The Smugglers: Picturesque Chapters in the Story of an Ancient Craft
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Title: The Smugglers: Picturesque Chapters in the Story of an Ancient Craft
Author: Charles G. Harper
Illustrator: Paul Hardy
Release date: June 1, 2014 [eBook #45856]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45856
Credits: This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SMUGGLERS: PICTURESQUE CHAPTERS IN THE STORY OF AN ANCIENT CRAFT ***
This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler
[Picture: “The Gentlemen go by”]
THE SMUGGLERS
PICTURESQUE CHAPTERS IN THE
STORY OF AN ANCIENT CRAFT
BY
CHARLES G. HARPER
“_SMUGGLER_.—_A wretch who_, _in defiance of_
_the laws_, _imports or exports goods without_
_payment of the customs_.”—DR. JOHNSON
ILLUSTRATED BY PAUL HARDY, BY THE AUTHOR
AND FROM OLD PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS
[Picture: Title page]
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.
1909
* * * * *
PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
PREFACE
_OPINIONS have ever been divided on the question of the morality_, _or
the immorality_, _of smuggling_. _This is not_, _in itself_,
_remarkable_, _since that subject on which all men think alike has not
yet been discovered_; _but whatever the views held upon the question of
the rights and wrongs of the_ “_free-traders_’” _craft_, _they have long
since died down into abstract academic discussion_. _Smuggling is_,
_indeed_, _not dead_, _but it is not the potent factor it once was_, _and
to what extent Governments are justified in taxing or restricting in any
way the export or the import of goods will not again become a living
question in this country until the impending Tariff Reform becomes law_.
_There have been those who_, _reading the proofs of this book_, _have
variously found in it arguments for_, _and others arguments against_,
_Protection_; _but_, _as a sheer matter of fact_, _there are in these
pages no studied arguments either way_, _and facts are here presented
just as they are retrieved from half-forgotten records_, _with no other
ulterior object than that of entertainment_. _But if these pages also
serve to show with what little wisdom __we are_, _and generally have
been_, _governed_, _they may not be without their uses_. _England_, _it
may surely be gathered_, _here and elsewhere_, _is what she is by sheer
force of dogged middle-class character_, _and in spite of her statesmen
and lawgivers_.
_CHARLES G. HARPER_
_PETERSHAM_, _SURREY_,
_July_ 1909.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 1
CHAPTER I
THE “OWLERS” OF ROMNEY MARSH, AND THE ANCIENT EXPORT 12
SMUGGLING OF WOOL
CHAPTER II
GROWTH OF TEA AND TOBACCO SMUGGLING IN THE EIGHTEENTH 24
CENTURY—REPRESSIVE LAWS A FAILURE
CHAPTER III
TERRORISING BANDS OF SMUGGLERS—THE HAWKHURST GANG—ORGANISED 39
ATTACK ON GOUDHURST—“THE SMUGGLERS’ SONG”
CHAPTER IV
THE “MURDERS BY SMUGGLERS” IN HAMPSHIRE 47
CHAPTER V
THE “MURDERS BY SMUGGLERS” _continued_—TRIAL AND EXECUTION 60
OF THE MURDERERS—FURTHER CRIMES BY THE HAWKHURST GANG
CHAPTER VI
OUTRAGE AT HASTINGS BY THE RUXLEY GANG—BATTLE ON THE 78
WHITSTABLE-CANTERBURY ROAD—CHURCH-TOWERS AS SMUGGLERS’
CELLARS—THE DRUMMER OF HERSTMONCEUX—EPITAPH AT
TANDRIDGE—DEPLORABLE AFFAIR AT HASTINGS—THE INCIDENT OF “THE
FOUR BROTHERS”
CHAPTER VII
FATAL AFFRAYS AND DARING ENCOUNTERS AT RYE, DYMCHURCH, 94
EASTBOURNE, BO-PEEP, AND FAIRLIGHT—THE SMUGGLERS’ ROUTE FROM
SHOREHAM AND WORTHING INTO SURREY—THE MILLER’S TOMB—LANGSTON
HARBOUR—BEDHAMPTON MILL
CHAPTER VIII
EAST COAST SMUGGLING—OUTRAGE AT BECCLES—A COLCHESTER 111
RAID—CANVEY ISLAND—BRADWELL QUAY—THE EAST ANGLIAN “CART
GAPS”—A BLAKENEY STORY—TRAGICAL EPITAPH AT HUSTANTON—THE
PEDDAR’S WAY
CHAPTER IX
THE DORSET AND DEVON COASTS—EPITAPHS AT KINSON AND WYKE—THE 119
“WILTSHIRE MOON-RAKERS”—EPITAPH AT BRANSCOMBE—THE WARREN AND
“MOUNT PLEASANT” INN
CHAPTER X
CORNWALL IN SMUGGLING STORY—CRUEL COPPINGER—HAWKER’S 129
SKETCH—THE FOWEY SMUGGLERS—TOM POTTER, OF POLPERRO—THE
DEVILS OF TALLAND—SMUGGLERS’ EPITAPHS—CAVE AT WENDRON—ST.
IVES
CHAPTER XI
TESTIMONY TO THE QUALITIES OF THE SEAFARING SMUGGLERS—ADAM 151
SMITH ON SMUGGLING—A CLERICAL COUNTERBLAST—BIOGRAPHICAL
SKETCHES OF SMUGGLERS—ROBERT JOHNSON, HARRY PAULET—WILLIAM
GIBSON, A CONVERTED SMUGGLER
CHAPTER XII
THE CARTER FAMILY, OF PRUSSIA COVE 165
CHAPTER XIII
JACK RATTENBURY 183
CHAPTER XIV
THE WHISKY SMUGGLERS 201
CHAPTER XV
SOME SMUGGLERS’ TRICKS AND EVASIONS—MODERN 228
TOBACCO-SMUGGLING—SILKS AND LACE—A DOG DETECTIVE—LEGHORN
HATS—FOREIGN WATCHES
CHAPTER XVI
COAST BLOCKADE—THE PREVENTIVE WATER-GUARD AND THE 239
COASTGUARD—OFFICIAL RETURN OF SEIZURES—ESTIMATED LOSS TO THE
REVENUE IN 1831—THE SHAM SMUGGLER OF THE SEASIDE—THE MODERN
COASTGUARD
INDEX 249
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“The Gentlemen go by” _Frontispiece_.
PAGE
The Owlers 12
The Owlers chase the Customs Officers into Rye 16
Goudhurst Church 40
“The Cautious turned their Faces away while the 46
Freetraders passed”
Breaking open the Custom-house at Poole. _From an 48
old Print_
The “Red Lion,” Rake 54
Sufferings of Daniel Chater. _From an old Print_ 56
Murder of Hawkins at the “Dog and Partridge.” 64
_From an old Print_
The “Dog and Partridge,” Slindon Common 66
“For our Parson” 76
The Chop-backs 78
The Drummer of Herstmonceux 82
Tandridge Church 84
Tombstone at Tandridge 86
“Run the Rascal through!” 92
Barham meets the Smugglers 96
A Landing at Bo-Peep 98
Smugglers’ Tracks near Ewhurst 102
The Miller’s Tomb 104
Langston Harbour 106
Bedhampton Mill 110
The “Green Man,” Bradwell Quay 112
Kitchen of the “Green Man” 114
“The Light of other Days” 136
The Devils of Talland 144
Escape of Johnson 156
Johnson putting off from Brighton Beach 158
“Oft from yon bat-haunted tow’r” 168
Prussia Cove 170
In a French Prison 174
Jack Rattenbury. _From an old Print_ 184
Smugglers hiding Goods in a Tomb 214
Dragoons dispersing Smugglers 222
Smugglers attacked. _From a mezzo-tint after Sir 228
Francis Bourgeois_
Smugglers defeated. _From a mezzotint after Sir 234
Francis Bourgeois_
INTRODUCTORY
Customs dues and embargoes on imports and exports are things of
immemorial antiquity, the inevitable accompaniments of civilisation and
luxury; and the smugglers, who paid no dues and disregarded all
prohibitions, are therefore of necessity equally ancient. Carthage, the
chief commercial community of the ancient world, was probably as greatly
troubled by the questions of customs tariffs and smuggling as was the
England of George the Third. Without civilisation, and the consequent
demand for the products of other lands, the smuggler’s trade cannot
exist. In that highly organised condition of so-styled civilisation
which produces wars and race-hatreds and hostile tariffs and swollen
taxation, the smuggler becomes an important person, a hateful figure to
governments, but not infrequently a beneficent being to the
ill-provided—in all nations the most numerous class—to whom he brought,
at a reasonable price, and with much daring and personal risk, those
comforts which, when they had paid toll to the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, were all but unattainable.
The chief defence, on the score of morals, set up by those few smugglers
who ever were at pains to prove that smuggling could be no crime, was
that customs duties were originally imposed in the time of Charles the
Second to provide funds for the protection of our coasts from the
Algerine and Barbary pirates who then occasionally adventured thus far
from their piratical lurks in the Mediterranean and ravaged the more
remote villages of our seaboard. When these dangers ceased, contended
these smugglers on their defence, the customs dues should automatically
have been taken off; but they were, on the contrary, greatly increased.
This view, or excuse, or defence—call it how we will—was, however,
entirely without historical foundation. It is true, indeed, that some
ports had been taxed, and that customs dues had been imposed for this
purpose, but customs charges were immemorially older than the seventeenth
century. There were probably such imposts in that lengthy era when
Britain was a Roman colony, and we certainly hear of customs charges
being levied in the reign of Ethelred, when a toll of one halfpenny was
charged upon every small boat arriving at Billingsgate, and one penny
upon larger boats, with sails.
These pages will show that not only import, but also export smuggling was
long continued in England, and not only so, but that the export
smuggling, notably that of wool, was for centuries the most important, if
not the only, kind. The prohibition of sending wool out of the kingdom
was, of course, introduced with the object of fostering the cloth
manufacture; but there are always two sides to any question, and in this
case the embargo upon wool soon taught the cloth-workers that, in the
matter of prices, they had the wool-growers at their mercy. By law they
could not sell to foreign customers, or (later) only upon paying heavy
dues; and the cloth-workers could therefore practically dictate their own
terms. In this pitiful resort—an example of the disastrous effect of
government interference with trade—there was nothing left but to set the
law at defiance, which the wool-growers and their allies, the “owlers,”
accordingly did, risking life and limb in the wholesale exportation of
wool. It is the duty of every citizen to oppose bad laws, but this
opposition to ill-conceived enactments creates a furtive class of men,
very Ishmaelites, who, with their liberty, and even their lives, forfeit,
are rendered capable, in extremity, of any and every enormity. Hence
arose those reckless bands of smugglers who in the middle of the
eighteenth century became highly organised and all-powerful in Kent,
Sussex, and Hampshire, and, realising their power, developed into
criminals of the most ferocious type. They were, properly regarded, the
products of bad government, the creatures brought into existence by a
vicious system that took its origin in the coming of William the Third,
the “Deliverer,” as history, tongue in cheek, styles him.
The growth of customs dues in the last years of the seventeenth century,
and so onward, in a vicious progression until the opening years of the
nineteenth, was not in any way owing to consideration for home traders,
or to a desire for the protection of British industries. They grew
exactly in proportion as the needs of the Government for revenue
increased; and were the direct results of that long-continued policy of
foreign alliances and aggressive interference in continental
politics—that “spirited foreign policy” advocated even in our own
times—which was introduced with the coming of William the Third. We did
well to depose James the Second, but we might have done better than bring
over his son-in-law and make him king; and we might, still more, have
done better than raise the Elector of Hanover to the status of British
sovereign, as George the First. Then we should probably have avoided
foreign entanglements, at any rate, until that later era when increased
intercourse between the nations rendered international politics
inevitable.
Foreign wars, and the heavy duties levied to pay for them, brought about
the enormous growth of smuggling, and directly caused all the miseries
and the blood-stained incidents that make the story of the smugglers so
“romantic.” Glory is very fine, and stirs the pulses in reading the
pages of history, but it is a commodity for which victorious nations, no
less than the defeated, are called upon to pay in blood, tears, and
privation.
With the great peace that, in 1815, succeeded the long and harassing
period of continual war, the people naturally looked forward towards a
time when the excessively heavy duties would be reduced, and many
articles altogether relieved from taxation. As a matter of fact, some of
these duties scarce paid the cost of their collection, and simply helped
to keep in office a large and increasing horde of officials. But the
price of glory continues to be paid, long after the laurels have faded;
and not for many years to come were those imposts reduced.
Sydney Smith, writing in 1820 on the subject of American desire for a
large navy, even then very manifest, warned the people of the United
States of the nemesis awaiting such indulgence. “We can inform
Jonathan,” he said, “what are the inevitable consequences of being too
fond of glory: Taxes upon every article which enters into the mouth, or
covers the back, or is placed under the foot; taxes upon everything which
it is pleasant to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste; taxes upon warmth,
light, and locomotion; taxes on everything on earth, and the waters under
the earth; on everything that comes from abroad, or is grown at home;
taxes on the raw material, taxes on every fresh value that is added to it
by the industry of man; taxes on the sauce which pampers man’s appetite
and the drug that restores him to health; on the ermine which decorates
the judge and the rope which hangs the criminal; on the poor man’s salt
and the rich man’s spice; on the brass nails of the coffin and the
ribands of the bride; at bed or board, couchant or levant, we must pay.
The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his taxed
horse with a taxed bridle on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman,
pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent., into a spoon that
has paid fifteen per cent., flings himself back upon his chintz bed which
has paid twenty-two per cent., makes his will on an eight-pound stamp,
and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a licence of a
hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death. His whole
property is then immediately taxed from two to ten per cent. Besides the
probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel; his
virtues are handed down to posterity on taxed marble; and he is then
gathered to his fathers—to be taxed no more.”
The real cost of military glory was aptly shown by a caricaturist of this
period, who illustrated the general rise of prices consequent upon war in
the following incident of an old country-woman buying a halfpenny candle
at a chandler’s shop:
“Price has gone up,” said the shopkeeper curtly, when she tendered the
money.
“What’s that for, then?” asked the old woman.
“On account of the war, ma’am.”
“Od rot ’em! do they fight by candlelight?” she not unnaturally asked.
Housekeepers of the present day may well enter—although somewhat
ruefully—into the humour of this simple story, for in the great and
continued rise of every commodity since the great Boer War, it is most
poignantly illustrated for us. In short, the people who pay for the
glory see nothing of it, and derive nothing from it.
How entirely true were those witty phrases of Sydney Smith we may easily
guess from the mere rough statement that there were, in 1787, no fewer
than 1,425 articles liable to duty (very many of them taxed at several
times their market value), bringing in £6,000,000 a year.
In 1797 the customs laws filled six large folio volumes. The total
number of Customs Acts prior to the accession of George the Third was
800, but no fewer than 1,300 were added between the years 1760 and 1813,
and newer Acts, partly repealing and partly adding to older enactments,
were continually being added to this vast mass of chaotic legislation
down to the middle of the Victorian era, until even experts were
frequently baffled as to the definite legal position of many given
articles. Finally—it is typical of our English amateur way of doing
things—in 1876, when so-called “Free Trade” had come in, and few articles
remained customable, the customs laws were consolidated.
Many years before, at one swoop, Sir Robert Peel had removed the duties
from four hundred different dutiable articles, leaving, however, many
hundreds of others more or less heavily assessed.
In consequence of this relief from taxation, smuggling rapidly decreased,
and the Commissioners of Customs were enabled to report: “With the
reduction of duties, and the removal of all needless and vexatious
restrictions, smuggling has greatly diminished, and the public sentiment
with regard to it has undergone a very considerable change. The smuggler
is no longer an object of general sympathy, as a hero of romance; and
people are beginning to awaken to a perception of the fact that his
offence is not only a fraud on the revenue, but a robbery of the fair
trader. Smuggling is now almost entirely confined to tobacco, spirits,
and watches.”
No fewer than four hundred and fifty other dutiable articles were struck
off the list in 1845, and the Cobdenite era of Free Trade, to which, it
was expected, all other nations would speedily be converted, had opened.
“Free Trade,” we are told, “killed smuggling.” It naturally killed
smuggling so far as duty-free articles were concerned; but this
all-embracing term of “Free Trade” is altogether a mockery and a
delusion. There has never been—there is not now—complete Free Trade in
this so-called free-trade country. Wines and spirits, tobacco, tea and
coffee, cocoa and sugar, are not they in the forefront of the articles
that render regularly to the Chancellor of the Exchequer? There have
been, indeed, throughout all the years of the Free Trade era, some forty
articles scheduled for paying customs duty on import into the United
Kingdom. They help the revenue to the extent of about £27,000,000 per
annum.
The romance of smuggling has very largely engaged the attention of every
description of writers, but we do not hear so much of its commercial
aspects, although it must be evident that for men to dare so greatly as
the smugglers did with winds and waves and with the customs’ forces, the
possible gains must have been great. Time and again a cargo of tea or of
spirits would be seized, and yet the smugglers be prepared with other
ventures, knowing, as they did, that one entirely successful run would
pay for perhaps two failures. When tea could be purchased in Holland at
sevenpence a pound, and sold in England at prices ranging from 3_s._
6_d._ to 5_s._, and when tobacco, purchased at the same price, sold at
2_s._ 6_d._, it is evident that great possibilities existed for the
enterprising free-trader.
As regards spirits, if we take brandy as an example, we find almost equal
profits; for excellent cognac was shipped from Roscoff, in Brittany, from
Cherbourg, Dieppe, and other French ports in tubs of four gallons each,
which cost in France £1 a tub, and sold in England at £4. One of the
ordinary smuggling luggers, generally built especially for this traffic,
on racing lines, would hold eighty tubs.
On such a cargo being brought, according to preconcerted plan, within
easy distance off-shore, generally at night, a lantern or other signal
shown from cliff or beach by confederates on land would indicate the
precise spot where the goods were most safely to be beached; and there
would be assembled a sufficient company of labourers engaged for the job.
A cargo of eighty tubs required forty men, who carried two each, slung by
ropes over chest and back. According to circumstances, they marched in
company on foot, inland; or, if the distance were great, they went on
horseback, each man with a led horse, carrying three or four tubs in
addition. These labourers, although not finally interested in the safe
running of the goods, and not paid on any other basis than being hired
for the heavy job of carrying considerable weights throughout the night,
were quite ready and willing to fight any opponents that might be met, as
innumerable accounts of savage encounters tell us. Besides these
carriers, there were often, in case of opposition to the landing being
anticipated, numerous “batsmen,” armed with heavy clubs, to protect the
goods.
The pay of a labourer or carrier varied widely, of course, in different
places, at different times, and according to circumstances. It ranged
from five shillings to half a sovereign a night, and generally included
also a present of a package of tea or a tub of brandy for so many
successful runs. It is recorded that the labourers engaged for riding
horseback, each with a led horse, from Sandwich, Deal, Dover, Folkestone,
or Romney, to Canterbury, a distance of some fifteen miles, were paid
seven shillings a night. The horses cost the smugglers nothing, for they
were commandeered, as a general rule, from the neighbouring farmers, who
did not usually offer any objection, for it was not often that the gangs
forgot to leave a tub in payment. The method employed in thus
requisitioning horses was quite simple. An unsigned note would be handed
to a farmer stating that his horses were wanted, for some purpose
unnamed, on a certain night; and that he was desired to leave his stables
unlocked for those who would come and fetch them. If he did not comply
with this demand he very soon had cause to regret it in the mysterious
disasters that would shortly afterwards overtake him: his outbuildings
being destroyed by fire, his farming implements smashed, or his cattle
mutilated.
The farmers, indeed, were somewhat seriously embarrassed by the
prevalence of smuggling. On the one hand, they had to lend their horses
for the smugglers’ purposes, and on the other they discovered that the
demand for carriers of tubs and other goods shortened the supply of
labour available for agricultural purposes, and sent up the rate of
wages. A labourer in the pay of smugglers would often be out three
nights in the week, and, with the money he received and with additional
payment in kind, was in a very comfortable position.
CHAPTER I
THE “OWLERS” OF ROMNEY MARSH, AND THE ANCIENT EXPORT SMUGGLING OF WOOL
THE earliest conflicts of interests between smugglers and the Government
were concerned with the export of goods, and not with imports. We are
accustomed to think only of the import smuggler, who brought from across
Channel, or from more distant shores, the spirits, wines, tea, coffee,
silks, laces, and tobacco that had never yielded to the revenue of the
country; but before him in point of time, if not also in importance, was
the “owler” who, defying all prohibitions and penalties, even to those of
bodily mutilation and death, sold wool out of England and secretly
shipped it at night from the shores of Kent and Sussex.
