Agriculture had a regular problem of over-production. ‘Nothing is more certain,’ Daniel Defoe wrote in 1713, ‘than that the ordinary produce of corn in England is much greater than the numbers of our own people or cattle can consume.’7 But grain was hard to store and expensive to transport. A bad year could cause famine. Then, twelve months on, farmers could be scrabbling desperately around to sell off their surplus.
That was the thinking behind William III’s package for farming in the 1690s. Find a new market for excess corn and the surplus in good years would be soaked up. Encourage over-capacity and there was less chance of famine after a bad harvest. He had started, in 1689, by reviving ‘bounties’ – subsidies – for corn exports. Setting up the distilling industry had followed the same logic. It wasn’t just that William had found a new market for English corn. Both policies had, as Daniel Defoe pointed out, the added advantage that ‘if at any time a scarcity happens, this trade can halt for a year, and not be lost entirely.’
Neither went down well with the general public (apart from gin-drinkers). There were stories of dealers picking up the export bounties and then dumping corn at sea. Most people assumed that if distillers were fixing prices at Bear Key, their loaf of bread probably cost more than it needed to. For landowners, though – and eighteenth-century Parliaments were particularly alive to the problems of landowners – the policies were a godsend. Without subsidies, English farmers could never have competed with farmers abroad. As for the distilling industry, to Daniel Defoe it was ‘one of the most essential things to support the landed interest, that any branch of trade can help us to; and therefore especially to be preserved, and tenderly used.’
So it wasn’t surprising that farmers had offered support to the distillers in the past. Back in 1702, when the brewers had promoted a bill against distilling, it was the ‘farmers and maltsters of the counties of Middlesex, Surrey, Essex, Kent, Sussex, Suffolk and Norfolk’ who weighed in with a petition to get it crushed. By 1714, distillers claimed they bought ‘above one hundred thousand quarters of malt yearly.’ By the time the first Gin Act came in, claims of 300,000 quarters were being bandied around. They were exaggerations, of course, but only by about fifty per cent. It took thirteen quarters of grain to make a tun of spirits, and 15,500 tuns were distilled in London the year before the Act came in.8 That meant 200,000 quarters of corn passing through the London grain market at Bear Key.
In the great scheme of things that didn’t exactly transform English agriculture. Over the whole country farmers produced more than thirteen million quarters of grain a year. But the distilling industry didn’t affect the whole country. It changed things for some farmers in some places. The key factors were what kind of grain the distillers bought, and where it came from.
Four corn crops were cultivated in England on a big scale – wheat, barley, rye and oats. But down in the south of England, for brewers, bakers and distillers, the ones that mattered were wheat and barley. Wheat fetched much the better price. Wheat flour was what London bakers wanted for bread; often it cost almost twice as much as barley. But wheat couldn’t be sown in the same field year after year. Thomas Coke’s tenants in Norfolk were allowed to plant three corn crops every six years. But two of those had to be barley, not wheat. The economics of eighteenth-century farming only worked if a market could be found for an awful lot of extra barley.
In the past, that had meant selling it to the brewers. But since 1690, the distilling industry had opened a whole new outlet. ‘The tenants of this kingdom,’ reckoned one parliamentarian in 1743, ‘pay their rents by their barley: and if we had no distillery our barley would be worth little.’9 Reformers soon twigged that ‘to suppress the distillery at home will raise great clamour from … the country gentlemen upon account of its taking barley.’10 The distillers wouldn’t just buy barley; they would buy bad barley, and bad malt as well. ‘What would become of our corn injured by bad harvests, were it not for distilling?’ asked one writer in 1736.11 The arrival of the distillers had been ‘sensibly felt by our farmers,’ according to another supporter, ‘because it opened to them a market for spoilt and coarse sorts of corn, which they never before could make anything of.’12 Often that meant barley which was damaged by rain, or which hadn’t fully ripened. But it could also mean barley from poor soil which had never in the past produced a marketable crop. ‘This,’ as Defoe put it, ‘is visible in the northern and eastern counties and coasts of England, where a very great quantity of poor and unimproveable lands, which formerly lay waste, are now plow’d and sow’d.’13 The eastern counties and coasts were the key. The 200,000 quarters of grain distillers bought was a drop in the ocean of overall grain output. It didn’t amount to all that much against the four million quarters of barley which England produced every year. But set it against the barley output of those counties which had cheap and ready access to London, and suddenly the malt distillers at Bear Key meant business.
