Pubdate: Thu, 11 Apr 2002
Source: Helsingin Sanomat International Edition (Finland)
Copyright: 2002 2000 Helsingin Sanomat
Contact:  http://www.helsinki-hs.net/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1158
Author: Tuomo Valiaho and Helsingin Sanomat

HISTORY: PROHIBITION TURNED HELSINKI INTO A WET CITY

Prohibition Repealed 70 Years Ago

A typical scene in a Helsinki restaurant during the prohibition era 
looked superficially serene.

Customers would sit at their tables sipping cup after cup of tea. The 
tables also had bowls of crisp bread which nobody ate. Whenever a 
customer would leave the restaurant, the bread would be moved to 
another table, where the customers also ignored it. No, the people of 
Helsinki at the time were not so fond of tea that they would have 
bothered to go to a restaurant and drink nothing else. The cups 
contained what was known as "hard tea" - half tea, half pure alcohol. 
The crisp bread was a bluff, used to ward off the sobriety monitors, 
or "breath sniffers".

The aim of Finnish prohibition, which ended exactly 70 years ago last 
Friday, was to get the Finnish people to sober up and to promote 
public morality by banning all beverages with an alcohol content of 
more than two percent. The law was virtually a complete failure. The 
consumption of alcohol actually increased during prohibition, as did 
crime, which became more brutal than before. "Overall respect for the 
law collapsed in the early part of prohibition", says social 
historian Matti Peltonen of the University of Helsinki. The problem 
with prohibition is that it made criminals out of ordinary citizens 
who happened to enjoy drinking alcohol.

Breaking the law became a national pastime of sorts, and even those 
in leading positions of society were indifferent. "When ministers 
hosted their foreign guests at hotels in Helsinki and at the Council 
of State, the porters would be told to bring confiscated booze in 
wheelbarrows", Peltonen notes.

Nearly every restaurant and cafe in Helsinki was in violation of the 
law. Hard tea and schnapps, made out of pure alcohol, burnt sugar and 
water, were served in the main dining rooms.

In the back rooms and in closed clubs nearly all types of alcoholic 
beverages were available: wines, whiskies, brandies, and liqueurs. 
Prohibition was a difficult time for Finnish restaurants: no attempts 
were made to compensate them for their loss of income from the sale 
of alcohol, which made breaking the law virtually the only way that 
many of them could stay in business. If a restaurant was caught 
selling alcohol, it was usually ordered shut down for a fixed period 
of time. The restaurant of the Hotel Kamp was shut down for two 
months in the autumn of 1926 when 140 bottles of Estonian spirits 
were found there. The restaurants usually had close ties with the 
officials, because most police and most judges were opposed to 
prohibition. For instance, almost all of Helsinki's foot police would 
take a break from their beats and stop at the Seurahuone where they 
were served cognac and hard tea in a special room reserved for them. 
Inspections were sometimes held, but restaurants were often tipped 
off in advance.

The Hotel Torni, which opened in 1931, had the most elaborate system 
for avoiding detection.

Hard liquor was served on the ninth and tenth floors, and arrack 
punch was prepared in the eleventh.

If anyone suspicious entered the building, the doorman sounded an 
alarm by discreetly pressing a button on the door of the elevator.

The Torni's booze stash was in the cellar of a flower shop, and 
bottles were hidden in one of the rooms on the ground floor. At 
Seurahuone the bottles were hidden in special compartments built 
inside table tops. In addition to legal bars and restaurants engaging 
in illegal activities, there were plenty of Finnish equivalents of 
the notorious speakeasies in the United States. These clandestine 
bars were often open 24 hours a day. Most of them were very simple 
apartments where ordinary families lived.

People could drink in one of the rooms, and for a price a guest who 
felt "tired" could go to another room to sleep it off. An improved 
version of these family restaurants were the "drop shops", where a 
party of a larger number of people could get a room to themselves. A 
third type of illicit drinking hole was for the upper classes - a 
real club with dancing, and where really fancy drinks were served.

Retail sales of alcohol focused mainly on the districts of Kallio and 
Punavuori. Police estimated that during prohibition bootleggers had 
about 1000 sales outlets for illegal booze in Helsinki. The 
bootleggers were usually of modest economic means, but once a civil 
servant of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs was arrested after he had 
been caught selling pure alcohol out of his office. The medical 
profession underwent a massive change in the prohibition years, with 
some doctors making more money prescribing alcohol "for medicinal 
purposes" than they did practising the healing profession. Sometimes 
a doctor might write several hundred alcohol prescriptions in a 
single day. Pharmacies soon became an important source of alcohol.

In addition to pure alcohol, doctors could prescribe medicinal cognac 
and whisky.

Public intoxication was a crime and police lock-ups filled up quickly.

In 1927 alone there were 25,000 arrests for drunkenness. The drunk 
tanks were usually segregated into two sections - one for ordinary 
people, and one for society's upper crust.

Sometimes this led to ludicrous situations. On one occasion a 
well-dressed gentleman was being put into the jail at the Ratakatu 
police station.

Suddenly he turned to the police escorting him and said that he was 
not dressed properly for the occasion. The jail already had five men 
dressed in tail-coats and one in a smoking jacket.
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