English wool had from a very early date been greatly in demand on the
Continent. The England of those distant times was a purely agricultural
country, innocent of arts, industries, and manufactures, except of the
most primitive description. The manufacturers then exercised their
skilled trades largely in France and the Low Countries; and, in especial,
the cloth-weaving industries were practised in Flanders.
[Picture: The Owlers]
So early as the reign of Edward the First the illegal exportation of wool
engaged the attention of the authorities, and an export duty of £3 a bag
(in modern money) was imposed, soon after 1276. This was in 1298
increased to £6 a bag, then lowered, and then again raised. English wool
was then worth 1_s._ 6_d._ a pound.
In the reign of Edward the Third a strenuous attempt was made to
introduce the weaving industries into England, and every inducement was
offered the Flemish weavers to settle here and to bring their art with
them. In support of this policy, the export of wool was, in various
years, subjected to further restrictions, and at one time entirely
forbidden. The royal solicitude for the newly cradled English weaving
industries also in 1337 forbade the wearing of clothing made with cloth
woven out of the country; but it is hardly necessary to add that edicts
of this stringency were constantly broken; and in 1341 Winchelsea,
Chichester, and thirteen other ports were named, whence wool might be
exported, on payment of a duty of 50_s._ a sack of twenty-six
stone—_i.e._ 364 lb.
The interferences with the sale and export of wool continued, and the
duty was constantly being raised or lowered, according to the supposed
needs of the time; but nearly always with unforeseen and disastrous
effects. The wool staple was removed to the then English possession of
Calais in 1363, and the export of it absolutely forbidden elsewhere. The
natural result, in spite of the great amount of smuggling carried on, was
that in a long series of years the value of wool steadily fell; the
cloth-makers taking advantage of the accumulation of stocks on the
growers’ hands to depress the price. In 1390 the growers had from three
to five seasons’ crops on hand, and the state of the industry had become
such that in the following year permission to export generally, on
payment of duty, was conceded. This duty tended to become gradually
heavier, and, as it increased, so proportionably did the “owling” trade.
The price of wool therefore declined again, and in 1454 it was recorded
as being not more than two-thirds of what it had been a hundred and ten
years earlier. The wool-growers, on the brink of ruin, petitioned that
wool, according to its various grades, might not be sold under certain
fixed prices; which were accordingly fixed.
But to follow, _seriatim_, the movements in prices and the complete
reversals of Government policy regarding the export, would be wearisome.
We will, therefore, pass on to the Restoration of the monarchy, in 1660,
when the export of wool was again entirely forbidden. Smuggling of it
was in 1662 again, by the reactionary laws of the period, made a felony,
punishable with death; yet the active smugglers, the rank and file of the
owling trade, who performed the hard manual labour for wages, at the
instigation of those financially interested, continued to risk their
necks for twelvepence a day. The low price their services commanded is
alone sufficient to show us that labour, in spite of the risks, was
plentiful. Not only Kent and Sussex, but Essex, and Ireland as well,
largely entered into this secret “stealing of wool out of the country,”
as the phrase ran; and “these caterpillars” had so many evasions, and
commanded so many combinations and interests among those officials whose
business it was to detect and punish, that few dared interfere: hence the
readiness of the labourers to “risk their necks,” the risk being, under
the circumstances, small.
Indeed, readers of the adventures of these owling desperadoes and of the
customs officers who hunted them will, perhaps, come to the conclusion
that the risks on either side were pretty evenly apportioned, and they
will see that the hunters not seldom became the hunted.
The experiences of one W. Carter, who appears to have been in authority
over the customs staff in the Romney Marsh district, towards the close of
the seventeenth century, were at times singularly vivid. His particular
“hour of crowded life” came in 1688, while he was engaged in an attempt
to arrest a body of owlers who were shipping wool into some French
shallops between Folkestone and New Romney.
Having procured the necessary warrants, he repaired to Romney, where he
seized eight or ten men who were carrying the wool on their horses’ backs
to be shipped, and desired the Mayor of Romney to commit them, but,
greatly to the surprise of this zealous officer, who doubtless imagined
he had at last laid some of these desperate fellows securely by the
heels, the Mayor of Romney consented to the prisoners being admitted to
bail. Mr. Carter, to have been so ingenuously surprised, must have been
a singularly simple official, or quite new to the business; for what
Mayor of Romney in those days, when every one on the Marsh smuggled, or
was interested financially in the success of smuggling, would dare not
deal leniently with these fellows! Nay, it was even abundantly probable
that the Mayor himself was financially committed in these ventures, and
perhaps even among the employers of Mr. Carter’s captives.
Romney was no safe abiding-place for Carter and his underlings when these
men were enlarged; and they accordingly retired upon Lydd. But if they
had fondly expected peace and shelter there they were woefully mistaken,
for a Marshland cry of vengeance was raised, and a howling mob of owlers,
ululating more savagely than those melancholy birds from whom they took
their name, violently attacked them in that little town, under cover of
night. The son of the Mayor of Lydd, well disposed to these sadly
persecuted revenue men, advised them to further retire upon Rye, which
they did the next morning, December 13th, pursued hotly across the
dyke-intersected marshes, as far as Camber Point, by fifty furious men.
[Picture: The Owlers chase the Customs Officers into Rye]
At Guilford Ferry the pursuers were so close upon their heels that they
had to hurriedly dismount and tumble into some boats belonging to ships
lying near, leaving their horses behind; and so they came safe, but
breathless, into Rye town.
At this period Calais—then lost to England—alone imported within two
years 40,000 packs of wool from Kent and Sussex; and the Romney Marsh men
not only sold their own wool in their illicit manner, but bought other
from up-country, ten or twenty miles inland, and impudently shipped it
off.
In 1698, the severe laws of some thirty years earlier having been thus
brought into contempt, milder penal enactments were introduced, but more
stringent conditions than ever were imposed upon the collection and
export of this greatly vexed commodity, and the civil deterrents of
process and fine, aimed at the big men in the trade, were strengthened.
A law was enacted (9 & 10 William the Third, c. 40, ss. 2 and 3) by which
no person living within fifteen miles of the sea in the counties of Kent
and Sussex should buy any wool before he became responsible in a legal
bond, with sureties, that none of the wool he should buy should be sold
by him to any persons within fifteen miles of the sea; and growers of
wool in those counties, within ten miles of the coast, were obliged,
within three days of shearing, to account for the number of fleeces
shorn, and to state where they were stored.
The success of this new law was not at first very marked, for the means
of enforcing it had not been provided. To enact repressive edicts, and
not to provide the means of their being respected, was as unsatisfactory
as fighting the wind. The Government, viewing England as a whole,
appointed under the new Act seventeen surveyors for nineteen counties,
with 299 riding-officers: a force barely sufficient for Kent and Sussex
alone. It cost £20,000 a year, and never earned its keep.
Henry Baker, supervisor for Kent and Sussex, writing on April 25th, 1699,
to his official chiefs, stated that there would be shorn in Romney Marsh,
quite apart from the adjacent levels of Pett, Camber, Guilford, and Dunge
Marsh, about 160,000 sheep, whose fleeces would amount to some three
thousand packs of wool, “the greatest part whereof will immediately be
sent off hot into France—it being so designed, preparations in great
measure being already made for that purpose.”
In fact, the new law at first did nothing more than to give the owlers
some extra trouble and expense in cartage of their packs; for, in order
to legally evade the extra disabilities it imposed, it was only necessary
to cart them fifteen miles inland and make fictitious sale and re-sale of
them there; thence shipping them as they pleased.
By this time the exportation of wool had become not only a kingly
concern—it had aroused the keen interest of the nation at large, fast
becoming an industrial and cloth-weaving nation. For two centuries and
more past the cloth-workers had been growing numerous, wealthy, and
powerful, and they meant, as far as it was possible for them to do, to
starve the continental looms out of the trade, for sheer lack of
material. No one cared in the least about the actual grower of the wool,
whether he made a loss or a profit on his business. It is obvious that
if export of it could have been wholly stopped, the cloth-workers, in the
forced absence of foreign buyers, would have held the unfortunate growers
in the hollow of their hands, and would have been able to dictate the
price of wool.
It is the inalienable right of every human being to fight against unjust
laws; only we must be sure they are unjust. Perhaps the dividing-line,
when self-interest is involved, is not easily to be fixed. But there can
be no doubt that the wool-growers were labouring under injustice, and
that they were entirely justified in setting those laws at naught which
menaced their existence.
However, by December 1703, Mr. Baker was able to give his superiors a
more favourable report. He believed the neck of the owling trade to have
been broken and the spirit of the owlers themselves to have been crushed,
particularly in Romney Marsh. There were not, at that time, he observed,
“many visible signs” of any quantities of wool being exported: which
seems to us rather to point to the perfected organisation of the owling
trade than to its being crushed out of existence.
“But for fine goods,” continued the supervisor, “as they call them
(_viz._ silks, lace, etc.), I am well assured that the trade goes on
through both counties, though not in such vast quantities as have been
formerly brought in—I mean in those days when (as a gentleman of estate
in one of the counties has within this twelve months told me) he has been
att once, besides at other times, at the loading of a wagon with silks,
laces, etc., till six oxen could hardly move it out of the place. I doe
not think that the trade is now so carried on as ’twas then.”
Things being so promising in the purview of this simple person, it seemed
well to him to suggest to the Commissioners of the Board of Customs that
a reduction of the annual charge of £4,500 for the preventive service
along the coasts of Kent and Sussex might be effected. At that time
there were fifty preventive officers patrolling over two hundred miles of
seaboard, each in receipt of £60 per annum, and each provided with a
servant and a horse, to help in night duty, at an estimated annual cost
of £30 for each officer.
We may here legitimately pause in surprise at the small pay for which
these men were ready to endure the dangers and discomforts of such a
service; very real perils and most unmistakable disagreeables, in midst
of an almost openly hostile country-side.
Mr. Baker, sanguine man that he was, proposed to abolish the annual
allowance to each of these hard-worked men for servant and horse, thus
saving £1,500 a year, and to substitute for them patrols of the Dragoon
regiments at that time stationed in Kent. These regiments had been
originally placed there in 1698 to overawe the owlers and other
smugglers, the soldiers being paid twopence extra a day (which certainly
did not err upon the side of extravagance) and the officers in
proportion: the annual cost on that head amounting to £200 per annum.
This military stiffening of the civil force employed to prevent
clandestine export and import appears to have been discontinued in 1701,
after about two years’ experiment.
These revived patrols, at a cost of £200, the supervisor calculated,
would more efficiently and economically undertake the work hitherto
performed by the preventive officers’ horses and men, still leaving a
saving of £1,300 a year. With this force, and a guard of cruisers
offshore, he was quite convinced that the smuggling of these parts would
still be kept under.
But alas for these calculations! The economy thus effected on this
scheme, approved of and put into being, was altogether illusory. The
owling trade, of which the supervisor had supposed the neck to be broken,
flourished more impudently than before. The Dragoons formed a most
inefficient patrol, and worked ill with the revenue officers, and, in
short, the Revenue lost annually many more thousands of pounds sterling
than it saved hundreds. When sheriffs and under-sheriffs could be, and
were, continually bribed, it is not to be supposed that Dragoons,
thoroughly disliking such an inglorious service as that of chasing
smugglers along muddy lanes and across country intricately criss-crossed
with broad dykes rarely to be jumped, would be superior to secret
advances that gave them much more than their miserable twopence a day.
Transportation for wool-smugglers who did not pay the fines awarded
against them was enacted in 1717; ineffectually, for in 1720 it was found
necessary to issue a proclamation, enforcing the law; and in five
successive years from 1731 the cloth-workers are found petitioning for
greater vigilance against the continued clandestine exportation, alleging
a great decay in the woollen manufactures owing to this illegal export;
150,000 packs being shipped yearly. “It is feared,” said these
petitioners, fighting for their own hand, regardless, of course, of other
interests, “that some gentlemen of no mean rank, whose estates border on
the sea-coast, are too much influenced by a near, but false, prospect of
gain”: to which the gentlemen in question, being generally brought up on
the dead classic languages, might most fairly have replied, had they
cared to do so, with the easy Latinity of _Tu quoque_!
This renewed daring and enterprise of the Sussex smugglers led to many
encounters with the customs officers. Among these was the desperate
engagement between sixty armed smugglers and customs men at Ferring, on
June 21st, 1720, when William Goldsmith, of the Customs, had his horse
shot under him.
A humorous touch, so far at least as the modern reader of these things is
concerned, is found in the Treasury warrant issued about this time, for
the sum of £200, for supplying a regiment with new boots and stockings;
their usual allowance of these indispensable articles having been “worn
out in the pursuit of smugglers.”
In spite of all attempts to suppress these illegal activities, it had to
be acknowledged, in the preamble of an Act passed in 1739, that the
export of wool was “notoriously continued.”
The old-established owling trade of Romney Marsh at length, after many
centuries, gave place to the clandestine import of silks, tea, spirits,
and tobacco; but it was only by slow and insensible degrees that the
owlers’ occupation dwindled away, in the lessening foreign demand for
English wool. The last was not heard of this more than
five-centuries-old question of the export of wool, that had so severely
exercised the minds of some twenty generations, and had baffled the
lawgivers in all that space of time, until the concluding year of the
final wars with France at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Many other articles were at the same time forbidden to be exported; among
them Fuller’s-earth, used in the manufacture of cloth, and so, of course,
subject to the same interdict as wool. A comparatively late Exchequer
trial for the offence of exporting Fuller’s-earth was that of one Edmund
Warren, in 1693. Fortunately for the defendant, he was able to show that
what he had exported was not Fuller’s-earth at all, but potter’s clay.
CHAPTER II
GROWTH OF TEA AND TOBACCO SMUGGLING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY—REPRESSIVE
LAWS A FAILURE
SIDE by side with the export smuggling of wool, the import smuggling of
tobacco and tea grew and throve amazingly in later ages. Every one,
knowingly or unsuspectingly, smoked tobacco and drank tea that had paid
no duty.
“Great Anna” herself, who was among the earliest to yield to the refining
influence of tea—
Great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Doth sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tay—
in all probability often drank tea which had contributed nothing to the
revenue. Between them tea and tobacco, in the illegal landing of the
goods, found employment for hundreds of hardy seafaring men and stalwart
landsmen, and led to much violence and bloodshed, beside which the
long-drawn annals of the owlers seem almost barren of incident.
Early in the eighteenth century, when continental wars of vast magnitude
were in progress, the list of dutiable articles began to grow quickly,
and concurrently with the growth of this list the already existing tariff
was continually increased. The smugglers’ trade grew with these growths,
and for the first time became a highly organised and widely distributed
trade, involving every class. The time had come at last when every
necessary of daily use was taxed heavily, often far above its ordinary
trading value; and an absurd, and indeed desperate, condition of affairs
had been reached, in which people of all ranks were more or less faced
with the degrading dilemma of being unable to afford many articles
generally consumed by persons of their station in life, or of procuring
them of the smugglers—the “free traders,” as they rightly styled
themselves—often at a mere one-third of the cost to which they would have
been put had their illicit purchasers paid duty.
The Government was, as we now perceive, in the mental perspective
afforded by lapse of time, in the clearly indefensible position of
heavily taxing the needs of the country, and of making certain practices
illegal that tended to supply those needs at much lower rates than those
thus artificially created, and yet of being unable to provide adequate
means by which these generally detested laws could be enforced. It was,
and is, no defence to hold that the revenues thus hoped for were a
sufficient excuse. To create an artificial restraint of trade, to
elevate trading in spite of restraint into a crime, and yet not to
provide an overmastering force that shall secure obedience, if not in one
sense respect, for those unnatural laws, was in itself a course of action
that any impartial historian might well hold to be in itself criminal;
for it led to continual disturbances throughout the country, with
appalling violence, and great loss of life, in conflict, or in the darker
way of secret murder.
But no historian would, on weighing the evidence available, feel
altogether sure of so sweeping an indictment of the eighteenth-century
governance of England. It was corrupt, it was self-seeking, it had no
breadth of view; but the times were well calculated to test the most
Heaven-sent statesmanship. The country, as were all other countries, was
governed for the classes; and governed, as one would conduct a business,
for revenue; whether the revenue was to be applied in conducting foreign
wars, or to find its way plentifully into the pockets of placemen, does
not greatly matter. This misgovernment was a characteristic failing of
the age; and it must, moreover, be recognised that the historian, with
his comprehensive outlook upon the past, spread out, so to speak,
map-like to his gaze, has the advantage of seeing these things as a
whole, and of criticising them as such; while the givers and
administrators of laws were under the obvious disadvantages of each
planning and working for what they considered to be the needs of their
own particular period, with those of the future unknown, and perhaps
uncared for. That there were some few among those in authority who
wrought according to their lights, however feeble might be their
illumination, must be conceded even to that age.
At the opening of this era, when Marlborough’s great victories were yet
fresh, and when the cost of them and of other military glories was
wearing the country threadbare, the most remarkable series of repressive
Acts, directed against smuggling, began. Vessels of very small tonnage
and light draught, being found peculiarly useful to smugglers, the use of
such, even in legalised importing, was strictly forbidden, and no craft
of a lesser burthen than fifteen tons was permitted. This provision, it
was fondly conceived, would strike a blow at smuggling, by rendering it
impossible to slip up narrow and shallow waterways; but this pious
expectation was doomed to disappointment, and the limit was accordingly
raised to thirty tons; and again, in 1721, to forty tons. At the same
time, the severest restrictions were imposed upon boats, in order to cope
with the ten, or even twelve and fourteen-oared galleys, rowed by
determined “free-traders.”
To quote the text of one among these drastic ordinances:
“Any boat built to row with more than four oars, found upon land or
water within the counties of Middlesex, Surrey, Kent, or Sussex, or
in the river Thames, or within the limits of the ports of London,
Sandwich, or Ipswich, or any boat rowing with more than six oars
found either upon land or water, in any other port, or within two
leagues of the coast of Great Britain, shall be forfeited, and every
person using or rowing in such boat shall forfeit £40.”
These prohibitions were, in 1779, in respect of boats to row with more
than six oars, extended to all other English counties; the port of
Bristol only excepted.
As for smuggling craft captured with smuggled goods the way of the
revenue authorities with such was drastic. They were sawn in three
pieces, and then thoroughly broken up.
The futility of these extraordinary steps is emphasised by the report of
the Commissioners of Customs to the Treasury in 1733, that immense
smuggling operations were being conducted in Kent, Sussex, Essex, and
Suffolk. In twelve months, this report declared, 54,000 lb. of tea and
123,000 gallons of brandy had been seized, and still, in spite of these
tremendous losses, the spirit of the smugglers was unbroken, and
smuggling was increasing. An additional force of 106 Dragoons was asked
for, to stiffen that of 185 already patrolling those coasts.
It was clearly required, with the utmost urgency, for such a mere handful
of troops spread over this extended seaboard could scarce be considered a
sufficient backing for the civil force, in view of the determined
encounters continually taking place, in which the recklessness and daring
of the smugglers knew no bounds. Thus, in June 1733, the officers of
customs at Newhaven, attempting to seize ten horses laden with tea, at
Cuckmere, were opposed by about thirty men, armed with pistols and
blunderbusses, who fired on the officers, took them prisoners, and kept
them under guard until the goods were safely carried off.
In August of the same year the riding-officers, observing upwards of
twenty smugglers at Greenhay, most of them on horseback, pluckily essayed
to do their duty and seize the goods, but the smugglers fell furiously
upon them, and with clubs knocked one off his horse, severely wounded
him, and confined him for an hour, while the run was completed. Of his
companions no more is heard. They probably—to phrase it delicately—went
for assistance.
In July 1735, customs officers of the port of Arundel, watching the
coast, expecting goods to be run from a hovering smuggler craft, were
discovered by a gang of more than twenty armed smugglers, anxiously
waiting for the landing, and not disposed for an all-night trial of
endurance in that waiting game. They accordingly seized the officers and
confined them until some boatloads of contraband had been landed and
conveyed away on horseback. In the same month, at Kingston-by-the-Sea,
between Brighton and Shoreham, some officers, primed with information of
a forthcoming run of brandy, and seeking it, found as well ten smugglers
with pistols. Although the smugglers were bold and menacing, the customs
men on this occasion had the better of it, for they seized and duly
impounded the brandy.
A more complicated affair took place on December 6th of the same year,
when some customs officers of Newhaven met a large, well-armed gang of
smugglers, who surrounded them and held them prisoners for an hour and a
half. The same gang then fell in with another party, consisting of three
riding-officers and six Dragoons, and were bold enough to attack them.
Foolish enough, we must also add; for they got the worst of the
encounter, and, fleeing in disorder, were pursued; five—armed with
pistols, swords, and cutlasses, and provided with twelve horses—being
captured.
