Bootleggers were creative in the Bygone Days
Liquor may have been illegal, but Islanders knew where to go to get a drink, says Dutch Thompson
Reginald "Dutch" Thompson's column The Bygone Days brings you the voices of Island seniors, many of whom are now long-departed. These tales of the way things used to be offer a fascinating glimpse into the past. Every second weekend CBC P.E.I. will bring you one of Dutch's columns.
Prohibition didn't end on P.E.I. until 1948, but anyone wanting a drink of alcohol before that knew exactly where to go.
Bootlegging was prolific in P.E.I.'s bygone days, says historian Dutch Thompson.
There were as many as a dozen bootleggers in the small town of Souris alone, according to Gus Gregory who was born in 1918 during the heyday of rum-running.
A bootlegger would buy a five-gallon keg of rum and the first thing he'd do is bore a hole into the barrel and pour out a gallon, replacing it with a gallon of water, Gregory told Thompson.
'Special customers'
The bootlegger would pour the watered-down rum into 65 beer bottles — not including the gallon he replaced with water.
"They'd have special customers that would want a quart of the straight rum and he'd pay a little extra for that," Gregory recalled.
"He'd want a quart of the real thing and they'd sell that to him maybe for about, well a 26-ouncer maybe that would cost him about three dollars."
Gregory told Thompson he once bought a gallon vinegar-jar of rum for $3 and a quart of gin for $1.40.
The total cost was $4.40 — the same amount of money Gregory got for selling 100 pounds of lobsters, he said.
Just ask for 'cold tea'
The bootleggers were creative about where they hid the illegal liquor in their homes from police — they hid it in walls, staircases and doors designed as bookshelves, with the hinges hidden.
One bootlegger hid his rum in a tank in the ceiling and ran a pipe to the kitchen sink — with just a flip of a valve, the rum ran out the hot water tap.
While many bootleggers worked out of their homes, there was at least one restaurant in Charlottetown that served beer — but you had to know how to ask for it, recalled Eileen Hunter.
"We used to go in and ask for cold tea, and that's what we got — beer in a teapot," she said.
Among the bootleggers' biggest customers were Royal Air Force pilots, navigators and mechanics who set up reconnaissance school in Charlottetown during the Second World War.
'Culture shock' for Brits
Pubs were a part of life in Britain, and it was quite the "culture shock" to find liquor was still illegal on P.E.I., recalled Syd Clay, who came to P.E.I. along with about 400 others with the RAF in 1940.
"When we first came here, we thought we actually reached the end of this world," he told Thompson.
But after near a near-revolt about a month after they arrived, Clay said they were able to convince Ottawa to allow beer and liquor on the camp, making it exempt from provincial prohibition laws.
The bootleggers continued to thrive even after Prohibition ended a few years later.
As for Clay, he met an Island woman named Minnie Downe and they were married for 64 years before his death in 2011.
