Australasian Correctional Management

Transcription

>> Okay, let's start again. So, there's the title of my talk. I'm not going to go through that again. So, what I do at [inaudible] is I study the historical geographies of drink. I've been working on this for quite some time now. And in the past, I've looking at things like this, which is a map of licensed premises in London in the 1880s produced by the National Temperance League. More on them later. You might spot the area in the middle is blank of licenses. That's because that's the Bloomsbury Estate. Due to a combination of Temperance leanings and property values, or the defense of property values, Bloomsbury has long remained relatively dry in a sea of red spots. So, that's something I've been interested in in the past. I've also been interested in the inside, as a geographer, thinking about the actual space of the pub does in terms of the way people work and live and think about alcohol and drinking and popular culture. But that's not what I'm talking about today, because over the past five years or so, I've become quite interested in something rather different. That's life assurance, and its relationship to these sorts of questions about drink in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, particularly one company, the United Kingdom Temperance and General Provident Institution, which kept cropping up in my research in various places. It crops up in government reports, select committee reports, investigations of various kinds. For example, the nation's physical deterioration was thought by some to be partly a result of drinking in the early 20th Century. This is -- arguments about the decline of the race, the British race, in the face of imperial competition elsewhere and so on. So alcohol and this particular institution is named in that research, and the research uses their figures to argue a particular point. But, it was also part of a suggested temperance syllabus at elementary schools in 1909. I don't think that ever took off, but again, the figures that the Temperance and General Provident Institution created would have been used to teach children, very small children, the problems of drinking. The institution crops up in temperance arguments over the relationship between abstinence and longevity as well, which mainly what I'll be talking about today. But it's also there in general discussions of the nature and value of temperance. Its figures were used by physicians. They were used by actuaries in insurance companies and they form the basis for papers read at the British Association for the Advancement of Science. So, their figures circulated in all of these different kinds of worlds, scientific, medical, moral, governmental. And I think what's interesting is that it allows us to connect worlds that were often kept rather separate. To give you an example very quickly of what these sorts of connections could look like, I want to talk about a very short-lived discussion between M. T. Bass of the brewing firm, who was also an MP and Edward Vivian, who was a banker and philanthropist based in Torguay, who was one of the directors of the institution that I'm talking about in 1871. He's also connected to the Torquay Museum, which is a very fine museum if I can make a quick plug for it. Bass was speaking at a meeting of the licensed [inaudible] society, which is the sort of trade organization of publicans, and it was often a chance then to defend themselves against temperance workers who were calling for either a reduction in the number of pubs or complete prohibition of the sale of drink. Bass of course, was the kind of man you got on your side to defend brewing and running pubs, and he rubbished the idea that drink was bad for you and particularly the idea that it cut your life expectancy, saying men advancing in years should eat half as much and drink twice as much as they do now. So, he refused to believe there was anything about excess consumption of alcohol that shortened your life expectancy, arguing instead it was the excess eating of the British which was the problem. Vivian responded in the letter columns of "The Times", in a particular way though, and this is just an excerpt from his response, but it looks like this. He didn't go to morality. He didn't talk about the cost of drinking. He didn't talk about the kind of social consequences. He didn't talk about things like time lost to employers through absenteeism, all sorts of things that temperance advocates usually said. He just presented these figures and they're quite hard to see, but it's two sets of figures covered the years 1866 to 1870, the five years before this happened. One refers to something called the total abstinence section and the other is the general section. These are the two main bits of the United Kingdom Temperance and General Provident Institution. The two main sections both insured lives. And I'll come back to this in a moment, but he pointed out there were 25% fewer deaths than expected in the abstainers' section of the UKT, as I'm abbreviating it, and only 5% fewer than expected in the general section. So there were, in other words, prospects for you if you were an abstainer. I'll come back to this, but I think what was interesting when I discovered the way in which these arguments were made, was that it seemed to shine a different light on how people thought about abstinence and temperance and drink. So temperance insurance seems to me to offer a variation on what we normally