Dark Days of Georgian Britain

by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)

  I have several times shuddered to witness…the conduct of a brutal Girl employed in driving a poor Ass that dragged the corves from the top of the Pit to the Stack at Ballyfield Colliery in Hansworth in Yorkshire which she incessantly cudgelled with a truncheon two inches or more diameter. It excites horror even now by its recollection.

  It was clear that asses were in shorter supply than children, and therefore the law of the market demanded better treatment. The report then explained how it was best practice not to shackle their legs when they were grazing in the sunshine. This referred to the animals, not the children. A large stick attached to a chain is enough to stop them leaping hedges or straying. Children were stopped from leaping in fields by spending twelve hours in a 4ft high tunnel of a coal seam.

  Young children died in coalmines regularly during this period. On Friday 2 June 1815 there was an explosion caused by firedamp (methane) at the ‘Success’ pit of the Newbottle Colliery in County Durham. Seventy-two bodies were brought to the surface, including twenty–eight boys, the youngest of whom, John Stout, was 6 years old. His father, John Stout senior, also died. There were at least seventeen boys under 13, and seven were 10 years old or younger.

  John Stout was a trapper – the most junior of the children’s jobs. It seemed a simple task, to open and close the wooden doors that allowed fresh air to provide ventilation. They would sit in total darkness for up to twelve hours at a time, waiting to let the coal tub through the door. It was not hard work but it was boring and could be very dangerous. If they fell asleep or kept their doors open when they should have been closed, the safety of the whole workings could be affected – poor ventilation would lead to explosions. John was quite near the entrance to the pit and was pulled out after the explosion; he died on the surface. When people were rescued alive by heroic efforts, it was often their first breath of fresh air at normal atmospheric pressure that killed them.

  There were attempts to stop the carnage. Sir Humphrey Davy’s lamp was being used in mines to detect flammable gases before they could cause an explosion. A Society for the Prevention of Accidents in Coal Mines was formed in Sunderland 1813, with Davy and the young engineer George Stephenson as members. The mine owners were more worried about petitioning the government to reduce the coal duties, although the rising alarm about casualties, and a natural desire to protect their mines meant that they supported Davy’s efforts. His safety lamp was in use at Harraton Colliery, south of Newcastle, in June 1817. A hewer (coal digger) by the name of John Moody refused to use one however, and lit candles instead. His reward was to be incinerated in a massive explosion. It happened at 11.30 am when the mine was as full as it could be. This was the biggest coalmine explosion of the period, with two miners being blown out of the shaft; the body parts of one were found in a neighbouring corn field. Ten members of the Hill family were killed, including the grandfather, father and eight children, the three youngest being 8, 9 and 10.

  Robert Langley was working in Plain pit, Rainton, County Durham at 3 am on the morning of 17 December 1817. The importance of Davy’s safety lamp was well known but it was thought that it was not needed in this particular seam. On that morning, 10-year-old Robert was killed in an explosion, along with fifteen boys.

  In July 1819, three poor boys from Whitehaven were forced into employment at the Sheriff Hill mine near Gateshead. Their desperate parents would have known that the mine had had two serious accidents in the last four years with the loss of sixteen lives. When the three children lost their job for reasons unknown, their parents begged – successfully – for their boys to be reinstated. They were there on 19 July 1819 when another accident killed them and another twenty-eight boys. It happened towards the end of the day. Most of the adult male coal hewers had left, which explains the disproportionate number of youngsters. The average age of the victims was 14.

  Chapter 19

  Currency Crisis

  In January 1810, a man who claimed to be called Mr Wright ordered dinner in the near-empty George Inn in Sittingbourne, Kent. Travelling alone and wanting some company, he asked the landlord if there were other single gentlemen in the inn who would like to share a glass of wine with him. This was a common thing to do for the single male traveller in Georgian times, and would have caused no suspicion in itself. The waiter pointed out a Captain Sanderson, and Mr Wright sent him over a glass of wine and request for his company. Sanderson, noting a member of his own class (Wright was a navy officer), accepted the invitation. One glass of wine led to one too many, and at the end of the evening the obliging Wright helped his new friend to bed. In the meantime, he stole the drunken man’s pocket book. He then made his escape; in the language of the time, he ‘decamped’.

  Wright stole ‘ten pounds and three Bank of England pound notes’. This was not, in the eyes of the newspaper, the same as £13. His £10 would have been in gold and silver. In the early nineteenth century, most money for daily use was in the form of coins, not paper. The expression ‘having deep pockets’ was not always a metaphor.

  Captain Sanderson and the whole country were using paper money because they had to, not because they wanted to. During the late Georgian period, the now meaningless statement: ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of…’ first appeared – and still appears on every British banknote today. Before the abolition of the ‘gold standard’ in 1797, all notes were exchangeable for gold of the same value, but gold was running out in the 1790s, and it was needed to pay for the war with Napoleon.

  His bank notes would therefore be less valuable than his gold and silver, and the metal was worth more than the face value of the coin. The gold in a guinea was worth a guinea and a half by 1812. In 1810 there was a severe shortage of gold coins in general circulation; they were being melted down into bullion and exported. If ‘Mr Wright’ had been a criminal, he could have sold the guineas for more than their face value if they were in a reasonable condition.

