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

by Dillon, Patrick

  And they drank gin. When gin was banned, subversion almost became too easy. To cock a snook at the ruling classes in winter 1736, all you had to do was buy a dram. If Parliament was going to outlaw Madam Geneva, that would only make Londoners love her more than ever. By disobeying the law, Londoners could take control of it. The ‘mob’, as Henry Fielding would lament in 1751 – by then he had changed sides and joined the reformers – ‘have not as yet claimed that right which was insisted on by the people or mob in old Rome, of giving a negative voice in the enacting laws, [but] they have clearly exercised this power in controlling their execution. Of this it is easy to give many instances, particularly in the case of the Gin-Act some years ago.’13

  Londoners took to prohibition like ducks to water. A subversive counter-culture grew up around illegal gin, a culture of passwords and Puss and Mew houses. And as with any banned drugs, counter-culture names for it proliferated. Londoners didn’t just drink Geneva anymore. They drank Max, Partiality, Blue Ruin, and Flashes of Lightning. They drank White Satin, Bob Makeshift and South Sea Mountain. They got topsey-frizey on My Lady’s Eye-water, the Baulk, the Last Shift, Old Tom. They ended up in the straw on Cock-my-Cap, Kill-Grief, Comfort, and Poverty.

  Maybe the fancy names made the drams taste better. The taste of rebellion might have been the only thing which made them palatable at all. Thomas Wilson once claimed that gin was made ‘not so much … from malt, as rotten fruit, urine, lime, human ordure, and any other filthiness from whence a fermentation may be raised, and by throwing in cochylus indice, and other hot poisonous drugs.’14 For once Thomas Wilson was hardly exaggerating. He didn’t need to. The truth about 1730s gin was already bad enough. When a market-woman pulled a brown bottle out from under her skirts, the name was usually the only fancy thing about it.

  A hundred years before, distillers had published careful recipes for how to make compound waters. But times had changed since then. For a start, the old, slow way of purifying raw spirit by repeated distillations was out. Bay salt and quick lime – anything alkaline – would do the same trick faster. ‘Calcined and well purified animal bones’ didn’t cost anything at all. When the flavours went in, things went from bad to worse. Even twenty years later, the distiller Ambrose Cooper reckoned that more gin was flavoured with turpentine than with juniper berries. ‘It is surprising,’ he added, ‘that people should accustom themselves to drinking it for pleasure.’15

  It wasn’t all that surprising. Londoners had spent four years drinking Parliamentary Brandy. But the old way of flavouring spirits by slow distillation was too expensive for bootleggers, and it took too long. It was simpler to add neat flavourings to the raw spirits and give them a quick stir. ‘The only still used in all the … houses in London,’ according to one report at the end of the century, was ‘a glass or brass pestle and mortar.’ That way anyone could brew up gin themselves on the kitchen table at home. One guide for publicans published a recipe. To 120 gallons of raw spirit, twenty under proof, it added a splash of turpentine (for taste), half an ounce of sulphuric acid (for kick), the same of bitter almonds (for bite), a gallon each of lime and rose water (for the bouquet), plus eight ounces of alum boiled up in water and a pint of wine spirits.16 That was a fancy drink. In St Giles’s, they didn’t bother with the rose water. It was a moot point, anyway, whether any of the drinkers much cared what their gin tasted like. ‘The delicacy of flavour,’ as a ‘bystander’ put it, ‘is not courted by the vulgar. What they chiefly regard is its being a dram.’17 Maybe it was no surprise that bottle labels made their appearance in April 1738, when a Hungary-water producer advertised that ‘to prevent counterfeits, the Black Boy and Comb is pasted on all bottles.’18 There was no shortage of counterfeits in St Giles’s.