do when we study temperance, when we study drink in the 19th and early 20th Century. It's another way to examine temperance beyond what we usually say it is, a middle class imposition on the working class. In other words, you know, you've made some money, stop showing off. Stop drinking, know your place. It's also I think more than simply a religious phenomenon or a moral crusade. It's also in this case, anyway, with this institution, a successful business. You could make money out of temperance. It also provides another kind of evidence in the debate about alcohol, which was going on at the time. So this is where Vivian's response comes in. He's not arguing morally or politically. He's arguing through numbers. And also interesting, those numbers had to engage in discussions in contemporary medicine with what people were arguing about consequences of drinking at that point in time. For me, it's also interesting that this is a way into thinking about what ordinary-ish people in Britain thought about drink and abstinence because who insured themselves this company were not the wealthiest and they were certainly weren't the poorest. They were the sort of middle of British society. [Background talking] It's also interesting that something like this is still operating today, although it operates rather differently, as we'll see towards the end. So, the United Kingdom Temperance and General Provident Institution will be the main focus of what I'm going to say. I'm going to talk quickly about how it began. I'm going to talk about how it prospered, how it operated as a temperance organization, and its relevance for life insurance today. So, this is how it started. This is the founder, Robert Warner, who was a businessman. In fact, he was the founder in more than one sense. His company, family company that he ran for many years was a foundry and they made bells. They made the first bell which was put into the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament. Big Ben, in other words, although that one was cracked and they had to send it back. But, he was a very successful businessman operating in the city of London for many decades. He was also very keen botanist and an expert on orchids. There's an illustration there by John Nugent Fitch. It was one of the plates in the book Select Orchidaccous Plants that he published with Benjamin Samuel Williams. He traveled the world with rare orchids. So, a classic Victorian I guess. He was a wealthy man. He had these scientific leanings. But he was also a teetotaller and a Quaker, and that made things slightly different when it came to life insurance. When he was thinking of getting married, he went to three companies to apply for life insurance. Two were more or less pursuaded once his friends weighed in to say that he was a good person. But in the third one, Warner was told that he'd have to pay an extra 10% on his premiums. And the response was later recorded as this, "You are a teetotaller, and the directors consider teetotal lives are worse than ordinary lives." Being teetotal, avoiding alcohol, was a medical risk in those days, and this gives you a sense of not just insurance but medical opinion, as to how people were received in this way. On the other hand, though, Quakers were generally rather long-lived. They were famous because of their sort of prudent habits and their kind of decision to lead a rather quiet life, I suppose, to live very long lives. And they already had their own life insurance company, Friends Providence, which had formed in 1832. So, in response to being rebuffed, Warner and his friends did what most people would do in the circumstances and opened their own company. They opened the U.K Total Abstinence Life Association in 1840, and this is the company that becomes the Temperance and General Provident Institution. There's the prospectus, or one of the two prospectuses that survived from 1840 from the archive scanned by the archivists for me. The middle is a list of patrons' and directors' names. Toward the bottom, the officers of the company. On the left, the agents, the people you would go to in the various towns around Britain and Ireland to get your policy if you couldn't come to the London office on Wargate [assumed spelling], and the medical referees on the right, which is the people you would need to see to be checked out. I'll talk about them in a moment. Applying for a policy brought together medicine and questions of drinking. So, all life insurance companies, not just this one, employed doctors to examine potential lives, in other words, potential applicants and advise on the rejection of bad risks. No insurance company wants to have too many poorly people on its books. Particularly, they were looking out for people who were already unwell, even if they didn't know it themselves, or were unwell and were trying to defraud the company, still something companies worry about. Or worse, people who had hereditary diseases. At the time, T.B. was thought to be something you inherited from your family, so there was a lot written by people in insurance about trying to avoid insuring people who might be consumptive. The use of doctors was very common. It was a very important part of medical practice and life insurance work. The 14 companies that were active in Scotland in the mid- 1850s paid for nearly 9,000 examinations in one year, in 1854, which is a lot of work. And that costs about 6,000 pounds, which is a tremendous sum of money. So you can see something of