There were practical difficulties as well. Parliamentary time was limited. There was a single session which ran, in 1729, from January to May. Parliament was dominated by parties, but parties were not interested in social policy. Sir Robert Walpole, Parliament’s master, reckoned himself ‘no Saint, no Spartan, no reformer.’ If a ‘social’ initiative was brought in, it was usually introduced by a private member, and survived only if he was particularly energetic or influential. Without parties throwing their weight behind reform, it was hard ever to break through the logjam of different interest groups of which Parliament was made up. The result was that when Parliament did address ‘social’ matters, it did so piecemeal – a plethora of lighting acts, a separate private bill to repair every stretch of broken highway in the country. Like the little Dutch boy, Parliament stuck its finger into every leak that appeared; it didn’t think of rebuilding the dyke.
As it happened, the session of 1729 almost managed to crack the mould. In 1729 the House of Commons was presented not only with Madam Geneva bound and gagged, but with a rare example of a social issue around which MPs could unite: prisons.
Prisons, like everything else in London, were a business. In 1713 John Huggins bought the wardenship of the Fleet jail for £5,000. It was a lucrative asset. Prisoners could be blackmailed to improve their accommodation; concessions could be sold for food and drink. In 1728 Huggins sold the wardenship to his deputy, Thomas Bambridge. It didn’t take long for rumours about conditions in the Fleet to start leaking out. Sir William Rich, unable to pay for better conditions in the jail, was threatened with a poker, then shackled and thrown into a freezing hole above an open sewer. Robert Castell, scholarly author of The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated, was forced to sleep in a sponging-house where smallpox was rife, even though he begged the Warden for mercy. He died.
In the ensuing outcry, a parliamentary Committee was appointed to investigate what was going on in the Fleet. The Committee laid before the House a catalogue of brutality, incompetence and corruption. Huggins admitted ‘that so many prisoners had escaped, during the time he was warden, that it was impossible to enumerate them.’3 Healthy women had been forced into smallpox wards; casual cruelty was an everyday occurrence. When the Committee moved on to look at the Marshalsea and King’s Bench, they found the same thing. Investigating the overall management of London’s prisons, they uncovered a Byzantine web of lets and sub-lets, transfers of ownership and corrupt charities.
During the session of 1729 some energetic MPs started to take an interest in reform. On 27 February the Prisons Committee had been painted at the Fleet by a rising young artist called William Hogarth. Hogarth’s sketch caught the moment when Bambridge was brought face to face with his accusers. Ranged around the table in front of him were William Pulteney, who would lead the Whig opposition to Walpole, and share power in the government that replaced him, Henry Pelham, who would be Walpole’s anointed successor, and several MPs who would take an active part in reform over the next thirty years.
But the most colourful and energetic of all the Prisons Committee was its Chair. Major-General James Oglethorpe wasn’t just a soldier, adventurer, Jacobite and bully. He was also an evangelical Christian, friend of Sir John Gonson and sworn enemy of Madam Geneva.
After meeting him for dinner in 1755, Dr Johnson urged Oglethorpe, then almost sixty, to write his autobiography. He even offered to write it himself. He told Boswell that he knew ‘no man whose life would be more interesting.’ It did turn out to be quite a life. In 1722, when he became an MP, Oglethorpe was only in his mid-twenties and already had a military career behind him. That year he wounded another MP in a fight. Three years later he killed a linkman when he got caught up in a brawl at a London brothel. Following his work on the Prisons Committee, Oglethorpe would move to America to found the colony of Georgia as a Christian refuge for the poor of England and the persecuted Protestants of Europe – it was Oglethorpe who persuaded the young John Wesley to go there. He would be a leading member of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Along the way, he would campaign against gin and in favour of Protestant minorities, prison inmates and the rights of lower deck sailors. When the General Magazine ran a competition for poems on ‘The Christian Hero’, the prize was a gold medal engraved with James Oglethorpe’s head.