That was why the farmers and maltsters ‘of the counties of Middlesex, Surrey, Essex, Kent, Sussex, Suffolk and Norfolk’ had stood up for distillers when the brewers were lobbying against them in 1702. It cost a lot to transport corn without roads or railways. Only the counties around London could compete at Bear Key. Hertfordshire was one big malting centre, buying ‘all the barley they can get out of the counties of Essex, Cambridge, Bedford, Huntingdon, and even as far as Suffolk.’14 They sent it on down the river Lea, or else along the turnpike road to London. But even from as close as Bedford, road transport added 3/6 a quarter to the price of corn. Sea transport, at two shillings a quarter, was always a better bet. For barley farmers, that had to mean the coasts of Sussex or East Anglia. Hence the ‘many ships or vessels,’ seen by one commentator, ‘loaded in Sussex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and other ports bound for Bear-Key Market, London, with 200 quarters of barley in each ship.’15
Landowners in East Anglia had done well out of William’s agricultural reforms. They were the ones who benefited most from the export subsidies as well. Ships from Great Yarmouth could sail to Holland, where the Baltic grain fleets loaded, and the Rhine flowed in from central Europe, and the Jenever distillers – there were 121 of them in Schiedam by 173016 – were always hungry for cheap barley and malt. In 1728, 96 per cent of England’s 200,000-odd quarters of malt and barley exports left from Norfolk ports.17 Add in the barley they could sell to London distillers, and East Anglian farming was transformed. Between them, the export trade and the corn distillery would soak up nearly a million quarters of corn a year, on average, for the two decades after 1730, and by far the biggest share came from the eastern counties. East Anglian landowners – men like Sir Robert Walpole* and Viscount Townshend** – suddenly found themselves in a whole new agricultural world.
It was ‘the great consumption of corn … in the distillery,’ for a distillery supporter looking back from 1760, that ‘first induced the farmer and landholder, to increase his tillage … Without [a regular market], many of the great and valuable improvements of land, in this kingdom, by tillage, must be greatly diminished … for, if the farmer cannot dispose of his grain … at such a price as will enable him to pay his rent … he must of course lay down his tillage, and these improvements cease.’18 Contemplating the 1690 Distillery Act, The Farmer Restored would celebrate in 1739 ‘what a great and extensive effect had this law, by encouraging the farmers to grub and break up immense numbers of acres of wood-lands and warrens, cultivating and sowing great quantities of other poor land, to the great advantage of the landed interest.’
In the past, over-production had been the farmer’s curse; now there was a market for the surplus. In the past, crop rotation had been an impossibility – it produced too much barley. Suddenly it was a money-spinner. In East Anglia, where the new markets had the biggest impact, the effects went a long way. After his resignation in 1730, ‘Turnip’ Townshend retired to Norfolk to improve his estates through crop rotation. A Gentleman’s Magazine feature on Norfolk farming tabulated the Norfolk rotation of turnips �
� barley – wheat – barley – clover – clover.19 ‘In Norfolk,’ commented Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary of 1733, ‘they cultivate great quantities of turnips … [w]hereby they procure a good dressing for their land, so that they have extraordinary good crops of barley.’ The ‘agricultural revolution’ was under way.
‘Government must certainly draw from [Norfolk] a much greater portion of revenue than from any other,’ wrote Nathaniel Kent at the end of the century. ‘The return which [barley] must make when traced through the malthouse, brewhouse and distillery, will be found to amount to a sum almost incredible.’20 It would never have worked without a market for all that barley. For a ‘farmer’ writing to support the distillery in 1736, it was ‘the goodness and certainty of our market at Bear-Key’ which had led to ‘good husbandry … and the improvement of turnips.’21
Madam Geneva wore many disguises in her career. She was the avenging angel of the slums, and the comforter of the poor; she was the curse of London and the friend of market-women. But her most unlikely role was as agricultural reformer, out in the windswept Norfolk fields where barley was sowed and harvested, and loaded in ships bound for Schiedam and London to be made into gin.