  There wasn’t even any guarantee of how strong the dram was. It depended on how much the gin-seller watered it down. Ambrose Cooper called proof gin ‘Royal Gin’, while most everyday Geneva was diluted by a third, but Ambrose Cooper wasn’t a bootlegger. It was academic anyway, because the first workable hydrometer, Clarke’s, had only appeared ten years before, and it was a long way from perfect. Excise men relied on old tests like dipping a cloth in the spirit and then setting fire to it, but most of those could be faked. The physician Peter Shaw defined proof spirit as fifty per cent alcohol by volume. In his hands, the compounder Thomas Cooke reckoned, it took ‘1 to 6 to reduce [spirits] to the strength gin and compounds in London are constantly sold to the retailer at’19 (known as phial proof). That made 1730s gin about the same strength as modern London Dry. But compounders had plenty of tricks for faking strength as well as taste. ‘Pepper, ginger, and other fiery ingredients are put into the still,’ explained a later reformer, ‘which makes the spirit hot to the palate, and burning to the stomach, though mixed with water, and under proof.’20 Distillers called it ‘the doctor’. They started with powdered quick lime, then mixed in varying proportions of almond oil and sulphuric acid.21 The final ingredient, cocculus indicus, was a poison, and a strong one, but that didn’t stop them from putting it into the stills. Constables counted up gin-shops, and Excise men busily recorded the gallons distilled. But when it came to the numbers of Londoners who were killed, maimed or blinded by bootleg spirits, no one was keeping a tally.

  * * *

  It didn’t seem to put them off. Three months into prohibition, the gin was still flowing. And if reformers and politicians spent Christmas looking for signs of popular subversion, they didn’t have long to wait. On 17 January 1737, the London Evening Post reported a disturbing incident.

  It happened in Hanover Square, in the heart of the polite new West End. ‘Yesterday,’ the paper reported, ‘one Pullin, a chairman,* was carry’d in effigy about the several streets, squares &c. in the parish of St George, Hanover Square, for informing against a victualler in Princess Street for retailing spirituous liquors.’ Londoners never did like informers. The Societies for Reformation of Manners had discovered that. ‘After the procession was over he was fixed on a chair pole in Hanover Square, with a halter about his neck, and then a load of faggots placed round him, in which manner he was burnt in the sight of a vast concourse of people.’

  For the authorities, the only good news was that the crowd’s attack on Pullin had been symbolic. The real violence would come later. But it was enough to cause them panic. They had legislated against gin, and they were being ignored. Thomas De Veil was up all night collecting fines and sending gin-sellers to Bridewell, but it didn’t make any difference.

  The new session of Parliament opened just two weeks later. On the first day the King declared to the assembled Lords and Commons that ‘it must be matter of the utmost surprise and concern to every true lover of his country, to see the many contrivances and attempts carried on … in different parts of the nation, tumultuously to resist and obstruct the execution of the laws and to violate the peace of the kingdom. These disturbers of the public repose … in their late outrages, have either directly opposed, or at least endeavoured to render ineffectual some acts of the whole legislature.’ The government was thinking of the riots of the year before: the summer riots in London, the disturbances in Edinburgh, the scare over a Jacobite rising. It didn’t help that for the past four months they had had to sit by and watch a major piece of legislation being ignored.

  Distillers had spent nine months waiting for the new session to start. There was no shortage of voices calling for the Gin Act to be scrapped. The London Magazine launched a long attack on informers. The Grub Street Journal proposed scrapping prohibition and replacing it with increased duties and better licensing controls. No one doubted that the Gin Act had gone too far. ‘[If] rigorous methods are chosen at the same time that moderate methods … offer themselves,’ the Grub Street Journal argued, ‘people can never be brought to think that such methods were … designed for the public good.’22

  But moderation was the last thing on the government’s mind as the 1737 session opened. It was thinking only of riot and rebellion. ‘His Maj
esty,’ the King went on, ‘thinks it affords a melancholy prospect to consider to what height these audacious practices may rise, if not timely suppressed.’ Suppression was the key note. In their loyal reply, the Commons could find no words harsh enough for those involved ‘in tumultuously resisting and obstructing the execution of the laws.’

