Preventing drinking for children’s welfare was one of the major arguments for temperance. This extended to educating children about abstinence from alcohol in the hope that they would never be tempted themselves, thus breaking the drinking cycle. A 1925 letter to the editor of The Argus by W. H. Rose, Band of Hope of Victoria, describes the importance of educating children about not drinking. “There is an urgent need that the child, the future citizen, be given proper training in the truth concerning alcoholic liquors before the liquor has been gripped or the liquor habit acquired.”
One of the ways this teaching could be done was through non-fictional and fictional literature. The Healthy Options Australia archive contains many examples of textbooks, other non-fictional works and stories, which may be of great interest to historians and researchers of children’s education, medical history and temperance. As well as the temperance message, they provide insight into social attitudes of their time.
Periodicals were one way to spread the temperance message, and there were often segments for children within temperance periodicals such as the Queensland Prohibitionist like The Prolliwog’s Own. These were filled with riddles, stories, comics and activities and provided instruction and encouragement for children to take action.
Some typical pages from The Prolliwog’s Own.
Children could join a Band of Hope branch, in which they signed a pledge never to touch alcohol as part of their initiation and were taught more about abstinence. One such pledge can be seen in the Museums Victoria collection.
Some works take a strictly factual approach. Examples of these are Albert F. Blaisdell’s scientific textbooks: The Child’s Book of Health, Our Bodies and How We Live and How to Keep Well. These textbooks were aimed at teaching temperance along with other things including how the body works, anatomy, good posture and hygiene. They are often beautifully illustrated, as can be seen below.
Among the scientific books in the collection are Lessons and Experiments on Scientific Hygiene and Temperance for Elementary School Children by Helen Coomber is a book of experiments that children could carry out to learn more about alcohol. Giant Alcohol; Or Talks with the Young on the Science of Temperance by William Spiers is another series of lessons for children about temperance.
Other books take a moral approach. John Murray’s Why Not Have a Drink – If You’re a Christian? focuses on teenagers who might be tempted to drink and appeals to their sense of morality as Christians. In a similar vein, the Temperance Teaching for the Children of the Church by C. R. Gant is a series of church addresses that could be read to children about temperance.
Some authors such as Margaret Baker wrote nonfictional and fictional temperance literature, and many of her titles can be found within the archive. These stories, like many others, are often simplistic and heavy-handed to get the message across to its audience. The Bottle Explains is one example of a story in which a boy named Jack rejects alcohol, personified as a walking bottle, because drinking will not allow him to have any job.
The bottle itself was used as a symbol of degeneracy in children’s educational material by the American Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
Other stories include Jack Tayler’s Visit to Venus and Shawn Starts the Fight. These pulp fiction style books show young people learning more about temperance through adventures.
The Don’t-Know Family by Noel Hope follows the day to day adventures of the titular family as they make their way through life, making mistakes and learning lessons, until the climatic death of Daddy Don’t-Know from alcohol-induced causes. His death, as well as the plight of his family, is seen as a warning to others within the neighbourhood to stop drinking. This appeal to emotion, also known as pathos, is common in temperance stories.
The illustrations of both fictional and non-fictional books are often striking and eccentric by today’s standards. However, they show the seriousness of the issues they often discuss.
An illustration from The Don’t Know Family, the alarming cover of Giant Alcohol Talks with the Young on the Science of Temperance and a page from The Prolliwog’s Own.
The Healthy Options Archive is housed at Unit 30, Jackman Street, Southport. For more details contact the Healthy Options Library on 07 3620 8871 or email library@hoa.org.au.
by Chloe Pickard