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

by Dillon, Patrick

  What can impart such solace to mankind,

  As this most powerful dram, which levels all

  The different ranks in this unequal world?

  The poor plebeian, elevate by Gin,

  Fancies himself a King.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE CHRISTIANS

  Landowners sought new markets in a corn glut; politicians argued and reformers preached; businessmen squabbled, and agriculture strode forward; but nothing much changed for gin addicts in the London slums.

  Judith Defour was a poor girl. She worked at a throwster’s, but earned only two or three shillings a week. She had a child, a little girl called Mary, born after a fling two years before. Judith wasn’t in touch with the father. Her own mother helped out, but money was always short. For the last few weeks Mary had lived at the parish workhouse.

  On a Sunday morning late in January 1734, Judith Defour went to collect Mary for a day out. Bethnal Green workhouse was out in open fields, ten minutes’ walk across footpaths from the top end of Brick Lane. Judith Defour arrived early, but the matron, Jane Prig, stopped her from taking Mary away. ‘I would not let her,’ she recalled, ‘without an order from the church wardens; so she went away, and came again in half an hour, and brought a note, as from the church warden, and upon that I let her have the child out.’1 Judith exclaimed over her daughter’s smart clothes. Just a few days before, the parish had given the child a new petticoat and stockings, and a coat to go over them. Judith Defour took Mary and promised to bring her back in the early afternoon. She was on shift that night. It was about ten o’clock in the morning when Jane Prig saw her set off across the fields, with the little girl clinging to her neck.

  At half past seven the same evening, Judith appeared for work as normal. Her workmates didn’t notice anything strange. She was a bit drunk, but Judith Defour was quite often a bit drunk. A lot of the women had the taste for gin and came to work topsey-frizey, as they used to say, particularly after a Sunday off.

  They settled down to the shift. Susan Jones asked Judith if she’d taken Mary back to the workhouse. Judith said it was her mother who had taken the little girl back. They didn’t talk much after that. The work was hard and boring, but slowly the hours went by. About one in the morning, Judith Defour sent out for a dram of gin. There was nothing strange about that. The women could always send out for gin if they wanted it. Their boss had an arrangement with a local dram-shop, and deducted it from their wages at the end of the week. That night, after her first dram, Judith Defour would have sent out for another, but Susan Jones stopped her. She could see the girl had had enough already. Instead, Susan remembered, ‘she desired a penny to buy a roll and cheese. I gave her a penny, but instead of fetching a roll and cheese, she brought in a roll and a ha’porth of gin.’ With another dram inside her, something in Judith Defour seemed to give way. Susan Jones remembered her looking blearily around the room full of workbenches. Then, out of the blue, ‘she said, she had done something that deserved Newgate.’ Susan Jones was shocked. She and another of the women, Elizabeth Scot, clustered round Judith Defour’s bench to find out what she was talking about. ‘I hoped she had not wrong’d my mistress,’ Susan Jones told her. Maybe that was when Susan realised what a state Judith Defour was in. ‘She said it was no such thing as that,’ she recalled. It was far worse. ‘[She said] she had left her child all night in the field. What? says I, in such a dismal cold night? How can you be so cruel?’ It wasn’t her fault, Judith Defour said; it was another woman who had made her do it, a girl called Sukey.

  But the two older women weren’t interested in that. It was January, and outside the night was freezing. And a child was lying out there somewhere in the fields.

  Shocked, Susan ‘bid Elizabeth Scot take a piece of bread and butter, and go with me and [Judith] to fetch the child.’ It must have been getting on for three in the morning by the time the women left the workshop. Stumbling a little from the gin she had drunk, Judith Defour led the others up Hare Street. They passed the wall of a market garden, and headed along a footpath towards the George public house. It was cold; out in the open fields, when the houses fell away, it felt colder still. Judith Defour led them through the darkness towards a rundown little shack out in the open. That was where she stopped. She seemed numbed by something, maybe by gin. Susan Jones would never forget what she saw when she looked down. In the uncertain glimmer of the moon, she could make out a little child ‘stript and lying dead in a ditch, with a linen-rag tied hard about its poor neck.’