  Not everyone saw things the same way. ‘I am as great an enemy to riots as any man,’ declared Carteret, one of the opposition leaders. ‘I am sorry to see them so frequent as they are; but I shall never be for sacrificing the liberties of the people, in order to prevent them engaging in any riotous proceedings.’ Any clamp-down would only drag the nation further from its freedoms. ‘The people seldom or never assemble in any riotous or tumultuous manner unless when they are oppressed,’ Carteret warned, ‘or at least imagine they are oppressed … You may shoot them, you may hang them, but, till the oppression is removed or alleviated, they will never be quiet.’23

  A city spinning out of control: Hogarth’s ‘South Sea Scheme’, 1721

  Zealot: Sir John Gonson enters to make his arrest in Hogarth’s ‘Harlot’s Progress’, 1732

  The reformers (clockwise from top left): Dr Stephen Hales, General James Oglethorpe, Isaac Maddox, Bishop of Worcester, and Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls

  The House of Commons, 1749

  Westminster Hall.

  The Jacobite bomb was placed on the steps between the Courts of King’s Bench and Chancery, at the far end

  ‘No Saint, no Spartan, no reformer’: Sir Robert Walpole

  Thomas Wilson: no Saint, but an ardent reformer

  Henry Fielding (seated, left) in his Bow Street court room: ‘a poor, emaciated, worn-out rake’

  ‘Beer Street’, 1751

  ‘Gin Lane’, 1751

  The future: industrial distilling, 1754

  Excise man at work, 1752

  Gin Palace: Cruikshank illustrates Dickens

  But when ministers contemplated Pullin’s effigy blazing in Hanover Square, they didn’t see free Englishmen with their liberties under threat; all they saw was a mob carrying sticks. For them, there was no point speculating what went on in the minds of the lower orders. As Lord Chancellor Hardwicke loftily put it, ‘as none but persons of the lowest rank has been concerned in any … riot … it is below the dignity of parliament to enquire particularly into them.’24 For the ministry, the debate was nothing to do with civil liberties. It was about respect. And the apparent failure of the Gin Act was all part of the same picture. ‘There is scarce a law made,’ William Hay, MP for Seaford, noted in his diary that year, ‘but the people … immediately prepare to resist it … so that it is now become a question whether this nation is for the future to be governed by a mob or the legislature.’25 By early 1737, prohibition wasn’t about gin any more. It was about authority.

  For Sir Robert Walpole, in particular, it was about authority: his own. If he had been rattled the summer before, he was still more so now. The rift between the Prince of Wales and his father was widening, and the opposition were doing all they could to woo the Prince their way. It was only a few months before he would set up his own court in Leicester Fields with opposition leaders thronging the anterooms. Walpole could see Tories and dissident Whigs uniting under the banner of liberty, the City of London sticking up for distillers, mob rule in the streets. The sooner the lid was slammed down on popular protest, the better.

  There was no more talk of repeal. Instead of pulling back, Parliament waded further into the mire. Instead of a new Gin Act, they passed an enforcement measure. The key clauses were buried in an Act to reduce taxes on British fruit wines, or ‘sweets’. As usual, Sir Robert was killing several birds with one stone. By dropping the duty on sweets, he hoped to increase consumption, make a revenue windfall, and cheer up the West Indian sugar merchants, who had lost their market for rum. There was a theory, in case any reformers were listening, that sweets might ‘be made to answer all the good ends of spirituous liquors, without being attended with any of the fatal consequences.’ With elderflower wine in the shops, Madam Geneva might just be out of a job.

  But the Sweets Act had a sting in its tail. Its final clauses turned their attention to gin-sellers. Until now, they had been sent down for hard labour if they couldn’t pay the £10 fine. The Sweets Act decreed that before they were discharged from Bridewell they should be ‘whipped bloody’. Until now, informers had only received their reward if their victims paid the £10 fine, not if they went to Bridewell. But now a reward was guaranteed for anyone giving information under the Gin Act. Parliament was determined to see prohibition through.

  It was April by the time the Sweets Act went through. On 27 April a farrier, Briat, talked half a pint of Geneva out of a distiller called Mound. Briat’s story was that he needed the spirits to treat a sick horse. When he took the gin to the Excise Office instead, and informed against the distiller for selling it to him, ‘the mob rose upon him at Stocks Market, and increased to such a number by that time he got to Whitechapel Bars, pelting him with stones, brickbats &c. that with much difficulty he was brought back in a coach to the Excise Office, at the hazard of his life.’26 If the authorities thought that informers were going to save the Gin Act, they had made a terrible mistake.

