Outside Preston, probably not one person in a thousand knows how the word “teetotal” sprang into popular use. It is said to have been, to all intents and purposes, deliberately invented by “Dicky Turner,” a reformed drunkard, who, speaking at a meeting held in September, 1833, at the Old Cockpit, declaimed vehemently against the arguments of the moderate drinkers, and insisted upon total abstinence. “I’ll have nowt to dee wi’ this moderation botheration pledge,” he said: “I’ll be reet down out—an’—out tee—tee—total for ever and ever.”
“Well done,” shouted the meeting, and the word was adopted, with enthusiasm.
“TEETOTAL”
It bore no reference to tea, as often supposed, nor was it the result of a stuttering attempt at the word “total”; for Turner was not a stutterer, but was well known as a coiner of words, at any emergency; to say nothing of being a perpetrator of what in an Irishman would be called “bulls”: of which the following is a supreme example. Speaking in furtherance of the temperance movement, he said, “We will go with our axes on our shoulders and plough up the great deep, and then the ship of temperance shall sail gallantly over the land.”
A stone in St. Peter’s churchyard, to his memory and to that of fellow-workers in their cause, is inscribed
Beneath
this stone are
deposited the Remains of
RICHARD TURNER,
author of the word Teetotal,
as applied to abstinence from
all intoxicating Liquors,
who departed this life on the
27th day of October, 1846,
Aged 56 years.
Here—where did you get that hat?—you see the fearsome spectacle (according to modern ideas) that Dicky Turner presented.
It will be observed that in this claim to the origin of “teetotal” there is a qualification not generally admitted. This reservation is generally overlooked, but is important. He was indeed only author of the word in its application to total abstinence, for it was at that time well known in Ireland, and is to be found in the writings of De Quincey and Maginn. But every tale is good until the next is told, and in another version “teetotal” is said to have originated in a general signing of a pledge of moderate drinking: those who signed and were prepared for total abstention adding a T, for “total,” to their signatures.
To conclude with Preston, it was here that the inspiration was given to Focardi, then an unknown and needy sculptor, for his group, long since famous, “You Dirty Boy!”
Lodging in a humble purlieu of the town, he witnessed the scene of the old woman scrubbing the writhing urchin and rubbing the soap into him, and realising the humorous possibilities of such a group, secured the two as models and at once set to work. He could not have foreseen the price of £500 at which the statuary was purchased, nor the world-wide advertising celebrity it was given, in pictures and in replica terra-cotta statuettes, by the proprietors of Pears’ soap.