the scale and importance of this work, both to life insurance and to general practitioners, who would see this as a kind of profitable sideline to their other business. But, by mid-century, many companies are asking doctors to investigate the applicant's drinking, not just their general health, and sort of got themselves into this risk in particular. So, the total abstinence people had been leading the way, but it spread to other companies. We can see this if we look at medical handbooks for life insurance referees, the medical referees I mentioned earlier. Handbooks were written to train these people who we'd now see, I suppose, as general practitioners. And most of the handbooks, I've looked about 20 of them, took drinking very seriously, indeed. In particular, publicans were likely to be in trouble if they sought life insurance. They were very poor lives according to mortality statistics that were collected by the Registrar-General. So when you divided up occupations in this way, publicans had the worst life expectancy, with only butchers rivaling them for short-lived lives. And that was because butchers were generally thought to be very drunken, as well. So many would be rejected by quite a few companies or they would be charged at an extra rate, the opposite of what happened to Warner. Examiners were advised not to trust applicants if they said that they didn't drink, but to look for tell-tale signs. This is one of my favorite anecdotes, well not anecdotes, this was something presented as something to do by the handbook. It was a maxim, something like, "A man who comes to a life insurance examination in the morning smelling of drink is a bad risk," which I think is probably fairly obvious, [audience laughter] but they felt that they needed to say it. So you have to look for the bulbous nose of the drunkard. All these other tell-tale signs are listed in these handbooks. But also to cross-examine family and friends in the hope of catching out the applicant, because you just could not trust them to tell the truth. And they would also ask about the patterns and quantities of drinking, so trying to build up a very detailed sense of just how risky these people might be. But coming back to my institution. This is how it was advertised and sold. On the left-hand side, we have advert from "The Times" in 1842, which really just tells you who the great men of the company are so that you have a sense of trust in them. On the right-hand side, this is something from the directory from basically something like a yellow pages or a phone book now, I suppose, which lists people in different professions in different parts of the world. This is from Leicester 1843, and it's the list of insurance companies, or a chunk of it I've cut out. In the middle, hopefully, you can see Total Abstinence Life, T. Cook of King Street. This was Thomas Cook of travel agency fame, who I'm sure you know started life as a man who organized away days and excursions for teetotallers. So, he was running a sort of parallel temperance business, effectively, to these insurance people. And this is one of the interesting things about this institution. It sought out people like Cook that it knew it could rely on as teetotallers and fellow abstainers, sympathetic minds, in other words, and enrolled them into selling life insurance in various parts of the country. So this company I also a way into local life insurance for me and seeing how it worked in different places. Leicester was a hotbed of life insurance from a temperance perspective for some reason. But the company does change its name from the Total Abstence to the United Kingdom Temperance and General. Under the Total Abstinence's rules, backsliders, people who had to -- people who didn't abstain, had signed a pledge but then would go and drink, would pay an extra 10% on their premiums and they would lose their bonuses. So they were dumped into a section that was essentially a sin-bin for drunken, failed abstainers. But it wasn't working very well. There was a very small number to insure and the company struggled for the first six years. In 1847, they admitted defeat, at least partially, and they added a general section for moderate drinkers, so they now had abstainers and general moderate drinkers. And they changed their name to the Temperance and General to reflect that. And, this was much more successful as you'll see in a moment. Bonuses were calculated separately for the two section, but the first bonus was actually put off. They were meant to pay out an extra bonus in 1850, but the business was still a little shaky. And they promised everybody that if they were still alive, or if their people who were going to get the money were still around in 1855, they would get an extra bonus. And that actually did happen. But, it was a flourishing office. It was a mutual office run for and by the members, not the shareholders. In 1854, it eight and a half thousand members. In 1857, 12,000 members. In 1864, 30,000 members. Then it drops in 1877 to 26,000 members. And this I think reflects the fact that life insurance companies constantly have to keep promoting themselves and finding new people, because the nature of life insurance is that you lose people every now and again, to death or they live long enough to claim their reward and go away with the pot of money they have been waiting for. So, this is 37 years after the company starts and they've lost a lot of people, hopefully not all of them have died, but it's a whole