Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze

by Dillon, Patrick

  The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva

  The Eighteenth-Century Gin Craze

  Patrick Dillon

  Copyright © 2013, Patrick Dillon

  All Rights Reserved

  This edition published in 2013 by:

  Thistle Publishing

  36 Great Smith Street

  London

  SW1P 3BU

  For Nicola

  Patrick Dillon was born in London in 1962. He has lived there all his life and has developed a broad knowledge of the city and its social history. As an architect, he has worked on a number of eighteenth-century projects, including Benjamin Franklin’s London house. His previous books, the novels Truth and Lies, were set in London. The Much-lamented Death of Madam Geneva is the result of detailed research into contemporary archives, court records, pamphlets and newspaper reports. Patrick Dillon is married with two children.

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  INTRODUCTION The Alchemists

  ONE The Glorious Revolution

  TWO London

  THREE South Sea Mountain

  FOUR The Magistrates

  FIVE The First Gin Act

  SIX Corn

  SEVEN The Christians

  EIGHT Prohibition

  NINE Summer Riots

  TEN The Death of Madam Geneva

  ELEVEN Bootleg

  TWELVE Clamp-down

  THIRTEEN Women

  FOURTEEN Repeal

  FIFTEEN Gin Lane

  SIXTEEN The Middle Classes

  SEVENTEEN The Devil’s Pact

  EPILOGUE

  Notes

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am particularly grateful to my agent, Andrew Lownie, and commissioning editor, Heather Holden-Brown, for their support, ideas and encouragement throughout the process of writing this book. Matthew Parker has been a sensitive, sharp-eyed and clear-headed editor. For their help in research, I am grateful to the staff of various archives and libraries, particularly the British Library, Public Records Office, London Metropolitan Archive, Guildhall Library, London Library, City of London Records Office and Cambridge University Library. I would also like to thank Penny Fussell, at the Draper’s Company, and Christine Jones, at the Diageo Archive Department, for giving me access to material at their disposal. I am grateful to Professor John Chartres of Leeds University for putting me on to Jessica Warner’s articles on the Gin Craze.

  But most of all, for ideas, suggestions, criticism and patience, this book is indebted, as well as dedicated, to my wife, Nicola Thorold.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The term ‘Gin Craze’ was not a contemporary one. Reformers of the early eighteenth century were more likely to talk about ‘the pernicious consequences of the common people drinking spirituous liquors.’ But ‘Gin Craze’ has gained some currency in subsequent histories of the period and is too useful a shorthand to abandon.

  The balance of early eighteenth-century prices, incomes and tax revenues was very different from our own, making a single multiplier confusing. An income of £20 a year was usually thought to be the subsistence line, but many lived below it. Daniel Defoe reckoned a hard-working poor man without skills would find it difficult to earn more than £10–£15 a year. A large section of London’s skilled tradesmen and ‘middle classes’ lived around the £40–£50 mark. £300 a year was reckoned the minimum for a gentleman. From his income, a poor man would probably spend a shilling a week on lodgings (£2–£3 a year) and five shillings on food. The cheapest dosshouses charged a penny a night. Jonathan Swift, by contrast, paid eight shillings a week (£20 a year) for his two rooms in Bury Street. Government revenues fluctuated around £5m–£6m a year throughout most of the period, rising in the 1750s to an annual figure around £7m–£8m.

  Statistics for spirit production are taken from the collection made by the Commissioners for Inland Revenue in 1870. Figures in original Excise Office records and reports to Parliament differ only marginally from these. Gin was measured in the wine gallon of 231 cubic inches.

  INTRODUCTION

  THE ALCHEMISTS

  It started as alchemy.

  It started with secrets. The Greeks knew how to take the salt out of sea water. Chemists of the Levant brewed mysterious potions in odd-shaped vessels. When Henry II’s soldiers raided monasteries in Ireland in the twelfth century, they sometimes came across casks of a heady liquid they didn’t recognise. The liquid was hot on the tongue and burned their throats. Just a few gulps could leave them roaring drunk.