  John Wolveridge lived in another hut out in the fields, near Bethnal Green. On the morning of Monday 30 January he was woken by shouting outside. At Judith Defour’s trial, a month later, he remembered hearing the outcry, ‘that a child was murder’d in the field. I went to the place and found a child dead; it appear’d to be upwards of two year old. I found a black circle about the neck, and a mark like the print of a thumb, under the right ear.’ A crowd had gathered by then. ‘Some gentlemen told me, they had seen three women coming from the place where the child lay.’ That was Susan Jones and Elizabeth Scot, hurrying Judith Defour off to get help. A doctor, Job London, was one of the first to arrive. Mary was lying in a shallow ditch that ran along one side of a field. She had been stripped naked except for the linen handkerchief tied round her neck. ‘About the fore-part of the child’s neck,’ the surgeon observed, was ‘part of a black circle, like that in executed persons, and I believe the violence it was done with, was the cause of her death.’ By then Susan Jones and Elizabeth Scot had raised the parish wardens, and Judith Defour had been brought back to the scene. John Wolveridge couldn’t help going up to her. He ‘ask’d her, how she could be so barbarous as to murder her own infant? She said she had only stripp’d it about seven at night, and laid it naked in the ditch; and this was all I could get out of her for a pretty while; but at last, in a violent agony of grief, she said, Then, sir, I will tell you how I did it; but there was a vagabond creature, one Sukey, that persuaded me to it; and was equally concern’d with me. On Sunday night we took the child into the fields, and stripp’d it, and ty’d a linen handkerchief hard about its neck to keep it from crying, and then laid it in a ditch. And after that, we went together, and sold the coat and stay for a shilling, and the petticoat and stockings for a groat. We parted the money, and join’d for a quartern of Gin.’

  It all came out at the trial. Judith Defour had forged the workhouse release note. She had collected Mary and then, ‘kept [the child] with her, till about 6 or 7 a clock in the evening.’ By that time she was with a woman called Susanna, or Sukey; Judith Defour didn’t know her surname. They had been drinking, but had run out of money. It was Susanna, Judith Defour said, ‘who persuaded her … to sell the child’s clothes and carry it into the fields and leave it there.’ She didn’t know why she agreed. She was drunk. ‘They went both of them together into a field near Joan Harding’s [shack], where they stripp’d the said child.’ She admitted all that. They were planning simply to abandon Mary. Maybe someone would find her and take care of her. But every time Judith walked away, her daughter started to cry. That was when the two women decided they had to silence her. They ‘ty’d a linen rag very hard about the child’s neck, to prevent its crying out, which strangled her, and … afterwards, they went together, leaving the child dead.’

  Stumbling away through the fields, they were carrying the clothes the workhouse had given Mary four days before, the petticoat and stockings and the new coat. They went ‘to one Mary Witts, who lives in Swan Yard, in the parish of St Leonard Shoreditch, and sold the clothes.’ They got sixteen pence for them, and split the money between them. And they spent what they got on gin.

  At the hearing in the great Old Bailey courtroom, open to the elements, with lawyers and onlookers crowded into the yard outside to hear the child-killer speak, Judith Defour testified that it was the woman called Susanna who had talked her into it. ‘I did not think to do anything to the child,’ she pleaded, ‘but that wicked cr
eature Sukey seduced me to it.’ Judith Defour would ‘plead her belly’ to escape punishment. But a jury of matrons decided she wasn’t pregnant. In the end it was her mother who had the last word on the short and tragic life of Judith Defour. Her daughter had never been right in the head, she testified on the witness stand; she ‘never was in her right mind, but was always roving.’

  For disappointed reformers in 1734, Judith Defour’s case became something of a rallying point. Maybe it was an isolated incident, murder in the slums, the tragedy of a single mother who had never been ‘in her right mind.’ But to Madam Geneva’s enemies, the Defour story had all the ingredients they had warned about: addiction, violence, even the abuse of welfare. It summed up everything that the Gin Craze led to: the irresponsibility of the poor, the failure of a mother, the death of a child.

  And reformers needed something to rally around. The repeal of the first Gin Act had left them on the ropes. Eight years of campaigning had come to nothing. When push came to shove, Parliament was as solid for the distilling industry and the farmers as ever. And in St Giles and Clerkenwell, all over Middlesex, the evils of gin-drinking were getting worse every year.