The reports of Oglethorpe’s Committee held Parliament spell-bound all through the 1729 session. Reform was in the air. For once, MPs were having their faces rubbed in London’s seamy side. They were mesmerised; but despite the horrific descriptions of torture and brutality they took no action. Not even the Prisons Committee could break the inertia of the House of Commons. The hours of evidence and cross-examination, the long reports to Parliament and stories in the press, still didn’t result in a Prison Reform Act.
If prison campaigners couldn’t win legislation from the House of Commons, there seemed little chance for the enemies of Madam Geneva. Luckily for the gin reformers, though, the Gin Act wasn’t going to have much to do with reform in any case. Madam Geneva was about to become embroiled with interests far closer to Parliament’s heart: money and power.
Two issues dominated the parliamentary session. The first was Sir Robert Walpole’s need to secure his position with a new monarch. The second was the likely collapse of the sixteen-year peace which had lasted since the Treaty of Utrecht. When he came to the throne in 1727, George II had tried to replace Walpole with the colourless Sir Spencer Compton. Walpole, showing his usual combination of charm, ruthlessness and brains, had quickly outmanoeuvred his rival. He had survived a general election. But he still needed to consolidate his position with a monarch who had got on badly with his father, and saw Walpole as his father’s creature.
Understanding that kings, like everyone else, have their price, Walpole had immediately proposed to increase the Civil List, which covered the King’s own expenses. Even this settlement, though, hadn’t been enough to secure his position. Eighteen months later, George II was complaining about arrears in the Civil List payments. No one took it very seriously. In private, Walpole had always held out against any reimbursement. But that had suddenly become risky. As Lord Hervey recorded, ‘the King … intimated to him, if he could not or would not do it, his Majesty would find those who were both able and willing.’4 The King was preparing to sell the ministry to the highest bidder.
Madam Geneva was exactly the woman Walpole needed. By this time drinkers were getting through 4,750,000 gallons of spirits a year, and on most of it they paid less than fivepence a gallon in tax. On 4 February Sir James Oglethorpe put forward a proposal that distillers should pay sixpence a bushel when they worked with unmalted corn. If that didn’t bring gin to the Prime Minister’s attention, it would certainly have caught his eye a week later. That was when the Grand Jury of Middlesex laid before the House a representation against ‘the number of shops or houses selling a liquor called Geneva, in and about this city.’
Sir Robert Walpole had no interest in reform, but he did need money, and was soon weighing up options for raising it. The Excise Office had already sent through statistics for spirit production over the last ten years. He now asked them to work out ‘an estimate of what may be raised by an additional duty of 2d per gallon on low wines from foreign materials, 1d per gallon on low wines from malted corn, 1d per gallon on spirits.’ A new ‘still-head’ tax, to be imposed on spirit production at source, would, they calculated, raise nearly £39,000 a year.5
It wasn’t a bad scheme, but there was a snag. The problem was the malt distillers.
By 1729 there was a clear split in the London distilling industry. The compound distillers – who bought proof spirits and turned them into gin – were everywhere. It didn’t cost much to buy a small still, and making gin wasn’t rocket science. One calculation reckoned there were 1,500 of them in London, with most owning less than a hundred pounds’ worth of equipment. If you believed Sir John Gonson, every chandler’s shop and alehouse had a still set up on the kitchen table. Mak
ing raw spirits, though, was a different matter. With vats and stills, sheds and bulk corn-buying, the set-up costs alone could come to over £4,000. That made malt- or corn-distilling one of the most costly investments in London. By 1729 the industry was dominated by no more than a couple of dozen large operators. But the rewards were equally inflated. Fifteen years later, Lord Hervey would reckon ‘that [distilling] is the most profitable trade of any now exercised in the kingdom, except that of being broker to a prime minister.’6
The malt distillers (they were called malt distillers even when they used unmalted corn) were wealthy, and they used that wealth to control the whole industry. ‘The smallness of their number,’ complained a compound distiller in 1733, ‘makes them easily capable of combining together, and they neglect not the advantage; this union is facilitated among them by their meeting at Bear-Key, on market-days for corn, three times a week, where they … arbitrarily settle the prices of spirits.’ If anyone new tried to break in, they squeezed them out by a spirits price war, or by pushing up the price of corn. Nor was it only the distilling industry they controlled. As one of the major purchasers on the London corn market, they could ‘oblige the factor to take what price they please for their corn … Every factor in Bear-Key knows their power, knows they make their own prices, and destroy all that would be a check upon their proceeding.’7
There had been plenty of signs already of how far the malt distillers would go. The Middlesex magistrates had seen them threatening constables and protecting their customers from prosecution. Others blamed them for the whole Gin Craze. The malt distillers, it was rumoured, ‘supplied [an agent] with means to open warehouses for the sale of spirituous liquors in every part of the town, underselling the compounders.’ That was what ‘brought the prices of spirituous liquors to that vile price as has … made them the bane of the vulgar.’
