We are the guardians of our soldiers’ homes; we are the trustees of the hope and happiness of their little children; but we let this drink trade, that takes our people’s food out of their cupboards, turn that food into the means of death, and sow ruin and destruction through the land.
But we will call the witnesses to these drink-ruined soldiers’ homes, these homes that the enemy worse than Germany has shattered and broken while our men have been fighting for your home and mine. We will call a few here and there, knowing that for every one called are hundreds more that can be called, and that beyond all these that are known there is in this little land a countless host of tragedies as secret as the grave.
A Tooting soldier whose wife had sent him loving letters to the trenches came back to surprise her after 18 months. He found another man in possession of his home and a new baby; and, overcome by the discovery, he gave way to drink and killed himself.
Records of Balham Coroner, March 1916
A soldier who had left a comfortable home behind returned from the Front to find it ruined, with not a bed to lie on, his children never sent to school, his wife all the time in publichouses. “I wish I had been shot in the trenches,” he said when he arrived.
Facts in “Cork Constitution,” December 10, 1915
Outside a publichouse in Liverpool a man was dragging home his drunken wife, the mother of eleven children. They rolled over and over on the ground, the drunken women violently resisting the maddened man. Then came up the eldest son, home from the Front, with five wounds in his body.
Facts in “Liverpool Post,” March 2, 1917
A soldier came back to his home in London to find his wife drinking his money away, harbouring another man; one of his children cruelly neglected and the other in its grave, perished from neglect; and a drunken carman’s baby about to be born in his home.
Facts in Shaftesbury Society Report