"The Dainty is IN!"

"A. M. Fox, the mate, and Joe Foggo, a seaman, both of St. George's, Bermuda, were held under technical arrest aboard the Mendota, coast guard cutter, which overhauled the Tanner, pending official decision of the case."

Gettysberg Times, 26 January 1933.

"The interviewer on leaving cast a reluctant glance at tantalising scrap books at which only a cursory glance had been allowed, but left cheered by a vague promise that the contents of a diary kept during Prohibition days might one day be revealed.

"Roddie's last words to me as I paused in the doorway were 'I have come up the hard way. I am a self-made man and proud of it. I would not have had anything otherwise.'

The Bermudian, December 1945.

Controversy currently swirls around the decriminalisation of marijuana in Bermuda, following examples of such removal of prohibition in other countries, like Canada perhaps. Perfectly legal into the early 1900s, "ganja" comes from the hemp plant, possibly one of the most useful of domesticated species and formerly a major source for longwearing cloth and rope for ships.

There is now a suggestion from finds in his backyard that the greatest of bards, William Shakespeare, might have lit up a spliff or two and may have referred to such as the "noted weed" in one of his sonnets.

Illegal since 1937 in the United States, some say due to pressure from the legal drug companies, others that it was a move against certain ethnic groups, marijuana is part of the probably unwinnable war on drugs, which rages throughout this hemisphere, indeed the world.

It is of interest that it was made illegal in the USA around the very time that the prohibition on alcohol was being lifted. Prohibitions seem often to produce more crime and intoxication than existed before the once accepted, but later demonised, substance was put on the "bad-for-you" list.

Such was certainly the case in the 1920s and early 1930s, when the puritanical leaders of the United States outlawed drinking alcohol, like rum and whiskey. So virulent was the support for a ban on booze, that it was mandated by an Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, a law that remained in place for 13 years from 1920 to 1933.

Like ganja-runners today, the business opportunities in that largely unenforceable Constitutional statute were seized upon by elements that became criminals due to its regulations.

The Prohibition Era (otherwise known as "The Noble Experiment"!) led to the Chicago excess of Alphonse Gabriel (Al) Capone and others, as today, ready with fist and gun to enforce their control of the illegal trade in liquor and women, with no doubt more than an occasional song in the speakeasies thrown in. Dying in 1947 of side effects of syphilis contracted in his youth, a recent book on "Al" is subtitled "The Biography of a Self-Made Man".

Back here on The Rock, some hard heads also saw a silver lining in the new climate of desertification of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

From fishermen, who spotted a good channel for diversification (before the term had such present diversification), to "respectable" Hamilton merchants, like the "self-made" (or Prohibition-created) Edgar Roderick Williams (then working for the J.E. Lightbourn liquor store), many in Bermuda went to town, or rather to sea, to supply the drought-ridden inhabitants of the East Coast with the liquid so necessary (to many) for a good life.

Looking in one image like Bermuda's (Al) Capone, "Roddie" Williams was an "exporter" who largely supplied Jack Kriendler's famous 21 Club in New York with the necessaries for happy nights, liquorly-speaking.

He is so described in Marilyn Kator's book "21: The Life and Times of New York's Favorite Club".

Aside from the continuance of the Williams family in Bermuda, it is believed that a grandson of Jack Kriendler is also resident in these islands, where liquor, despite all its adverse social effects, remained legal throughout "The Noble Experiment" up north.

In January 1933, the last year of Prohibition, two St. David's Islanders, Messrs. A.M. Fox and J. Foggo were apprehended on a run into Wilmington, North Carolina, mimicking a favourite route by blockade runners out of St. George's to the Confederacy during the American Civil War in the 1860s.

They got off on a technicality, for during an experiment by the US authorities, their boat, Tanner, still fully loaded with 849 cases of liquor, was not within an hour's run of the coast at the point at which they were arrested, 10.8 miles off Cape Hatteras.

No lesson learned, perhaps the gentlemen were again on the Tanner, when on 4 September 1933, it was loaded with 126 cases, according to an "Export Sales" Register from Frith's Liquors in the collections of the National Museum of Bermuda.

In the same Register between May, 1932 and November, 1933, some 15,000 cases of booze were "exported" on seventeen rumrunners, the boats with names like Emma Helene, Baronet, Bear Cat, Big Boy, and others representing foreign vessels with American Indian names, such as Apockamuchia and Popocatapelt, the last not easily pronounced if the crew dipped into the cargo on the way.

The bottles were removed from packing cases in Bermuda, for easier secret stowage on the vessels, and a picture may be seen on Flickr of a mountain of discarded crates on the shoreline at St. George's or St. David's.

One story that has recently emerged, thanks to Fred and Toni Werblow, sometime Bermuda residents and life members of the National Museum, connects the Dainty, once a Newport-Bermuda racer and latterly a tourist boat in Hamilton Harbour, with rum running into Larchmont, New York, on the north side of Long Island Sound.

Apparently, that small sailing ship made many trips to Larchmont during Prohibition, loaded perhaps with Gosling's Highland Nectar Scots whiskey, advertised under an opening sentence in 1930 as "IMMORALITY is usually thought of, quite erroneously, in these days in terms of sex!" (See photo below)

Legend has it that as soon as the boat hit the docks at Larchmont, the phone message that immediately burnt up the local lines came to be simply and emphatically uttered as: "The Dainty is IN!"

Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum of Bermuda, incorporating the Bermuda Maritime Museum. Comments may be made to drharris@logic.bm or 704-5480.