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

by Dillon, Patrick

  It was significant that the meeting took place at the house of Colonel Thomas De Veil. They were a mixed bag, the Middlesex magistrates. There were the zealots, like Sir John Gonson, who liked the committees and the speeches. There were the trading justices, and the justices who never lifted a finger, and the justices who wrote tracts in favour of gin. Thomas De Veil was something else again. He was the nearest thing to a professional law-man that London had in 1736. If the Gin Act was running into trouble, the burden of enforcing it was going to fall on him.

  Thomas De Veil was no traditional gentleman magistrate. He ‘passed thro’ many scenes of life,’ as his biographer afterwards put it, ‘and raised himself by his personal merit, from carrying a brown musket, to make a very considerable person in the world.’26 His qualities were ‘courage, indefatigable diligence, and a certain boldness in address, [which] will carry a man through most of those troubles, that are incident to setting out in the world, with few friends, and a very small fortune.’ In other words, he was a chancer and self-made man, a creature of the Age of Risk. De Veil’s father, a Huguenot, was librarian at Lambeth Palace. De Veil started an apprenticeship, but his master went out of business. At seventeen, with no more money in the family, Thomas De Veil had ended up a private in the army.

  He never lost his chip on the shoulder about that. Throughout his life, ‘people took the liberty of aspersing him, as if he had been a foreigner by birth, and meanly descended, neither of which were true.’ Thomas De Veil hadn’t stayed a private soldier for long. He caught the eye of his officers, made contacts, and won a commission in the dragoons. When peace came and he found himself in London on half-pay, he opened an office in Scotland Yard as a political lobbyist. In 1729 old army friends got him onto the Commission of Peace for Middlesex and Westminster. The immigrant’s son, the private soldier, was on his way up.

  The post he was aiming for was ‘court justice’. It wasn’t quite an official job. It suited the ministry to have a magistrate in Middlesex whom they could trust, and to whom they could turn for advice on law and order, or help when the Westminster election turned nasty. ‘To this,’ De Veil’s biographer explained, ‘he was moved by many motives; first, it gratified his ambition. He loved to be about great men, and to have an interest in them … In the next place he knew it would give him credit and power, for which he had also a very strong appetite.’

  In 1735 Thomas De Veil got lucky, broke up a gang of thieves, survived an assassination attempt, and found himself ‘recommended to the notice and protection of the ministry, who thought it very requisite to distinguish a justice capable of acting in such a manner.’ His office, first in Leicester Fields, then Thrift Street* in Soho, became a permanent court of summary justice. Even before the Gin Act, De Veil worked a twenty-four-hour day, seven days a week. The harder he worked, the more business came his way and the more money he made. Enemies called him a trading justice; De Veil reckoned himself a professional. ‘Though he did much of [the trading justices’] kind of business,’ as his biographer put it, ‘[he] did it in another manner; so that though his office was profitable, yet it was not liable to any scandal.’

  That wasn’t quite true. There may not have been scandals about money, but money wasn’t Thomas De Veil’s weakness. ‘His greatest foible,’ his shamefaced biographer admitted, ‘was a most irregular passion for the fair sex.’ And when it came to women he was quite prepared to abuse his office. If whores were brought in, Thomas De Veil made sure to get their address, whether their house had a back door, and when was a good time to visit them. He was adept ‘in distinguishing ladies of a certain character.’ ‘You see, madam,’ he would say as he led women out of his study after a ‘private examination’, ‘that I am capable of being particularly diligent and expeditious, in doing a lady’s business.’

  The Gin Act had at last given magistrates like Thomas De Veil the powers they needed to clean up the streets. It was up to Excise men to take care of unlicensed shops and distillers, and to charge them with the £100 fine for selling spirits without a licence. Magistrates were there to tackle the hawkers and barrow-boys, the pedlars and stallholders who infested the alleys of Middlesex. Getting to grips with the problem, De Veil found the Gin Act gave him one immediate advantage. It offered rewards for anyone informing on gin-sellers. Buy a dram, squeal on the person who sold it to you, and the court would award you half of their £10 fine. That fine was De Veil’s first sanction against gin-sellers, but £10 turned out to be beyond the means of most of them. A poor woman could work hard all year and barely earn £10. Commit trespass and assault and you were rarely fined more than a few shillings. So with most of them, Thomas De Veil fell back on the alternative. He sent them to the House of Correction.