A fatal encounter took place at Bulverhythe, between Hastings and
Bexhill, in March 1737. It is best read of in the anonymous letter
written to the Commissioners of Customs by a person who, for fear of the
smuggling gangs, was afraid to disclose his real name, and subscribed
himself “Goring.” The letter—whose cold-blooded informing, the work
evidently of an educated, but cruel-minded person, is calculated to make
any reader of generous instincts shiver—is to be found among the customs
correspondence, in the Treasury Papers.
“May it please [your] Honours,—It is not unknown to your Lordships of
the late battle between the Smuglers and Officers at Bulverhide; and
in relation to that Business, if your Honours but please to advise in
the News Papers, that this is expected off, I will send a List of the
names of the Persons that were at that Business, and the places’
names where they are usually and mostly resident. Cat (Morten’s man)
fired first, Morten was the second that fired; the soldiers fired and
killed Collison, wounded Pigon, who is since dead; William Weston was
wounded, but like to recover. Young Mr. Bowra was not there, but his
men and horses were; from your Honours’
“Dutifull and Most faithfull servant,
“GORING.
“There was no foreign persons at this Business, but all were Sussex
men, and may easily be spoke with.
“This [is] the seventh time Morten’s people have workt this winter,
and have not lost anything but one half-hundred [of tea] they gave to
a Dragoon and one officer they met with the first of this winter; and
the Hoo company have lost no goods, although they constantly work,
and at home too, since they lost the seventy hundred-weight. When
once the Smuglers are drove from home they will soon all be taken.
Note, that some say it was Gurr that fired first. You must well
secure Cat, or else your Honours will soon lose the man; the best way
will be to send for him up to London, for he knows the whole Company,
and hath been Morten’s servant two years. There were several young
Chaps with the Smuglers, whom, when taken, will soon discover the
whole Company. The number was twenty-six men. Mack’s horses,
Morten’s, and Hoak’s, were killed, and they lost not half their
goods. They have sent for more goods, and twenty-nine horses set out
from Groombridge this day, about four in the afternoon, and all the
men well armed with long guns.
“And if I hear this is received, I will send your Honours the Places
names where your Honours will intercep the Smuglers as they go to
Market with their Goods, but it must be done by Soldiers, for they go
stronger now than ever. And as for Mr. Gabriel Tompkin, Supervisor
of Dartford, there can be good reason given that Jacob Walter brought
him Goods for three years last past, and it is likewise no dispute of
that matter amongst allmost all the Smuglers. The Bruces and Jacob
fought about that matter and parted Company’s, and Mr. Tompkin was
allway, as most people know, a villain when a Smugler and likewise
Officer. He never was concern’d with any Body but Jacob, and now
Jacob has certainly done with Smugling. I shall not trouble your
Honours with any more Letters if I do not hear from this, and I do
assure your Honours what I now write is truth.
“There are some Smuglers with a good sum of money, and they may pay
for taking; as Thomas Darby, Edward King, John Mackdanie, and others
that are rich.
“The Hoo Company might have been all ruined when they lost their
goods; the Officers and Soldiers knew them all, but they were not
prosecuted, as [they] was not at Groombridge, when some time since a
Custom House Officer took some Tea and Arms too in Bowra’s house at
Groombridge.
“The first of this Winter, the Groombridge Smuglers were forced to
carry their goods allmost all up to Rushmore Hill and Cester Mark,
which some they do now, but Tea sells quick in London now, and Chaps
from London come down to Groombridge allmost every day, as they used
to do last Winter. When once they come to be drove from home, they
will be put to great inconveniences, when they are from their friends
and will lose more Goods than they do now, and be at more Charges.
Do but take up some of the Servants, they will soon rout the Masters,
for the Servants are all poor.
“Young Bowra’s House cost £500 building, and he will pay for looking
up.
“Morten and Bowra sold, last Winter, some-ways, about 3,000 [lb.]
weight a week.”
We hear nothing further of “Goring,” and there is nothing to show who was
the person whose cold malignance appears horribly in every line of his
communication. Any action that may have been officially taken upon it is
also hidden from us. But we may at least gather from it that the
master-men, the employers of the actual smugglers of the goods, were in a
considerable way of business, and already making very large profits. We
see, too, that the smuggling industry was even then well on towards being
a powerful organisation.
Still sterner legislative methods were, accordingly, in the opinion of
the authorities, called for, and the Act of Indemnity of 1736 was the
first result. This was a peculiarly mean and despicable measure, even
for a Revenue Act. There is this excuse—although a small one—for it;
that the Government was increasingly pressed for money, and that the
enormous leakage of customs dues might possibly in some degree be
lessened by stern and not very high-minded laws. By this Act it was
provided that smugglers who desired (whether on trial or not) to obtain a
free pardon for past offences, might do so by fully disclosing them; at
the same time giving the names of their fellows. The especial iniquity
of this lamentable example of frantic legislation, striking as it did at
the very foundations of character in the creation of the informer and the
sneak, is a sad instance of the moral obliquity to which a Government
under stress of circumstances can descend.
The Act further proceeded to deal with backsliders who, having purged
themselves as above, again resumed their evil courses, and it made the
ways of transgressors very hard indeed; for, when captured, they were
charged with not only their present offence, but also with that for which
they had compounded with the Dev— that is to say, with the law. And,
being so charged, and duly convicted, their case was desperate; for if
the previous offence had carried with it, on conviction, a sentence of
transportation (as many smuggling offences did: among them the carrying
of firearms by three, or more men, while engaged in smuggling goods), the
second brought a sentence of death.
With regard to the position of the pardoned smuggler who had earned his
pardon by thus peaching on his fellows, it is not too much to
say—certainly so far as the more ferocious smuggling gangs of Kent and
Sussex were concerned—that by so doing he had already earned his capital
sentence; for the temper of these men was such, and the risks they were
made to run by these ferocious Acts were so great, that they would
not—and, in a way of looking at these things, could not—suffer an
informer to live.
Thus, even the additional inducements offered to informers by
statute—including a reward of £50 each for the discovery and conviction
of two or more accomplices—very generally failed to obtain results.
Many other items of unexampled severity were included in this Act, and in
the yet more drastic measures of 1745 and the following year. By these
it was provided that persons found loitering within five miles of the
sea-coast, or any navigable river, might be considered suspicious
persons; and they ran the risk of being taken before a magistrate, who
was empowered, on any such person being unable to give a satisfactory
account of himself, to commit him to the House of Correction, there to be
whipped and kept at hard labour for any period not exceeding one month.
In 1746, assembling to run contraband goods was made a crime punishable
with death as a felon, and counties were made liable for revenue losses.
Smuggled goods seized and afterwards rescued entailed a fine of £200 upon
the county; a revenue officer beaten by smugglers cost the county £40; or
if killed, £100; with the provision that the county should be exempt if
the offenders were convicted within six months.
As regards the offenders themselves, if they failed to surrender within
forty days and were afterwards captured, the person who captured them was
entitled to a reward of £500.
Dr. Johnson’s definition of a smuggler appears on the title-page of the
present volume. It is not a flattering testimonial to character; but, on
the other hand, his opinion of a Commissioner of Excise—and such were the
sworn enemies of smugglers—was much more unfavourable. Such an one was
bracketed by the doctor with a political pamphleteer, or what he termed
“a scribbler for a party,” as one of “the two lowest of human beings.”
Without the context in which these judgments are now placed, it would be
more than a little difficult to trace their reasoning, which sounds as
little sensible as it would be to declare at one and the same time a
burglar to be a dangerous pest and a policeman a useless ornament. But
if smugglers can be proved from these pages wicked and reckless men, so
undoubtedly shall we find the Commissioners of Excise and Customs, in
their several spheres, appealing to the basest of human instincts, and
thus abundantly worthy of Johnson’s censure.
The shifts and expedients of the Commissioners of Customs for the
suppression of smuggling were many and ingenious, and none was more
calculated to perform the maximum of service to the Revenue with the
minimum of cost than the commissioning of privateers, authorised to
search for, to chase, and to capture if possible any smuggling craft.
“Minimum of cost” is indeed not the right expression for use here, for
the cost and risks to the customs establishment were _nil_. It should be
said here that, although the Acts of Parliament directed against
smuggling were of the utmost stringency, they were not always applied
with all the severity possible to be used; and, on the other hand,
customs officers and the commanders of revenue cutters were well advised
to guard against any excess of zeal in carrying out their instructions.
To chase and capture a vessel that every one knew perfectly well to be a
smuggler, and then to find no contraband aboard, because, as a matter of
fact, it had been carefully sunk at some point where it could easily be
recovered at leisure, was not only not the way to promotion as a zealous
officer; but was, on the contrary, in the absence of proof that
contraband had been carried, a certain way to official disfavour. And it
was also, as many officers found to their cost, the way into actions at
law, with resultant heavy damages not infrequently awarded against them.
It was, indeed, a scandal that these public servants, who assuredly
rarely ever brought to, or overhauled, a vessel without reasonable and
probable cause, should have been subject to such contingencies, without
remedy of any kind.
The happy idea of licensing private adventurers to build and equip
vessels to make private war upon smuggling craft, and to capture them and
their cargoes, was an extension of the original plan of issuing letters
of marque to owners of vessels for the purpose of inflicting loss upon an
enemy’s commerce; but persons intending to engage upon this private
warfare against smuggling had, in the first instance, to give security to
the Commissioners of a diligence in the cause thus undertaken, and to
enter into business details respecting the cargoes captured. It was,
however, not infrequently found, in practice, that these privateers very
often took to smuggling on their own account, and that, under the
protective cloak of their ostensible affairs, they did a very excellent
business; while, to complete this picture of failure, those privateers
that really did keep to their licensed trade generally contrived to lose
money and to land their owners into bankruptcy.
CHAPTER III
TERRORISING BANDS OF SMUGGLERS—THE HAWKHURST GANG—ORGANISED ATTACK ON
GOUDHURST—THE “SMUGGLERS’ SONG”
BUT the smugglers of Kent and Sussex were by far the most formidable of
all the “free-traders” in England, and were not easily to be suppressed.
Smuggling, export and import, off those coasts was naturally heavier than
elsewhere, for there the Channel was narrower, and runs more easily
effected. The interests involved were consequently much greater, and the
organisation of the smugglers, from the master-men to the labourers, more
nearly perfect. To interfere with any of the several confederacies into
which these men were banded for the furtherance of their illicit trade
was therefore a matter of considerable danger, and, well knowing the
terror into which they had thrown the country-side, they presumed upon
it, to extend their activities into other, and even less reputable,
doings. The intervals between carrying tubs, and otherwise working for
the master-smugglers became filled, towards the middle of the eighteenth
century, with acts of highway robbery and house-breaking, and, in the
home counties, at any rate, smuggling proved often to be only the first
step in a career of crime.
Among these powerful and terrorising confederacies, the Hawkhurst gang
was pre-eminent. The constitution of it was, necessarily, a matter of
inexact information, for the officers and the rank and file of such
societies are mentioned by no minute-books or reports. But one of its
principals was, without question, Arthur Gray, or Grey, who was one of
those “Sea Cocks” after whom Seacox Heath, near Hawkhurst, in Kent, is
supposed to be named. He was a man who did things on, for those times, a
grand scale, and was said to be worth £10,000. He had built on that then
lonely ridge of ground, overlooking at a great height the Weald of Kent,
large store houses—a kind of illicit “bonded warehouses”—for smuggled
goods, and made the spot a distributing centre. That all these facts
should have been contemporaneously known, and Gray’s store not have been
raided by the Revenue, points to an almost inconceivable state of
lawlessness. The buildings were in after years known as “Gray’s Folly”;
but it was left for modern times to treat the spot in a truly sportive
way: when Lord Goschen, who built the modern mansion of Seacox Heath on
the site of the smuggler’s place of business, became Chancellor of the
Exchequer. If the unquiet ghosts of the old smugglers ever revisit their
old haunts, how weird must have been the ironic laughter of Gray at
finding this the home of the chief financial functionary of the
Government!
[Picture: Goudhurst Church]
In December 1744 the gang were responsible for the impudent abduction of
a customs officer and three men who had attempted to seize a run of goods
at Shoreham. They wounded the officer and carried the four off to
Hawkhurst, where they tied two of them, who had formerly been smugglers
and had ratted to the customs service, to trees, whipped them almost to
death, and then took them down to the coast again and shipped them to
France. A reward of £50 was offered, but never claimed.
To exhume yet another incident from the forgotten doings of the time: In
March 1745 a band of twelve or fourteen smugglers assaulted three
custom-house officers whom they found in an alehouse at Grinstead Green,
wounded them in a barbarous manner, and robbed them of their watches and
money.
In the same year a gang entered a farmhouse near Sheerness, in Sheppey,
and stole a great quantity of wool, valued at £1,500. A week later £300
worth of wool, which may or may not have been a portion of that stolen,
was seized upon a vessel engaged in smuggling it from Sheerness, and
eight men were secured.
The long immunity of the Hawkhurst Gang from serious interference
inevitably led to its operations being extended in every direction, and
the law-abiding populace of Kent and Sussex eventually found themselves
dominated by a great number of fearless marauders, whose will for a time
was a greater law than the law of the land. None could take legal action
against them without going hourly in personal danger, or in fear of
house, crops, wheat-stacks, hay-ricks, or stock being burnt or otherwise
injured.
The village of Goudhurst, a picturesque spot situated upon a hill on the
borders of Kent and Sussex, was the first place to resent this ignoble
subserviency. The villagers and the farmers round about were wearied of
having their horses commandeered by mysterious strangers for the carrying
of contraband goods that did not concern them, and were determined no
longer to have their houses raided with violence for money or anything
else that took the fancy of these fellows.
They had at last found themselves faced with the alternatives, almost
incredible in a civilised country, of either deserting their houses and
leaving their property at the mercy of these marauders, or of uniting to
oppose by force their lawless inroads. The second alternative was
chosen; a paper expressive of their abhorrence of the conduct of the
smugglers, and of the determination to oppose them was drawn up and
subscribed to by a considerable number of persons, who assumed the style
of the “Goudhurst Band of Militia.” At their head was a young man named
Sturt, who had recently been a soldier. He it was who had persuaded the
villagers to be men, and make some spirited resistance.
News of this unexpected stand on the part of these hitherto meek-spirited
people soon reached the ears of the dreaded Hawkhurst Gang, who contrived
to waylay one of the “Militia,” and, by means of torture and
imprisonment, extorted from him a full disclosure of the plans and
intentions of his colleagues. They swore the man not to take up arms
against them, and then let him go; telling him to inform the Goudhurst
people that they would, on a certain day named, attack the place, murder
every one in it, and then burn it to the ground.
Sturt, on receiving this impudent message, assembled his “Militia,” and,
pointing out to them the danger of the situation, employed them in
earnest preparations. While some were sent to collect firearms, others
were set to casting bullets and making cartridges, and to providing
defences.
Punctually at the time appointed (a piece of very bad policy on their
part, by which they would appear to have been fools as well as rogues)
the gang appeared, headed by Thomas Kingsmill, and fired a volley into
the village, over the entrenchments made. The embattled villagers
replied, some from the houses and roof-tops, and others from the leads of
the church-tower; when George Kingsmill, brother of the leading spirit in
the attack, was shot dead. He is alluded to in contemporary accounts as
the person who had killed a man at Hurst Green, a few miles distant.
In the firing that for some time continued two others of the smugglers,
one Barnet Wollit and a man whose name is not mentioned, were killed and
several wounded. The rest then fled, pursued by the valorous “Militia,”
who took a few prisoners, afterwards handed over by them to the law, and
executed.
Surprisingly little is heard of this—as we, in these more equable times,
are prone to think it—extraordinary incident. A stray paragraph or so in
the chronicles of the time is met with, and that is all. It was only one
of the usual lawless doings of the age.
But to-day the stranger in the village may chance, if he inquires a
little into the history of the place, to hear wild and whirling accounts
of this famous event; and, if he be at all enterprising, will find in the
parish registers of burials this one piece of documentary evidence toward
the execution done that day:
“1747, Ap. 20, George Kingsmill, Dux sclerum glande plumbeo emisso,
cecidit.”
All these things, moreover, are duly enshrined, amid much fiction, in the
pages of G. P. R. James’s novel, “The Smuggler.”
And still the story of outrage continued. On August 14th, 1747, a band
of twenty swaggering smugglers rode, well-armed and reckless, into Rye
and halted at the “Red Lion” inn, where they remained drinking until they
grew rowdy and violent.
Coming into the street again, they discharged their pistols at random,
and, as the old account of these things concludes, “observing James
Marshall, a young man, too curious of their behaviour, carried him off,
and he has not since been heard of.”
History tells us nothing of the fate of that unfortunate young man; but,
from other accounts of the bloodthirsty characters of these Kentish and
Sussex malefactors, we imagine the very worst.
Others, contemporary with them—if, indeed, they were not the same men, as
seems abundantly possible—captured two revenue officers near Seaford,
and, securely pinning them down to the beach at low-water mark, so that
they could not move, left them there, so that, when the tide rose, they
were drowned.
Again, on September 14th of this same year, 1747, a smuggler named
Austin, violently resisting arrest, shot a sergeant dead with a
blunderbuss at Maidstone.
In “The Smugglers’ Song” Mr. Rudyard Kipling has vividly reconstructed
those old times of dread, when, night and day, the numerous and
well-armed bodies of smugglers openly traversed the country, terrorising
every one. To look too curiously at these high-handed ruffians was, as
we have already seen, an offence, and the most cautious among the rustics
made quite sure of not incurring their high displeasure—and incidentally
of not being called upon by the revenue authorities as witnesses to the
identity of any among their number—by turning their faces the other way
when the free-traders passed. Mothers, too, were careful to bid their
little ones on the Marshland roads, or in the very streets of New Romney,
to turn their faces to the hedge-side, or to the wall, “when the
gentlemen went by.” And—
If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,
Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street;
Them that ask no questions isn’t told a lie,
Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by.
Five and twenty ponies
Trotting through the dark—
Brandy for the parson;
’Baccy for the clerk;
Laces for a lady; letters for a spy,
And watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by.
[Picture: The cautious turned their faces away]
CHAPTER IV
THE “MURDERS BY SMUGGLERS” IN HAMPSHIRE
THE most outstanding chapter in the whole history of smuggling is that of
the cold-blooded “Murders by Smugglers” which stained the annals of the
southern counties in the mid-eighteenth century with peculiarly revolting
deeds that have in them nothing of romance; nothing but a long-drawn
story of villainy and fiendish cruelty. It is a story that long made
dwellers in solitary situations shiver with apprehension, especially if
they owned relatives connected in any way with the hated customs
officers.
This grim chapter of horrors, upon which the historian can dwell only
with loathing, and with pity for himself in being brought to the telling
of it, was the direct outcome of the lawless and almost unchecked doings
of the Hawkhurst Gang, whose daring grew continually with their
long-continued success in terrorising the countryside.
The beginnings of this affair are found in an expedition entered upon by
a number of the gang in September 1747, in Guernsey, where they purchased
a considerable quantity of tea, for smuggling into this country.
Unfortunately for their enterprise, they fell in with a revenue cutter,
commanded by one Captain Johnson, who pursued and captured their vessel,
took it into the port of Poole, and lodged the tea in the custom-house
there.
The smugglers were equally incensed and dismayed at this disaster, the
loss being a very heavy one; and they resolved, rather than submit to it,
to go in an armed force and recover the goods. Accordingly a mounted
body of them, to the number of sixty, well provided with firearms and
other weapons, assembled in what is described as “Charlton Forest,”
probably Chalton Downs, between Petersfield and Poole, and thence
proceeded on their desperate errand. Thirty of them, it was agreed,
should go to the attack, while the other thirty should take up positions
as scouts along the various roads, to watch for riding-officers, or for
any military force, and so alarm, or actively assist, if needs were, the
attacking party.
It was in the midnight between October 6th and 7th that this advance
party reached Poole, broke open the custom-house on the quay, and removed
all the captured tea—thirty-seven hundredweight, valued at £500—except
one bag of about five pounds weight. They returned in the morning, in
leisurely fashion, through Fordingbridge; the affair apparently so public
that hundreds of people were assembled in the streets of that little town
to see these daring fellows pass.
[Picture: . . breaking open the Customs House at Poole]
Among these spectators was one Daniel Chater, a shoemaker, who recognised
among this cavalcade of smugglers a certain John Diamond, with whom he
had formerly worked in the harvest field. Diamond shook hands with him
as he passed, and threw him a bag of tea.