They certainly weren’t above bringing their power to bear in Parliament. When more detailed plans were presented to the Commons on 15 April, the ‘still-head’ duty on spirit production had mysteriously been dropped. Malt distillers would not be taxed. They would be hit by any fall in consumption, of course, but at least the tax wouldn’t come out of their own pockets. Instead, the proposed Gin Act would target London’s thousands of small compound distillers and gin-sellers. There would be no extra costs for anyone who drank French brandy or punch. Madam Geneva and her devotees stood in the dock alone.
The Company of Distillers had coped with Sir John Gonson, but Robert Walpole on the hunt for cash was a different matter. The Company had a clerk waiting to rush them a draft of the Bill as soon as it was published. What they read was about as bad as it could have been. They embarked on a pamphlet campaign, but it was never more than a rearguard action. The trouble was that by now Sir John Gonson had managed to link Madam Geneva and public disorder inextricably in the public mind. And the Company of Distillers couldn’t, in any case, deny what was going on in Rag Fair and Drury Lane. Nor was there any hiding the fact that spirits production had doubled in the last ten years. The Company had to make the best of a bad case. They tried to make out that respectable compounders were on the side of reform. They were ‘very desirous the excessive use of any of the said liquors, that enervate and debauch the common people, may, in the most effectual manner, be prevented.’8 They supported moderate restrictions,9 and reminded MPs that it was Parliament who had encouraged the trade in the first place. They had coopers lobby the Commons as an example of the other trades which would be hit by a distilling slump. Then they played their strongest card – the quantities of corn the industry bought from landowners – for all it was worth.
But they suffered from a shortage of fire-power. They didn’t have Daniel Defoe on their side in 1729. The best they could manage was ‘Alexander Blunt, Distiller’, who droned on about William of Orange, and addressed his poem, Geneva, ‘to the Right Honourable Sir R — W —.’ ‘O may I live to hail the day!’ he exhorted the Prime Minister, ‘when thou …’
(Suspending the fatigue of state affairs)
Shalt make the city tour, and condescend
To visit my poor mansion, and, beneath
Its humble roof, take a reviving glass
Of anodyne GENEVA!
Unfortunately for the distillers, it was going to take more than a glass of gin to win over Sir Robert Walpole. The Prime Minister was looking for enough cash to buy off a king. A week after the Gin Act got its first reading, on 23 April, the ministry proposed to a shocked House of Commons that they offer George II the lump sum of £115,000 on account of Civil List arrears. Sir Robert had done his calculations. For gin-sellers there was a new retail licence for £20 a year, which was as much as many of them earned. And ‘for every gallon of mixed or compound … spirits, commonly called Gin,’ the new Act decreed an additional duty of five shillings a gallon, payable by the compounders. The excise duty on a gallon of gin had just been increased by 1,400 per cent.
If only half of English spirits were compounded and paid the new duty, the Gin Act would give Sir Robert £400,000 a year. That was enough to make even a Hanoverian king smile. Not everybody was expecting the same thing out of the first Gin Act, of course. Sir John Gonson assumed that the distillery would slump, and the manners of the poor be reformed. Parliament had, to his joy, overturned forty years of promoting the distillers; it had taken action for the first time against the scourge of spirit-drinking.
