Date and Time: Tuesday 16 April 2024 | 5.15pm - 6.30pm
The well-known nineteenth-century sea shanty ‘What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?’ reveals the common perception of seamen in British popular culture during this time. The Jolly Jack Tar had long been caricatured as a drinker, often portrayed as being ‘three sheets to the wind’ (i.e. drunk). A campaign by Christian temperance activists to sober up the Royal Navy began in earnest in the 1870s but decades earlier temperance periodicals had already begun to re-construct the sailor image.