It was not long before a proclamation was issued offering rewards for the
identification or apprehension of any persons concerned in this impudent
raid, and Diamond was in the meanwhile arrested on suspicion at
Chichester. Chater, who seems to have been a foolish, gossiping fellow,
saying he knew Diamond and saw him go by with the gang, became an object
of considerable interest to his neighbours at Fordingbridge, who, having
seen that present of a bag of tea—a very considerable present as the
price of tea then ran—no doubt thought he knew more of the affair than he
cared to tell. At any rate, these things came to the knowledge of the
Collector of Customs at Southampton, and the upshot of several interviews
and some correspondence with him was that Chater agreed to go in company
with one William Galley, an officer of excise, to Major Battin, a Justice
of the Peace and a Commissioner of Customs at Chichester, to be examined
as to his readiness and ability to identify Diamond, whose punishment, on
conviction, would be, under the savage laws of that time, death.
Chater, in short, had offered himself as that detestable thing, a hired
informer: a creature all right-minded men abhor, and whom the smugglers
of that age visited, whenever found, with persecution and often with the
same extremity to which the law doomed themselves.
The ill-fated pair set out on Sunday, February 14th, on horseback, and,
calling on their way at Havant, were directed by a friend of Chater’s at
that place to go by way of Stanstead, near Rowlands Castle. They soon,
however, missed their way, and calling at Leigh, at the “New Inn,” to
refresh and to inquire the road, met there three men, George and Thomas
Austin, and their brother-in-law, one Mr. Jenkes, who accompanied them to
Rowlands Castle, where they all drew rein at the “White Hart”
public-house, kept by a Mrs. Elizabeth Payne, a widow, who had two sons
in the village, blacksmiths, and both reputed smugglers.
Some rum was called for, and was being drank, when Mrs. Payne, taking
George Austin aside, told him she was afraid these two strangers were
after no good; they had come, she suspected, with intent to do some
injury to the smugglers. Such was the state of the rural districts in
those times that the appearance of two strangers was of itself a cause
for distrust; but when, in addition, there was the damning fact that one
of them wore the uniform of a riding-officer of excise, suspicion became
almost a certainty.
But to her remarks George Austin replied she need not be alarmed, the
strangers were only carrying a letter to Major Battin, on some ordinary
official business.
This explanation, however, served only to increase her suspicions, for
what more likely than that this business with a man who was, among other
things, a highly placed customs official, was connected in some way with
these recent notorious happenings?
To make sure, Mrs. Payne sent privately one of her sons, who was then in
the house, for William Jackson and William Carter, two men deeply
involved with smuggling, who lived near at hand. In the meanwhile Chater
and Galley wanted to be gone upon their journey, and asked for their
horses. Mrs. Payne, to keep them until Jackson and Carter should arrive,
told them the man who had the key of the stables was gone for a while,
but would return presently.
As the unsuspecting men waited, gossiping and drinking, the two smugglers
entered. Mrs. Payne drew them aside and whispered her suspicions; at the
same time advising Mr. George Austin to go away, as she respected him,
and was unwilling that any harm should come to him.
It is thus sufficiently clear that, even at this early stage, some very
serious mischief was contemplated.
Mr. George Austin, being a prudent, if certainly not also an honest, man,
did as he was advised. Thomas Austin, his brother, who does not appear
to have in the same degree commanded the landlady’s respect, was not
warned, and remained, together with his brother-in-law. To have won the
reader’s respect also, she should, at the very least of it, have warned
them as well. But as this was obviously not a school of morals, we will
not labour the point, and will bid Mr. George Austin, with much relief,
“goodbye.”
Mrs. Payne’s other son then entered, bringing with him four more
smugglers: William Steel, Samuel Downer, _alias_ Samuel Howard, _alias_
“Little Sam,” Edmund Richards, and Henry Sheerman, _alias_ “Little
Harry.”
After a while Jackson took Chater aside into the yard, and asked him
after Diamond; whereupon the simple-minded man let fall the object of his
and his companion’s journey.
While they were talking, Galley, suspecting Chater would be in some way
indiscreet, came out and asked him to rejoin them; whereupon Jackson,
with a horrible oath, struck him a violent blow in the face, knocking him
down.
Galley then rushed into the house, Jackson following him. “I am a King’s
officer,” exclaimed the unfortunate Galley, “and cannot put up with such
treatment.”
“You a King’s officer!” replied Jackson, “I’ll make a King’s officer of
you; and for a quartern of gin I’ll serve you so again!”
The others interposed, one of the Paynes exclaiming, “Don’t be such a
fool; do you know what you are doing?”
Galley and Chater grew very uneasy, and again wanted to be going; but the
company present, including Jackson, pressed them to stay, Jackson
declaring he was sorry for what had passed. The entire party then sat
down to more drink, until Galley and Chater were overcome by drunkenness
and were sent to sleep in an adjoining room. Thomas Austin and Mr.
Jenkes were by this time also hopelessly drunk; but as they had no
concern with the smugglers, nor the smugglers with them, they drop out of
this narrative.
When Galley and Chater lay in their drunken sleep the compromising
letters in their pockets were found and read, and the men present formed
themselves into a kind of committee to decide what should be done with
their enemies, as they thought them. John Race and Richard Kelly then
came in, and Jackson and Carter told them they had got the old rogue, the
shoemaker of Fordingbridge, who was going to give an information against
John Diamond the shepherd, then in custody at Chichester.
They then consulted what was best to be done to their two prisoners, when
William Steel proposed to take them both to a well, a little way from the
house, and to murder them and throw them in. Less ferocious proposals
were made—to send them over to France; but when it became obvious that
they would return and give the evidence after all, the thoughts of the
seven men present reverted to murder. At this juncture the wives of
Jackson and Carter, who had entered the house, cried, “Hang the dogs, for
they came here to hang us!”
Another proposition that was made—to imprison the two in some safe place
until they knew what would be Diamond’s fate, and for each of the
smugglers to subscribe threepence a week for their keep—was immediately
scouted; and instantly the brutal fury of these ruffians was aroused by
Jackson, who, going into the room where the unfortunate men were lying,
spurred them on their foreheads with the heavy spurs of his riding-boots,
and, having thus effectually wakened them, whipped them into the kitchen
of the inn until they were streaming with blood. Then, taking them
outside, the gang lifted them on to a horse, one behind the other, and,
tying their hands and legs together, lashed them with heavy whips along
the road, crying, “Whip them, cut them, slash them, damn them!” one of
their number, Edmund Richards, with cocked pistol in hand, swearing he
would shoot any person through the head who should mention anything of
what he saw or heard.
From Rowlands Castle, past Wood Ashes, Goodthorpe Deane, and to Lady Holt
Park, this scourging was continued through the night, until the wretched
men were three parts dead. At two o’clock in the morning this gruesome
procession reached the Portsmouth Road at Rake, where the foremost
members of the party halted at what was then the “Red Lion” inn, long
since that time retired into private life, and now a humble cottage. It
was kept in those days by one Scardefield, who was no stranger to their
kind, nor unused to the purchase and storing of smuggled spirits. Here
they knocked and rattled at the door until Scardefield was obliged to get
out of bed and open to them. Galley, still alive, was thrust into an
outhouse, while the band, having roused the landlord and procured drink,
caroused in the parlour of the inn. Chater they carried in with them;
and when Scardefield stood horrified at seeing so ghastly a figure of a
man, all bruised and broken, and spattered with blood, they told him a
specious tale of an engagement they had had with the King’s officers:
that here was a comrade, wounded, and another, dead or dying, in his
brew-house.
[Picture: The “Red Lion,” Rake]
Chater they presently carried to an outhouse of the cottage of a man
named Mills, not far off, and then returned for more drink and discussion
of what was to be done with Galley, whom they decided to bury in Harting
Combe. So, while it was yet dark, they carried him down from the ridge
on which Rake stands, into the valley, and, digging a grave in a
fox-earth by the light of a lantern, shovelled the dirt over him, without
inquiring too closely whether their victim were alive or dead. That he
was not dead at that time became evident when his body was discovered
eight months later, hands raised to his face, as though to prevent the
earth from suffocating him.
The whole of the next day this evil company sat drinking in the “Red
Lion.” Richard Mills, son of the man in whose turf-shed Chater lay
chained by the leg, passing by, they hailed him and told him of what they
had done; whereupon he said he would, if he had had the doing of it, have
flung the man down Harting Combe headlong and broken his neck.
On this Monday night they all returned home, lest their continued absence
might be remarked by the neighbours; agreeing to meet again at Rake on
the Wednesday evening, to consider how they might best put an end to
Chater.
When Wednesday night had come this council of murderers, reinforced by
others, and numbering in all fourteen, assembled accordingly. Dropping
into the “Red Lion” one by one, it was late at night before they had all
gathered.
They decided, after some argument, to dispatch him forthwith, and, going
down to the turf-shed where he had lain all this while, suffering agonies
from the cruel usage to which he had been subjected, they unchained him.
Richard Mills at first had proposed to finish him there. “Let us,” said
he, “load a gun with two or three bullets, lay it upon a stand with the
muzzle of the piece levelled at his head, and, after having tied a long
string to the trigger, we will all go off to the butt-end, and, each of
us taking hold of the string, pull it all together; thus we shall be all
equally guilty of his death, and it will be impossible for any one of us
to charge the rest with his murder, without accusing himself of the same
crime; and none can pretend to lessen or to mitigate his guilt by saying
he was only an accessory, since all will be principals.”
[Picture: Chater being kicked and cut]
Thus Richard Mills, according to the story of these things told in horrid
detail (together with a full report of the subsequent trial) by the
author of the contemporary “Genuine History.” The phraseology of the
man’s coldly logical proposals is, of course, that of the author himself;
since it is not possible that a Sussex rustic of over a hundred and sixty
years ago would have spoken in literary English.
Mills’s proposition was not accepted. It seemed to the others too
merciful and expeditious a method of putting an end to Chater’s misery.
They had grown as epicurean in torture as the mediæval hell-hounds who
racked and pinched and burnt for Church and State. They were resolved he
should suffer as much and as long as they could eke out his life, as a
warning to all other informers.
The proposal that found most favour was that they should take him to
Harris’s Well, in Lady Holt Park, and throw him in.
Tapner, one of the recruits to the gang, thereupon inaugurated the new
series of torments by pulling out a large clasp-knife, and, with a
fearful oath, exclaiming, “Down on your knees and go to prayers, for with
this knife I will be your butcher.”
Chater, expecting every moment to be his last, knelt down as he was
ordered, and, while he was thus praying, Cobby kicked him from behind,
while Tapner in front slashed his face.
The elder Mills, owner of the turf-shed, at this grew alarmed for his own
safety. “Take him away,” he said, “and do not murder him here. Do it
somewhere else.”
They then mounted him on a horse and set out for Lady Holt Park; Tapner,
more cruel, if possible, than the rest, slashing him with his knife, and
whipping him with his whip, all the way.
It was dead of night by the time they had come to the Park, where there
was a deep dry well. A wooden fence stretched across the track leading
to it, and over this, although it was in places broken and could easily
have been crawled through, they made their victim climb. Tapner then
pulled a rope out of his pocket and tied it round Chater’s neck, and so
pushed him over the opening of the well, where he hung, slowly
strangling.
But by this time they were anxious to get home, and could afford no more
time for these luxuries of cruelty, so they dropped him to the bottom of
the well, imagining he would be quite killed by the fall. Unfortunately
for Chater, he was remarkably tenacious of life, and was heard groaning
there, where he had fallen.
They dared not leave him thus, lest any one passing should hear his
cries, and went and roused a gardener, one William Combleach, who lived a
little way off, and borrowed a ladder, telling him one of their
companions had fallen into Harris’s Well. With this ladder they intended
to descend the well and finally dispatch Chater; but, seeing they could
not manage to lower the ladder, they were reduced to finding some huge
stones and two great gateposts, which they then flung down, and so ended
the unhappy man’s martyrdom.
The problem that next faced the murderers was, how to dispose of the two
horses their victims had been riding. It was first proposed to put them
aboard the next smuggling vessel returning to France, but that idea was
abandoned, on account of the risk of discovery. It was finally decided
to slaughter them and remove their skins, and this was accordingly done
to the grey that Galley had ridden, and his hide cut up into small pieces
and buried; but, when they came to look for the bay that Chater had used,
they could not find him.
CHAPTER V
THE “MURDERS BY SMUGGLERS” _continued_—TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF THE
MURDERERS—FURTHER CRIMES BY THE HAWKHURST GANG
EVEN in those times two men, and especially men who had set out upon
official business, could not disappear so utterly as Chater and Galley
had done without comment being aroused, and presently the whole country
was ringing with the news of this mysterious disappearance. The
condition of the country can at once be guessed when it is stated that no
one doubted the hands of the smugglers in this business. The only
question was, in what manner had they spirited these two men away? Some
thought they had been carried over to France, while others thought,
shrewdly enough, they had been murdered.
But no tidings nor any trace of either Galley or Chater came to satisfy
public curiosity, or to allay official apprehensions, until some seven
months later, when an anonymous letter sent to “a person of distinction,”
and probably inspired by the hope of ultimately earning the large reward
offered by the Government for information, hinted that “the body of one
of the unfortunate men mentioned in his Majesty’s proclamation was buried
in the sands in a certain place near Rake.” And, sure enough, when
search was made, the body of Galley was found “standing almost upright,
with his hands covering his eyes.”
Another letter followed upon this discovery, implicating William Steel in
these doings, and he was immediately arrested. To save himself, the
prisoner turned King’s evidence, and revealed the whole dreadful story.
John Race, among the others concerned, voluntarily surrendered, and was
also admitted as evidence.
One after another, seven of the murderers were arrested in different
parts of the counties of Hants and Surrey, and were committed to the
gaols of Horsham and Newgate, afterwards being sent to Chichester, where
a special Assize was held for the purpose of overawing the smugglers of
the district, and of impressing them with the majesty and the power of
the law, which, it was desired to show them, would eventually overtake
all evil-doers.
We need not enter into the details of that trial, held on January 18th,
1749, and reported with painful elaboration by the author of the “Genuine
History,” together with the sermon preached in Chichester Cathedral by
Dean Ashburnham, who held forth in the obvious and conventional way of
comfortably beneficed clergy, then and now.
Let it be sufficient to say that all were found guilty, and all sentenced
to be hanged on the following day.
Six of them were duly executed, William Jackson, the seventh, dying in
gaol. He had been for a considerable time in ill health. He was a Roman
Catholic and the greatest villain of the gang, and, like all such,
steeped in superstition. Carefully sewed up in a linen purse in his
waistcoat pocket was found an amulet in French, which, translated, ran as
follows:
Ye three Holy Kings,
Gaspar, Melchior, Balthasar,
Pray for us now, and in the hour of death.
These papers have touched the three heads of the Holy Kings at
Cologne.
They are to preserve travellers from accidents on the road,
headaches, falling sickness, fevers, witchcraft, all kinds of
mischief, and sudden death.
His body was thrown into a pit on the Broyle, at Chichester, together
with those of Richard Mills, the elder, and younger. The body of William
Carter was hanged in chains upon the Portsmouth road, near Rake; that of
Benjamin Tapner on Rook’s Hill, near Chichester, and those of John Cobby
and John Hammond upon the sea-coast near Selsea Bill, so that they might
be seen for great distances by any contrabandists engaged in running
goods.
Another accomplice, Henry Shurman, or Sheerman, _alias_ “Little Harry,”
was indicted and tried at East Grinstead, and, being sentenced to death,
was conveyed to Horsham Gaol by a strong guard of soldiers and hanged at
Rake, and afterwards gibbeted.
In January 1749, a brutal murder was committed at the “Dog and Partridge”
inn, on Slindon Common, near Arundel, where Richard Hawkins was whipped
and kicked to death on suspicion of being concerned in stealing two bags
of tea, belonging to one Jerry Curtis. Hawkins was enticed away from his
work at Walberton, on some specious pretext, by Curtis and John Mills,
known as “Smoker,” and went on horseback behind Mills to the “Dog and
Partridge,” where they joined a man named Robb: all these men being
well-known smugglers in that district. Having safely got Hawkins thus
far, they informed him that he was their prisoner, and proceeded to put
him under examination in the parlour of the inn. There were also present
Thomas Winter (afterwards a witness for the prosecution), and James
Reynolds, the innkeeper.
Hawkins denied having stolen the tea, and said he knew nothing of the
matter, whereupon Curtis replied, “Damn you; you do know, and if you do
not confess I will whip you till you do; for, damn you, I have whipped
many a rogue and washed my hands in his blood.”
Reynolds said, “Dick, you had better confess; it will be better for you.”
But his answer still was, “I know nothing of it.”
Reynolds then went out, and Mills and Robb thereupon beat and kicked
Hawkins so ferociously that he cried out that the Cockrels, his
father-in-law, and brother-in-law, who kept an inn at Yapton, were
concerned in it. Curtis and Mills then took their horses and said they
would go and fetch them. Going to the younger Cockrel, Mills entered the
house first and called for some ale. Then Curtis came in and demanded
his two bags of tea, which he said Hawkins had accused him of having.
Cockrel denied having them, and then Curtis beat him with an oak stick
until he was tired. Curtis and Mills then forcibly took him to where his
father was, at Walberton, and thence, with his father, behind them on
their horses, towards Slindon.
Meanwhile, at the “Dog and Partridge,” Robb and Winter placed the
terribly injured man, Hawkins, in a chair by the fire, where he died.
Robb and Winter then took their own horses and rode out towards Yapton,
meeting Curtis and Mills on the way, each with a man behind him. The
men, who were the Cockrels, were told to get off, which they did, and the
four others held a whispered conversation, when Winter told them that
Hawkins was dead, and desired them to do no more mischief.
“By God!” exclaimed Curtis, “we will go through it now.” Winter again
urged them to be content with what had already been done; and Curtis then
bade the two Cockrels return home.
Then they all four rode back to the “Dog and Partridge,” where Reynolds
was in despair, saying to Curtis, “You have ruined me.”
[Picture: The whipping of Richard Rowland]
Curtis replied that he would make him amends; and they all then consulted
how to dispose of the body. The first proposition was to bury it in a
park close at hand, and to give out that the smugglers had deported
Hawkins to France. But Reynolds objected. The spot, he said, was too
near, and would soon be found. In the end, they laid the body on a horse
and carried it to Parham Park, twelve miles away, where they tied large
stones to it, and sunk it in a pond.
This crime was in due course discovered, and a proclamation issued,
offering a pardon to any one, not himself concerned in the murder, nor in
the breaking open of the custom-house at Poole, who should give
information that would lead to the capture and conviction of the
offenders.
William Pring, an outlawed smuggler, who had heard some gossip of this
affair among his smuggling acquaintance, and was apparently wishful of
beginning a new life, determined to make a bid for his pardon for past
offences, and, we are told, “applied to a great man in power,” informing
him that he knew Mills, and that if he could be assured of his pardon he
would endeavour to take him, for he was pretty certain to find him either
at Bristol or Bath, whither he knew he was gone, to sell some run goods.
Being assured of his pardon, he set out accordingly, and found not only
Mills, but two brothers, Lawrence and Thomas Kemp, themselves smugglers
and highway robbers, and wanted for various offences; Thomas Kemp being
additionally in request for having broken out of Newgate.
The informer, Pring, artfully talking matters over with these three, and
observing that the cases of all of them were desperate, offered the
advice that they should all accompany him towards London, to his house at
Beckenham, where they would decide upon some plan for taking to highway
robbery and house-breaking, in the same manner as Gregory’s Gang {66}
used to do.
This they all heartily agreed to, and confidentially, on the journey up
to Beckenham, spoke and bragged of their various crimes.
Arrived at Beckenham, Pring made a plausible excuse to leave them awhile
at his house, while he fetched his mare, in exchange for the very
indifferent horse he had ridden. It would never do, he said, when on
their highway business, for one of the company to be badly horsed.
He left the house and rode hurriedly to Horsham, whence he returned with
eight or nine mounted officers of excise. They arrived at midnight, and
found his three guests sitting down to supper.
The two Kemps were easily secured, and tied by the arms; but Mills would
not so readily submit, and was slashed with a sword before he would give
in.
[Picture: The “Dog and Partridge,” Slindon Common]
John Mills was a son of Richard Mills, and a brother of Richard Mills the
younger, executed at Chichester for the murder of Chater and Galley, as
already detailed, and he also had taken part in that business. Brought
to trial at East Grinstead, he said he had indeed been a very wicked
liver, but he bitterly complained of such of the witnesses against him as
had been smugglers and had turned King’s evidence. They had, he
declared, acted contrary from the solemn oaths and engagements they had
made and sworn to among themselves, and he therefore wished they might
all come to the same end, and be hanged like him and damned afterwards.