  It was clear that others were doing the same, because in 1811 the law was changed to make it legal to pay debts in paper, and fix the value of the guinea at 21s, making the sale of guineas at a higher price illegal.

  This law was passed because of the criminal market for the gold guinea. In 1812 a man called Hodgson, a mail coach driver, was found guilty at the Old Bailey of exchanging eight guineas (£8 8s) for £10 in Bank of England notes. A coachman was always a good bet for criminal currency activity. He could move about the country without comment. He mingled with dubious characters in coaching houses and could fence currency. He could also steal notes that were regularly hidden in luggage by wary passengers, or smuggle them himself using the same method.

  Unless Captain Sanderson was more careful with his finances than his social life, he could not be sure that his banknotes were real. Forgery was not difficult as the banknote was only a part-printed document. The amount and the name of the bank were pre-printed but the note number, name of payee, and the chief clerk, were handwritten. The simple design also made forgery easily.

  The original process by which the note was produced was the same copper engraving process that was practised by thousands of artisans all over the country. Unlike today, the technological skill needed to be a forger was limited, and many of the tools and materials required – apart from crudely watermarked paper – could be obtained in any urban street of artisans. In the decade before 1811, the Bank of England had refused payment on £101,000 worth of notes, and banknote forgery continued to rise until 1818.

  If Captain Sanderson had been the original recipient of the note, his name would be on it. If not, it would contain the names of all the people through whose hands it had passed. This was not a legal requirement, but it would add to the confidence that the notes were genuine, unless of course, the names on the note were also forged. If they were originally his banknotes and he had recorded the number, then he could have them stopped at the bank. Otherwise, genuine small denomination notes that had been stolen would be very easy to spend. Highwaymen and robbers
were often quite disappointed if they were to steal a £50 or £40 note (they were issued for lots of different amounts), because they would be hard to dispose of. Jewellery was preferable as it could be more easily fenced. However, since the smaller notes were issued, they were increasingly in the hands of criminals, and this helped forgeries circulate.

  As a gentleman, Sanderson would not have used banknotes to pay small debts. He would be extended a long line of credit by suppliers and would pay back a large amount at a later date, perhaps with an individual banker’s draft. He would certainly not pay a debt with gold if he could help it.

  If Captain Sanderson had banknotes from an obscure minor bank on the other side of the country, then they were more or less worthless in Sittingbourne. Similarly, assuming he was just passing through, if Captain Sanderson had been able to pay his bill, he would have waited to the end of his stay and paid in such a way as to avoid any banknotes from the Sittingbourne and Ashford bank in his change; a highly respected Kentish bank, but useful only in that area.

  If Captain Sanderson had been robbed of a large denomination note at home, he would have put an advertisement like this in the newspaper:

  TWO GUINEAS REWARD – Lost, in the neighbourhood of Chancery Lane or Holborn, a forty pound Bank of England note Number 5385, dated 15th January 1810 with the name Hoare written in the right hand corner. Whoever has found the same, and will bring it to Mr Warrens China Shop, Chancery Lane, shall receive the above reward. Payment is stopped at the bank.

  Whether lost or stolen, a £40 note would be hard to cash without drawing attention, or questions being asked. Passing stolen notes was a capital crime and a guaranteed £2 would be enough compensation. If you had stolen the note, it would be better to send a third party to pick up the reward. As the note came straight from the bank, the number would be known. It was usually better to settle for a sum that would be two weeks wages for a skilled man rather than risk the noose.

  The Bank of England and its notes were guaranteed by the government, but county banks were unregulated. Anybody could open a bank and issue promissory notes. There were 800 banks in Britain by 1811. In January 1810 a group of businessmen with money to lend formed the Northampton Town and County Bank. On the same page of the newspaper announcement, the Percival Bank announced that contrary to rumours, the bank was in good shape. The system was based on reputation and trust, and not much else.

  Both banks thrived, despite the Percival Bank’s panicky advertisement. On 2 June 1811, the Society for the Relief of British Prisoners in France announced that they had £359 in the Percival bank, and £504 in the Northampton Town and County Bank. They split their money partly for safety. Unlike the Bank of England, there was no guarantee that money lodged with the bank was safe; if there was a panic, a ‘run’ on the bank meant it would run out of money and those at the back of the queue would lose everything, which would cause yet more panic.

  The Town and County Bank must have been a success, as in 1811 Antoine Roche Orasion was found guilty of forging one of its £1 notes.1 The fact that the forger was a French prisoner of war languishing in a damp cell shows how easy it was. In 1813, General Warde had thirty £1 notes of that bank stolen by a John Goodman, who then hid them in a parcel and sent them to an accomplice on a stage coach.

  In the provinces, local notes from banks that were known were often more acceptable than Bank of England notes. ‘Known’ was the key word. Some social events that charged admission would state which banks’ notes were acceptable in their newspaper advertisements. Ambitious county banks would link with London banks for the benefit of their more mobile clients – the Town and County, for example, was linked with Praed’s Bank of 71, Fleet Street, where their notes could be swapped for Bank of England notes.

