DRINKING CUSTOMS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23002, 1 April 1938, Page 10

DRINKING CUSTOMS

DOMINION HOTEL HOURS COMPARISON WITH ENGLAND USE OF "GOD'S GOOD GIFT" [by telegraph—OWN correspondent] CHRISTCHURCH, Thursday The hours in which bars in New Zealand hotels may be open arc? "perfectly appalling," in the opinion of tbe Bev. C. E. B. Muschamp, vicar of St. Michael's Church. Mr. Muschamp, who arrived in Christchureh last year from England, expressed this opinion in an address at the annual meeting of the Canterbury branch of the Society for the Protection of Women and Child-

"Whoever wants a drink at nine o'clock in the morning?" he asked. "If any man wants a drink then he should not be able to get it. On the other hand, to ask a man to have his drink in the short period after he finishes his work is asking for trouble." There was excessive drinking in New Zealand, lie said, and he was convinced that one reason for it was that people did not know how ti* use "God's good gift of fermented liquor." It had been said that the publican in England was required to have a moral standing equal to that of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Certainly llie standing of publicans in England was extremely high. Drunkenness was absolutely discouraged, and the Ecglisli public house, which was open in the evening, was a place to which a man could take his wife and where the parish priest was not out of place. "1 have not tried the public-houses here because I am told that it would not be wise," said Air Muschamp. "In England you rarely see drunkenness, and you never see drunkenness in a publichouse. And in the 10 years I was a parish priest in England I did not see nearly as much drunkenness as I saw in the first 10 weeks ] spent in this country."