He was found guilty and duly sentenced to death, and was hanged and
afterwards hung in chains on a gibbet erected for the purpose on Slindon
Common, near the “Dog and Partridge.”
Curtis, an active partner in the same murder, fled the country, and was
said to have enlisted in the Irish Brigade of the French Army. Robb was
not taken, and Reynolds was acquitted of the murder. He and his wife
were tried at the next Assizes, as accessories after the fact.
The “Dog and Partridge” has long ceased to be an inn, but the house
survives, a good deal altered, as a cottage. In the garden may be seen a
very capacious cellar, excavated out of the soil and sandstone, and very
much larger than a small country inn could have ever required for
ordinary business purposes. It is known as the “Smugglers’ Cellar.”
At the same sessions at which these bloodstained scoundrels were
convicted a further body of five men, Lawrence and Thomas Kemp, John
Brown, Robert Fuller, and Richard Savage, were all tried on charges of
highway robbery, of housebreaking, and of stealing goods from a wagon.
They were all members of the notorious Hawkhurst Gang, and had been
smugglers for many years. All were found guilty and sentenced to death,
except Savage, who was awarded transportation for life. The rest were
executed at Horsham on April 1st, 1749. One of them had at least once
already come near to being capitally convicted, but had been rescued from
Newgate by a party of fellow-smugglers before justice could complete her
processes.
These rescuers were in their turn arrested on other charges, and brought
to trial at Rochester Assizes, with other malefactors, in March 1750.
They were four notorious smugglers, Stephen Diprose, James Bartlett,
Thomas Potter, and William Priggs, who were all executed on Penenden
Heath, on March 30th.
Bartlett, pressed to declare, after sentence, if he had been concerned in
any murders, particularly in that of Mr. Castle, an excise officer who
had been shot on Selhurst Common by a gang of smugglers, would not give a
positive answer, and it was therefore supposed he was concerned in it.
Potter described some of the doings of the gang, and told how, fully
armed, they would roam the country districts at night, disguised, with
blackened faces, and appear at lonely houses, where they would seize and
bind the people they found, and then proceed to plunder at their leisure.
In the short interval that in those days was allowed between sentence and
execution Potter was very communicative, and disclosed a long career of
crime; but he declared that murder had never been committed by him. He
had, it was true, proposed to murder the turnkey at Newgate at the time
when he and his companions rescued their friends languishing in that
doleful hold: but it had not, after all, been found necessary.
This, it will be conceded, was sufficiently frank and open. The official
account of that rescue was that Thomas Potter and three other smugglers
came into the press-yard at Newgate to visit two prisoners, Thomas Kemp
and William Grey, also of the Hawkhurst Gang, when they agreed at all
hazards to assist in getting them out. Accordingly the time was fixed
(Kemp having no irons, and Grey having his so managed as to be able to
let them fall off when he pleased), and Potter and the other three went
again to the press-yard and rang the bell for the turnkey to come and let
them in. When he came and unlocked the door Potter immediately knocked
him down with a horse-pistol, and cut him terribly; and Kemp and Grey
made their escape, while Potter and his companions got clear away without
being discovered. Three other prisoners at the same time broke loose,
but were immediately recaptured, having irons on.
All these men were, in fact, originally smugglers, and had, from being
marked down as criminals for that offence, and from being “wanted” by the
law, found themselves obliged to keep in hiding from their homes. In
default of being able to take part in other runs of smuggled goods, and
finding themselves unable to get employment, they were driven to other,
and more serious, crimes.
On April 4th of the same year four other members of the terrible
Hawkhurst Gang—Kingsmill, Fairall, Perrin, and Glover by name—were
together brought to trial at the Old Bailey, charged with being concerned
in the Poole affair, the breaking open of the custom-house, and the
stealing of goods therefrom. They had been betrayed to the Government by
the same two ex-smugglers who had turned King’s evidence at the
Chichester trial, and their evidence again secured a conviction. Glover,
recommended by the jury to the royal mercy, was eventually pardoned; but
the remaining three were hanged. Fairall behaved most insolently at the
trial, and even threatened one of the witnesses. Glover displayed
penitence; and Kingsmill and Perrin insisted that they had not been
guilty of any robbery, because the goods they had taken were their own.
Kingsmill had been leader in the ferocious attack on Goudhurst in April
1747, and was an extremely dangerous ruffian, ready for any extremity.
Fairall was proved to be a particularly desperate fellow. Two years
earlier he had been apprehended, as a smuggler, in Sussex, and, being
brought before Mr. Butler, a magistrate, at Lewes, was remitted by him
for trial in London.
Brought under escort overnight to the New Prison in the Borough, Fairall
found means to make a dash from the custody of his guards, and, leaping
upon a horse that was standing in Blackman Street, rode away and escaped,
within sight of numerous people.
Returning to the gang, who were reasonably surprised at his safe return
from the jaws of death, he was filled with an unreasoning hatred of Mr.
Butler, the justice who, in the ordinary course of his duty, had
committed him. He proposed a complete and terrible revenge: firstly, by
destroying all the deer in his park, and all his trees, which was readily
agreed to by the gang; and then, since those measures were not extreme
enough for them, the idea was discussed of setting fire to his house and
burning him alive in it. Some of the conspirators, however, thought this
too extreme a step, and they parted without coming to any decision.
Fairall, Kingsmill, and others, however, determined not to be baulked,
then each procured a brace of pistols, and waited for the magistrate,
near his own park wall, to shoot him when he returned home that night
from a journey to Horsham.
Fortunately for him, some accident kept him from returning, and the party
of would-be assassins, tired of waiting, at last said to one another,
“Damn him, he will not come home to-night! Let us be gone about our
business.” They then dispersed, swearing they would watch for a month
together, but they would have him; and that they would make an example of
all who should dare to obstruct them.
Perrin’s body was directed to be given to his friends, instead of being
hanged in chains, and he was pitying the misfortunes of his two
companions, who were not only, like himself, to be hanged, but whose
bodies were afterwards to be gibbeted, when Fairall said, “_We_ shall be
hanging up in the sweet air when _you_ are rotting in your grave.”
Fairall kept a bold front to the very last. The night before the
execution, he smoked continually with his friends, until ordered by the
warder to go to his cell; when he exclaimed, “Why in such a hurry?
Cannot you let me stay a little longer with my friends? I shall not be
able to drink with them to-morrow night.”
But perhaps there was more self-pity in those apparently careless words
and in that indifferent demeanour than those thought who heard them.
Kingsmill was but twenty-eight years of age, and Fairall twenty-five, at
the time of their execution, which took place at Tyburn on April 26th,
1749. Fairall’s body was hanged in chains on Horsenden Green, and that
of Kingsmill on Goudhurst Gore, appropriately near the frighted village
whose inhabitants he had promised the vengeance of himself and his
reckless band.
When G. P. R. James wrote his romance, “The Smuggler,” about the middle
of the nineteenth century, reminiscences of the smuggling age were yet
fresh, and many an one who had passed his youth and middle age in the art
was still in a hale and hearty eld, ready to tell wonderful stories of
bygone years. James therefore heard at first hand all the ins and outs
of this shy business; and although his story deals with the exploits of
the Ransley Gang (whom he styles “Ramley”) of a much earlier period, the
circumstances of smuggling, and the conditions prevailing in Kent and
Sussex, remained much the same in the experiences of the elderly
ex-smugglers he met. What he has to say is therefore of more than common
value.
Scarcely any one of the maritime counties, he tells us, was without its
gang of smugglers; for if France was not opposite, Holland was not far
off; and if brandy was not the object, nor silk, nor wine, yet tea and
cinnamon, and hollands, and various East India goods, were duly estimated
by the British public, especially when they could be obtained without the
payment of custom-house dues.
As there are land-sharks and water-sharks, so there were land-smugglers
and water-smugglers. The latter brought the objects of their commerce
either from foreign countries or from foreign vessels, and landed them on
the coast—and a bold, daring, reckless body of men they were; the former,
in gangs, consisting frequently of many hundreds, generally well-mounted
and armed, conveyed the commodities so landed into the interior and
distributed them to others, who retailed them as occasion required. Nor
were these gentry one whit less fearless, enterprising, and lawless than
their brethren of the sea.
The ramifications of this vast and magnificent league extended themselves
to almost every class of society. Each tradesman smuggled, or dealt in
smuggled goods; each public-house was supported by smugglers, and gave
them in return every facility possible; each country gentleman on the
coast dabbled a little in the interesting traffic; almost every
magistrate shared in the proceeds, or partook of the commodities.
Scarcely a house but had its place of concealment, which would
accommodate either kegs or bales, or human beings, as the case might be;
and many streets in seaport towns had private passages from one house to
another, so that the gentleman inquired for by the officers at No. 1 was
often walking quietly out of No. 20, while they were searching for him in
vain. The back of one street had always excellent means of communication
with the front of another, and the gardens gave exit to the country with
as little delay as possible.
Of all counties, however, the most favoured by nature and art for the
very pleasant and exciting sport of smuggling was the county of Kent.
Its geographical position, its local features, its variety of coast, all
afforded it the greatest advantages, and the daring character of the
natives on the shores of the Channel was sure to turn those advantages to
the purposes in question. Sussex, indeed, was not without its share of
facilities, nor did the Sussex men fail to improve them; but they were so
much farther off from the opposite coast that the chief commerce—the
regular trade—was not in any degree at Hastings, Rye, or Winchelsea to be
compared with that carried on from the North Foreland to Romney Hoy. At
one time the fine level of the Marsh, a dark night, and a fair wind,
afforded a delightful opportunity for landing a cargo and carrying it
rapidly into the interior; at another, Sandwich Flats and Pevensey Bay
presented harbours of refuge and places of repose for kegs innumerable
and bales of great value; at another, the cliffs round Folkestone and
near the South Foreland saw spirits travelling up by paths which seemed
inaccessible to mortal foot; and at another, the wild and broken ground
at the back of Sandgate was traversed by long trains of horses, escorting
or carrying every description of contraband articles.
The interior of the county was not less favourable to the traffic than
the coast: large masses of wood, numerous gentlemen’s parks, hills and
dales tossed about in wild confusion; roads such as nothing but horses
could travel, or men on foot, often constructed with felled trees or
broad stones laid side by side; wide tracts of ground, partly copse and
partly moor, called in that county “minnises,” and a long extent of the
Weald of Kent, through which no highway existed, and where such a thing
as coach or carriage was never seen, offered the land-smugglers
opportunities of carrying on their transactions with a degree of secrecy
and safety no other county afforded. Their numbers, too, were so great,
their boldness and violence so notorious, their powers of injuring or
annoying so various, that even those who took no part in their operations
were glad to connive at their proceedings, and at times to aid in
concealing their persons or their goods. Not a park, not a wood, not a
barn, that did not at some period afford them a refuge when pursued, or
become a depository for their commodities, and many a man, on visiting
his stables or his cart-shed early in the morning, found it tenanted by
anything but horses or wagons. The churchyards were frequently crowded
at night by other spirits than those of the dead, and not even the church
was exempted from such visitations.
None of the people of the county took notice of, or opposed these
proceedings. The peasantry laughed at, or aided, and very often got a
good day’s work, or, at all events, a jug of genuine hollands, from the
friendly smugglers; the clerk and the sexton willingly aided and abetted,
and opened the door of vault, or vestry, or church for the reception of
the passing goods; the clergyman shut his eyes if he saw tubs or jars in
his way; and it is remarkable what good brandy-punch was generally to be
found at the house of the village pastor. The magistrates of the county,
when called upon to aid in pursuit of the smugglers, looked grave and
swore in constables very slowly, dispatched servants on horseback to see
what was going on, and ordered the steward or the butler to “send the
sheep to the wood”: an intimation not lost upon those for whom it was
intended. The magistrates and officers of seaport towns were in general
so deeply implicated in the trade themselves that smuggling had a fairer
chance than the law, in any case that came before them; and never was a
more hopeless enterprise undertaken, in ordinary circumstances, than that
of convicting a smuggler, unless captured _in flagrante delicto_.
[Picture: “For our Parson”]
CHAPTER VI
OUTRAGE AT HASTINGS BY THE RUXLEY GANG—BATTLE ON THE
WHITSTABLE-CANTERBURY ROAD—CHURCH-TOWERS AS SMUGGLERS’ CELLARS—THE
DRUMMER OF HERSTMONCEUX—EPITAPH AT TANDRIDGE—DEPLORABLE AFFAIR AT
HASTINGS—THE INCIDENT OF “THE FOUR BROTHERS”
SUSSEX was again the scene of a barbarous incident, in 1768; and on this
occasion seafaring men were the malefactors.
It is still an article of faith with the writers of guide-books who do
not make their own inquiries, and thus perpetuate obsolete things, that
to call a Hastings fisherman a “Chop-back” will rouse him to fury. But
when a modern visitor, primed with such romance as this, timidly
approaches one of these broad-shouldered and amply-paunched fisherfolk
and suggests “Chop-backs” as a subject of inquiry, I give you my word
they only look upon you with a puzzled expression, and don’t understand
in the least your meaning.
But in an earlier generation this was a term of great offence to the
Hastingers. It arose, according to tradition, from the supposed descent
of these fisherfolk from the Norse rovers who used the axe, and cleaved
their enemies with them from skull to chine. But the true facts of the
case are laid to the account of some of the notorious Ruxley Gang, who in
1768 boarded a Dutch hoy, the _Three Sisters_, in mid-channel, on
pretence of trading, and chopped the master, Peter Bootes, down the back
with a hatchet. This horrid deed might never have come to light had not
these ruffians betrayed themselves by bragging to one another of their
cleverness, and dwelling upon the way in which the Dutchman wriggled when
they had slashed him on the backbone.
[Picture: The Chop-Backs]
The Government in November of that year sent a detachment of two hundred
Inniskilling Dragoons to Hastings, to arrest the men implicated, and a
man-o’-war and cutter lay off shore to receive them when they had been
taken prisoners. The soldiers had strict orders to keep their mission
secret, but the day after their arrival they were called out to arrest
rioters who had violently assaulted the Mayor, whom they suspected of
laying information against the murderers. The secret of the reason for
the soldiers’ coming had evidently in some manner leaked out. Several
arrests of rioters were made, and the men implicated in the outrage on
the Dutch boat were duly taken into custody.
The whole affair was so closely interwoven with smuggling that it was by
many suspected that the men who had been seized were held for that
offence as well; and persons in the higher walks of the smuggling
business, namely, those who financed it, and those others who largely
purchased the goods, grew seriously alarmed for their own liberty. In
the panic that thus laid hold of the town a well-to-do shopkeeper
absconded altogether.
Thirteen men were indicted in the Admiralty Court on October 30th, 1769,
for piracy and murder on the high seas; namely, Thomas Phillips, elder
and younger, William and George Phillips, Mark Chatfield, Robert Webb,
Thomas and Samuel Ailsbury, James and Richard Hyde, William Geary,
_alias_ Justice, _alias_ George Wood, Thomas Knight, and William Wenham,
and were capitally convicted. Of these, four, Thomas Ailsbury, William
Geary, William Wenham, and Richard Hyde, were hanged at Execution Dock,
November 27th.
The next most outstanding incident, a bloody affray which occurred on
February 26th, 1780, belongs to Kent.
As Mr. Joseph Nicholson, supervisor of excise, was removing to Canterbury
a large seizure of geneva he had made at Whitstable, a numerous body of
smugglers followed him and his escort of a corporal and eight troopers of
the 4th Dragoons. Fifty of the smugglers had firearms, and, coming up
with the escort, opened fire without warning or demanding their goods.
Two Dragoons were killed on the spot, and two others dangerously wounded.
The smugglers then loaded up the goods and disappeared. A reward of £100
was at once offered by the Commissioners of Excise, with a pardon, for
informers; and Lieutenant-Colonel Hugonin, of the 4th Dragoons, offered
another £50. John Knight, of Whitstable, was shortly afterwards
arrested, on information received, and was tried and convicted at
Maidstone Assizes. He was hanged on Penenden Heath and his body
afterwards gibbeted on Borstal Hill, the spot where the attack had been
made.
The south held unquestioned pre-eminence, as long as smuggling activities
lasted, and the records of bloodshed and hard-fought encounters are
fullest along the coasts of Kent and Sussex. Sometimes, but not often,
they are varied by a touch of humour.
The convenience afforded by churches for the storing of smuggled goods is
a commonplace of the history of smuggling; and there is scarce a seaboard
church of which some like tale is not told, while not a few inland
church-towers and churchyards enjoy the same reputation. Asked to
account for this almost universal choice of a hiding-place by the
smugglers, a parish clerk of that age supposed, truly enough, that it was
because no one was ever likely to go near a church, except on Sundays.
This casts an instructive side-light upon the Church of England and
religion at any time from two hundred to seventy or eighty years ago.
But a tale of more than common humour was told of the old church at Hove,
near Brighton, many years ago. It seems that this ancient building had
been greatly injured by fire in the middle of the seventeenth century,
but that the population was so small and so little disposed to increase
that a mere patching up of the ruins was sufficient for local needs.
Moreover, the spiritual needs of the place were considered to be so small
that Hove and Preston parishes were ecclesiastically united, and were
served by one clergyman, who conducted service at each parish church on
alternate Sundays. At a later period, indeed, Hove church was used only
once in six weeks.
But in the alternate Sunday period the smugglers of this then lonely
shore found the half-ruined church of Hove peculiarly useful for their
trade; hence the following story.
One “Hove Sunday” the vicar, duly robed, appeared here to take the duty,
and found, greatly to his surprise, that no bell was ringing to call the
faithful to worship. “Why is the bell not ringing?” demanded the vicar.
“Preston Sunday, sir,” returned the sexton shortly.
“No, no,” replied the vicar.
“Indeed, then, sir, ’tis.”
But the vicar was not to be argued out of his own plain conviction that
he had taken Preston last Sunday, and desired the sexton to start the
bell-ringing at once.
“’Taint no good, then, sir,” said the sexton, beaten back into his last
ditch of defence; “you can’t preach to-day.”
[Picture: The Drummer of Herstmonceux]
“_Can’t_, fellow?” angrily responded the vicar; “what do you mean by
‘can’t’?”
“Well, then, sir,” said the sexton, “if you must know, the church is full
of tubs, and the pulpit’s full of tea.”
An especially impudent smuggling incident was reported from Hove on
Sunday, October 16th, 1819, in the following words:
“A suspected smuggling boat being seen off Hove by some of the
custom-house officers, they, with two of the crew of the _Hound_ revenue
cutter, gave chase in a galley. On coming up with the boat their
suspicions were confirmed, and they at once boarded her; but while intent
on securing their prize, nine of the smugglers leapt into the _Hound’s_
galley and escaped. Landing at Hove, seven of them got away at once, two
being taken prisoners by some officers who were waiting for them. Upon
this a large company of smugglers assembled, at once commenced a
desperate attack upon the officers, and, having overpowered them,
assaulted them with stones and large sticks, knocked them down, and cut
the belts of the chief officer’s arms, which they took away, and thereby
enabled the two prisoners to escape.”
A reward of £200 was offered, but without result. The cargo of the
smugglers consisted of 225 tubs of gin, 52 tubs of brandy, and one bag of
tobacco.
Many of the ghost-stories of a hundred years and more ago originated in
the smugglers’ midnight escapades. It was, of course, entirely to their
advantage that superstitious people who heard unaccountable sounds and
saw indescribable sights should go off with the notion that supernatural
beings were about, and resolve thenceforward to go those haunted ways no
more. The mysterious “ghostly drummer” of Herstmonceux, who was often
heard and seen by terrified rustics whose way led them past the ruined
castle at night, was a confederate of the Hastings and Eastbourne
smugglers, to whom those roofless walls and the hoary tombs of the
adjoining churchyard were valuable storehouses. Rubbed with a little
phosphorus, and parading those spots once in a way with his drum, they
soon became shunned. The tombstones in Herstmonceux churchyard, mostly
of the kind known as “altar-tombs,” had slabs which the smugglers easily
made to turn on swivels; and from them issued at times spirits indeed,
but not such as would frighten many men. The haunted character of
Herstmonceux ceased with the establishment of the coastguard in 1831, and
the drummer was heard to drum no more.
The churchyards of the Sussex coast and its neighbourhood still bear
witness to the fatal affrays between excisemen and smugglers that marked
those times; and even far inland may be found epitaphs on those who fell,
breathing curses and Divine vengeance on the persons who brought them to
an untimely end. Thus at Tandridge, Surrey, near Godstone, may be seen a
tall tombstone beside the south porch of the church, to one Thomas
Todman, aged thirty-one years, who was shot dead in a smuggling affray in
1781. Here follow the lamentable verses, oddities of grammar, spelling,
and punctuation duly preserved:
Thou Shall do no Murder, nor Shalt thou Steal
are the Commands Jehovah did Reveal
but thou O Wretch, Without fear or dread
of Thy Tremendous Maker Shot me dead
Amidst my strength my sins forgive
As I through Boundless Mercy
hope to live.