  It wasn’t only horror stories like the Judith Defour case which reignited the reform campaign in the mid-1730s. There was new blood coming into the reform movement as well. The Societies for Reformation of Manners were winding down. Prosecutions had peaked in 1722. Twelve years later they had dwindled almost to nothing. The Societies had set out to save the world, but all they’d done was to make themselves unpopular. Quite early on, the high church maverick Henry Sacheverell had criticised the Societies’ campaigns as ‘the unwarranted effects of an idle, incroaching, impertinent, and medling curiosity … the base product of ill-nature, spiritual pride, censoriousness and sanctified spleen.’2 No one ever loved an informer. It was time for a new approach.

  The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge had been founded not long after the first Societies, in 1699, but it had moved in a quite different direction. Its founder was Thomas Bray, evangelical vicar of St Botolph-without-Aldgate. He had decided that ‘the growth of vice and immorality is greatly owing to the gross ignorance of the principles of the Christian religion.’ The SPCK wouldn’t spy on sinners, berate blasphemers or drag drunkards to the courts. Instead, they would promote Christianity through charity schools and improving literature, and the results would speak for themselves.

  In 1732 they had their first major success. Thomas Bray was dead by then, but before his death he had been entrusted with a charitable legacy and established a group of SPCK members – ‘The Associates of Dr Bray’ – to administer it. The result was the foundation of the Georgia Colony, chartered by Act of Parliament in 1732, to assist the poor of England and the persecuted Protestants of Europe. Its first governor was Major James Oglethorpe.

  Every week, a dedicated group of Christian reformers met at the SPCK headquarters in Bartlett’s Buildings. Many were Trustees of the Georgia Colony; all were devoted to the promotion of Christian principles. They included James Oglethorpe, Lord Egmont, retired sea-captain Thomas Coram, and the distinguished scientist and churchman Dr Stephen Hales. It was from this group that the next blow would be struck against Madam Geneva. There was nothing surprising in that. Another member was that tireless campaigner and zealous magistrate, Sir John Gonson.

  It came a year after repeal of the first Gin Act, when the taste of Parliamentary Brandy was almost forgotten and Judith Defour was the talk of London. In 1734, Dr Stephen Hales published A Friendly Admonition to the Drinkers of Brandy, and other distilled spirituous liquors.

  It could hardly have been a friendlier admonition. Dr Stephen Hales never did anything unfriendly in his life. Even Alexander Pope, who could find a bad word for most people, called him ‘plain Parson Hale,’ and added ‘I … always love to see him; he is so worthy and so good a man.’3 Horace Walpole remembered him later as ‘the old philosopher, a poor, good primitive creature.’ As a scientist, Hales roved widely. His Vegetable Staticks of 1727 explored the physiology of plants. He came up with ventilators, through which ‘great quantities of fresh air [were] conveyed into mines, gaols, hospitals, work-houses and ships, in exchange for their noxious air.’ He busied himself with fire-fighting, food preservation and wholemeal bread. He invented airholes to ventilate floor joists, and pumps for fish tanks. There was something of the mad professor in Stephen Hales. A friend walked into his house one afternoon to find him dissecting a frog on the dining-room table. ‘His whole mind,’ as Gilbert White put it, ‘seemed replete with experiment, which of course gave a tincture, and turn to his conversation, often somewhat peculiar, but always interesting.’ Taking tea at Leicester House, he asked the Princess of Wales to look in her cup for mineral sediments.4 Talking politics, he would calculate out loud the amount of air breathed in an hour by the Members of the House of Commons.

  Stephen Hales ended up a celebrity and pillar of the establishment. He would even be talked of as a possible tutor for the future George III. But in his own mind, there was one achievement which overshadowed all his publications and prizes, all the professional acclaim. It was his campaign against gin, he told Bishop Hildesley in 1758, ‘[over] 30 years, in eleven different books or newspapers’ that gave him the greatest satisfaction of his entire life.5

