OpenFile freelancer Adrian Lee expanded on the original suggested story idea he got, "what does it take to keep a bar going in Halifax?" He's written a series on bars in the city, starting with the very first one in 1749. Tomorrow, he'll write about drunks and drinks and strange laws post-1948. Thursday, we'll look at what it takes to keep a bar open in Halifax.
It may sit on an ocean, but Nova Scotia wasn’t always wet.
It’s strange to think that Halifax wasn’t always a city with a deep, abiding tradition of drinking. After all, it even started that way: according to George Bates, a Halifax cartographer who mapped, in the 1960s, over 40 taverns dotted the small town of Halifax between 1749-1830. The first thirty liquor licenses were distributed in a matter of eight months, the first in the province given in 1749 to a tavern called the Spread Eagle, which had, by 1805, officially taken up its unofficial nickname, the Split Crow. “(Taverns) were a very vital part of the social, cultural and economic life of the town,” wrote Bates.
Even one of the province’s most iconic statesmen, Joseph Howe, delivered a passionate speech in 1855 against prohibition, arguing that if alcohol was to be banned because it was dangerous, so, too, should Nova Scotia ban fire, gunpowder, and women: "Who would venture to argue, that because mischief was done by many of God's gifts, they should, on that account, be circumscribed or prohibited by human laws?"
But as alcohol started taking root in the province’s identity, so too did a powerful temperance movement. The first organized group was founded in Pictou County in 1827; 12 of the 16 Nova Scotian counties opted into the Canada-wide Temperance Act of 1878, and in the other four, which included Halifax City, liquor licenses were renewed annually only with the approval of two-thirds of the electorate. A Mail-Star retrospective article wrote of protests in 1875 against the renewal of more liquor licenses.
“The more licences, the more drinking and drunkenness,” the temperance movement wrote in an 1875 calendar tract. “Every licensed shop, saloon, bar-room or other drinking place is therefore a manufactory of drunkards. As drunkards increase, so increase misery, vice, pauperism and crime.”
A confluence of circumstances gave the temperance movement power. One was the onset of tuberculosis, which became the country’s primary scourge. The other was the allegiance of religious groups and churches that saw sin and social decay and started taking up the temperance cause. According to the historian E.R. Forbes, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Roman Catholics and Anglicans started to engage in a “social gospel” that sought to rid the province of personal sin, using the pulpit to urge ministers to promote temperance. "The Church of God exists for his glory and the true happiness and well being of his children, the sons of men, and therefore anything which emphasizes this aspect of his kingdom is to be fostered and strengthened,” wrote the Nova Scotia Synod in a 1912 report.
Temperance groups argued that those who drank were not spending money on protecting their families from tuberculosis. And despite years of political maneuvering, Liberal premier George Henry Murray—“who had an alleged fondness for liquor,” wrote Forbes—was ultimately forced to sign the Nova Scotia Temperance Act into legislation in 1910 to retain power. And while the act did exempt Halifax—appeasing temperance supporters by slashing the number of distributable liquor licenses and making liquor import more difficult—three successive efforts by a Conservative party that took up the temperance cause made Halifax dry come 1916.
This became irrelevant come WWI, when the federal government invoked national prohibition in the War Measures Act. When the war ended, individual provinces were given the power to vote on whether or not prohibition should remain. Halifax was the only county to not vote strongly in favour of prohibition, which was reimposed in 1921, anyway.
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| A bottle of Web's Tonic (alcohol based) from 1923. |
But pressure soon mounted. With trade unions seeking beer parlours for the working man, Atlantic breweries struggling to compete against markets in Ontario, economic councils lusting after increased tourism, enforcement complaining about fighting in vain against bootlegging and even the Canadian Medical Association, which in a 1926 general meeting “strongly disapproved” of their being "forced to bear practically the entire brunt of the enforcement of (the Temperance) Act" as doctors and dentists could not easily sell medicinal liquors, the province felt compelled to move. “The present laws controlling liquor, wine and beer hereabouts are unfortunately subject to pressure from relatively small and narrow-minded groups,” wrote Philip Moore of the Atlantic Advocate.
And where Foster described prohibition as “politically irresistible” in the 1910s, politics and the reality of economics ended up igniting the shift away a decade later. In 1923, the economically depressed province couldn’t ignore that British Columbia had made a net profit of $3 million in liquor sales. In 1926, the province faced a deficit of over a million dollars, a situation made all the more untenable in 1927 with the federal government legislating mandatory old-age pensions. Conservative premier Edgar Rhodes did not openly support prohibition as his party once did, and after a royal commission recommended that government-controlled liquor sales serve as a revenue source for pensions, prohibition ended in 1930.
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| Ad against drinking in the Jul. 12, 1948 Daily Star |
Outside of Legions, however, public consumption remained illegal and bootlegging continued. In 1946, writer Dorothy Duncan noted that because Halifax lacked taverns, men congregated dangerously on street corners.
It all came to a head on Jul. 20, 1948, when a Nova Scotia plebiscite voted 10787 to 5445 in favour of allowing beer and wine to be sold by the glass and bottle. Politicians, once either coy about or loudly against alcohol, spoke in different language: “It is a definite indication of the trend of thought in Halifax. There is no doubt that Halifax is a ‘wet’ city,” said Hon. Geoffrey Stevens, minister in charge of the Nova Scotia Liquor Commission, to the Daily Star.
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| An interior shot of the Sea Horse in 1948, when it had just opened after prohibition.This was rare, because legislation was soon created to not allow photographers to take interior shots of bars. |
In September of 1948, the Sea Horse Tavern, operated by the Carleton hotel, was the first tavern to open since Halifax’s 1916 prohibition, charging 25 cents for a pint of Maritime-brewed bottled beer and 30 cents for a pint of Central Canadian beer, the maximum price set by the province. By 10:20 am, 51 people had filed in to drink. “When the fridge doors were opened, they stayed open. Trucks were backing up to get the stuff in. The beer had no time to get cool, we were dragging the crates out this side so fast,” said ‘Yank’ Landry, Sea Horse manager, to the Mail-Star.
At the time of the opening, the committee was simultaneously reviewing 49 tavern applications and had already rejected four. “The committee wanted to see how the authorized taverns operated and determine public demand before proceeding further,” the anonymous reporter wrote. The language changed, and the attitudes had shifted, but temperance beliefs were still held. Taverns were back in Halifax, but if they were to have a future, it would have to ride on the Sea Horse.
Tomorrow: Did a government aching for liquor income learn anything from The Sea Horse?