The prudery of some conscientious objector to the word “wretch” has
caused it to be almost obliterated.
[Picture: Tandridge church]
At Patcham, near Brighton, the weatherworn epitaph on the north side of
the church to Daniel Scales may still with difficulty be deciphered:
Sacred to the memory of DANIEL SCALES
who was unfortunately shot on Thursday evening,
November 7th 1796
Alas! swift flew the fatal lead,
Which piercèd through the young man’s head
He instant fell, resigned his breath,
And closed his languid eyes in death.
All you who do this stone draw near,
Oh! pray let fall the pitying tear.
From this sad instance may we all,
Prepare to meet Jehovah’s call.
Daniel Scales was one of a desperate smuggling gang, who had had many
narrow escapes, but was at last shot through the head.
Again, at Westfield, Sussex, not far from Rye, may be found an old stone,
rapidly going to decay, bearing some lines to the memory of a smuggler
named Moon:
“In Memory of John Moon, who was deprived of life by a base man, on
the 20th of June 1809, in the 28th year of his age.
’Tis mine to-day to moulder in the earth. . . .”
The rest is not now readable.
Among the many tragical incidents of the smuggling era was the affray
aboard a fishing-smack off Hastings in March 1821, in which a fisherman
named Joseph Swain, supposed by the blockading officers of the preventive
force to be a smuggler, was killed. Fishing-boats and their crews were,
as a matter of course, searched by these officials; but the boat boarded
by them on this occasion belonged to Swain, who denied having any
contraband goods aboard and refused to permit the search. So strenuous a
refusal as Swain offered would seem, in those times, of itself sufficient
evidence of the presence of smuggled articles, and the boarders
persisted. A sailor among them, George England by name, pressed forward
to the attack, and Swain seized his cutlass and tore it out of his hand;
whereupon England drew a pistol and fired at Swain, who instantly fell
dead.
An epitaph in the churchyard of All Saints, Hastings, bears witness to
this incident:
[Picture: Tombstone at Tandridge]
This Stone
Sacred to the memory of
JOSEPH SWAIN, Fisherman
was erected at the expence of
the members of the friendly
Society of Hastings
in commiseration of his cruel and
untimely death and as a record of
the public indignation at the need-
lefs and sanguinary violence of
which he was the unoffending Victim
He was shot by Geo. England, one
of the Sailors employ’d in the Coast
blockade service in open day on the
13th March 1821 and almost instantly
expir’d, in the twenty ninth Year of
his age, leaving a Widow and five
small children to lament his lofs.
England was subsequently put on his trial for wilful murder at Horsham,
and was sentenced to death, but afterwards pardoned.
In short, in one way and another, much good blood and a great quantity of
the most excellent spirits were spilt and let run to waste, along the
coasts.
The affair of the _Badger_ revenue cutter and the _Vre Brodiers_, or
_Four Brothers_, smuggling lugger was the next exciting event. It
happened on January 13th, 1823, and attracted a great deal of attention
at the time, not only on account of the severe encounter at sea, but from
the subsequent trial of the crew of the smuggler. The _Four Brothers_
was a Folkestone boat, and her crew of twenty-six were chiefly Folkestone
men. She was a considerable vessel, having once been a French privateer,
and was, as a privateer had need to be, a smart, easily handled craft,
capable of giving the go-by to most other vessels. She carried four
six-pound carronades. In constant commission, her crew pouched a pound a
week wages, with an additional ten guineas for each successful run.
On January 12th, of this momentous voyage, she sailed from Flushing with
over one hundred tons of leaf-tobacco aboard, snugly packed for
convenience of carriage in bales of 60 lb., and carried also a small
consignment of brandy and gin, contained in 50 half-ankers, and 13 chests
of tea—all destined for the south of Ireland. Ship and cargo were worth
some £11,000; so it is sufficiently evident that her owners were in a
considerable way of business of the contraband kind.
At daybreak on the morning of January 13th, when off Dieppe and sailing
very slowly, in a light wind, the crew of the _Four Brothers_ found
themselves almost upon what they at first took to be French
fishing-boats, and held unsuspiciously on her course. Suddenly, however,
one of them ran a flag smartly up her halliards and fired a gun across
the bows of the _Four Brothers_, as a signal to bring her to. It was the
revenue cutter _Badger_.
Unfortunately for the smuggler, she was carrying a newly stepped
mainmast, and under small sail only, and accordingly, in disobeying the
summons and attempting to get away, she was speedily outsailed.
The smuggler, unable to get away, hoisted the Dutch colours and opened
the fight that took place by firing upon the _Badger_, which immediately
returned it. For two hours this exchange of shots was maintained. Early
in the encounter William Cullum, seaman, was killed aboard the _Badger_,
and Lieutenant Nazer, in command, received a shot from a musket in the
left shoulder. One man of the _Four Brothers_ was killed outright, and
nine wounded, but the fight would have continued had not the _Badger_
sailed into the starboard quarter of the smuggler, driving her bowsprit
clean through her adversary’s mainsail. Even then the smuggler’s crew
endeavoured to fire one of her guns, but failed.
The commander of the _Badger_ thereupon called upon the _Four Brothers_
to surrender; or, according to his own version, the smugglers themselves
called for quarter; and the mate and some of the cutter’s men went in a
boat and received their submission, and sent them prisoners aboard the
_Badger_. The smugglers claimed that they had surrendered only on
condition that they should have their boats and personal belongings and
be allowed to go ashore; but it seems scarce likely the Lieutenant could
have promised so much. The _Four Brothers_ was then taken into Dover
Harbour and her crew sent aboard the _Severn_ man-o’-war and kept in
irons in the cockpit. Three of her wounded died there. The others,
after a short interval, were again put aboard the _Badger_ and taken up
the Thames to imprisonment on the Tower tender for a further three or
four days. Thence they were removed, all handcuffed and chained, in a
barge and committed to the King’s Bench Prison. At Bow Street, on the
following day, they were all formally committed for trial, and then
remitted to the King’s Bench Prison for eleven weeks, before the case
came on.
On Friday, April 25th, 1823, the twenty-two prisoners were arraigned in
the High Court of Admiralty; Marinel Krans, master of the _Four
Brothers_, and his crew, nearly all of whom bore Dutch names, being
charged with wilfully and feloniously firing on the revenue cutter
_Badger_, on January 13th, 1823, on the high seas, about eight miles off
Dungeness, within the jurisdiction of the High Court of Admiralty of
England.
Mr. Brougham, afterwards Lord Brougham, defended, the defence being that
the _Four Brothers_ was a Dutch vessel, owned at Flushing, and her crew
Dutchmen. A great deal of very hard swearing went towards this ingenious
defence, for the crew, it is hardly necessary to say, were almost all
English. At least one witness for the prosecution was afraid to appear
in consequence of threats made by prisoners’ friends, and an affidavit
was put in to that effect. It appeared, in the evidence given by the
commander of the _Badger_ and other witnesses for the prosecution, that
the prisoners all spoke excellent English at the time of the capture, and
afterwards; but they, singularly enough, understood little or none when
in court, and had to be communicated with through the agency of an
interpreter.
In summing up, Mr. Justice Parke said the crime for which the prisoners
were tried was not murder, but was a capital offence. Two things, if
found by the jury, would suffice to acquit the prisoners. The first was
that no part of the vessel which they navigated belonged to any subject
of His Majesty; the other that one half of the crew were not His
Majesty’s subjects. For if neither of these facts existed, His Majesty’s
ship had no right to fire at their vessel. But if the jury believed that
any part of the vessel was British property, or that one half of her crew
were British subjects, then His Majesty’s ship _Badger_, under the
circumstances that had been proved, being on her duty, and having her
proper colours flying, was justified in boarding their vessel; and their
making resistance by firing at the _Badger_ was a capital offence. The
reason for the evidence respecting the distance of the vessels from the
French coast being given was that, by the law of nations, ships of war
were not, in time of peace, permitted to molest any vessel within one
league of the coast of any other power.
The jury, after deliberating for two hours, returned a verdict of “Not
Guilty” for all the prisoners, finding that the ship and cargo were
wholly foreign property, and that more than one half the crew were
foreigners. They were, accordingly, at once liberated, and returned to
Folkestone in midst of great popular rejoicings. The _Four Brothers_ was
also released, and the commander of the _Badger_ had the mortification of
being obliged to escort her out of Dover harbour.
Dover town was, about this time, the scene of stirring events. One
Lieutenant Lilburn, in command of a revenue cutter, had captured a
smuggler, and had placed the crew in Dover gaol. As they had not offered
armed resistance to the capture, their offence was not capital, but they
were liable to service on board a man-o’-war—a fate they were most
anxious to avoid. These imprisoned men were largely natives of
Folkestone and Sandgate, and their relatives determined to march over the
ten miles between those places and Dover, and, if possible, liberate
them. When they arrived in Dover, and their intention became known, a
crowd of fisherfolk and longshore people swarmed out of the Dover
alley-ways and reinforced them. Prominent among them were the women,
who, as ever in cases of popular tumult, proved themselves the most
violent and destructive among the mob. Nothing less than the destruction
of the gaol was decided upon, and the more active spirits, leaving others
to batter in the walls, doors, and windows, climbed upon the roof, and
from that vantage-point showered bricks and tiles upon the Mayor and the
soldiers who had been called out. The Mayor, beset with tooth and claw
by screeching women, who tore the Riot Act out of his hand, fled, and
Lieutenant Lilburn exhorted the officer in charge of the military to fire
upon the crowd, but he declined; and meanwhile the tradespeople and
respectable inhabitants busied themselves in barricading their shops and
houses.
[Picture: “Run the Rascals through!”]
The prisoners were triumphantly liberated, taken to a blacksmith’s, where
their irons were knocked off, and then driven off in post chaises to
Folkestone, whence they dispersed to their several hiding-places.
Romney was, about this time, the scene of another desperate affair, when
an attempted seizure of contraband brought all the smugglers’ friends and
relations out, in violent contest with the excise and a small party of
marines in command of which was one Lieutenant Peat. A magistrate was
sent for, who, amid a shower of stones, read the Riot Act. The
Lieutenant hesitated to resort to extreme force, but one of the smugglers
was eventually killed by him, in response to the magistrate’s order, in
respect of one of the most violent of the crowd: Secure your prisoner,
sir. Run the rascal through!
CHAPTER VII
FATAL AFFRAYS AND DARING ENCOUNTERS AT RYE, DYMCHURCH, EASTBOURNE,
BO-PEEP, AND FAIRLIGHT—THE SMUGGLERS’ ROUTE FROM SHOREHAM AND WORTHING
INTO SURREY—THE MILLER’S TOMB-LANGSTON HARBOUR—BEDHAMPTON MILL
THE ’twenties of the nineteenth century formed a period especially rich
in smuggling incidents, or perhaps seem so to do, because, with the
growth of country newspapers, they were more fully reported, instead of
being left merely the subject of local legend.
A desperate affray took place in Rye Harbour so late as May 1826, when a
ten-oared smuggling galley, chased by a revenue guard-boat, ran ashore.
The smugglers, abandoning their oars, opened fire upon the guard, but the
blockade-men from the watch-house at Camber then arrived upon the scene
and seized one of the smugglers; whereupon a gang of not fewer than two
hundred armed smugglers, who had until that moment been acting as a
concealed reserve, rushed violently from behind the sandhills, and
commenced firing on the blockade-men, killing one and wounding another.
They were, however, ultimately driven off, with the capture of their
galley, but managed to carry off their wounded.
On another occasion, four or five smugglers were drowned whilst swimming
the Military Canal, with tubs slung on their backs, at a point on Pett
Level called “Pett Horse-race.” They had, in the dark, missed the spot
where it was fordable. Romney Marsh, and the wide-spreading levels of
Pett, Camber, Guilford, and Dunge Marsh had—as we have already seen, in
the account of the owlers given in earlier pages—ever been the smugglers’
Alsatia.
The Rev. Richard Harris Barham, author of the “Ingoldsby Legends,” has
placed upon record some of his meetings with smugglers in “this recondite
region,” as he was pleased to style it; and his son, in the life he wrote
of his father, adds to them. Barham, ordained in 1813, and given the
curacy of Westwell, near Ashford, had not long to wait before being
brought into touch with the lawless doings here. One of the desperate
smugglers of the Marsh had been shot through the body in an encounter
with the riding-officers, and fatally wounded. As he lay dying, Barham
was brought to convey to him the last consolations of religion, and was
startled when the smuggler declared there was no crime of which he had
not been guilty.
“Murder is not to be reckoned among them, I hope,” exclaimed the not
easily shocked clergyman.
“Too many of them!” was the startling response of the dying man.
In 1817 Barham was collated by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the
adjoining livings of Warehorne and Snargate, the first-named situated on
the verge of the marsh; the second situated, moist and forbidding, in the
marsh itself. The winding road between these two villages crossed the
then newly made Royal Military Canal by a bridge. Often, as the
clergyman was returning, late at night, to his comfortable parsonage at
Warehorne, he was met and stopped by some mysterious horsemen; but when
he mentioned his name he was invariably allowed to proceed, and, as he
did so, a long and silent company of mounted smugglers defiled past, each
man with his led horse laden with tubs. The grey tower of Snargate
church he frequently found, by the aroma of tobacco it often exhaled,
instead of its customary and natural mustiness, to have been recently
used as a store for smuggled bales of that highly taxed article.
The _Cinque Ports Herald_ of 1826 records the landing on a night in May,
or in the early hours of the morning, of a considerable cargo of
contraband hereabouts:
“A large party of smugglers had assembled in the neighbourhood of
Dymchurch, and a boat laden (as is supposed) with tubs of spirits,
being observed to approach the shore nearly opposite to Dymchurch,
the smugglers instantly commenced cheering, and rushed upon the
coast, threatening defiance to the sentinels of the blockade; who,
perceiving such an overwhelming force, gave the alarm, when a party
of marines, coming to their assistance, a general firing took place.
The smugglers retreated into the marshes, followed by the
blockade-men, and, from their knowledge of the ground, were indebted
for their ultimate escape. We regret to state two of the blockade
seamen were wounded; one severely in the arm, which must cause
amputation, and the other in the face, by slug shots. There can be
no doubt but that some of the smugglers must have been wounded, if
not killed. One of their muskets was picked up loaded—abandoned, no
doubt, by the bearer of it, on account of wounds. The boat, with her
cargo, was obliged to put to sea again, without effecting a landing,
and, notwithstanding the vigilance of Lieutenants Westbrook, Mudge,
and McLeod, who were afloat in their galleys on the spot, from the
darkness of the night, effected its escape. We have also heard that
a run of five hundred tubs took place on the Sussex coast last week,
not far from Hastings, the smugglers losing only eleven tubs. This
was also effected by force, and with such a superiority in number
that they completely overpowered the blockade force.”
[Picture: Barham meets the Smugglers]
The _Brighton Gazette_, of a few days later, contained the following:
“We have been favoured with some particulars of another recent
attempt to work contraband goods a few miles eastward of Eastbourne,
when it appears the coast blockade succeeded in taking a large boat
and upwards of two hundred tubs. We are sorry to add much mischief
has occurred, as on the following morning blood was observed near the
spot. Two men, it is said, belonging to the boat are taken
prisoners, and two of the blockade are reported to be much bruised
and beaten, and it is also suspected some of the smugglers are
seriously, if not mortally, wounded. The blockade in this instance
behaved in the most humane manner, having received a regular volley
from their opponents before their officers gave directions for them
to fire. We have just heard that five smugglers were killed in the
affray.”
On a Sunday night towards the end of July 1826, during a run of smuggled
goods at Dover, the smugglers shot dead a seaman of the preventive force
named Morgan, for which no one was ever convicted.
A determined and blood-stained struggle took place at Bo-Peep at midnight
of January 3rd, 1828. Bo-Peep was the name of a desolate spot situated
midway between Hastings and Bexhill. The place is the same as that
westernmost extension of St. Leonards now known by the eminently
respectable—not to say imposing—name of “West Marina”; but in those times
it was a shore, not indeed lonely (better for its reputation had it been
so) but marked by an evil-looking inn, to which were attached still more
evil-looking “Pleasure Gardens.” If throats were not, in fact, commonly
cut in those times at Bo-Beep, the inn and its deplorable “Pleasure
Gardens” certainly looked no fit, or safe, resort for any innocent young
man with a pocketful of money jingling as he walked.
[Picture: A Landing at Bo-Peep]
On this occasion a lugger came in view off shore, when a party of
smugglers armed, as usual, with “bats,” _i.e._ stout ash-poles, some six
feet in length, rushed to the beach, landed the cargo, and made off with
it, by various means, inland a distance of some three miles to Sidley
Green. Here the coast blockade-men, some forty in number, came up with
them.
The smugglers drew up in regular line-formation, and a desperate fight
resulted. The smugglers fought with such determination and courage that
the blockade-men were repulsed and one, Quartermaster Collins, killed.
In the first volley fired by the blockade an old smuggler named Smithurst
was killed; his body was found next morning, with his “bat” still grasped
in his hands, the stout staff almost hacked to pieces by the cutlasses
and bayonets of the blockade-men.
At the Spring Assizes held at Horsham, Spencer Whiteman, of Udimore,
Thomas Miller, Henry Miller, John Spray, Edward Shoesmith, William
Bennett, John Ford, and Stephen Stubberfield were indicted for
assembling, armed, for purposes of smuggling, and were removed for trial
to the Old Bailey, where, on April 10th, they all pleaded guilty; as did
Whiteman, Thomas Miller, Spray, Bennett, and Ford, together with Thomas
Maynard and William Plumb, for a like offence on January 23rd, 1828, at
Eastbourne. Sentence of death was passed on all, but was commuted to
transportation. With three exceptions, they were young men, under thirty
years of age.
Again, in broad daylight, in 1828, a lugger landed a heavy cargo of kegs
on the open beach at Bo-Peep. No fewer than three hundred rustic
labourers, who had been hired by the job, in the usual course, by the
smugglers bold, assembled on the beach, and formed up two lines of guards
while the landing of the tubs, and their loading into carts, on horses,
or on men’s shoulders, was proceeding. If the preventive officers knew
anything of what was toward that busy day they did not, at any rate,
interfere; and small blame to them for the very elementary discretion
they displayed. They had, as already shown, been too seriously mauled at
an earlier date for them to push matters again to extremity.
On January 3rd, 1831, in Fairlight Glen, two miles east of Hastings, two
smugglers, William Cruttenden and Joseph Harrod, were shot dead, and on
February 22nd, 1832, at Worthing, when between two and three hundred
smugglers had assembled on the beach, William Cowardson was shot dead,
and several others were carried away wounded.
Still the tale was continued, for during a landing on January 23rd, 1833,
at Eastbourne, the smugglers, who had assembled in large numbers, killed
George Pett, chief boatman of the local preventive station, and ran their
cargo safely. Several of both sides were wounded on this occasion, but
no one among the smugglers was ever arrested.
The last fatal happening in this way along the Sussex coast appears to
have been in the marshes at Camber Castle, on April 1st, 1838, when a
poor fiddler of Winchelsea, named Thomas Monk, was shot in the course of
a dispute over run goods, by the coastguard.
But we may quite easily have a surfeit of these brutal affrays, and it is
better to dwell on a lighter note, to contemplate the audacity, and to
admire the ingenuity and the resource often displayed by the smugglers in
concealing their movements.