generation of people have had their policies mature or have died. So, in 1897, in terms of capital, this company was the 7th largest life insurance company in Britain, which is astonishing. And it's certainly the largest mutual, I think probably the largest mutual life company. The ones at the top were the people like the Prudential, who were enormous and had a different sort of strategy and also, American firms; the New York Life had moved in and was the largest in 1897. So, it was actually doing extraordinarily well as a life insurance company, and it was still going in 1986, when it was bought out by Friends Providence. In fact, I suppose it's possible somebody in this room might have a life insurance policy with this company, or perhaps a mortgage with these people because they did last so long. If we look at this graph right quickly, this is the number of policies issued per annum. It's -- yes, you can see that, hopefully. It's possible to see in the first ten years or so that it was quite tricky for them to go over 500 policies a year, to add that many people to it, so its policies. But once they changed to the Temperance and General, that number starts to rise, reaching nearly 1,000 by the early 1850s. And then it just climbs, because in the 1850s, it looks as if this company hit the road. One of the great things about having teetotal advocates as your salesmen, and they were all men, is that they are very keen to press things upon people. They're not people who have to do this because they get paid. They are doing it out of a sense of moral duty, as well. So, a tremendous surge, and then a collapse, I think again, reflecting this sort of dying back of their original investors. And then it starts to climb again, although you can see there are plenty of gaps in the top of the table because I have yet to find all of these figures. It's quite difficult to do. Total funds, not much to say about this, but again, a kind of steady rise. Just to show you, this is what they were worth. This is their total investments, their total value reaching nearly 8,000,000 by 1911. So, profitable business. So profitable it inspired others around Britain and around the country. In Britain, The Sceptre, The Abstainers and General, Scottish Temperance, The Victorian, and The Whittington. And elsewhere, in the commonwealth in Britain's colonial possessions and formal colonial possessions. The Australasian Temperance and General, Temperance and General North America, which was based in Canada, and the American Temperance Life based in New York City. The badge on the top right is the Canadian Temperance and General Life Assurance Company, promising energy, equity, and economy, and the Scottish Temperance Life advert is there below. So, I think this was a really interesting thing, a very unusual model perhaps, but one that worked very well. But it was also a Temperance organization. Its patrons in the beginning, in 1840, included James Silk Buckingham, who was a former MP, who had just chaired a select committee on drunkenness, Samuel Bowly, who was a very famous Quaker abolitionist and who threw his energies into temperance after he had secured victories in the abolition of the slave trade, and Richard Tapper Cadbury of the Cadbury family. So, you can see again a link with other Quakers, who linked with that philanthropic benevolence, paternalistic tradition that we saw in the Cadbury family. This institution shared its address, it shared its offices pretty much, with the New British and Foreign Temperance Society, which then became the National Temperance Society, and then eventually the National Temperance League. And these were the major southern Temperance organizations, and in fact, they became the company that printed that map I showed right at the beginning. Seven of the UKT's patrons and directors including Warner, the man we started with, were members of the executive committee of the National Temperance Society, so they're effectively the same organization. Or they share a lot of personnel, a lot of the same goals. It looks like Warner really went to this society of which he was a member, director, and said, "Shall we start a new insurance company as the business side of our temperance activities?" And it worked to promote temperance in various ways. You could argue that in a very moral Victorian sense, the way we always think of Victorians, it was trying to encourage responsibility, but that was also encouraging fear. James McKenna was a member of the National Temperance Society but he was also the right hand man of Father Matthew, who was probably the most famous, certainly the most successful Irish temperance reformer. And he said, "What a happy period in our history when men of all ranks, aye, and women, too shall know not the taste of small drink, when a provision for all shall have been secured in the Temperance Provident Institution. Then the widow and the orphan shall have the blessings of plenty in their home, and old age find security in competence and independence." So a very early plug for the institution. Slightly later, William Gawthorpe, who was not just the agent for this institution in Manchester, but also the secretary of the United Kingdom Alliance, which the Alliance is the big northern temperance organization and was set up to basically bring about prohibition in Britain. So he's again mixing this kind of business and temperance connections. He said that he knew that there were some persons who did not approve of life