is that it was duly celebrated in the fishing villages with strong drinks for everyone.

At the end of the Lofoten fishery, there was also a tradition “to hanse”. The one they called Skårungen, the youngest in the boat, on his very first trip to the Lofoten Sea that season, had to treat the crew to drinks on the last day of fishing. There were also other “hanses”, including the Chieftain’s, if it was his first year as a Chieftain.

We can therefore imagine that there was a lot of rowdy activities in the fishing villages around this time of year, and a lot of strong drinks in circulation.

This leads us to another liquor story from the end of March, and it is actually about the temperance movement!

Alcohol consumption in the northernmost part of the country was mentioned by several people in the 1700s. The parish priest Sigvart Kildal described Vågan in 1764 as “this Sodom of brandy” During the century, the framework for trade in the north was tightened, and one of the goals was to overcome the sale and consumption of so-called “useless goods”. Among these “useless goods” was, of course, the liquor. When the regulation of innkeepers’ rights came, this limited who could sell alcohol. The very first to receive such a right was Arnt Schøning in Steigen.

Throughout the 1800s, many people had expressed great concern about the conditions in the fishing villages during winter fishing. People came from far away to small villages with little infrastructure to take care of such large numbers of people. The district doctors told of drunkenness and violence and prostitution galore. People suddenly lived as close together as in barrels, drinking, defecating wherever there was room and having intimate contact for a fee. Winter fishing attracted not only fishermen, but also prostitutes. STDs and other infectious diseases spread like wildfire.

The really profitable herring fishery in the mid-1800s gradually declined, but the number of people in the fishing villages during the Lofoten fishery continued to increase throughout the century. The work as a fisherman was dangerous. The chance of dying at sea was great, and the joy of coming ashore with a fully loaded boat was probably just as great every time.

Throughout the second half of the 1800s, we see a marked decline in alcoholism throughout the country. Laestadianism has its share of the credit for this, along with the Salvation Army, the Inner Seamen’s Mission, established in Eidsfjorden during the herring fishery in 1879, and the Lapp Mission, to name a few. The temperance movement was on the rise.

This was also visible in the fisheries, where several traders actually gave up the right to run alcohol sales for reasons of conscience, including Lars Berg, the father of the painter Gunnar Berg in Svolvær.

Smuggled alcohol was nevertheless quite possible to get hold of in the fishing villages. You could buy both over the scratch from moored vessels, from tents set up in a hurry, or from cellars and shelters under roofs that often identified themselves as coffee houses.

In Kabelvåg there were so many such shops in one place, that people started calling the stretch “Brandystreet”.

There was great frustration over this, not only among the authorities, but among the fishermen themselves. Drunkenness and fornication made many men unable to work for short or long periods. Hungover workers do not do good work, and injuries as a result of drunken fights could have significant financial consequences for the crews.

Therefore, it is perhaps not so strange that one Sunday at the end of March, the fishermen found it in their hearts to put an end to this misery once and for all.

At the end of March in 1895, admittedly not on the 25th March, but on the 24th, on a Sunday, about 2000 fishermen went into action in Stamsund. They are said to have marched together from house to house, that were known to sell smuggled alcohol, and break windows, breaking open doors and pouring out all the alcohol they came across.

Some merchants resisted, and the newspaper “Den 17de mai” tells of a Swede who fired a shotgun at the attackers and injured three people.

The incident was nicknamed “The Great Liquor War”, and there were rumours that similar actions would be carried out in Kabelvåg.

The incident was so dramatic that the County Governor came travelling to Stamsund to meet the fishermen, and the following year both the minister and the Director of Public Prosecutions travelled up north to observe the conditions.

All this led to new tightening of the regulations and an increase in fines. Thus, we got the “Act of 27 July 1896 for the prevention of smuggling of spirituous beverages in Tromsø diocese’s rural districts”.

When the anniversary edition of Johan Bojer’s The Last Viking was published in 1974, the artist Kaare Espolin Johnson contributed illustrations, and among these we find the silkscreen print illustrating the ruckus in Stamsund, which the artist has simply called “The Great Liquor Day”

Sources:

Hutchinson, Alan and Elstad, Åsa. 2015. The History of Nordland 2 In the days of the County Governor. Fagbokforlaget.

Kolle, Nils. 2014. Norwegian Fisheries and Coastal History Volume 3 An industry in transformation 1880-1970. Fagbokforlaget.

On May 17, “They were police themselves” on May 26, 1895.