A Tribute to Alan Douglas – Founder of AAC/WGCADA

A Short History of Alcohol

As far back as 5,000 to 6,000 B.C. - when the first beers were produced in Egypt, alcohol had a part to play in society’s day to day life. This first non-distilled alcoholic beverage was made inadvertently due to natural fermentation.

The earliest written law, the Code of Hammurabi, was written in Assyria in 2,225 B.C. setting forth rules for the keeping of beer, wine shops and taverns. The earliest reference to distilled spirits appears in China about 1,000 B.C.

The great philosopher Plato was greatly concerned about the drinking habits of his countryman. He wrote – ‘When a man drinks wine he begins to be better pleased with himself and the more he drinks the more he is filled full of brave hopes, and conceit of his powers, and at least the string of his tongue is loosened, and fancying himself wise, he is brimming over with lawlessness and has no more fear or respect and is ready to do or say anything’.

The fall of the Roman Empire has been blamed on wine. The wine was stored and fermented in lead containers and contained an additive with a high lead content. Most of the nobility who drank wine suffered from lead poisoning, of which mental instability is a symptom.

The gin epidemic hit the streets of London in the early 1700’s along with the prolific use of Laudanum, a cheap mixture of opium soaked in alcohol. Laudanum, popular among all classes, is rumoured to have occasionally been used to aid ‘child quietness’, allowing mothers enough ‘freedom’ to work longer, uninterrupted hours in the many work houses of the Great Revolution.

The Temperance movement in the 1800’s recognised and fought the demon alcohol on many fronts, battling to redeem fellow men and women that had fallen into the clutches of alcohol.

Lloyd George felt that one of the most serious obstacles to increasing the output of munitions during the First World War was heavy drinking by the workforce. He introduced the Defence of the Realm Act, which greatly reduced the availability of alcohol and introduced the British system of ‘opening hours’.

As far back as we care to look, we can clearly see that alcohol has caused, and still continues to cause more havoc and mayhem than any other mood altering drug we know today.

The History of WGCADA - Tribute to Alan Douglas

In June 1935, in a little town in Ohio, America called Akron the first Alcoholics Anonymous group was established. From there Alcoholics Anonymous groups, have sprung up in the towns and cities of countries all around the world. This is the story of how it reached our little town, now known as the City and County of Swansea

“I first met Alan in 1978 in an AA meeting. Through my own cycle of drinking, abstaining and relapsing I ended up going away to Broadway Lodge for treatment. At that time, they provided a 10 week inpatient treatment programme.

When I returned from Broadway Lodge, I continued attending AA. I was unemployed but soon started doing voluntary work with Probation helping Young Offenders with substance misuse problems. Some how Alan heard about the work I was doing and once I had been clean and sober for two years he asked me to become a volunteer at the Alcohol Advice Centre, 75 Uplands Crescent, Swansea. I was thrilled! I started volunteering in 1982. Alan's vision was to develop an abstinence outpatient treatment centre based on Broadway Lodge.

The need for funding was a constant pressure… Finally in 1984 Alan had convinced the Manpower services to fund alcohol and drug treatment services probably for the first time in Wales. Alan was then able to employ five staff members a year…and guess who was employed as Senior Counsellor?!  My career started due to Alan's vision and for that I will be eternally grateful.”

‘Norman Preddy. Chief Executive Officer WGCADA.’   

Alan was born in Swansea on the 8th of August 1927 and had fond memories of his childhood. He passed his 11+ exams in order to attend Brynmill School, where he was an enthusiastic member of the school’s various sports teams. At the age of fourteen Alan remembers ‘bunking’ off school on the odd Wednesday afternoon, to go and play snooker down in the Castle Snooker Hall. It was here that Alan had his first drink. At the age of sixteen Alan attended a cousin’s wedding in Bridgend and remembered getting as drunk as a ‘coot’ and being really ill the next day. That was the only time Alan recalled being ill after drinking. At age seventeen Alan joined the army and remembered complaining to the Corporal in charge that there wasn’t enough beer for the men. The Corporal managed to secure two big kegs of rum. This had to be watered down before serving to the troops.

Following his discharge from the army Alan went to work for Her Majesties Customs and Excise.