* * *
All of that might have been reason enough for farmers and landowners to flock to the defence of Madam Geneva. But in 1729 they needed her more than ever. Farming was heading into recession. People in towns dreaded bad harvests because the price of bread went up. For farmers, it was the opposite. Farmers were ‘always more afraid of a good year than a bad one.’22 Good years hit farmers from both sides. The price they got for their corn dropped, but it cost them more to take a big harvest in because agricultural wages went up. And that double whammy was about to hit them hard. ‘All history,’ as Wimpey would write in 1775, ‘cannot furnish twenty such years of fertility and abundance as from 1730 to 1750.’23 Between 1729 and 1732 the price of a loaf of bread in London fell below fourpence halfpenny for the first time in more than a decade. Rents were on their way down from 1730 onwards; even so, tenants fell into arrears. And when a farm was abandoned, landlords had to invest in improvements to pull new tenants in. ‘The interests of our British landholders has been declining several years last past,’ reported William Allen in 1736. ‘It has been a general observation, that rents have been sinking, and tenants as unable to make as good payments as formerly … Innumerable are the distresses of our farmers.’24 The worst year of all was 1732–3, when one landowner found a tenth of the income on his estate – nearly £2,000 – to be in arrears.25 By 1734, farmers were producing so much excess corn that they were exporting five times as much as they had in 1728. That corn glut just happened to coincide with the brief, inglorious career of the first Gin Act.
Distillers’ attempts to whip up support in the cornfields hit a raw nerve among reformers straightaway. Reformers were perfectly well aware how strong the farming lobby was. ‘The distillers make it their business,’ one tract seethed, ‘to persuade and influence the farmers … for forty or fifty miles about London, that if the late Act of Parliament to restrain them from distilling gin … be not repealed, all their grain and other produce … will come to so low a market, that they will not be able to pay their rents.’26 The distillers, it seemed, had been asking farmers to lobby landowners for action in Parliament. ‘Nay … the farmers publickly declare in the markets thro’ the adjacent counties about London, that they will not give their votes again to any representative who will not promise them to get the distillers such a law made as may enable them to buy all their … corn … as usually.’ That was 1731, and by then reformers were on the back foot.
But it wasn’t just because of the farmers. By then everybody could see that the Gin Act hadn’t worked.
In fact, it never had a prayer. The Excise men had a hard enough time keeping tabs on a couple of dozen malt distillers. The 1729 Gin Act expected them to track down thousands of compound distillers and gin-sellers scattered all over London’s attics and cellars, its sheds and back rooms. There were 6,187 gin-sellers in Middlesex alone, as the magistrates kept telling everybody. And because compound spirits had never been liable to duty before – duties were paid further up the supply line, by the malt distillers – most compound distillers had never been registered before. The Excise men were starting from scratch.
That wasn’t the only trouble with the Gin Act. There was a problem of definitions as well. Everyone knew what gin was, but it was more difficult to pin it down in law. The Act defined it as spirits to which had been added ‘juniper berries, or other fruit, spices, or ingredients.’27 Out in the streets of St Giles, the answer was blindingly obvious: don’t add the juniper berries.