  Bridewell, the original House of Correction, was down by the Fleet River, but by now there were Houses of Correction all over England, and they were all called Bridewells. Middlesex had two, in Clerkenwell and Tothill Fields, and there was another one in Southwark. They weren’t quite prisons. Back in the sixteenth century, when they were introduced, Bridewells had been meant as part of the welfare system; they were the stick to balance the carrot of parish relief, the short, sharp shock for whores, beggars and the idle poor. Duly corrected, beggars would come out as honest labourers, and whores as dutiful wives and daughters. The reality, by the start of the eighteenth century, was rather different. Uffenbach, visiting a Bridewell, was shocked by the women locked up there, who ‘were very bold and we had to give them a few shillings for brandy.’27 Ned Ward was even less impressed. He and his friend watched a woman being whipped with the doors kept open so that the court could see. Outside, his friend asked ‘whether you think this sort of correction is a proper method to reform women? … Why, truly, said I … I only conceive it makes many whores, but that it can in no measure reclaim ’em.’28

  With punitive fines in one hand, and Bridewell in the other, the magistrates meant business. From Thomas De Veil’s house in Leicester Fields they sent strict instruction out to their constables. The magistrates themselves agreed ‘to meet at the several vestries once or twice a week, to receive informations against all such offenders, and to punish ’em with the utmost severity.’29 Thomas De Veil’s office soon filled up with hawkers and barrow-boys, and market-women with gin bottles ‘concealed under their clothes.’

  The result was shocking. The enforcement drive didn’t make any difference at all. All the magistrates achieved was to fill up the Houses of Correction. Two weeks later, the London Daily Post reported that ‘gin is still sold about streets every morning about six and seven o’clock, by women and shoe-blackers.’ The paper found it, ‘very surprizing, considering what numbers are now in gaol, for retailing that liquor.’ Another morning, they described how ‘last night, and for several nights past, gin was publickly sold by women and ordinary fellows, on the bulks on Ludgate Hill, and about Fleet Ditch; and there are running shabby fellows, that still sell it about the streets.’30 Other vendors had simply moved out of town. ‘The skirts of the town are pester’d with great numbers of … walking distillers,’ reported the Daily Post on 19 November, ‘insomuch that no less than six of them were taken up yesterday on Southwark side … for retailing the same in the fields.’

  Two months into prohibition, a horrible realisation began to dawn on the authorities. They had feared uprising, riot and overthrow of the state, but something far worse was happening. They were being ignored.

  Sir Robert Walpole was the only one who had seen it coming. He had never been a reformer; he had never had any illusions about the Gin Act. A month before Michaelmas he had predicted to his brother that ‘the lower sort of brandy-shops, whose poverty secures them from the penalties of the law, [will] continue to sell in defiance of the law, and in hopes that no body will think worth their while to prosecute them for what they cannot possibly recover.’31

  It was in the last week of October that the authorities realised events were running out of their control. Thomas Wilson dined with the
Lord Mayor that Sunday and found him worried. ‘He says that … his management … has kept things pretty quiet, but that it will not be so long. That people are generally uneasy and dissatisfied … both Scotland and England are ripe for a Rebellion.’ It didn’t help that the King was still abroad. ‘The citizens of London cry out their trade is ruined by his Majesty’s going and long stay,’ Lord Egmont noted in his diary the same week. ‘The mob, dissatisfied with putting down their beloved gin, exclaim publicly, No gin, no King, and many of them have taken it into their heads that the late King is still alive; others that the present will never return. Some of better fashion say (whatever face the Queen puts on it) that whenever a packet arrives from Hanover she falls into hysterick fits.’ The Queen had already been mobbed in the street. Driving back to Kensington Palace, ‘the mob got round her coach and cried, “No gin, no King.”’ Caroline did the best she could. ‘She put forth her head,’ Lord Egmont recorded, ‘and told them that if they had patience till the next Session they should have again both their gin and their King.’

