BAJAN SUN MAGAZINE
DEC 2014
The Barbadian Rum Shop
Early origins
T
drinkers. It was estimated that each white male
settler drank 26 gallons of rum a year, free blacks
and coloured 20 gallons, and slaves 3 gallons.
Presumably the difference in consumption
depended on the amount of leisure available to
each class of person.
Thomas Walduck, writing in 1708, noted the
different thrusts of European colonization: the
Spanish set up churches, the Dutch, trading
stations, and the English, tippling houses. The
name ‘tippling house’ was common in England
from the sixteenth century to describe houses that
sold intoxicating liquor. For example, an English
Act of 1552 speaks in the preamble of ‘Common
Ale-Houses and other houses called Tippling
houses’. The tippling houses in Barbados were
very popular and did a roaring trade in rum and
other spirits that soon caught the attention and
earned the disapproval of the authorities.
One early English Governor observed that ‘one
English servant is worth two Barbadians, they are
so much addicted to rum, that they will do little
but while the bottle is at their nose’.
he origins of the rum shop might well be
said to lie in the ‘tippling houses’ of the
seventeenth century. These were a kind of tavern
that sprang up in Bridgetown not long after the
island was settled in 1627.
In the early days of Bridgetown there was a
tavern for every twenty inhabitants. Indeed, the
Parliament of Barbados, in the latter part of the
seventeenth century, met occasionally in The
Roebuck, a famous tavern in Roebuck Street. The
early colonists were, by all accounts, hard
In 1652 an Act was passed by the Assembly ‘…
prohibiting persons from keeping a common
alehouse or tippling, selling any liquor of this
country’s spirit to be drank in ye houses or
plantations without license’. This was followed in
1654 by another Act to suppress the unlicensed
rum shops.
The problem was, from the authorities’ point of
view, that the distillation and sale of rum was
open to just about anyone who wanted to get into
the business. The Assembly, however, wanted to
bring the manufacture and sale of rum under the
control of the big planters and merchants.
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