“I joined the Customs and Excise which was a wonderful job for me because I had booze on tap 24 hours a day. Anywhere you wanted it, it was there. All you had to do was ask and I was never backward in coming forward! (Laughs) So I used to ask and once you’d asked, the bottle was out and they used to throw away the cork (laughs) so you were       alright for a while”.

At the age of 21, not long after he was demobbed, Alan got married. He married Barbara in his demob suit and sadly recalled that there was only one photograph to commemorate that day.

At this point Alan was drinking beer plus one to two bottles of spirits a day.

“Yeah, I could see the empty bottles, but that didn’t include the pints on the way home or the pints on the way to work, or uh bottles of beer or whatever and what I consumed on ships going around the dock. I couldn’t total them up”.

Alan was an assistant Preventive Officer and stated that out of the eighteen men working with him, sixteen had a problem with alcohol misuse.

“And most of the older people, the Preventive Officers, I was an assistant PO, most of the PO’s who were there were ex-first World War army, navy, air force see servicemen. And they all had a problem – every one of them. Every bloody one of them. I can think of maybe two that didn’t but the rest did. Well 16 did and 2 didn’t, so you were going into the middle of it sort of thing and I thought I was landed. (Laughs) Oh dear, happy days. They were a great crowd of fellas, I’ll say that. And it was everybody looked after his own, you looked after your mate”

At this time a gentleman by the name of George Glass was Alan’s boss and it is he who Alan gave credit for setting him on the road to recovery. He recalled Mr Glass saying, ‘Alan you’re a young man with a great future well behind you.’ At this time Alan had many ‘black marks’ against his work record and promotions were not coming his way.

At this point in Alan’s drinking career, his wife left him and their three children. Alan found it impossible to cope with work, three children and all the housework. He called on his mother for help. She looked after the house and children for just one day and then left saying she couldn’t cope in that madhouse. A short while later Alan visited his mother-in-law to tell her that he wanted his wife back. She told Alan that Barbara would only return home if he stopped drinking. Alan promised to make an appointment with the doctor and his wife returned home.

Alan had an assessment appointment with Dr. Riordan and remembered the doctor writing ‘Douglas A. W. G. – chronic alcoholic’ across his case notes. Following this appointment Alan was admitted to Cefn Coed where he stayed for about a month. Following his discharge from hospital, Alan remained sober for approximately 3 months, followed by another stay at Cefn Coed. This was to be the pattern of Alan’s life for the next 12 months. Alan then heard about a clinic that was being run on the Westfa ward in Cefn Coed.

In the early 1950’s Dr McMillan, a psychiatrist at Cefn Coed Hospital, started the first clinic in Swansea to help people who had ‘a drink problem’. The clinic was based at the Westfa day centre on Eaton Crescent in the Uplands and was linked to Cefn Coed Hospital. The clinic only ran for a short time as McMillan found it too difficult to keep up the running of the group week after week. There wasn’t anyone in place to succeed him.

Alan continued to go to the meetings at the Westfa clinic every Thursday night. This meeting was run by doctors and a psychiatric social worker for ‘people with drinking problems’. Family members could also attend these meetings. Alan recalled that the ‘powers that be’ didn’t like the patients to call themselves ‘alcoholics’, they were just people who drank too much. Although Alan didn’t feel that these meetings were doing him any good, he acknowledged that they weren’t doing him any harm. One thing that Alan found helpful was the fact that no one asked him to ‘pull himself together’ or advised him to try ‘just one drink, or anything silly like that.’ Obviously if he could have done that, then he would have!  One night in particular stood out in Alan’s memory from his early days in ‘recovery’. The night he offered to go in search of Bill, a friend who hadn’t turned up for a meeting.

“I know where he is, he’s in the pub. I’ll go and fetch him. And I had started to have a few drinks but that’s the last drink I ever took was that night. And I went and fetched him. I went to the pub, he was there alright. And I said to him, ‘You coming? You’ve forgotten there’s a meeting tonight’. ‘Oh yes I’ll be with you now in a minute, I’ll just finish this drink. Have one, keep me company’, he said. I said, ‘Yes alright, I’ll have a half’. Now I’d never drunk a half of beer in my life ‘till then. But I mean you just didn’t drink a half then, and ummm when I had finished my half I said to him, ‘Come on Bill we’re off’. ‘I'm not bloody going.’ He said, ‘I'm sitting here’. And I said ‘I'm off.’ And I left him sitting there and I went back to Westfa and that’s the first time I ever heard Donald say ‘My name is Donald and I'm an alcoholic’. I thought, ‘This guy’s crackers, he’s off his bloody head. Fancy admitting you’re an alcoholic’. But I had to listen to him because he was telling a story that was very similar to mine, particularly about the feelings - they were very, very close to mine. So uh…the next, we decided we’d have meetings of AA, and the next three meetings were held in Eversley Road in my house, which was quite an impossible thing to keep up I discovered very quickly.”