  When the magic of distilling began to be whispered around Europe in the late Middle Ages, it was ‘Books of Secrets’1 which passed on the formulae. Distilling transformed the nature of matter, and that had always been the alchemist’s dream. The distiller put ordinary wine into his still. He lit a fire beneath it. And at the touch of the fire’s wand, a mysterious transformation took place. Vapour rose from the broad base of the still to its narrow neck, condensed, then dripped from the spout. What the distiller collected in the vessel he had waiting was clear and odd-smelling, slightly oily. It was nothing like the wine he had started with; nature had been transformed. The distiller had reached out and placed one hand on the philosopher’s stone.

  The philosopher’s stone produced the elixir of life, and that was the name distillers gave to the clear, pungent liquid that dripped from their stills. It became aqua vitae, eau de vie, usquebaugh, the water of life. No one doubted its power. Distilled spirits were the new wonder-drugs in the apothecaries’ cabinet. Their medical possibilities seemed limitless. They cured palsy and prevented scurvy, some claimed. They were good for the eyes. They would even protect drinkers from the most terrible scourge of all, the plague. An English doctor who set down his own recipe not long before the terrible outbreak of 1665 boasted that ‘this water … must be kept as your life, and above all earthly treasure … All the Plague time … trust to this; for there was never man, woman, or child that failed of their expectation in taking it.’2

  The ingredients distillers put into their stills were exotic, the recipes complex and fantastical. One, of 1559, was for ‘a certain Aqua Vita such as is made at Constantinople in the Emperor’s Court.’3 The most refined of all spirits were ‘compound waters’ (aquae compositae), which were made in two separate processes. First a raw spirit was distilled, usually from wine. Then a complex bouquet of flavourings was added to the spirit, and it was distilled again. This time, the liquid which dripped from the still carried with it a powerful aroma and taste. Its flavourings were herbs from the medieval medicine chest, spices carried halfway across the world in small sealed boxes: ‘rue, sage, lavender, marjoram, wormwood, rosemary, red roses, thistle, pimpernel, valerian, juniper berries, bay berries, angelica, citrus bark, coriander, sandalwood, basil, grain of paradise, pepper, ginger, cinnamon, saffron, mace, nutmeg, cubeb, cardamon, galingall.’4 It was no coincidence that the flavoured spirit called gin would be developed in Holland and England, the two countries that would dominate the spice trade.

  Time soon showed that the alchemists had missed the philosopher’s stone again. Spirits didn’t grant eternal life; they didn’t even cure the plague. But they did have other effects. Even the most earnest doctor couldn’t help noticing that. Spirit-drinking ‘sharpeneth ye wit,’ one wrote. ‘It maketh me merry & preserveth youth … It agreeth marvellously … with man’s nature.’5 Spirits may not have conquered death, but they did make life more palatable. Compared to distilled spirits, beer and
wine were just flavoured water.

  Something else was about to become clear as well. You didn’t have to be philosopher, alchemist or magician to make these powerful new drugs. You didn’t even need a ready source of wine. They could be distilled from anything – even from grain, the staple food of northern Europe. Soon, on a tour to the Baltic, the Dutchman Caspar Coolhaes noticed that, ‘in Danzig, Königbergen and similar White Sea towns, just like in our countries at Amsterdam and neighbourhood and also at Rotterdam, Hoorn, Enkhuyzen and other towns, corn-distilleries were founded.’6 Lucas Bols established his distillery near Amsterdam in 1572. Schiedam was growing as the home of the Dutch distilling industry by the 1630s. The stage was set for Europe to be flooded with a cheap and intoxicating new drug.