  Even the Master of the Rolls couldn’t help commenting to his protégé on ‘the great and general uneasiness that the people are under.’ For Thomas Wilson himself the public mood seemed one of unfocused anger. ‘The Nation … [are] ripe for a change without knowing what scheme would make them easier and more free,’ he wrote nervously in his diary that week. ‘Angry with the Prime Minister and yet no other better offered to succeed him.’32 But he, for one, had no intention of taking his share of the blame. Thomas Wilson never was cut out for martyrdom. Madam Geneva had served her purpose; he had made his reputation. He dined with the Lord Mayor and visited all the senior bishops of the Church of England. The Queen knew his name. The Master of the Rolls was lobbying for a place for him. Now prohibition was starting to get too dangerous. In the same week that the magistrates met, the champion of reform ‘wrote to Dr Hales excusing myself from meddling any further in supporting the Gin Bill.’ His reason was ‘the hazard I am [in] of my life or being abused by a Mob.’33

  Maybe the ‘mob’ were starting to enjoy the sight of a law sinking without trace. London’s constant undercurrent of subversion and disrespect had bubbled up to the surface. There was even a new anti-hero to admire that autumn. ‘Yesterday morning,’ reported the Daily Journal a week before Michaelmas, ‘about nine o’clock, a gentleman with his lady and son, in a coach and six, were attacked by two highwaymen well-mounted … on Barnes Common, and robbed of their watches and money to the value of about £40.’ The paper couldn’t be sure, but the highwaymen were ‘supposed to be Turpin and his companion.’34 Dick Turpin, an Essex farmer’s son, was on the path which would take him to the gallows and a place in popular mythology.

  Madam Geneva had been blamed for crime and social breakdown, for uppity tradesmen, dishonest servants and the decline of the nation. Outlawing her was supposed to return the country to a better, more wholesome age. But, on 2 December, it was reported in the press that ‘the Commissioners of Excise … have clearly discovered the late act to be ineffectual; and notwithstanding the high penalties inflicted on the retailers by the said act, it is daily sold in garrets, workshops &c.’35 Two months into prohibition, it was all going horribly wrong.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BOOTLEG

  Before prohibition there were gin stalls; afterwards there were basket-women with bottles under their skirts and ‘running shabby fellows.’ Before prohibition there were distillers’ shops and apothecaries; afterwards, there was Captain Dudley Bradstreet.

  Dudley Bradstreet was an adventurer, a soldier and a con-man. His autobiography read like a work of fiction, and probably was one. His life was as random as any eighteenth-century novel. In the ’45 Rebellion he would be a spy in the Young Pretender’s camp. He was the one – he claimed – who persuaded Bonnie Prince Charlie to turn back at Derby. The irony was how like Colonel Thomas De Veil he was. Captain Dudley Bradstreet was another ambitious chancer with an immigrant background, another military man with ‘a bold address’ but no cash. If things had turned out differently, Dudley Bradstreet could have been the one sitting in a magistrate’s office, sending bootleggers off to Bridewell.

  But he wasn’t. In 1736, Dudley Bradstreet was in London, in debt and at a loose end, and when prohibition came he saw an opportunity. ‘The mob being very noisy and clamorous for want of their beloved liquor,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘which few or none … dared to sell, it soon occurred to me to venture upon that trade.’1 He wasted no time about it: ‘I got an acquaintance,’ he recalled, ‘to take a house in Blue Anchor Alley.’ He bought the sign of a cat and nailed it to the window. ‘I then caused a leaden pipe, the small end out about an inch, to be placed under the paw of the cat.’ The other end of the pipe, inside the house, had a funnel on it. Dudley Bradstreet asked around for the best gin in London, and spent the last £13 he had at Langdale’s distillery in Holborn. Then he was ready.

  He had the word put about ‘that gin would be sold by the cat at my window next day.’ Business was slow to start with, but when the first customer arrived it was worth the three-hour wait. ‘I heard the chink of money, and a comfortable voice say, “Puss, give me twopennyworth of gin.”’ Two pennies appeared through the cat’s mouth. Dudley Bradstreet raised his bottle and poured two penn’orth of gin carefully into the funnel. By the end of the day he had made six shillings.

  That was only the start. Soon Dudley Bradstreet was turning over £3–4 a day. Parliament could pass whatever laws it liked against Madam Geneva, but Londoners hadn’t lost their taste for her company. ‘The street now became quite impassable,’ Bradstreet went on, ‘by the numbers who came out of curiosity to see the enchanted cat, for so Puss was called. This concourse of idle people had such an effect, that my neighbours went to their several landlords and declared, their houses were not tenantable unless they got the cat-man removed; they asked who the cat-man was, but received no other information than that he was the greatest nuisance they ever saw or heard of.’

