TIS the season for a festive tipple - but, under a 150-year-old law, being drunk in a pub could land you with a hefty fine.

Under Section 12 of the Licensing Act 1872, “Every person found drunk...on any licensed premises, shall be liable to a penalty”.

So it is actually illegal to be drunk in a public place - including a pub. Technically, you could face a £200 fine if found to be breaking this law.

Pub historian DR PAUL JENNINGS writes: The law is from the 1872 Licensing Act, which made it an offence to serve a drunken person, be drunk on licensed premises or buy a drink for a drunken person.

Subsequent legislation kept the wording but increased the penalties. It was always, however, difficult to enforce.

Did the drunk actually get drunk on the premises? What actually is being drunk? Witnesses were all too ready to support the landlord.

Temperance people complained that the pubs and streets of Bradford were full of drunks but almost no publicans were prosecuted for serving them or permitting drunkenness on their premises.

One of them, James Scurrah, a house painter and Methodist lay preacher did a survey of the town’s pubs in 1875 to see just how much drunkenness there was in pubs. It is absolutely fascinating and is preserved at Bradford Archives.

He describes customers and what they were up to. For example, at the Pack Horse in Westgate he found 70 men and 25 women, ‘very many’ of the men and some of the women were the ‘worse for liquor’.

In another pub he saw two 16-year-old girls giving drink to another girl of nine. At another pub on Leeds Road he saw a mother who had come for her 18-year-old son who was ‘very stupid’ drunk and would not go with her.

At the Swaine Green, he saw a couple of policemen there on a Saturday afternoon. And, naturally enough, it saddened him to see people from chapel in the pubs. But in actual fact most pubs were quiet enough.

I first went in pubs in Bradford in the early 1970s and it was still usual for the police to bob in and look around: for drunken behaviour and under-age drinkers. I remember once in the Crescent in the Ice rink building, people breaking into the theme from Z Cars on their entrance.

The police were always in twos to prevent drinking on duty, which was also an offence, as was serving them. But not uncommon, especially in the early Victorian years of the police force. Very funnily portrayed in the sitcom Early Doors.

I worked in a pub in the mid-1970s and the landlord impressed upon us not to serve people who were drunk.

Police supervision, as it was called, ended about this time and now it is left to staff.

But I have seen some pretty drunk people, by any definition, served drink.

* Paul Jennings is the author of Bradford Pubs and The Local: A History of the English Pub.