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Prohibition Repealed 70 Years Ago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.