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Grandad Rudd (Bert Bailey) and Mr Banks (Bill Stewart) leave the pub in a state of complete inebriation. Mr Banks offers Mr Rudd a lift on his horse. Back at the Rudd household, Mrs Banks (Marie D’Alton) and her daughter Amelia (Molly Raynor) drink tea with the assembled Rudds. Mrs Banks espouses the ‘Band of Hope’, a temperance union, as Grandad and Mr Banks roll up in a ‘horse and car’, completely ‘shickered’.
Curator’s notes
Some lovely acting by Bert Bailey and Bill Stewart, as comical drunks. Younger viewers may be puzzled by several aspects of this scene – the idea of a temperance union, the use of horses as a normal mode of transport, and words like ‘shickered’, which are barely part of popular language anymore. Audiences at the time would have understood them clearly. The ‘pledge’ – a vow of abstinence from alcohol – was a common undertaking at the time. Young people came under strong pressure to avoid all contact with alcohol – although as the Rudd boys make clear, there were many who viewed the whole thing with suspicion and ridicule.