The public ‘got drunk as frequently as ever,’ Carteret remembered during a debate in 1743, ‘with that nauseous … spirit, which, in derision of the authority of the legislature, they called Parliamentary Brandy.’28 Parliamentary Brandy was gin without the juniper. It was dirty spirit, pure hooch, and it fell outside the Gin Act. Londoners preferred their dram to taste of juniper (failing that, turpentine) but they weren’t going to make a fuss about it. If they couldn’t drink gin, they were perfectly happy to drink raw spirit instead. ‘Who,’ asked the compound distiller John Brown in disgust, ‘could imagine that the most abandoned would continue to swallow down burning spirit, prohibited by law from having any salutary ingredient in its composition?’ The answer was thousands of Londoners. Spirit output dipped briefly in 1729, but it was back up to 4.3 million gallons within a year. Poor John Brown had to conclude, more in sorrow than anger, that ‘the vulgar have no joy in drinking these spirits but to be intoxicated and inflamed.’29
Intoxicated and inflamed, and possibly crippled as well. Drinking raw spirits was dangerous. Drams of Parliamentary Brandy, as the Occasional Monitor pointed out in 1731, ‘not only kill, which would be some charity to the public, but … maim and disable the drinkers thereof, so as to be only fit for hospitals, alms-houses, and Bedlam itself.’ Even the Excise Office could see the Act wasn’t working. As early as March 1731 they had preliminary meetings with the Treasury to discuss a ‘Bill intended to be brought into Parliament for new modelling the duties on spirits drawn from corn.’ The Company of Distillers had been bombarding them with suggestions ever since the Gin Act was passed. One which found its way into the draft bill was a subsidy for spirit exports. If London distillers could prosper while the social problems of spirit-drinking were sold abroad, then everybody would be happy. There was talk of offering distillers as much as nine shillings a gallon to export gin.30
The main goal for the Company of Distillers, though, was to get the Gin Act repealed. And that took time. 1731 went by without repeal. The Company of Distillers was only a small organisation; for the past eight years it had been punching above its weight. Now they were running out of cash. Mr Kenn, the parliamentary lobbyist, kept presenting his bills. There was another guinea apiece to be paid ‘to Mr Hollinshead & Mr Bradshaw, doorkeepers of the House of Commons.’31 Then there were the printer’s bills for all their tracts. Ten years earlier, Daniel Defoe had been the distillers’ champion; two decades later, Henry Fielding would spearhead the campaign against gin and Tobias Smollett would weigh in on the same side. It was ironic that the Company of Distillers’ bills for tracts against the first Gin Act would come from the other great novelist of the mid-century, ‘Mr Richardson, printer.’
To cut costs, they even had to agree, in January 1732, ‘that during the next Sessions of Parliament the expense of the dinner of the Committee during their attendance there shall not exceed forty shillings in any one day.’32 Even so, in 1733 the Company’s lobbying bill would again top £100. But by then the prize of repeal was almost within their grasp. They only failed to get it through in 1732 because the measure ran out of parliamentary time. In 1733, repeal of the Gin Act was top of the agenda. The House wasted no time in meeting ‘to consider of methods for encouraging the making and exporting of … spirits distilled from British grain.’33
But Sir Robert Walpole had been as disappointed by the Gin Act as everyone else. It had never produced a fraction of what he had hoped. It was Sir Robert’s brother, Horatio, who signalled the U-turn with the announcement, on 9 March, that ‘we are now in a committee for encouraging home-made spirits.’ MPs agreed that the Gin Act had been ‘a discouragement to the distilling of spirits from corn in Great Britain, and therefore ought to be repealed.’ A petition was brought in by some Essex farmers. Outside the House, meanwhile, Thomas Robe was arguing in the Post-Boy that ‘there is nothing that ever more required the care of the legislature, than the preserving and improving the British distillery.’ The distilling industry, Robe argued implausibly, ‘is of more value to the kingdom in general, than the mines of Potosi to the King of Spain.’35 Madam Geneva was back in favour again.
The five-shilling duty on compound spirits was discarded and nothing brought in to replace it. Subsidies were offered for exports. For reformers, the only crumbs of comfort were that distillers and chandlers would still need retail licences, and there would be a ban on spirit-selling in the streets. Street-hawkers couldn’t afford a parliamentary lobby.
It was hardly enough to cheer up Sir John Gonson. To make matters worse, the new Act squeezed its way through Parliament only just in time. Two days after the House approved it, Sir Robert Walpole plunged into the Excise Affair, the worst crisis of his political career.
The celebrations were left to Madam Geneva’s new poet laureate. Stephen Buck’s Geneva, A Poem in Blank Verse, was dedicated ‘to all gin-drinkers in Great-Britain and Ireland.’ If Stephen Buck had wanted to turn the knife in Sir John’s wounds, he could hardly have done better. The thing conservatives hated most about drink was the transformation it offered; the way it broke down traditional barriers. That was what they hated most about the whole age. Now Stephen Buck asked,
Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze Page 9