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

by Dillon, Patrick

  If it was any comfort to him, the constables weren’t the only ones being purged. The Enforcement Act stopped distillers from acting as JPs in any matter to do with gin. In May, all magistrates would be banned from taking fees on Gin Act prosecutions. And in August the Lord Chancellor would make a clean sweep of the Middlesex Bench, striking out no fewer than seventy-five trading justices, timeservers and lame ducks. ‘Informers now may find th’ employment bad,’ crowed the Gentleman’s Magazine, breaking into verse. ‘And Justice may from Justices be had.’

  That remained to be seen. For the Westminster magistrates, the clamp-down began with a pep-talk in Westminster Hall. Their chairman, Nathaniel Blackerby, was the son-in-law of the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, recently deceased. He exhorted Westminster’s magistrates to ‘resolution, courage and perseverance.’8 Just like the MPs in Parliament next door, Blackerby could see what would happen if the attacks on informers went on. ‘If … persons who lay the informations before the justices are … to be knocked on the head … how are our laws ever to be carried into execution? … If there be no information, in consequence … laws made by the wisdom of Parliament … will all prove a dead letter.’ As the magistrates filed out of the hall, none of them stopped to ponder the significance of the date. It was April Fools’ Day, 1738.

  The first special session was held two days later. It wasn’t a particularly auspicious start. A woman called Martha Walker was committed to Bridewell. Two other precepts were sent out, but neither gin-seller could be found. The magistrates didn’t give up, though. By the end of the month eighteen cases had been heard by the special sessions, and another thirty-three by Thomas De Veil in Thrift Street. Two gin-sellers had been discharged, eighteen paid the £10 fine, thirty were committed to Bridewell, and one escaped. Forty-two magistrates had taken part in the hearings (including James Oglethorpe, making a token appearance before he went back to Georgia). The constables had ‘behav’d very well.’ They were using new short staves, to make them less conspicuous when they were shepherding informers. As another way of avoiding attacks, the magistrates had also agreed to pay for informers to be picked up in hackney coaches.

  It hadn’t all been smooth going. A woman called Judith Walmsley went down for contempt of court after ‘threatening the informers that she would wait their coming out.’ But by the end of the month there was ‘great unanimity among the Justices,’ Nathaniel Blackerby reported to the Duke of Newcastle, ‘who … can and will carry on this service with that duty and zeal as becomes them.’9

  But duty and zeal weren’t going to be enough. The clamp-down was about to run into trouble almost before it had started. Six weeks in, on 10 May, Roger Allen’s case came up for trial.

  The authorities probably thought the timing would work their way. The Enforcement Act received Royal Assent the same week. Maybe they thought that hanging Roger Allen would make a good example. Even so, there were some in the ministry who had twinges of doubt. The solicitor of the Treasury, Nicholas Paxton, was one of them, and he had a reputation for common sense. The way Paxton saw it, ‘as the Ginn-Act was in the judgment of most people, a very severe law, it would look like doubling the severity of it, to make it become the subject of a capital prosecution, and therefore he was against it.’10 In the end it was Thomas De Veil himself who insisted Roger Allen’s trial should go ahead. Maybe the Gin Act was starting to get to Thomas De Veil. Maybe he couldn’t forget that quartern of urine. Maybe he just had it in for Roger Allen. The month after the riot he had sent down Allen’s wife, Mary, for house-breaking.

  To the authorities, after all, it seemed an open-and-shut case. You couldn’t stage more of a riot than the trouble Roger Allen had fomented outside Thomas De Veil’s house. He had ignored the Riot Act, threatened informers, and tried to assault a magistrate. A crowd of a thousand had watched him do it, and so had the court justice, peering out through the shutters. If there was anyone in London they could throw the book at, it was Roger Allen. To the authorities, it didn’t seem as if anything could possibly go wrong.

  Except that someone, somewhere, stumped up the cash for a defence lawyer. The lawyer could see exactly what Roger Allen’s trial was about. He could see what the Gin Act was about; he could see what Londoners thought of prohibition, and Thomas De Veil, and informers, and what they were likely to think of Roger Allen. His first move was an objection ‘to all Esquires being on the Jury.’11 Most people saw the Gin Act as an attack by the rich on the poor. Roger Allen was going to be tried by a jury of the poor.

  The defence didn’t waste time querying the details of the case against Roger Allen. In a six-hour trial, as Thomas De Veil’s biographer put it, ‘the facts were incontestably proved.’ They took a different tack instead. Roger Allen pleaded insanity. His old master swore ‘he was so weak and silly he could be of no service to him in his trade, nor would he ever learn it.’ Allen’s mother ‘depos[ed] he was an idiot, and a silly weak fellow.’ The jury couldn’t deny what had happened in Thrift Street, but they weren’t being asked to. The defence had given them room for manoeuvre. After an hour’s deliberation, Roger Allen was acquitted of all charges.