assurance. Perhaps they were not provident, or perhaps they did not love their wives or families to such a degree as to feel an inducement to save threepence or sixpence or a shilling a week to make provision for them in the future. So again, charging those who did not take life insurance out with kind of lack of fellow feeling or lack of care for their wives or families. Remember, this is always generally men who were targeted as the people who might take out life insurance policies. Samuel Smith, the great prophet of self-help of course weighed in on this, and this is him talking in general about life insurance. "To bring a family into the world, give them refined tastes, and accustomed them to comforts, the loss of which is misery, and then to leave the family to the workhouse, the prison or the street is nothing short of a crime done against society, as well against the unfortunate individuals who are the immediate sufferers." This was the kind of thing that struck fear into the hearts of the prosperous working class. If you had done fairly well, you were now thinking about the future. It wasn't enough to just make enough money to keep your family happy now. You also had to provide for the future. What happened when you weren't there? Could they be kept from the workhouse? Would you end up in a pauper's grave? So these were all the kind of things we expect Victorians to think about insurance. But there is another side to it. And that is the sense that it might actually be a profitable investment, again very Victorian. But it means it's not simply something I think which works as a moral strategy, or a strategy of fear and blame. This is from a pamphlet published anonymously in Toronto, but it's probably passed with this Canadian company that sets up on the model of the UKT. "The hard-headed business sagacity that directs these institutions, life insurance institutions, is not very likely to be influenced by any merely sentimental considerations, and yet the companies, that some time ago looked with suspicion upon teetotallers, now seek after them as insurers with the utmost eagerness, and even offer then special inducements. Why do they do this? Simply because it pays." This is explained, if we think about the comparison between the abstainers and the general section, T.P. Wittaker was the managing director in 1904 and he had at his disposal 60 years of comparison between the abstainers and the non-abstainers. He said, "During the strenuous years of manhood, between twenty five to sixty years of age, the annual mortality rates among abstainers were, on the average, 40% lower than among the non-abstainers." His figures clearly showed, without any question of doubt, that you lived longer if you were an abstainer, if you were insuring with his company. This meant that the abstainers section paid out less often, which in turn meant effectively more savings for that section. And those increased savings had to be distributed in the form of bonuses, which means that the abstainers policies grew in value faster than those in the general section. Which leads me to the title of the talk, an observer at [inaudible] was said to have asked "On what principal are the profits divided?" when he saw that bigger profits were going to the abstainers and he suspected that this was something they did deliberately to reward people who thought like them. The actuary of the firm replied, "They're not divided on any principal. They divide themselves. The fact is, those who don't drink don't die so fast." So it wasn't a temperance fix. It appeared to fit in with attempts in 19th Century actuarial science to discover the laws of mortality, which were felt to operate independently of providence, which had to be considered in these days, but also of our own human actions. These were thought to be laws of life which couldn't be again said. So, there seemed scientific proof of the value of abstinence, which explains the UKT's importance in settling all kinds of arguments with temperance and drink. That goes back to what Edward Vivian was saying, that really this was proof that Bass was talking nonsense. But was it really proof? The abstainers in the company did really live longer, and their policies were worth more. And the business did extremely well, so there must have been something in it. On the other hand, insurance companies are, by nature, extremely conservative. Premiums were probably set higher than they needed to be, so that they could build up a surplus, in case they had got it wrong. If they were proved to be wrong, they had the money to be able to bail themselves out. This is quite a common thing that insurance companies, tend to be more cautious than they have to be. So they work it all out scientifically and then they say let's raise it a bit, just in case. And contemporaries also wondered, quite loudly -- in some places, whether members of the general section were really moderate drinkers, and whether there was something else beyond abstinence that explained the healthiness of the abstainers' section. They said maybe it's not just abstinence. Maybe they are freakishly healthy people who gravitate to this company because they know they will be effectively paid more for being in this one. And today, well, this may all sound faintly ridiculous today, the idea of temperance life insurance. But if you have a life insurance policy, you probably have been asked about your drinking. You've probably been asked about other habits like smoking, family history of disease, and so on. GP still collects information on drinking for life insurance forms just as they have since the early 19th Century. And insurers definitely believe that there is a statistical relationship between alcohol consumption, measured in units, and life expectancy. Many people don't understand units. Every time they do a survey about alcohol units, people say [inaudible] and they questios the usefulness. Are the units scientifically accurate? This is something asked by many people. But for insurers, it doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter whether they are accurate scientifically or not. For them, it's still those who don't drink don't die so fast. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Thank you very much. That was really interesting. I'm sure we have some questions. [Clicking sound] We have one up here. >> Thank you for the extremely interesting talk. I have quite a number of Victorian books that I've collected, because I collect old children's books, and a lot of them prizes from schools or from Sunday schools were all about the tragic life of families when their parents had drunk. I mean, there just seemed to be a proliferation. So, what about the religious connection. It must have been quite inaugurated with it. Would you like to comment? >> Yes. What about the religious element? Yes, religion was clearly a very important part of this. But it was very complicated by the fact that obviously there were varieties of Christianity around at the time, so the Anglican Church was very suspicious of temperance because the people who were the most vocal advocates were actually quite, often quite radical working class or lower middle class men who didn't really fit into the Anglican Church's sense of, who should be making these decisions and who should be arguing these sorts of things. So there are many religious organizations doing their own, thing, but some of them are... >> Was the Salvation Army about in those days? >> Yes, it was. Yes. And they were allies of the temperance organization. Most of the things that I've seen that were produced for children were produced for the Band of Hope, which was a particularly child oriented form of temperance to recruit people before they knew what they were doing effectively, and get them to sign the pledge early. Which had very strong links to a number of different religions. And I think there is an argument that those people, effectively, by teaching those arguments in Sunday schools, recruited people for life insurance because they got them worrying about life expectancy. And they may also have given them a positive sense that if you lived longer, you might be happier. So there is, I think there's definitely a connection. Thank you. >> Any other questions? Yes, we have one here. >> Thank you. One of the largest studies reported in the last fortnight I think, about whether there was a safe limit, and where before they tried to be practical and said that women could have four small glasses of wine a week and men could have seven, or something like that. This latest study said there was actually no lower limits. Now, what do they mean by that? Do they study the IQ of babies or something that indeed they were reduced by x percent? Or what do they mean? >> So this is about the safe limits of alcohol now? >> Indeed. >> When they mean there is no safe lower limits, I think the argument for contemporary public health is that all alcohol is harmful. This does tie into insurance. If I had another half hour, I could tell you how arguments about moderation -- people started to say, "Well how much is moderate?" Exactly as we do now, and insurance companies were also very interested in this because they were thinking, "What if these moderate drinkers are steady lushes, you know, topers and sots. And they tried to put a con-stated value on this and strangely enough, all the research I've done suggests it's quite close to the figures we've been told since the mid- 90s were safe or safer limits for drinking. But at the same time, people -- some people were more critical and said, actually there is no safe level, there is just a safer level. So, one glass of wine is bad. Four is worse. >> What wasn't clear was what they meant by the effect. Does it mean that if you have a thimble full of alcohol then yes, you drop by 3% on your IQ when you're 20? Or, what does it mean? >> I'm much stronger on the mid-Victorian medical science on this than I am with contemporary science. For earlier -- for the late 19th Century, there was an argument where the body could absorb a certain amount before it started to remove it, eliminate, and that that was the maximum capacity that the body should have. After that, it was harmful. So they did manage to set that on the kind of physiological level. But the argument was, I think, that alcohol as quite serious effects that are invisible until much later in life. Which is where life insurance became a useful way of checking up on that. But I think, I don't know about the contemporary arguments as much. But it certainly seems to me to be something in parallel with what I've been researching. >> Indeed. Thank you. >> Thank you. Any other questions? Yes, we have one here. >> [Inaudible]. >> Hold on. >> Has all your research changed your own drinking habits? >> I wish it had. [Audience laugh] One of the classic things that happens to people researching alcohol is that their assumptions about drinking are changed. Like [inaudible], he