  That was a more dangerous kind of magic, and many were scared of it. Way back in 1450, a Brandenburg Codex had tried to slam shut the lid of Pandora’s box. ‘Nobody,’ it decreed, ‘shall serve aquavit or give it to his guests.’ Augsburg legislated in 1570 against grain spirits as ‘harmful to the health, and a useless waste of wheat.’7 In France, where distilling would remain focused on wine, rather than grain, brandy was banned in 1651. In Russia the rapid spread of vodka-drinking led to a panic clamp-down on drinking houses in 1652. Neither measure lasted long. But in 1677, only five years after the ban had been replaced by taxes, the Paris authorities again noted the spread of the limonadiers, and warned against ‘those sorts of liqueurs of which the excess is incomparably more dangerous than that of wine.’8

  That was the nub of it. Spirits weren’t just stronger versions of wine or beer; they were different in kind, more destabilising, more dangerous. Beer and wine had been around for centuries. They were hallowed by tradition, ingrained in the woodwork; the tavern and alehouse reeked of them. Beer-drinkers raised their flagons in the same room where their grandfathers had drunk. When they broke into song, they didn’t threaten the order of things; they were figures of fun. Falstaff was a cheery and familiar presence. By contrast, the new spirits were gaunt strangers in town. They took up residence in bare cellars and rooms behind shops; their devotees were vicious and unpredictable. Instead of good cheer and old drinking songs, spirits offered quick intoxication, then long oblivion.

  Maybe the aura of magic never left distilling. Spirits would always reek of alchemy, of the dark arts. When English reformers came to revile spirit-drinking in the early eighteenth century, they saw gin not just as different in degree from beer, but worse, different in kind. ‘Man,’ wrote the campaigner Dr Stephen Hales in 1734, ‘not contented with what his bountiful and munificent creator intend[ed] for his comfort … has unhappily found means to extract, from what God intended for his refreshment, a most pernicious and intoxicating liquor.’9 The distiller was a second snake in the garden of Eden; gin-drinking was a second fall. Madam Geneva was not only unholy but unnatural as well, part whore and part witch.

  By the time Dr Stephen Hales began his campaign, five million gallons of raw spirits were being distilled in London every year. The most common drink in the slums, flavoured with juniper berries, had once been called Geneva, after the Dutch name for juniper spirits. But by then it had ‘by frequent use and the laconic spirit of the nation, from a word of middling length, shrunk into a monosyllable, intoxicating GIN.’10

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION

  Martial WILLIAM drank

  GENEVA, yet no age could ever boast

  A braver prince than he …1

  Forty years after the Glorious Revolution, as Parliament passed the first act to control the scourge of gin-drinking, Alexander Blunt (pseudonym of Elias Bockett, a distiller) would write the first epistle to Geneva ‘in verse sublime’. It didn’t take long to develop into a paean to William of Orange, the King who ‘with liberty restored, GENEVA introduced!’

  Martial William may or may not have drunk Geneva himself. He certainly drank something. On his first Twelfth Night in London, while Mary spent the evening playing cards at Kensington with her sister, William entered into the spirit of things at Lord Shrewsbury’s with Godolphin and the Duke of Marlborough. An onlooker recorded that in the end ‘they all became so drunk that there was not a single one who did not lose consciousness.’2 Coming round, Marlborough managed to stagger back as far as Whitehall, where he passed out in the antechamber to the King’s bedroom. The King himself fell asleep in a chair by the fire. Later, after Mary’s death, William was said to indulge in drinking bouts with his old Dutch friend Augustus Keppel, by then Earl of Albemarle.

  Whether it was gin William soaked in or not, to later writers the link between gin and the Glorious Revolution was an obvious one. William was Dutch; so was gin. ‘Mother Gin was of Dutch parentage,’ recorded a Life of Mother Gin published in 1736, ‘but her father, who was a substantial trader in the city of Rotterdam … came to settle in London, where … he married an English woman, and obtained an Act of Parliament for his naturalization.’ More importantly, it was William of Orange whose Acts of Parliament opened the floodgates to the cheap spirits that were soon being sold in cellars and garrets all over London, from barrows, out on the river, even in workshops. With the flight of James Stuart, all things French and Catholic were outlawed, and brandy went with them. Dutch Geneva became the spirit of the Glorious Revolution.