  Public reaction was ecstatic. ‘Westminster Hall was so full one might have walked on the people’s heads,’ reported the London Evening Post, ‘and the mob on hearing of his being acquitted, were so insolent as to huzza for a considerable time, whilst the court was sitting. In the Hall Yard a set of butchers waited for the issue, and finding the fellow was acquitted, they rung him home with a peal upon their marrow-bones and cleavers.’ That was the traditional fanfare of Londoners’ disrespect. As for the hero of the moment, now legally classified insane, the crowd chaired him out of the hall and set him up on a wall in Old Palace Yard. Roger Allen decided to make a speech. He was feeling pleased with himself. He should have been on his way to Tyburn; instead, he was the hero of the hour. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I thank you very kindly for this honour, but the great liberty of mobbing a justice now and then (and my own life) had been certainly lost, if I had not had wit enough to prove myself a fool.’12

  For the authorities, it was a devastating blow. They were supposed to be living in the Age of Oligarchy. They were defending the Riot Act, their main weapon of social control, and a recent law which was the subject of a vigorous enforcement drive. No one in London disputed what Roger Allen had done. And despite all that, they had failed to bring in a verdict against him. It was a blow to Thomas De Veil’s prestige, and a blow for the clamp-down on the Gin Act. The Westminster magistrates tried to pick up the pieces a few days after the trial. Even before Allen’s acquittal, two constables had had to abandon an arrest when some passers-by started shouting, ‘“Informers, Mob them,”’ and ‘followed the constables all the way to the Old Palace Yard calling out “Mob them, Mob them” several times.’13 Now, the High Constable told the bench, ‘on Allen’s being acquitted the constables were afraid to go out with precepts as they had done, lest the populace, encouraged by his acquittal, should rise on them. And … the Excise Officer who [attends] the Justices … inform’d the bench that the witnesses were so terrified on Allen’s acquittal that he could not prevail on many of them to appear as usual.’ No gin-sellers were sent to Bridewell that day.

  The authorities were in a hole, but all they did was keep digging. The next day, 1,000 copies of the Riot Act appeared on church doors all over Westminster.

  It didn’t make any difference. In late May the Riot Act was read again outside the special sessions of Middlesex Tower Division. A bad fortnight in late August saw three assaults on informers and constables. An informer in Swallow Street was stabbed. At the funeral of Pinchin, another informer, the body ‘was attended to the grave by a great concourse of people, many of whom play’d on salt boxes, some on jews harps, and others diverted the company with marrow-bones and cleavers.’14 Afterwards they made a fire and burned Pinchin in effigy.

  There were other symptoms of protest as well. Some spirit-sellers insisted on going to Bridewell ra
ther than pay the fine. When Mary Simpson of St George’s Southwark was convicted, she couldn’t pay the fine, ‘but was so well-beloved in the neighbourhood, that the money was raised to save her from going to gaol.’ Martha Walker, the first person to be convicted in Westminster special sessions, was the wife of a well-known publican in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. The day after the magistrates sent her to Bridewell, ‘a hundred of her neighbours went, some in coaches and others on foot and redeemed her, and brought her home … in triumph to her own house.’15

  Even for those with no neighbours to save them, the Bridewells were losing their power to terrify. A magistrate speaker in Parliament commented how he had ‘within 12 days, sent above 40 of the poor creatures … to prisons of correction; but they did not seem to value that punishment, since they were always sure of being free in a short time, and of gaining their bread in the same way after they were free.’16 And sometimes it seemed as if however many gin-sellers the magistrates locked up, there was always another one standing on the street corner. ‘There have been about 100 committed by His Lordship,’ reported the London Evening Post of proceedings in the City, ‘and scarce a day passes without some informations of that nature, so that it may truly be called a Hydra.’17 The Board of Excise had ‘so great a number of informations depending … that their honours have determined to sit eight hours every day next week in order to finish their examinations.’18 All they did was fill up the jails. Surrey Assizes reported, that summer, that its prisons were ‘very sickly on account of the great number of prisoners there for selling spirituous liquors.’19

  At the end of July, statistics were published for the numbers of prosecutions made since the clamp-down began. ‘We hear that claims have been already made … for near 4,000 persons sent to the several Bridewells,’ reported the London Daily Post. Three thousand gin-sellers were said to have paid the £10 fine. Added to nearly 5,000 convicted by the Excise Commissioners, the rumour in mid-summer was that in London alone, ‘there has been about 12,000 persons in all convicted on this Act.’20

  Someone was massaging the figures. The magistrates hadn’t sent down anything like 4,000 people, and the Duke of Newcastle knew it – he was reading their monthly reports. The authorities were failing to control the gin problem, so they had resorted to spin.