But it had also hooked itself up to a drip-feed of new revenue from gin. The unholy trinity of drug abuse, tax revenues, and powerful industry was complete. It wasn’t only the poor of St Giles who could get hooked on gin. Governments could as well.
CHAPTER SIX
CORN
The Company of Distillers didn’t waste time crying over spilt milk. They paid their lobbying bills and thanked the MPs who had supported them. They had an advert published in the papers ‘to signify the Company’s good inclination to prevent the excessive drinking of any distilled liquors to the damage of the common people.’ They fired off a memo to the Commissioners of Excise to get various points in the new act clarified.1
The 1729 lobbying campaign had been expensive. Kenn, the political lobbyist, put in a bill for £56. The House of Commons doormen had needed their palms greased. The campaign accounts also explained, at last, how the Company of Distillers always seemed to know what the magistrates were planning. They included a payment, ‘to satisfy Mr Justice Robe … for [his] expences in relation to the Company’s affairs last session in Parliament.’2 Thomas Robe had written tracts for the distillers under the pen-name of Eboranos. He also happened to be a magistrate for the County of Middlesex. He had even been on the committee which drew up the 1726 magistrates’ report.
It was time to count up Madam Geneva’s friends. Top of the list were Sir John Barnard and Micaiah Perry, influential MPs for the City of London. The City was less affected by the social problems of gin-drinking than Middlesex, and more concerned about business. It was a promising ally. To reinforce the link, the Company sent a memo to the Court of Aldermen to underline their own ‘dislike of … the scandalous practice of tippling.’
It was time, too, to come up with a strategy for the fight-back. A committee was quickly appointed ‘to consider of the present state of the Company & report their opinion.’3 First priority was to make sure everyone knew how much the distillers were suffering. A petition to George II bewailed ‘the miserable and deplorable condition to which we are brought,’ and tugged the royal heartstrings on behalf of apprentices whose families had ‘bestowed their all in giving them a trade by which they thought to have enabled them to lead their lives comfortably.’4 Old friends weighed in to help. ‘Not long ago I knew the day,’ lamented a familiar voice,
When I could rent and taxes pay:
Each morning with my wife drink tea,
And who so happy then as we! …
And whence this wretched change? In fact,
It comes from the GENEVA Act.
In case Walpo
le, the subject of this call for repeal, was wondering who the author was, he didn’t have long to wait.
‘Do it I say,’ ended the poem, ‘and don’t affront,
The muse of
Your old friend,
A Blunt.’5
Next, the Company did all it could to persuade the world that respectable distillers were part of the solution to gin-drinking, not part of the problem. There was a subtext. The Company of Distillers had never stopped grieving for its lost monopoly. Now they argued that if Parliament would only put the industry back in their hands, they could drive out the crooks and cowboys and back-room distillers. That was what lay behind their request to the crown, ‘that we may be made an incorporated body.’
But the distillers knew all along what was their strongest card. The industry had, after all, been established in the first place ‘for the greater consumption of corn, and the advantage of tillage in this kingdom.’ Their best hope for repeal of the Gin Act was to get the farmers back on their side and, through them, the landed interest.
Farming had gone through changes of its own in the years since the Glorious Revolution. Once, the prices of bread and beer had been fixed by the authorities. But farming was being commercialised, like so much else. Traditionalists complained that ancient corn markets stood deserted. ‘Where … there us’d to come to town upon a day, one, two, perhaps three, and in some boroughs, four hundred loads of corn,’ sighed one writer, ‘now grass grows in the market-place.’ Instead of honest trading, ‘badgers’ – grain merchants – met in inns to strike deals over ‘parcels of corn in a bag or handkerchief, which are called samples.’6 They were middlemen. This was business, not subsistence. Small farmers who couldn’t hang on for the best prices after harvest were squeezed out.
Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze Page 8