  Imitators were soon copying Dudley Bradstreet’s idea. The cat caught on. ‘In the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields,’ reported Read’s Weekly Journal, ‘and other parts of the town … the buyer comes into the entry and cries Puss, and is immediately answered by a voice from within, Mew. A drawer is then thrust out, into which the buyer puts his money, which when drawn back, is soon after thrust out again, with the quantity of gin required.’2 All over town, gin-sellers were finding ways to keep the gin flowing. Londoners weren’t going to give up their favourite dram when the gentlemen who had banned it were still knocking back the port and smuggled French brandy. It was that discrimination between poor and rich that Lonsdale blamed for the Gin Act’s failure when he addressed the House of Lords in the debate on its repeal. ‘It was this invidious distinction,’ he declared, ‘that set the mob so much against the execution of that law.’ If anything, prohibition ‘made them more fond of dram-drinking than ever; because they then began to look upon it as an insult upon the rich.’3

  Insulting the rich was, after all, one of London’s favourite pastimes. Watermen abused their betters as a matter of professional pride. ‘A man in court dress,’ Casanova moaned, ‘cannot walk in the streets of London without being pelted with mud by the mob.’ Another foreign visitor was shocked to see that ‘the people in general testify but little respect for their superiors … Even the Majesty of the throne is often not sufficiently respected.’4 Uffenbach described an election at Tothill Fields where one noble candidate was opposed by ‘a common townsman and brewer called Cross.’ When the nobles appeared, ‘we were amazed to hear the vile remarks and insults that the others hurled at them, and the mob even made so bold as to pursue them with filth and stones.’5

  There was a devilish kind of humour flowing beneath early eighteenth-century London. Lord Hervey reported how during one of George II’s extended trips to Hanover, ‘on St James’s Gate this advertisement was pasted: “Lost or strayed out of this house, a man who has l
eft a wife and six children on the parish.”’6 A Brief Description of London in 1776 tried to put its finger on ‘that sort of pleasantry in conversation, which is … peculiar to [Londoners]. It … gives its sharpest edge to ridicule. Their comedies abound with it, and it never fails to influence the gesture and the tone of voice in a way that cannot easily be explained, but is irresistibly engaging.’7 It was subversive, and it was satirical. A group of coffee-house drunks hired a hackney coach, dressed coachman and postilion in street scavenger’s clothes, and rode it round the Hyde Park ring, in among all the fashionable equipages. In March 1742 a satirical ‘procession of the scald miserable masons’ tagged onto the real freemason’s parade, lampooning their ceremonial with ‘fellows on jack asses … cow horns on their heads, [and] a kettle-drummer on a jack-ass with two butter firkins for kettle-drums.’8 The undercurrent of subversion was there in London’s flirtations with Jacobitism as well, and in its popular heroes. When Jack Sheppard broke out of Newgate for the last time, he spent fifteen days being feted around London and drinking in the gin-shops of Clare Market before they caught him again. Highwaymen posed as latter-day Robin Hoods. Thomas Easter, told by a victim that he looked surprisingly honest, replied, ‘So I am, because I rob the rich to give to the poor.’9

  Maybe the urge to tweak aristocratic noses came from an idea about English liberties. Their rulers, after all, were forever telling Englishmen that they were raised above all other nations by being free. ‘I that am born free,’ a pressed sailor told James Oglethorpe in 1728, ‘are not I and the greatest Duke in England equally free born?’10 ‘This nation is passionately fond of liberty’11 was Montesquieu’s comment. It was hard to understand of a nation where real political power was still gripped by a small élite. Disraeli would later raise his eyebrows at the way ‘a people without power or education had been induced to believe themselves the freest and most enlightened nation in the world.’12 But Disraeli was writing at a time when the vote seemed the only measure of political freedom. For most Londoners in the early eighteenth century, the vote wasn’t even on the cards. Instead, they found other ways of demonstrating their freedom from authority. They hurled verbal abuse; they satirised and they ridiculed. They turned law-breakers into heroes.