  Back in January, gin-drinkers had made effigies of informers before burning them. From now on, the attacks were for real. An informer was ducked in the Thames at the end of July and almost lost an eye; he was rescued by a passing waterman. On 20 August, a husband and wife informed on a woman for selling gin, but were cornered by a crowd in Honey Lane Market. ‘The man [escaped],’ reported the London Evening Post, ‘but the wife they seized upon, and pelted her with all manner of filth, and rolled her in the kennel. Then they forced her to the Swan and Two Necks in Lad Lane, in order to pump her; but the people of the inn shut the gates against them.’ The crowd had to take her all round the City in their search for a pump. In the end they dragged her into Guildhall yard, where ‘they pumped her for a long while.’ The informer only escaped by crawling into the porch, ‘where a gentleman belonging to Guildhall Hall took her in and saved her from the fury of the mob, who it is thought would else have killed her.’

  No one had tried to help the woman as they dragged her from pump to pump. The London Evening Post thought it ‘remarkable that she begged for mercy and protection of the shopkeepers &c. all the way they dragged her and pelted her; but nobody showed her any compassion.’ Londoners had never cared much for informers.

  Some among the authorities weren’t all that keen on them either. For the London Magazine, campaigning for repeal at the start of the parliamentary session, reliance on informers was the fundamental flaw in prohibition. ‘I hope it will be granted,’ it wrote in January (about the time Londoners were burning Pullin’s effigy in Hanover Square) ‘that treachery in every degree is wicked … It ought … to be the care of every people, but especially a free people, to prevent as much as possible the character of a treacherous informer from ever becoming tolerable among them.’27 Societies depended on mutual trust. ‘A general spirit of treachery among the people,’ the magazine warned, ‘is one of the main supports of arbitrary power.’

  The trouble for the authorities was that they had no alternative. Enforcing the Gin Act was always an uphill struggle. There was no police department. There were no special agents to get in behind the counter and pull Dudley Bradstreet out by the ears. The justice system depended on private individuals. If you caught a robber in your house, you were expected to prosecute him yourself. Law enforcement depended on citizens, and when the citizens wouldn’t co-operate, the authorities ran dangerously short of options. It was no good relying on constables when it came to gin. Almost half the Middlesex constables were gin-sellers themselves. ‘As every other trade makes interest to be excused having this office,’ magistrates had complained in their 1736 report, ‘[victuallers and dealers in spirituous liquors] are the only ones who covet it.’ Victuallers and dealers in spirituous liquors
were hardly going to be enthusiasts for enforcing prohibition.

  So there was no other option but to rely on informers. At least, with a £5 reward on offer, there was no shortage of informers coming forward. Five pounds was a year’s rent for a poor family, six weeks’ wages even for a skilled craftsman. By summer 1737, the Gin Act hadn’t yet had any effect on gin-drinking in London, but it had, at least, had one result. In the words of Thomas De Veil’s biographer, it had ‘let loose a crew of dangerous and desperate people who turn’d informers merely for bread.’

  Informers worked in organised gangs. The same names turned up time and again in reports of convictions. Samuel and Marjory Brookes, along with their friend Elizabeth Jenkins, were responsible for numerous prosecutions around Spitalfields. Another regular team of informers, Margaret Dawson and Mary Fountons, only came to grief when they were caught out blackmailing their victim as well as turning him in to the authorities. Under the Gin Act, magistrates were supposed to convict a hawker ‘on the oath of one or more credible witness,’ but in practice no one was too fussy about how credible the witnesses were. It was a hard enough job as it was, trying to enforce prohibition in a city addicted to gin.

  But after almost a year the risks of depending on informers were starting to show. Even in the first months of prohibition, there had been alarming signs of informers’ evidence falling apart in court. In January the Commissioners of Excise had put out an order that officers should check informers’ names, ‘& that when any sample of any goods or liquors are taken by any officer intended to be produced at the hearing of an information, that he keep the same in his own custody until the information is heard.’28 Informers couldn’t be trusted not to tamper with evidence.