The Fiddlers; Drink in the Witness Box — Reading Notes

Prophetic Fury and Statistical Calm

Mee’s own prose is deliberately biblical in cadence. He speaks of “eternal glory or eternal shame,” of rulers who “quail before a foe within the gate.” The repetition of “she has let” in a single paragraph—five times in quick succession—builds a rhythm of accusation. Yet these rhetorical crescendos are immediately followed by numbered facts: “4,800,000 tons of food” destroyed, “£1,000,000 a week” paid to the government. The effect is that of a sermon punctuated by exhibits. Mee does not argue so much as present evidence and then hammer it home with moral language. The reader is never allowed to settle into either pure emotion or pure data; the two modes constantly interrupt each other, creating a sense of urgency and irrefutability.

The Witnesses: Voices from the Dock

The excerpts include a dozen or more short testimonies from police courts, inquests, and assizes. These are not summarized but quoted directly, often with the source line: “Police Records of Southport, January 9, 1915” or “Facts in ‘Western Daily Mercury,’ January 8, 1917.” The voices are varied: a disabled soldier who plans to spend his pension on “a month’s booze”; a lieutenant who calls drink “the whole trouble”; a coroner who declares prohibition “a blessing.” Mee lets these speakers contradict or reinforce each other. The soldier’s casual confession sits alongside the judge’s solemn warning about “millions of brave men” returning to temptation. By refusing to smooth these voices into a single narrative, Mee creates a mosaic of social breakdown—each fragment a small, damning story.

Pace and Accumulation: The Weight of Repetition

The book’s structure is cumulative. Mee does not develop a linear argument but piles instance upon instance. The same phrases recur: “the foe within the gate,” “the greatest enemy force outside Berlin,” “the drink trade.” Each new witness adds weight without advancing a thesis. The pace is relentless—short paragraphs, frequent source citations, and a refrain of “there is no room for them here” that paradoxically makes room for more. The effect is that of a drumbeat. By the time the reader reaches the Derbyshire Assizes record of a decorated soldier ruined by drink, the pattern is familiar: a good man, a few drinks, a fall. Mee’s method is not persuasion but accumulation; he means to overwhelm.

Readers should attend to the tension between Mee’s prophetic voice and the documentary evidence he marshals. The book is not a history but a polemic built from fragments. Pay attention to the sources he chooses—police records, newspaper clippings, parliamentary returns—and how he frames them. The gaps are as telling as the inclusions: what voices are missing? The book’s power lies in its relentless specificity, but that same specificity limits its scope. It is a wartime document, not a balanced inquiry.

I keep thinking about that old war-time book, how the dry court records felt heavier than the anger around them. It left a quiet ache, that sense of ordinary lives caught in something vast. I found a similar weight later in Told in gallant deeds — Reading Notes, though its light is gentler. Different shadows, same hush.