  Until then, England had lagged behind the rest of Europe in the fashion for spirits. Dutch distillery manuals had been translated early in the sixteenth century, but most distilling took place in the farm kitchen, where country housewives used the still to prepare home remedies. Through most of the seventeenth century, professional interest stayed medical as well. When Charles I granted a monopoly of distilling to Sir William Brouncker in 1638, it was two distinguished physicians, Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, a Huguenot and the King’s doctor, and Sir Thomas Cademan, physician to the Queen, who joined him in setting up the Company of Distillers. Rivalry came from the apothecaries, not the brewers. When Samuel Pepys recorded his only encounter with Madam Geneva, on 10 October 1663, she was dressed up in nurse’s uniform. Colleagues at work recommended ‘strong water made of juniper’ to cure constipation and pain in making water (‘Whether that … did it, I cannot tell, but I had a couple of stools forced after it and did break a fart or two’).

  All through the 1650s, while the French and Russians panicked about spirit-drinking, the puritan English stayed on their knees, sober and spiritless. The first change came with the return of the monarchy. ‘Our drunkenness as a national vice takes its epoch at the Restoration,’ Daniel Defoe wrote in 1726, ‘anno 1661/2, or within a very few years after … Very merry, and very mad, and very drunken, the people were, and grew more and more so every day.’3 This time, there was more than beer for them to get drunk on. Brandy, outlawed in France, flooded across the Channel. Customs inspector and writer Charles Davenant soon noticed the ‘considerable brandy retailers’ in East Sussex, and all over Wiltshire, the ‘abundance of brandy brought into every corner of this county.’4 Brandy – from the Dutch ‘brandewijn’, burned (distilled) wine – was a generic for all spirits, but until the Glorious Revolution most of it did come from France and was made from wine. The best quality, fashionable at court, was often called Nantz, after the port it was shipped from.

  Cheaper home-made spirits also started to make their appearance on the streets. Restoration London, Daniel Defoe recorded, ‘began to abound in strong water-shops.’ Defoe, born at the time of the Restoration, was an enthusiast for the Glorious Revolution, and would become London’s most prolific journalist. For three decades he would also be the most ardent advocate of the distilling industry. ‘These were a sort of petty distillers,’ he recorded of the early days, ‘who made up … compound waters from such mixed and confused trash, as they could get to work from … Till then there was very little distilling known in England, but for physical uses. The spirits they drew were foul and gross; but they mixed them up with such additions as they could get, to make them palatable, and so gave them
in general, the name of Cordial Waters.’5

  Distillers had been experimenting for generations with the flavourings that best masked the taste of cheap spirits. Juniper had been discovered early on – Augsburg had seen a petition against ‘Cramatbeerwasser’ back in 1613. In London it was aniseed – elsewhere the flavouring for spirits like raki and ouzo – that started out as the favourite. ‘The quantity that was drunk of it was prodigious great,’ Defoe recalled. ‘The famous Aniseed Robin … was so well known in Leaden-Hall, and the Stocks-Market for his liquor, and his broad-brimmed hat, that it became proverbial, when we saw a man’s hat hanging about his ears, to say, he looks like Aniseed Robin.’ Defoe listed some of the other flavoured spirits that gained favour after the Restoration:

  Aqua Vitae Aniseed Water

  Aqua Mirabilis Cinnamon Water

  Aqua Solis Clove Water

  Aqua Dulcis Plague Water …

  Colic Water, which in short was Geneva.

  At this stage, though, the quantities didn’t add up to much. As London recovered from plague and fire, no one was talking about a social problem, let alone a Gin Craze. The sudden explosion in spirit-drinking would only come when William of Orange crossed the sea from Holland, home of grain spirits, to ascend the English throne.

  His first act was to declare war on France, and immediately measures were passed to ban trade with the new enemy. They made a point of singling out France’s lucrative brandy exports. With French spirits out of the way, that left a gap in the market. And so Parliament opened the door to the English distilling industry. In 1690 they passed ‘An Act for encouraging the distilling of brandy and spirits from corn,’ and the industry was born. If later Parliaments wondered how the scourge of spirituous liquors had taken root, they had only to look at their own statute book.