Alan soon realised that holding the AA meetings at his home wasn’t working out, so he approached Dr. Riordon regarding holding the AA meetings on Westfa. Dr. Riordon agreed to let them have Westfa on Thursday evenings. Alan stipulated that the meetings were to be for AA members only which meant that the doctors and social worker were not to attend. Dr. Riordon agreed saying “If it does you good, it must be good. Yes you can have the place on Thursday nights”. The doctors stuck to their promise but Alan did have problems with the social worker, who would still turn up and sit in on the meeting. Eventually Alan asked Dr. Riordon to intervene. The social worker wasn’t seen again.

A few months later Dr Riordon approached Alan to ask him if he would start an AA group in Cefn Coed. Alan agreed and the meeting was held every Tuesday. That Cefn Coed meeting is still running but is now held on a Tuesday and a Friday.

Alan acknowledged that Travers Cousins and Tani Young, both recovering alcoholics provided a lot of support in the early years of AA. Travers would travel down from Bristol, and Tani from Wells, with car loads of AA members. Tani was Alan’s first AA ‘sponsor’.

“We didn’t believe in those days that men should only sponsor men and women should only sponsor women. It seemed unimportant. We were so concerned about getting sober, we weren’t concerned about anything else. And Tani anyway was everybody’s idea of an original Gran. Little did we know that she’d kept a brothel in Chicago. During those toughest years I remember… I’ll always remember her telling me that. I knew she was a hard character underneath, but I think one of the reasons…the main reason why I quit was my sponsor. It’s ‘cos she could be brutally frank, it was necessary at times.”

When Alan got stuck on the ‘God’ bit of AA’s philosophy he remembered Tani walking over to her sideboard and bringing out a bottle of whiskey and placing it on the table in front of him.  She asked Alan if he could see what it was. Alan replied that he could see a bottle of scotch. Tani asked if he would call the bottle of scotch a powerful good. Alan said if anything the bottle of scotch was a powerful evil. To which Tani replied, ‘In this world there’s an equal and an opposite for everything if you think about it’. It was then that Alan realised fully that there must be a “Powerful Good”.

Alan was interested in the ‘service’ side of AA. He felt there was a need for more than just AA.

“I think AA is the only thing that could work for me but quite obviously it’s not the only thing that’ll work for everybody. Other people have other forms of upbringing I suppose, and see things in a different light. I felt that there ought to be a place for them as well”.

In 1968 whilst Alan was visiting Lourdes the idea that there must be another way for people to find sobriety kept popping into Alan’s head. He remembered visiting the Avon Council on Alcoholism in Bristol and thought ‘That’s a way forward, All you had to do was educate’.

When Alan returned home he put his idea to Dr McMillan, who agreed that AA wasn’t for everybody and it therefore seemed to be a good idea to start up some other type of support. Dr McMillan suggested that they approach John Smith who was the Director of Swansea Social Services. John Smith advised them to get a committee of four or five people together to form their Council on Alcoholism. They also spoke to Cornel Perfect, Director of the National Council on Alcoholism, who spoke to Social Services on their behalf.

In 1974 Alan had formed his committee which consisted of Dr McMillan, Dr Riorden, Dr Littlepage, Dr J.M. John, Alan Hawkins, and Sheila Lockhead. They arranged a meeting with John Smith, Director of Social Services, where they were informed that there was no money left in the ‘pot’. So Alan’s search to secure the necessary funding to establish the Alcohol Advice Centre (AAC) began.

Colonel Perfect had retired and Derek Rutherford had taken over as Director of Social Services. Derek Rutherford was very knowledgeable in the health field and he negotiated with the funders on behalf of Alan and his committee. Alan recalled there being a shortfall in the funding available to establish AAC. Three female health instructors from the Health Education Service each offered to forgo their money for that year to boost the fund. That donation made the difference, without it the AAC could not have opened!