  The collapse of county banks was a common occurrence. In December 1825, both Northampton banks suspended payments as part of the banking crash partly caused by the great number of unregulated institutions. Jane Austen’s brother George was a partner in the bank of Austen, Maunde and Tilson, which closed its doors in March 1816 with Jane losing only £13, a portion of her profits from Mansfield Park.

  Many people lost everything. The county banking system was another aspect of Regency life that was waiting for reform; although the banks provided credit for businesses and extra currency for transactions, by 1820 there were too many of them and they could not be relied upon. When banks failed they destroyed trade, savings, and created instant misery. When the Portsmouth bank of Goodwin, Minchin and Carter failed in November 1818 it destroyed £200,000 of assets, ruined businesses who deposited there and created mass poverty because their £1 notes were held by the poor as far as Gosport and Portsea. County Banks were strictly limited in the denominations they could offer; mostly £1 or £2, so when they crashed the poor suffered as much as the rich. When the Melverton and Taunton bank failed on a market Saturday in September 1814, local traders were in great distress and panic as they tried to offload their notes for whatever price they could get. On most occasions however, bank failures turned hard-earned wealth into useless pieces of paper.

  Captain Sanderson would have probably had silver coins in his pocket. They would have been a sorry sight compared to today’s. Many of the coins were in a very poor state, especially those of a lower denomination, which circulated quickly. Two of the nicknames for the 6d piece were the ‘cripple’ and the ‘crook back’ giving some hint of their condition.2 Therefore, even when they could be found, silver coins could be damaged, completely smooth disks that might have come from anywhere. A letter in the newspaper suggested that only one in thirty sixpences had any monarch’s head on at all.3 Many were blank discs, some were actually foreign coins that had been over stamped.

  There had been a crisis in England’s currency for almost 100 years. The silver coinage contained silver with an intrinsic value as a precious metal. For most of the eighteenth century the silver content was worth more than the face value of the coin. This led to shortages. In the Regency period, advertisements appeared offering to buy old silver coins. Coins were melted down and exported or turned into silverware. Others were clipped by those wishing to pass the coin on and still gain a profit from some of the precious metal in it.

  Any silver coins that Captain Sanderson owned would need to be checked for clipping and ‘sweating’. Silver was relatively soft, so it could also be ‘sweated’; that is, placed in a bag with other coins and shaken vigorously, this caused friction and created silver dust which was collected and sold. In an age when thinking people claimed to detect a reduction in anti-Semitic feeling, this activity was still linked in the popular mind with the small Jewish population.

  Clipping was also an easy process. Some of the coins would have been in circulation for a century and would already be in a poor condition. Clipping was done on an industrial scale and was a simple operation using files. When completed, the slightly lighter coins would often be used to buy banknotes, and then the whole operation would begin again.

  It was a major criminal industry and the criminals took great efforts to avoid detection. In June 1813, Birmingham constables, lead by High Constable William Payne, smashed a note and coin-counterfeiting ring that had moved from Warwick. The factory was deep inside a slum area, with barricaded doors in the house, and the factory itself in the cellar, with secret trap doors and burly men guarding them. Luckily, the constables had hammers to smash through doors and anything else that got in their way.

  There was a vast army of poor, desperate, ‘utterers’ who tried to pass the coin in the local area. Armed with a genuine note, they would make a purchase or ask for change and slip a bad shilling into their own change, show it to the shopkeeper or publican, and demand a real one. It’s hard to appreciate today that when dealing with money in the Regency, you had to be on your guard all the time.

  Captain Sanderson would probably have had no copper coins, being too rich to use them. By 1811 there was a shortage of copper coinage as well, as prices were rising and t
hey, too, were being melted down. He would not have made purchases using pennies and smaller coins, but the poor would need them. Employers often could not find enough small coins to pay their workers. Many took the opportunity to produce their own coins, especially if they were in the metal industries themselves.

  If the captain had worked in the Hull Lead Factory of John Kirby Picard, he would have been partly paid in the owner’s own currency. Picard made a fortune producing the lead that was the dangerous main ingredient of paint but he could not rely on a constant supply of copper coin. Tokens with patriotic images – the Duke of Wellington and rampant British lions, as well as others showing his lead works and family crest – circulated in Hull as currency. As a substantial manufacturer he had enough credibility to do this. In 1813, criminals started to forge his ‘Wellington’ token, so he called them all in by appointment and swapped them for Bank of Hull or Bank of England notes. This would apply to shopkeepers rather than his poor workers, as you would need a minimum of 240 tokens to make £1. His confident newspaper advertisements suggested that he would issue more tokens, ‘as long as they were of benefit to the public’.

  In January 1818, copper tokens were banned by parliament as part of an attempt to reform the whole currency. Not all issuers were as scrupulous as John Pickard – some issued anonymous tokens that were seriously underweight; other companies demanded that debts to them were paid in their own coin, and due to the small denominations, large numbers of them ended up in the hands of the poor. In the wrong hands, it was no more than half a step from forgery.