To especially single out any particular line of coast for pre-eminence in
smuggling would be impossible. When every one smuggled, and every one
else—owing to that well-understood human foible of buying in the cheapest
market—supported smuggling by purchasing smuggled goods, every foreshore
that did not actually present physical difficulties, or that was not
exceptionally under excise and customs surveillance, was a free port, in
a very special signification. The thickly peopled coast-line of Kent,
Sussex, and Hampshire of our own time was then sparsely populated, and
those shores that are now but thinly settled were in that age the merest
aching wildernesses, where not only towns, but even villages and hamlets,
were few and far apart. A coast-line such as that at Brighton would seem
to us to present certain obvious difficulties to the smuggler, but close
at hand was the low-lying land of Shoreham, with its lagoon-like harbour,
a very shy, secretive kind of place, to this day; while away to Worthing,
and beyond it, stretched a waste of shingle-beach, running up to solitary
pasture-lands that reached to the foot of the noble rampart of the South
Downs. On these shores the free-traders landed their illegal imports
with little interference, and their shore-going allies received the goods
and took them inland, to London or to their intermediate storehouses in
the country-side, very much at their leisure. Avoiding the
much-travelled high-roads, and traversing the chalk-downs by unfrequented
bridle-tracks, they went across the level Weald and past the Surrey
border into that still lonely district running east and west for many
miles, on the line of Leith Hill, Ewhurst, and Hindhead. There, along
those wooded heights, whose solitary ways still astonish, with their
remote aspect, the Londoner who by any chance comes to them, although but
from thirty to thirty-five miles from the Bank of England in the City of
London, you may still track, amid the pine-trees on the shoulders of the
gorsy hills, or among the oaks that grow so luxuriantly in the Wealden
clay, the “soft roads,” as the country folk call them, along which the
smugglers, unmolested, carried their merchandise. On Ewhurst Hill stands
a windmill, to which in those times the smugglers’ ways converged; and
near by, boldly perched on a height, along the sylvan road that leads
from Shere to Ewhurst village, stood the “Windmill,” once the “New” inn,
which had a double roof, utilised as a storehouse for clandestine kegs.
A “Windmill” inn stands on the spot to-day, but it is a new building, the
old house having unfortunately been burned down some two years since.
Surveying the country from this spot, you have, on the one hand, almost
precipitous hill-peaks, gorsy to their summits, and on the other a lovely
dale, deeply embosomed in woods. The sub-soil here is a soft yellow
sandstone, streaked with white sand, breaking out along the often hollow
paths into miniature cliffs, in which the smugglers and their allies were
not slow to scoop caverns and store part of their stock. We have already
learnt how terrible these men could be to those who informed against them
or made away with any of their property, and by direct consequence the
goods thus stored were generally safe, either from the authorities or
from the rustics, who had a very wholesome and well-founded dread of the
smuggling bands. But they had a way of their own of letting these justly
dreaded folk see that their stores were evident to some, and that silence
was supposed to have a certain market value. Their way was just a
delicate hint, which consisted in marking a tub or two with a chalk
cross; and, sure enough, when the stock was removed, those chalk-marked
tubs were left behind, with possibly, if the country-folk had been modest
and the smugglers were generous, a few others to keep them company.
[Picture: Smuggler’s tracks near Ewhurst]
An old brick-and-tile-hung farm, down below Ewhurst Hill, older than it
looks, known as Barhatch, was in those times in possession of the Ticknor
family; and still, in what was the old living-room, may be seen the
inglenook, with its iron crane, marked “John Ticknor, 1755.” The
Barhatch woods were often used by smugglers, and the Ticknors never had
any occasion to purchase spirits, because, at not infrequent intervals,
when the household arose, and the front door was opened in the morning, a
keg would be found deposited on the steps: a complimentary keg, for the
use of the Ticknor property and the discretion of the Ticknor tongue.
One of the choicest landing-places along the Sussex coast must
undoubtedly have been just westward of Worthing, by Goring, where the
shore is yet secluded, and is even now not readily come at by good roads.
In a line with it is Highdown Hill, a rounded hump of the Downs, rising
to a height of two hundred and ninety-nine feet, two miles inland; a spot
famed in all guidebook lore of this neighbourhood as the site of the
“Miller’s Tomb.” This miller, whose real business of grinding corn seems
to have been supplemented by participation in the stern joys of illegal
importation, was one John Olliver. His mill was situated on this
hill-top: a very remote spot, even now, arrived at only along lanes in
which mud and water plentifully await the explorer’s cautious foot, and
where brambles and intrudant twigs, currycomb his whiskers, if he have
such.
[Picture: The Miller’s Tomb]
John Olliver, miller, was an eighteenth-century eccentric, whose morbid
fancy for having his coffin made early in life, and wheeled under his bed
every night, was not satisfied until he had also built himself a tomb on
the hill-top, on a twelve-foot square plot of ground granted him by the
landowner, one W. W. Richardson, in 1766: a tomb on which he could with
satisfaction look every day. Yet he was not the dull, dispirited man one
might for these things suppose; and Pennant, in his _Tour in Sussex_, is
found saying, “I am told he is a stout, active, cheerful man.” And then
comes this significant passage. “Besides his proper trade he carries on
a very considerable one in smuggled goods.” Let us pause a moment to
reflect upon the impudent public manner in which John Olliver must have
carried on his smuggling activities. To this impudence he added also
figures on his house-top, representing a miller filling a sack and a
smuggler chased by an exciseman with a drawn sword; after the exciseman
coming a woman with a broom, belabouring him about the head. The tomb
the miller had built for eventual occupation by his body was in the
meanwhile generally occupied by spirits—not the spirits of the dead, but
such _eaux de vie_ as hollands and cognac; and he himself was not laid
here for many years, for he lived to be eighty-four years of age, and
died in 1793. He had long been widely known as an eccentric, and
thousands came to his funeral on the unconsecrated spot. Here the tomb,
of the altar-tomb type, stands to this day, kept in excellent repair, and
the lengthy inscriptions repainted; at whose costs and charges I know
not. A small grove of trees almost entirely encircles it. At one end is
a gruesome little sculpture representing Death, as a skeleton, laying a
hand upon an affrighted person, and asking him, “Whither away so fast?”
and at the other end are the following lines:
Why fhould my fancy anyone offend
Whofe good or ill does not on it depend
(A generous gift) on which my Tomb doth ftand
This is the only fpot that I have chofe
Wherein to take my lafting long repofe
Here in the drift my body lieth down
You’ll fay it is not confecrated ground,
I grant ye fame; but where shall we e’er find
The fpot that e’er can purify the mind?
Nor to the body any luftre give.
This more depends on what a life we live
For when ye trumpet fhall begin to found
’Twill not avail where’er ye Body’s found.
Blefsed are they and all who in the Lord the Saviour die
Their bodief wait Redemption day,
And fleep in peace where’er they lay.
On the upper slab are a number of texts and highly moral reflections.
As for the Selsey Peninsula, and the district of flat lands and oozy
creeks south of Chichester and on to Portsmouth, Nature would seem almost
to have constructed the entire surroundings with the especial objects of
securing the smugglers and confounding the customs. Here Sussex merges
into Hampshire.
[Picture: Langston Harbour]
Among the many smuggling nooks along the Hampshire coast, Langston
Harbour was prominent, forming, as it does, an almost landlocked lagoon,
with creeks ramifying toward Portsea Island on one side and Hayling
Island on the other. There still stands on a quay by the waterside at
Langston the old “Royal Oak” inn, which was a favourite gathering-place
of the “free-traders” of these parts, neighboured by a ruined windmill of
romantic aspect, to which no stories particularly attach, but whose
lowering, secretive appearance aptly accentuates the queer reputation of
the spot.
The reputation of Langston Harbour was such that an ancient disused brig,
the _Griper_, was permanently stationed here, with the coastguard housed
aboard, to keep watch upon the very questionable goings and comings of
the sailor-folk and fishermen of the locality. And not only these watery
folk needed watching, but also the people of Havant and the
oyster-fishers of Emsworth. Here, too, just outside Havant, at the
village of Bedhampton, upon the very margin of the mud, stands an
eighteenth-century mill. It would have been profitable for the
coastguard to keep an eye upon this huge old corn-milling establishment,
if the legends be at all true that are told of it. A little stream,
issuant from the Forest of Bere, at this point runs briskly into the
creek, after having been penned up and made to form a mill-leat. It runs
firstly, moat-like, in front of a charming old house, formerly the
miller’s residence, and then to the great waterwheel, and the mill
itself, a tall, four-square building of red brick, not at all beautiful,
but with a certain air of reserve all the more apparent, of course,
because it is now deserted, bolted, and barred: steam flour-mills of more
modern construction having, it may be supposed, successfully competed
with its antiquated ways. But at no time, if we are to believe local
legend, did Bedhampton Mill depend greatly upon its milling for
prosperity. It was rather a smugglers’ storehouse, and the grinding of
corn was, if not altogether an affectation, something of a by-product.
You may readily understand the working of the contraband business, under
these specious pretences, beneath the very noses of coastguard and
excise; how goods brought up the creek and stored in this capacious hold
could, without suspicion incurred, be taken out of store, loaded in among
the flour-sacks in the miller’s wagons, and delivered wherever desired.
Of course, that being the mill’s staple business, it is quite readily
understood that when the business of smuggling declined such milling as
went forward here did by no means suffice to keep the great building
going.
The house, which appears now to be let as a country residence for the
summer to persons who neither know nor care anything about the story of
the place, has an odd inscription on its gable:
The gift of Mr. George
Judge at Stubbington
Farm at Portsea Hard, in
Memory of his very good Friend,
Mr. George Champ,
Senr. 1742.
That sporadic cases of smuggling long continued in these districts, as
elsewhere, after the smuggling era was really ended, we may see from one
of the annual reports issued by the Commissioners of Customs. The
following incident occurred in 1873, and is thus officially described:
“On the top of a bank rising directly from highwater-mark in one of the
muddy creeks of Southampton Water stands a wooden hut commanding a full
view of it, and surrounded by an ill-cultivated garden. There are houses
near, but the hut does not belong to them, and appears to have been built
for no obvious purpose. An old smuggler was traced to this hut, and from
that time, for nearly two months, the place was watched with great
precaution, until at midnight, on May 28th, two men employed by us being
on watch, a boat was observed coming from a small vessel about a mile
from the shore. The boat, containing four men, stopped opposite the hut,
landed one man and some bags, while the remainder of the crew took her
some two hundred yards off, hauled her up, and then proceeded to the hut.
One of our men was instantly despatched for assistance, while the other
remained, watching. On his return with three policemen, the whole party
went to the hut, where they found two men on watch outside and four
inside, asleep. A horse and cart were also found in waiting, the cart
having a false bottom. The six men were secured and sent to the
police-station; a boat was then procured, the vessel whence the men had
come was boarded, and found to be laden with tobacco and spirits. The
result was that the vessel, a smack of about fifteen tons, with
eighty-five bales of leaf-tobacco, six boxes of Cavendish, with some
cigars and spirits, was seized, and four of the persons concerned in the
transaction convicted of the offence.”
[Picture: Bedhampton Mill]
CHAPTER VIII
EAST COAST SMUGGLING—OUTRAGE AT BECCLES—A COLCHESTER RAID—CANVEY
ISLAND—BRADWELL QUAY—THE EAST ANGLIAN “CART GAPS”—A BLAKENEY
STORY—TRAGICAL EPITAPH AT HUNSTANTON—THE PEDDAR’S WAY
THE doings of the Kentish and Sussex gangs entirely overshadow the annals
of smuggling in other counties; and altogether, to the general reader,
those two seaboards and the coasts of Devon and Cornwall stand out as
typical scenes. But no part of our shores was immune; although the
longer sea-passages to be made elsewhere of course stood greatly in the
way of the “free-traders” of those less favoured regions. After Kent and
Sussex, the east coast was probably the most favourable for smuggling.
The distance across the North Sea might be greater and the passage often
rough, but the low muddy shores and ramifying creeks of Essex and the
sandy coastwise warrens of Suffolk, Norfolk, and Lincolnshire, very
sparsely inhabited, offered their own peculiar facilities for the shy and
secretive trade.
Nor did the East Anglian smugglers display much less ferocity when their
interests were threatened, or their goods seized, than was shown by the
yokels of those other counties. The stolid, ox-like rustics of the
country-side there, as along the margin of the English Channel, were
roused to almost incredible acts of brutality which do not seem to have
been repeated in the West.
We do not find the hardy seafaring smugglers often behaving with the
cold-blooded cruelty displayed, as a usual phenomenon, by the generally
unemotional men of ploughed fields and rustic communities who took up the
running and carried the goods inland from the water’s edge whither those
sea-dogs had brought them. In the being of the men who dared tempestuous
winds and waves there existed, as a rule, a more sportsmanlike and
generous spirit. Something of the traditional heartiness inseparable
from sea-life impelled them to give and take without the black blood that
seethed evilly in the veins of the landsmen. The seamen, it seemed,
realised that smuggling was a risk; something in the nature of any game
of skill, into which they entered, with the various officers of the law
naturally opposed to them; and when either side won, that was incidental
to the game, and no enmity followed as the matter of course it was with
their shore-going partners.
Perhaps these considerations, as greatly as the difference in racial
characters, show us why the land-smugglers of the Home Counties should
have been so criminal, while from the Devon and Cornish contrabandists we
hear mostly of humorous passages.
[Picture: The “Green Man,” Bradwell Quay]
At Beccles, in Suffolk, for example, we find the record, in 1744, of an
incident that smacks rather of the Hawkhurst type of outrage. Smugglers
there pulled a man out of bed, whipped him, tied him naked on a horse,
and rode away with their prisoner, who was never again heard of, although
a reward of £50 was offered.
Colchester was the scene, on April 16th, 1847, of as bold an act as the
breaking open of the custom-house at Poole. At two o’clock in the
morning two men arrived at the quay at Hythe, by Colchester, and, with
the story that they were revenue officers come to lodge a seizure of
captured goods, asked to be shown the way to the custom-house. They had
no sooner been shown it than there followed thirty smugglers, well armed
with blunderbusses and pistols, who, with a heavy blacksmith’s hammer and
a crowbar, broke open the warehouse, in which a large quantity of
dutiable goods was stored. They were not molested in their raid, and
went off with sixty oil-bags, containing 1514 lb. of tea that had been
seized near Woodbridge Haven. No one dared interfere with them, and by
six o’clock that morning they had proceeded as far as Hadleigh, from
which point all trace of them was lost.
Canvey Island, in the estuary of the Thames, off Benfleet, with its
quaint old Dutch houses, relics of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century
Hollanders who settled there and carried on a more than questionable
business, was reputedly a nest of smugglers. The “Lobster Smack,” a
quaint old weatherboarded inn built just within the old earthen sea-wall
for which those Dutchmen were responsible, and standing somewhat below
the level of high water, has legends of smuggling that naturally do not
lose by age or repetition.
The Blackwater estuary, running up from the Essex coast to Maldon,
offered peculiar facilities for smuggling; and that, perhaps, is why a
coastguard vessel is still stationed at Stansgate, half way along its
length, opposite Osea Island. At the mouth of the Blackwater there
branch other creeks and estuaries leading past Mersea Island to
Colchester; and here, looking out upon a melancholy sea, and greatly
resembling a barn, stands the ancient chapel of St. Peter-upon-the-Wall,
situated in one of the most lonely spots conceivable, on what were, ages
ago, the ramparts of the Roman station of _Othona_. It has long been
used as a barn, and was in smuggling times a frequent rendezvous of the
night-birds who waged ceaseless war with the Customs.
Two miles onward, along sea and river-bank, Bradwell Quay is reached,
where the “Green Man” inn in these times turns a hospitable face to the
wayfarer, but was in the “once upon a time” apt to distrust the casual
stranger, for it was a house “ower sib” with the free-traders, and Pewit
Island, just off the quay, a desolate islet almost awash, formed an
admirable emergency store. The old stone-floored kitchen of the “Green
Man,” nowadays a cool and refreshing place in which to take a modest
quencher on a summer’s day, still remains very much what it was of old;
and the quaint fireplace round which the sly longshore men of these Essex
creeks foregathered on those winter nights when work was before them
keeps its old-time pot-racks and hooks.
[Picture: Kitchen of the “Green Man”]
Among the very numerous accounts of smuggling affrays we may exhume from
the musty files of old newspapers, we read of the desperate encounter in
which Mr. Toby, Supervisor of Excise, lost an eye in contending with a
gang of smugglers at Caister, near Yarmouth, in April 1816; which
shows—if we had occasion to show—that the East Anglian could on occasion
be as ferocious as the rustics of the south.
The shores of East Anglia we have already noted to be largely composed of
wide-spreading sandy flats, in whose wastes the tracks of wild birds and
animals—to say nothing of the deeply indented footmarks of heavily-laden
men—are easily distinguished; and the chief problem of the free-traders
of those parts was therefore often how to cover up the tracks they left
so numerously in their passage across to the hard roads. In this resort
the shepherds were their mainstay, and for the usual consideration,
_i.e._ a keg of the “right stuff,” would presently, after the gang had
passed, come driving their flocks along in the sandy trail they had left:
completely obliterating all evidences of a run of contraband goods having
been successfully brought off.
Blakeney, on the Norfolk coast, is associated with one of the best, and
most convincing, tales ever told of smuggling. This coast is rich in
what are known as “cart gaps”: dips in the low cliffs, where horses and
carts may readily gain access to the sea. These places were, of course,
especially well watched by the preventive men, who often made a rich haul
out of the innocent-looking farm-carts, laden with seaweed for manure,
that were often to be observed being driven landwards at untimeous hours
of night and early morn. Beneath the seaweed were, of course, numerous
kegs. Sometimes the preventive men confiscated horses and carts, as well
as their loads, and all were put up for sale. On one of these painful
occasions the local custom-house officer, who knew a great deal more of
the sea and its ways than he did of horses, was completely taken in by a
farmer-confederate of the smugglers whose horses had been seized. The
farmer went to make an offer for the animals, and was taken to see them.
The season of the year was the spring, when, as the poet observes, “a
young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love”—and when horses shed
their coats. Up went the farmer to the nearest horse, and easily, of
course, pulled out a handful of hair. “Why,” said he, in the East
Anglian way, “th’ poor brute hey gotten t’ mange, and all tudderuns ’ull
ketch it, of yow baint keerful.” And then he examined “tudderuns,” and
behold! each _had_ caught it: and so he bought the lot for five pounds.
That same night every horse was back in its own stable.
Searching in graveyards is not perhaps the most exhilarating of pastimes
or employments, but it, at any rate, is likely to bring, on occasion,
curious local history to light. Not infrequently, in the old churchyards
of seaboard parishes, epitaphs bearing upon the story of smuggling may be
found.
Among these often quaint and curious, as well as tragical, relics, that
in Hunstanton churchyard, on the coast of Norfolk, is pre-eminent, both
for its grotesquely ungrammatical character and for the history that
attaches to the affair:
In Memory of William Webb, late of the 15th Lt. D’ns,
who was shot from his Horse by a party of Smugglers
on the 26 of Sepr. 1784.
I am not dead, but sleepeth here,
And when the Trumpet Sound I will appear.
Four balls thro’ me Pearced there way:
Hard it was. I’d no time to pray
This stone that here you Do see
My Comerades erected for the sake of me.
Two smugglers, William Kemble and Andrew Gunton, were arraigned for the
murder of this dragoon and an excise officer. The jury, much to the
surprise of every one, for the guilt of the prisoners was undoubted,
brought in a verdict of “Not guilty”; whereupon Mr. Murphy, counsel for
the prosecution, moved for a new trial, observing that if a Norfolk jury
were determined not to convict persons guilty of the most obvious crimes,
simply because, as smugglers, they commanded the sympathy of the country
people, there was an end of all justice.
A second jury was forthwith empanelled and the evidence repeated, and
after three hours’ deliberation the prisoners were again found “Not
guilty,” and were, in accordance with that finding, acquitted and
liberated.
It is abundantly possible that the foregoing incident had some connection
with that locally favourite smugglers’ route from the Norfolk coast
inland, the Peddar’s Way, which runs a long and lonely course from Holme,
near Hunstanton, right through Norfolk into Suffolk, and is for the
greater part of its length a broad, grassy track, romantically lined and
overhung with fine trees. Such ancient ways, including the many old
drove-roads in the north, never turnpiked, made capital soft going, and,
rarely touching villages or hamlets, were of a highly desirable,
secretive nature. The origin of the Peddar’s, or Padder’s, Way is still
in dispute among antiquaries, some seeing in it a Roman road, others
conceiving it to be a prehistoric track; but the broad, straight
character of it seems to point to this long route having been Romanised.
Its great age is evident on many accounts, not least among them being
that the little town of Watton, near but not on it, is named from this
prehistoric road, “Way-town,” while that county division, the hundred, is
the Hundred of Wayland.
CHAPTER IX
THE DORSET AND DEVON COASTS—EPITAPHS AT KINSON AND WYKE—THE “WILTSHIRE
MOON-RAKERS”—EPITAPH AT BRANSCOMBE—THE WARREN AND “MOUNT PLEASANT” INN
NOT so much smuggling incident as might be expected is found along the
coasts of Dorset and Devon, but that is less on account of any lack of
smuggling encounters in those parts than because less careful record has
been kept of them. An early epitaph on a smuggler, to be seen in the
churchyard of Kinson, just within the Dorset boundary, in an
out-of-the-way situation at the back of Bournemouth, in a district
formerly of almost trackless heaths, will sufficiently show that
smuggling was active here:
To the memory of Robert Trotman, late of Rowd, in
the county of Wilts, who was barbarously murdered
on the shore near Poole, the 24th March, 1765.