  In publishing his Friendly Admonition, Hales wasn’t only bringing a scientific reputation to the reform campaign. For the first time he built a detailed medical case against the abuse of spirits. In an age that loved bowing to the marvels of science, Stephen Hales attacked Madam Geneva with medical argument backed up by experiment. Hales found that spirits ‘coagulate and thicken the blood, [and] also contract and narrow the blood-vessels.’ He discovered this ‘by experiments purposely made, with brandy, on the blood and blood-vessels of animals.’6 The experiments had probably been carried out on Hales’ dining-room table. The result for gin-drinkers? ‘Obstructions and stoppages in the liver; whence the jaundice, dropsy, and many other fatal diseases.’ That wasn’t the only effect of gin. Spirits caused problems with circulation, brain damage (‘whereby they spoil the memory and intellectual faculties’) and heart disease. Gin was so addictive that ‘when men had got a habit of it, they would go on, though they saw Hell-fire burning before them.’ Stephen Hales’ experiments may have been quaint and his explanations curious, but his diagnosis was accurate enough. It even went as far as advice for pregnant women and breast-feeding mothers. ‘We have too frequent instances,’ he warned, ‘where the unhappy mothers habituate themselves to these distill’d liquors, whose children, when first born, are often either of a diminutive, pygmy, size, or look withered and old, as if they had numbered many years, when they have not, as yet, alas! attained to the evening of the first day. How many more instances are there of children, who, tho born with good constitutions, have unhappily sucked in the deadly spirituous poison with their nurse’s milk?’

  Gin hadn’t gone away. More was being drunk than ever. In the London tenements, Madam Geneva’s trail of broken hearts and ruined families, of crime and violence, was longer than ever. Stephen Hales’ Friendly Admonition opened a new front in the battle. The bandwagon against Madam Geneva was rolling again.

  But Stephen Hales was no politician. If progress was to be made, the campaign needed a very different kind of champion. It needed someone with a genius for publicity, a man of energy and ambition, someone who had the cunning to guide legislation through a fickle Parliament. And it so happened that a couple of years earlier a young churchman called Thomas Wilson had landed at Bristol on his way to build a career in London. Thomas Wilson had no shortage of energy, cunning or ambition, and in his pocket he was carrying a letter of introduction to Dr Stephen Hales. Madam Geneva was about to meet her most dangerous enemy.

  The eighteenth-century Church of England was accused of many things, from sloth to venality, corruption to greed. But at least there was one sin it never had on its conscience. It never made Thomas Wilson a bishop. H
orace Walpole described Thomas Wilson in old age as ‘that dirty disappointed hunter of a mitre.’ He came from an impeccable church background. His father was the venerated Bishop of Sodor and Man. Thomas Wilson senior was an Old Testament prophet, a harsh and unrelenting holy man who kept the Isle of Man in the grip of Bible law. Under Bishop Wilson, prostitutes were dragged through the sea behind boats, and adulterers stood at crossroads holding lists of their crimes. Maybe it wasn’t surprising that Thomas Wilson decided to make his own career elsewhere.

  In London, aged twenty-eight, he wasted no time in searching for a good living. He entered a little vow in his diary ‘that I may make no indirect methods to gain preferment.’7 That was one promise Thomas Wilson never broke. His schemes for getting on in the world were anything but indirect.

  Church livings were only available when someone died. So for the next six years Thomas Wilson’s diary became a roll-call of the sick and dying of the Church of England. When death knocked, Thomas Wilson was sure to be lurking somewhere near the rectory door. In August 1735 he noted ‘that Dr. Brampston, Prebendary of Worcester and Rector of St. Christopher’s and Vicar of Mortlake died at Worcester. Aged 80.’ In October ‘Mr Fynch was very ill and … Dr Sharp was in a declining state of health at Bath.’ The death of a Bishop created the best openings of all. When the Bishop of St Asaph expired, Thomas Wilson ‘waited upon Sir Robt. W[alpole] [and] told him that the Bishop … died Sunday night between 8 and 9 … He told me that he would do what he could for me.’ Another time he heard a rumour that the Canon of Christ Church had passed away. ‘Wrote to Lady Sundon about it,’ he recorded, ‘and to Mr Phillips to speak to Sir Robt. W.’ He only stopped to check the rumour afterwards, when he added the exultant note, ‘Knipe … certainly dead.’ His web of information didn’t often let him down. Once someone told him the Bishop of Durham had passed on. Hurrying to the Bishop’s home, Thomas Wilson ‘found it was a mistake, he being in very good health.’ Shamefaced, he ‘returned home to dinner.’