I know, I know you will regret my Loss:
Where now, alas!  Will the forsaken Wife,
The Cast-Off Mistress, the despairing Maid,
The Officer disbanded, Gamester broke,
Or Bankrupt Tradesman, an Asylum find,
When once my Hospitable Gates are closed?
Another Dram – for I am faint and ill –
Pledge me my Subjects; for it is the last,
Last Time you ever will see your wretched Queen.

— The deposing and death of Queen Gin
by Jack Juniper, 1736

It was two Queens, Queen Mary II and her sister Queen Anne, together with Mary’s husband King William of Orange, who brought jenever to Britain from Holland at the turn of the eighteenth century and started a gin craze that would rage for close to a century. As Madame Genever fever spread from the lords and ladies of the Royal court to the mistresses and maids of the town, it was not long before the whole country was hooked on the juniper spirit.

At the time, almost anyone could make bathtub gin and almost anyone could sell it, and certainly those who could hide bottles under a fulsome skirt could sell quite a lot of it. By the middle of the 1700’s, women were gathering in marketplaces across England to share a daily dram of their beloved Mother Gin.

Alas, the powers that be were not fans of women’s new-found entrepreneurialism and gin-fueled joie de vivre and began to spread propaganda alleging that they were degenerating as mothers because of gin, and that this in turn was causing the degeneration of society. They called for a return to the more wholesome image of men drinking beer in alehouses with other men, while the women remained locked away at home, removed from the lure of Mothers Ruin.

However, despite many parliamentary acts and a prohibition attempt in opposition, gin’s popularity could not be reversed. Fortunately, by the turn of the nineteenth century improvements in distillation led the spirit to take a classier turn. And it was not long before the New Victorian Woman was hosting tea parties and luncheons with gin in its softer, sweeter cordial form in pride of place among her dainties.

And of course, by now the pioneering spirit had travelled across the Atlantic, where it also found itself at the center of the newly emerging cocktail boom. Naturally, its feminine appeal made it ideal for all manner of mixes, not least sips like the Bee’s Knees, Gimlet, Singapore Sling and the Pink Lady that had been fittingly styled for a finer palate.

As the journalist Alma Whitaker concluded in 1933, “Ever since Charles Dickens had Sary Gamp partaking of her thimbleful o’ comfort, gin has been regarded as a vastly better spirit for women than whisky.  In the main, women prefer gin as being far less disastrous to the complexion”. Gin for women had always been, and so would always be.

So, it’s time to give Mother Gin back her rightful place! It’s time for a return to the dawn of our love affair with gin, bringing fancy, modernity and dare we say it, a touch of femininity, to this wondrously old-world spirit.  

It's gin. Reimagined.