A little tea, one leaf I did not steal,
For guiltless bloodshed I to God appeal;
Put tea in one scale, human blood in t’other
And think what ’tis to slay a harmless brother.
This man was shot in an encounter with the revenue officers. He was one
of a gang that used the church here as a hiding-place. The upper stage
of the tower and an old altar-tomb were the favourite receptacles for
their “free-trade” merchandise.
Trotman, it will be observed, was of Rowd, or Rowde, in Wiltshire, two
miles from Devizes, and was thus one of the “Wiltshire Moonrakers,” whose
descriptive title is due to smuggling history. Among the nicknames
conferred upon the natives of our various shires and counties none is
complimentary. They figure forth undesirable physical attributes, as
when the Lincolnshire folk, dwellers among the fens, are styled
“Yellow-bellies,” _i.e._ frogs; or stupidity, _e.g._ “Silly Suffolk”; or
humbug—for example, “Devonshire Crawlers.” “Wiltshire Moonrakers” is
generally considered to be a term of contempt for Wilts rustic stupidity;
but, rightly considered, it is nothing of the kind. It all depends how
you take the story which gave rise to it. The usual version tells us how
a party of travellers, crossing a bridge in Wiltshire by night when the
harvest moon was shining, observed a group of rustics raking in the
stream, in which the great yellow disc of the moon was reflected. The
travellers had the curiosity to ask them what it was they raked for in
such a place and at so untimeous an hour; and were told they were trying
to get “that cheese”—the moon—out of the water. The travellers went on
their way amused with the simplicity of these “naturals,” and spread the
story far and wide.
But these apparently idiotic clod-hoppers were wiser in their generation
than commonly supposed, and were, in fact, smugglers surprised in the act
of raking up a number of spirit-kegs that had been sunk in the bed of the
stream until the arrival of a convenient season when they could with
safety be removed. The travellers, properly considered, were really
revenue officers, scouring the neighbourhood. This version of the story
fairly throws the accusation of innocence and dunderheadedness back upon
them, and clears the Wiltshire rural character from contempt. It should,
however, be said that the first version of the story is generally told at
the expense of the villagers of Bishop’s Cannings, near Devizes, who have
long writhed under a load of ancient satirical narratives, reflecting
upon a lack of common sense alleged to be their chief characteristic.
Many of the western smuggling stories are of a humorous cast, rather than
of the dreadful blood-boltered kind that disgraces the history of the
home counties. Here is a case in point. On the evening of Sunday, July
10th, 1825, as two preventive men were on the look-out for smugglers,
near Lulworth in Dorset, the smugglers, to the number of sixty or
seventy, curiously enough, found them instead, and immediately taking
away their swords and pistols, carried them to the edge of the cliff and
placed them with their heads hanging over the precipice; with the
comfortable assurance that if they made the least noise, or gave alarm,
they should be immediately thrown over. In the interval a smuggling
vessel landed a “crop” of one hundred casks, which the shore-gang placed
on their horses and triumphantly carried away. The prisoners were then
removed from their perilous position, and taken into an adjoining field,
where they were bound hand and foot, and left overnight. They were found
the next morning by their comrades, searching for them.
There are several points in this true tale that suggest it to have been
the original whence Mr. Thomas Hardy obtained the chief motive of his
short story, _The Distracted Preacher_.
We do not find consecutive accounts of smuggling on this wild coast of
Dorset; but when the veil is occasionally lifted and we obtain a passing
glimpse, it is a picturesque scene that is disclosed. Thus, a furious
encounter took place under St. Aldhelm’s Head, in 1827, between an armed
band of some seventy or eighty smugglers and the local preventive men,
who numbered only ten, but gave a good account of themselves, two
smugglers being reported killed on the spot, and many others wounded,
while some of the preventive force, during the progress of the fight,
quietly slipped to where the smugglers’ boats had been left and made off
with the goods stored in them.
“The smugglers are armed,” says a report of this affair, “with swingels,
like flails, with which they can knock people’s brains out”; and proceeds
to say that weapons of this kind, often delivering blows from unexpected
quarters, are extremely difficult to fight against.
The captain of this gang was a man named Lucas, who kept an inn called
the “Ship,” at Woolbridge; and, information being laid, Captain Jackson,
the local inspector of customs, went with an assistant and a police
officer from London to his house at two o’clock in the morning and roused
him.
“Who’s there?” asked Lucas.
“Only I, Mrs. Smith’s little girl. I want a drop of brandy for mother,”
returned the inspector, in a piping voice.
“Very well, my dear,” said the landlord, and opened the door; to find
himself in the grasp of the police-officer. Henry Fooks, of Knowle, and
three others of the gang, were then arrested; and the whole five
committed to Dorchester gaol.
The wild coast of Dorset, if we except Poole Harbour and the cliffs of
Purbeck, yields little to the inquirer in this sort, although there can
be no doubt of smuggling having been in full operation here. Jack
Rattenbury, whose story is told on another page, could doubtless have
rubricated this shore of many cliffs and remote hamlets with striking
instances; and not a cliff-top but must have frequently exhibited lights
to “flash the lugger off,” what time the preventive men were on the
prowl; and no lonely strand but must have witnessed the smugglers, when
the coast was again clear, rowing out and “creeping for the crop” that
had been sunk and buoyed, or “put in the collar,” as the saying went.
A relic of these for the most part unrecorded and forgotten incidents is
found in the epitaph at Wyke, near Weymouth, on one William Lewis:
Sacred to the memory
of
WILLIAM LEWIS,
who was killed by a shot
from the _Pigmy_ Schooner
21st April 1822, aged 53 years.
* * * * *
Of life bereft (by fell design),
I mingle with my fellow clay,
On God’s protection I recline
To save me on the Judgment-day.
There shall each blood-stain’d soul appear,
Repent, all, ere it be too late,
Or Else a dreadful doom you’ll hear,
For God will sure avenge my fate.
* * * * *
This Stone is Erected by his Wife
as the last mark of respect to an
Affectionate Husband.
The inscription is surmounted by a representation, carved in low relief,
of the _Pigmy_ schooner chasing the smuggling vessel.
Old folk, now gone from the scene of their reminiscences, used to tell of
this tragedy, and of the landing of the body of the unfortunate Lewis on
the rocks of Sandsfoot Castle, where the ragged, roofless walls of that
old seaward fortress impend over the waves, and the great bulk of
Portland isle glooms in mid distance upon the bay. They tell, too, how
the inscription was long kept gilded by his relatives; but the last trace
of it has long since vanished.
Many miles intervene, and another county must be entered, before another
tragical epitaph bearing upon smuggling is found. If you go to Seaton,
in South Devon, and walk inland from the modern developments of that now
rapidly growing town to the old church, you may see there a tablet
recording the sad fate of William Henry Paulson, midshipman of H.M.S.
_Queen Charlotte_, and eight seamen, who all perished in a gale of wind
off Sidmouth, while cruising in a galley after smugglers, in the year
1816.
A few miles westward, through Beer to Branscombe, the country is of a
very wild and lonely kind. In the weird, eerie churchyard of Branscombe,
in which astonishing epitaphs of all kinds abound, is a variant upon the
smugglers’ violent ends, in the inscription to one “Mr. John Harley,
Custom House Officer of this parish.” It proceeds to narrate how, “as he
was endeavouring to extinguish some Fire made between Beer and Seaton as
a signal to a Smuggling Boat then off at sea, he fell by some means or
other from the top of the cliff to the bottom, by which he was
unfortunately killed. This unhappy accident happened the 9th day of
August in the year of our Lord 1755, _ætatis suæ_ 45. He was an active
and diligent officer and very inoffensive in his life and conversation.”
So here was another martyr to the conditions created by bad government.
The estuary of the Exe, between Exmouth and Starcross, was for many years
greatly favoured by smugglers, for, as may readily be perceived to this
day, there lay in the two-miles-broad channel, where sea and river
mingle, a wide, wild stretch of sand, almost awash at high water, heaped
up in towans overgrown with tussocks of coarse, sour grasses, or sinking
into hollows full of brackish water: pleasant in daytime, but a dangerous
place at night. Here, in this islanded waste, there were no roads nor
tracks at all, and few were those who ever came to disturb the curlews or
the seabirds that nested, unafraid. In these twentieth-century times of
ours the Warren—for such is the name of this curiously amphibious
place—has become a place of picnic parties on summer afternoons, largely
by favour of the Great Western Railway having provided, midway between
the stations of Starcross and Dawlish, a little platform called the
“Warren Halt.” But in those times before railways, when the Warren was
not easily come at, the smugglers found it a highly convenient place for
their business. Beside it, under the lee of Langston Point, there is a
sheltered strand, and, at such times when it was considered quite safe,
the sturdy free-traders quietly ran their boats ashore here, on the
yellow sands, and conveyed their contents to the “Mount Pleasant” inn,
which is an unassuming—and was in those times a still more
unassuming—house, perched picturesquely on the crest of a red sandstone
bluff which rises inland, sheer from the marshy meadows. It was a very
convenient receiving-house and signal-station for all of this trade, for
it owned caverns hollowed out of the red sandstone in places inaccessible
to the authorities, and from its isolated height, overlooking the flats,
could easily communicate encouragement or warning to friends anxiously
riding at anchor out at sea. The lights that flashed on dark and
tempestuous nights from its high-hung rustic balcony were significant.
The only man who could have told much of the smugglers’ secrets here was
the unfortunate Lieutenant Palk, who lay wait one such night upon the
Warren. But dead men tell no tales; and that ill-starred officer was
found in the morning, drowned, face downwards, in a shallow pool, whether
by accident or design there was nothing to show. As already remarked,
the Warren was a dangerous place to wander in after dark.
It is quite vain nowadays to seek for the smugglers’ caves at Mount
Pleasant. They were long ago filled up.
In these times the holiday-maker, searching for shells, is the only
feature of the sands that fringe the seaward edge of the Warren. It is a
fruitful hunting-ground for such, especially after rough weather. But
the day following a storm was, in those times, the opportunity of the
local revenue men, who, forming a strong party, were used to take boat
and pull down here and thoroughly search the foreshore; for at such times
any spirit-tubs that might have been sunk out at sea and carefully buoyed
by the smugglers, awaiting a favourable time for landing, were apt to
break loose and drift in-shore. There was always, at such times, a
sporting chance of a good haul. But, on the other hand, some of the many
tubs that had been sunk months before, and lost, would on these occasions
come to hand, and they were worth just nothing at all: long immersion in
salt water having spoiled their contents, with the result that what had
been right good hollands or cognac had become a peculiarly ill-savoured
liquid, which smelt to heaven when it was broached. The revenue people
called this abominable stuff, which, as Shakespeare might say, had
“suffered a sea-change into something new and strange,” by the
appropriate name of “stinkibus.”
CHAPTER X
CORNWALL IN SMUGGLING STORY—CRUEL COPPINGER—HAWKER’S SKETCH—THE FOWEY
SMUGGLERS—TOM POTTER, OF POLPERRO—THE DEVILS OF TALLAND—SMUGGLERS’
EPITAPHS—CAVE AT WENDRON—ST. IVES
CORNWALL is the region of romance: the last corner of England in which
legend and imagination had full play, while matter-of-fact already sat
enthroned over the rest of the land. At a time when newspapers almost
everywhere had already long been busily recording facts, legends were
still in the making throughout this westernmost part of the island. We
may, in our innocence, style Cornwall a part of England; but the Cornish
do not think of it as such, and when they cross the Tamar into Devonshire
will still often speak of “going into England.” They are historically
correct in doing so, for this is the unconquered land of the Cornu-Welsh,
never assimilated by the Saxon kingdoms. Historically and
ethnologically, the Cornish are a people apart.
The Coppinger legend is a case in point, illustrating the growth of wild
stories out of meagre facts. “Cruel Coppinger” is a half-satanic,
semi-viking character in the tales of North Cornwall and North Devon, of
whom no visitor is likely to remain ignorant, for not only was he a dread
figure of local folklore from about the first quarter of the nineteenth
century, but he was written up in 1866 by the Reverend R. S. Hawker,
Vicar of Morwenstow, who not only collated those floating stories, but
added very much of his own, for Hawker was a man—and a not very
scrupulous man—of imagination. Hawker’s presentment of “Cruel Coppinger”
was published in a popular magazine, and then the legend became
full-blown.
The advent of Coppinger upon the coast at Welcombe Mouth, near where
Devon and Cornwall join, was dramatic. The story tells how a strange
vessel went to pieces on the reefs and how only one person escaped with
his life, in the midst of a howling tempest. This was the skipper, a
Dane named Coppinger. On the beach, on foot and on horseback, was a
crowd, waiting, in the usual Cornish way, for any wreck of the sea that
might be thrown up. Into the midst of them, like some sea-monster,
dashed this sole survivor, and bounded suddenly upon the crupper of a
young damsel who had ridden to the shore to see the sight. He grasped
her bridle, and, shouting in a foreign tongue, urged the doubly-laden
animal to full speed, and the horse naturally took his usual way home.
The damsel was Miss Dinah Hamlyn. The stranger descended at her father’s
door and lifted her off her saddle. He then announced himself as a Dane,
named Coppinger, and took his place at the family board and there
remained until he had secured the affections and hand of Dinah. The
father died, and Coppinger succeeded to the management and control of the
house, which thenceforward became the refuge of every lawless character
along the coast. All kinds of wild uproar and reckless revelry appalled
the neighbourhood, night and day. It was discovered that an organised
band of smugglers, wreckers, and poachers made this house their
rendezvous, and that “Cruel Coppinger” was their captain. In those times
no revenue officer durst exercise vigilance west of the Tamar, and, to
put an end at once to all such surveillance, the head of a gauger was
chopped off by one of Coppinger’s gang, on the gunwale of a boat.
Strange vessels began to appear at regular intervals on the coast, and
signals were flashed from the headlands, to lead them into the safest
creek or cove. Amongst these, one, a full-rigged schooner, soon became
ominously conspicuous. She was for long the terror of those shores, and
her name was the _Black Prince_. Once, with Coppinger aboard, she led a
revenue cutter into an intricate channel near the Bull Rock, where, from
knowledge of the bearings, the _Black Prince_ escaped scathless, while
the King’s vessel perished with all on board. In those times, if any
landsman became obnoxious to Coppinger’s men, he was seized and carried
aboard the _Black Prince_, and obliged to save his life by enrolling
himself as one of the crew.
Amid such practices, ill-gotten gold began to accrue to Coppinger. At
one time he had enough money to purchase a freehold farm bordering on the
sea. When the day of transfer came, he and one of his followers appeared
before the lawyer and paid the money in dollars, ducats, doubloons, and
pistoles. The lawyer objected, but Coppinger, with an oath, bade him
take that or none.
Long impunity increased Coppinger’s daring. Over certain bridle-paths
along the fields he exercised exclusive control, and issued orders that
no man was to pass over them by night. They were known as “Coppinger’s
Tracks,” and all converged at a cliff called “Steeple Brink.” Here the
precipice fell sheer to the sea, 300 feet, with overhanging eaves a
hundred feet from the summit. Under this part was a cave, only to be
reached by a rope-ladder from above. This was “Coppinger’s Cave.” Here
sheep were tethered to the rock and fed on stolen hay and corn until
slaughtered. Kegs of brandy and hollands were piled around; chests of
tea, and iron-bound sea-chests contained the chattels and revenues of the
Coppinger royalty of the sea.
The terror linked with Coppinger’s name throughout the north coasts of
Cornwall and Devon was so extreme that the people themselves, wild and
lawless though they were, submitted to his sway as though he had been
lord of the soil, and they his vassals. Such a household as his was, of
course, far from happy or calm. Although, when his father-in-law died,
he had insensibly acquired possession of the stock and farm, there
remained in the hands of the widow a considerable amount of money. This
he obtained from the helpless woman by instalments, and by force. He
would fasten his wife to the pillar of her oak bedstead, and call her
mother into the room, and assure her he would flog Dinah with a
cat-o’-nine-tails till her mother had transferred to him what he wanted.
This act of brutal cruelty he repeated until he had utterly exhausted the
widow’s store.
There was but one child of Coppinger’s marriage. It was a boy, and deaf
and dumb, but mischievous and ungovernable, delighting in cruelty to
other children, animals, or birds. When he was but six years of age, he
was found one day, hugging himself with delight, and pointing down from
the brink of a cliff to the beach, where the body of a neighbour’s child
was found and it was believed that little Coppinger had flung him over.
It was a saying in the district that, as a judgment on his father’s
cruelty, the child had been born without a human soul.
But the end arrived. Money became scarce, and more than one armed King’s
cutter was seen, day and night, hovering off the land. And at last
Coppinger, “who came with the water, went with the wind.” A wrecker,
watching the shore, saw, as the sun went down, a full-rigged vessel
standing off and on. Coppinger came to the beach, put off in a boat to
the vessel, and jumped aboard. She spread canvas, and was seen no more.
That night was one of storm, and whether the vessel rode it out or not,
none ever knew.
It is hardly necessary to add that the Coppinger of these and other
rumbustious stories is a strictly unhistorical Coppinger; and that, in
short, they are mainly efforts of Hawker’s own imagination, built upon
very slight folklore traditions.
Who and what, however, was the real Coppinger? Very little exact
information is available, but what we have entirely demolishes the
legendary half-man, half-monster of those remarkable exploits.
Daniel Herbert Copinger, or Coppinger, was wrecked at Welcombe Mouth on
December 23rd, 1792, and was given shelter beneath the roof of Mr.
William Arthur, yeoman farmer, at Golden Park, Hartland, where for many
years afterwards his name might have been seen, scratched on a
window-pane:
D. H. Coppinger, shipwrecked December 23 1792, kindly received by Mr.
Wm. Arthur.
There is not the slightest authority for the story of his sensational
leap on to the saddle of Miss Dinah Hamlyn; but it is true enough that
the next year he married a Miss Hamlyn—her Christian name was Ann—elder
of the two daughters of Ackland Hamlyn, of Galsham, in Hartland, and in
the registers of Hartland church may be found this entry: “Daniel Herbert
Coppinger, of the King’s Royal Navy, and Ann Hamlyn mard. (by licence) 3
Aug.” The “damsel” of the story also turns out, by the cold, calm
evidence of this entry, to have been of the mature age of forty-two.
Mrs. Hamlyn, Coppinger’s mother-in-law, died in 1800, and was buried in
the chancel of Hartland church. It is, of course, quite possible that
his married life was stormy and that he, more or less by force, extracted
money from Mrs. Hamlyn, and he was certainly more or less involved in
smuggling. But that he, or any of his associates, chopped off the head
of an excise officer is not to be credited. Tales are told of revenue
officers searching at Galsham for contraband, and of Mrs. Coppinger
hurriedly hiding a quantity of valuable silks in the kitchen oven, while
her husband engaged their attention in permitting them to find a number
of spirit-kegs, which they presently found, much to their disgust, to be
empty; and, moreover, empty so long that scarce the ghost of even a smell
of the departed spirit could be traced. But the flurried Mrs. Coppinger
had in her haste done a disastrous thing, for the oven was in baking
trim, and the valuable silks were baked to a cinder.
Little else is known of Coppinger, and nothing whatever of his alleged
connection with the Navy. He became bankrupt in 1802, and was then a
prisoner in the King’s Bench Prison. With him was one Richard Copinger,
said to have been a merchant in Martinique. Nothing is known of him
after this date, but rumour told how he was living apart from his wife,
at Barnstaple, and subsisting on an allowance from her.
Mrs. Coppinger herself, in after years, resided at Barnstaple, and died
there on August 31st, 1833. She lies buried in the chancel of Hartland
church beside her mother.
According to the Rev. S. Baring-Gould, Coppinger was not really a Dane,
but an Irishman, and had a wife at Trewhiddle near St. Austell. He, on
the same authority, is said to have done extremely well as a smuggler,
and had not only a farm at Trewhiddle, but another at Roscoff, in
Brittany. A daughter, says Mr. Baring-Gould, married a Trefusis, son of
Lord Clinton, and Coppinger gave her £40,000 as a dowry. A son married
the daughter of Sir John Murray, Bart., of Stanhope. The source of this
interesting information is not stated. It appears wildly improbable.
Hawker very cleverly embodied the smuggling sentiment of Cornwall in a
sketch he wrote, styled “The Light of Other Days.”
“It was full six in the evening of an autumn day when a traveller arrived
where the road ran along by a sandy beach just above high-water mark.
The stranger, who was a native of some inland town, and utterly
unacquainted with Cornwall and its ways, had reached the brink of the
tide just as a ‘landing’ was coming off. It was a scene not only to
instruct a townsman, but to dazzle and
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