Alcoholic drink was one of the leading causes of crime in Victorian Scotland. According to the historian T.C. Smout, in the 1830s, adult Scots drank an average of a gallon of whisky a year. As that referred only to legal whisky, and the excise men discovered around seven hundred illicit stills yearly, the actual total could be higher.
In 1853 the Public Houses (Scotland) Act ordered that pubs in Scotland should close at ten o’clock on weekdays and remain closed all day on Sundays. As William Forbes Mackenzie, Conservative MP for Liverpool, had been a very active proponent of the measure, it became known as the Forbes Mackenzie Act. However, rather than curing the problem, the Act only served to drive late night and Sunday drinking underground. One result was a rash of shebeens throughout