Alan decided to apply for the post of AAC Director along with seven other applicants. He made his plan know to Alan Hawkins who was the Chairman at that time. Mr Hawkins informed Alan that he would have to resign from the committee if he wanted to go for the Directors post. The interview panel consisted of Alan Hawkins, Derek Rutherford, Dr. Philip-Whiles and Sheila Lockhead, and after a tough interview, Alan was given the job much to his surprise.

“And I got the job which is quite surprising. I didn’t expect it because they were quite a…a panel of ummm experts. I had a real hard time with that. Derek Rutherford was the one that gave me the hard time (laughs) and he was a friend of mine! I could’ve killed him’.

He made a promise to himself that he would give five years of service to the newly founded West Glamorgan Alcohol Advice Centre.

Funding was to be provided by the Government and the West Glamorgan Local Authority. Dr Philip-Whiles was the local area medical officer at that time. Unfortunately the fledgling agency found themselves in a catch twenty-two situation. The Local Authority wouldn’t release the funds until the government released theirs (they were going to match pound for pound), and the government wouldn’t release their funds until the Local Authority did!

Alan heard that the then Health Secretary, Sir Keith Joseph, was to address a meeting of Social Workers in the Mount Pleasant Chapel, in Swansea. He got himself a ticket even though he didn’t have the ‘right’ to be there. As Sir Keith Joseph finished speaking and said he was now ready to take answers from the floor, Alan quickly scrambled to his feet explaining AAC’s funding predicament. Sir Joseph promised that he would have it all sorted by the end of the week. He kept that promise, all the money was in the bank before the end of the week.

Alan’s next task was to employ a secretary and luckily he knew just the person for the job. Margaret was a recovering alcoholic and had been a member of the Swansea AA group from the early days.

“Then I had to appoint a secretary, which was not difficult at all because Margaret had always wanted the job and she’d started up all sorts of agencies, including a dentists and set all the records, started all them off and had them working fine. So she had the job”.

Alan and his team had been busy networking prior to the Centre’s opening. This involved public meetings, approaching union representatives, probation, prison governors, the police, the Quakers, Cyrenians, the Samaritans and various churches.

On their first day at the newly opened Centre in the Uplands Alan and Margaret sorted out their desks, sat down and had a cup of tea and waited for their first client. Suddenly a voice was heard saying, ‘Do something with this one!’ and a woman was pushed into the office.

“Oh when we talked to her she was the most alcoholic kind of person I had ever encountered in my life. I’d never had anybody that drunk the way she did…and she never made it. I realised that we didn’t have the facilities…there was only myself and Margaret. There was nobody else there, we didn’t have any counsellors in those days, only me and I wasn’t really prepared for that – anything as far gone as that. Anyway, we arranged for her to go to Broadway Lodge and when they took her they found her…now she hadn’t had a drink for 12 hours I think it was. I think it was 12 hours. Anyhow, when they took her into Broadway uhh the reading went 5 times the normal level. Five times the driving level I mean – at that time. So how much she’d had to drink God only knows. She was a character though that lady."

As well as working to establish the AAC Alan was also very active within AA circles. In the late 70’s Alan started an AA meeting in Gorseinon (this meeting is still running today). Initially alcoholics and their families would attend this meeting. After a while the family members decided that they wanted their own meeting. Alan remembered that the same thing had happened in America, and he thought ‘Well it’s no good fighting against this, that’s what they want, that’s what they shall have’. And so Al-Anon was born in Swansea.

The AAC always encouraged their clients and their families to attend regular AA or Al-Anon meetings but it should be made clear at this point that AAC is not a part of AA. The AA ‘Big Book’ states that they do not affiliate themselves with any particular faith, sect or denomination, nor do they oppose anyone. The only requirement for membership of AA is an honest desire to stop drinking. Rather the staff at the Alcohol Advice Centre recognised that their clients would benefit from the extra support offered by the AA groups.

The need for more funding was a constant pressure. Alan made it his business to speak to people in the ‘know’ and was advised to apply for drug rehab funding as well as alcohol rehab funding.

Alan left the Centre in 1987 at the age of 60, having given eight years of service to the West Glamorgan Alcohol Advice Centre… three years more than the promise he had made to himself. Alan remained active in AA circles until his death.  

In Loving Memory of Alan William Gamage Douglas

Who passed away on Thursday,16th February 2006

At the age of 78

‘Requiescat in Pace’