oversaw and enormous committee investigation into drinking in the 1890s and became teetotaller on the spot. Is it one of the Buxtons? [Inaudible] Buxton became a teetotaller even though his family were brewers because he was ashamed of what his family had done for the [inaudible]. It hasn't got that far with me yet. But it's made me worry about it more. Which is probably how Victorians would like it. You know, they would want me to take out a life insurance policy pretty quickly, I suspect. Thank you. >> We have two. One here and one here. Whoever gets the... >> Thank you. >> Alright, this gentleman first. >> Looking at the death rates, were companies that offered policies for abstainers able to put their money where their mouth is and offer better rates? >> Yes. The idea that you might offer better rates was something that was adopted by the Scottish Temperance Organization. They went for a slightly different model than the UKT. So their premiums for abstainers were lower than a non-abstainer could get anywhere else. And that was because they went through such a rigorous vetting. These people were often [inaudible] a very good bill of health, anyway. Not just they were non-drinkers, but you know, they could run a marathon, etc. So the Scottish Temperance Office was again very conservative in that way. But they did put their money where their mouth was and charge lower premiums, yes. >> Thank you. We have another one here. >> Was there any discussion of the possibility that the better life expectancy of abstainers and temperate drinkers was due to other aspects of their lifestyle? They might be more cautious in their general behavior. >> Yes, that's right. The argument about whether these people were living longer purely because of abstinence. They did often touch upon those sorts of points. When critics said, you haven't effectively compared two rather large populations. You've got these two rather cue-less self-selecting populations who've chosen to be in these sections. They've often said things like, these people may be not just teetotal, but extraordinarily careful. They may come from particular occupations where they get the right to earn fresh air but they don't ever have to cross any railroad tracks, you know. They're in occupations where there's little chance of accident, and so on. So, yes. That remained a bit of a bug-bag, clearly for the institution, they kept arguing that the only difference between the two sections was abstinence or non-abstinence because that was what their argument was really based on. That was all they had to say. If that disappeared, then that would leave them with very little except a successful business, I think. In the early 20th Century, it's reviewed by government in the first major attempt after the First World War to work out whether alcohol is a good thing scientifically. It was a very large investigation. And that actually concluded that the statistics weren't that convincing, for exactly that reason. They didn't know enough about those people except this one thing about whether they drank too much. So it is quite possible that they were just much healthier or in particular forms of life that protected them against these diseases. Thank you. >> Thank you. Any other questions? Yes, we have one up here. >> Hi. You said earlier that in answer to a question, that no alcohol is better for your health. But what would you say about all the protective and things that have been found out about things like red wine for heart disease and things? And they've actually recommended that you can have a small glass of red [chuckle] wine and it's actually good for you. >> Two answers. One, as a 19th Century Victorian medical specialist, they had different sorts of expectations about protective health. They were looking in different sorts of places. So, I suppose their arguments about all alcohol being harmful were based on rather different sorts of trials, rather different sorts of chemical tests. I mean, as far as I understand it, the thing about protective effects of red wine, that's based on public health research. So it's based on, a bit like health insurance, enormous populations of people, and if you can identify those who drink a little bit and those who drink a lot, you can see how there's some difference there. The medical people I'm talking about basically did a lot of laboratory research and quite often tested themselves, to see whether they were harmed or not. So it's a rather different set of argument and, in fact, with life insurance, no one really was sure why these figures came out this way. They just said, well, they are like that. In terms of the contemporary argument, I think there's a very good paper coming out -- and I can tell you this because it's one of my Ph.D students who I don't think is here, which I think might question the protective effects of red wine on heart disease. But, I'm not going to say anymore. But look out for it. And don't worry, you know, I'm not a medical doctor. I shouldn't be giving any kind of medical advice. [Laughter] But, it is very complicated. Thank you. >> Thank you. I think perhaps we better wrap it up now. Just to say that once the lecture is over, if everyone can leave the theater very quickly because there's a class -- usually a class coming in after, and they don't like to be kept waiting. But I know you would like to join me in thanking Dr. Neil for a very interesting and stimulating lecture. [Applause] >> [Applause] Thank you very much.