  Some fell for it. ‘The populace are behaving now in a more quiet and peaceable manner,’ commented Read’s Weekly Journal, ‘since they are prevented getting at that intoxicating liquor; nor are the streets infested with street robbers and drunken people as before, the publick selling it in brandy shops being pretty well over, few venturing now to sell to strangers, but to those only whom they think they can confide in.’21 The trouble was the authorities ended up fooling themselves. Even the magistrates started to sound upbeat about the clamp-down. In June, Nathaniel Blackerby reported to Newcastle ‘that there has been no rioting or mobbing during this month’s service … The practice of selling spirituous liquors is chiefly restrain’d to private places, very few selling now in open shops.’ The next month there was a swoop on ‘houses and places where spirituous liquors are sold by persons concealing themselves by the name of Puss and Mew.’ Philip Cholmondly, High Constable of Holborn, reported that he ‘dispersed great numbers of idle disorderly persons whom he had found so assembled, and had caused seven Puss and Mew houses to be shut up.’22 With a few successes like that under their belts, the magistrates started to claim victory. Westminster saw fewer than half the number of gin-sellers in October as in former months. In his report, Nathaniel Blackerby proudly asked ‘whether from hence it may not justly be inferr’d that the zeal and diligence of the Justices in Westminster for the publick service in these prosecutions has not had in some measure the desir’d effect in checking the publick selling of spirituous liquors.’23

  He was whistling in the wind. Spirit production had dipped when prohibition came in, but by 1738 production was up 28 per cent on the previous year. Someone, somewhere, was still drinking gin. If fewer gin-sellers were ending up in court, it wasn’t because Londoners had taken to elderflower wine. There had to be another explanation.

  Some people thought Madam Geneva had gone into the country to lie low. Back in May the Daily Post had remarked how ‘the retailers of spirituous liquors multiply … in the towns and villages near London, as Stockwell, Mewington, Dulwich, etc.’24 Five years later, Bishop Secker would claim that during prohibition, the distillers ‘sent [gin] where they could in the country,’ with the result that ‘the disease’ of gin-drinking was driven ‘from the heart into the extremities.’25

  Others thought Madam Geneva had just gone underground, into the tortuous slums of St Giles’s where neither constables nor magistrates could find much trace of her. ‘Those crowds,’ one commentator thought, ‘which were daily and nightly seen drinking and enflaming themselves, carousing and debauching in petty gin-shops … are now to be found in just the same abominable pickle in cellars, garrets, back-houses, and hutts, where they are kept without suffering them to go out into the street, in order to screen them, whilst in that filthy condition, from public view.’26

  The explanation may have been even simpler. The magistrates were getting tired. They were amateurs, after all. No one was paying them. When the clamp-down started in April, fifteen magistrates had attended each session. The average hearing attracted nine. By October that average was down to four. After October, when sixty-nine made the journey to Bridewell, commitments would run swiftly downhill. The early eighteenth-century justice system had simply worn itself out.

  But in the end, maybe it was the informers who finally killed off the authorities’ chances of enforcing the Gin Act. Faced with public anger and the threat of attack, informers started to change their tactics. They moved outside London, where their faces were less well-known. In mid-May, distillers in Bristol found themselves targeted by ‘two women, strangers, who belong to a gang of informers now harbouring about this city and parts adjacent.’ Informers were reported to have appeared at ‘Highgate, and other places near London.’ Bath was troubled by ‘a vile fellow, who … inform[ed] against fifteen persons for retailing spirituous liquors.’27

  At least those travelling informers were still working inside the law. Faced with the risk of a mugging – or worse – if they denounced gin-sellers openly, others came up with a different tactic. They started to blackmail them instead. In late April it was reported that the Lord Mayor ‘committed several persons to gaol, for extorting money from people to stifle informations which they were going to lodge against them.’28 The problem of crooked informers soon became too obvious for the authorities to ignore. In August, the Duke of Newcastle had to write to magistrates, exhorting them to prevent ‘the great abuses and perjuries committed by informers against the supposed retailers of spirituous liquors.’29

  It didn’t work. In October, an advert appeared in the papers asking readers to send in stories of informer abuses. The results were compiled into a pamphlet and published. It made depressing reading. William Tyson and his wife ran the Red Cow in Hammersmith. They were charged under the Gin Act when Elizabeth Gardiner, an occasional customer of theirs, swore she had been sold a dram of gin by Mrs Tyson on 4 July 1737. A friend of Gardiner, Charles Darley, had been with her and backed up her story. But at the subsequent trial, under intense questioning from a suspicious magistrate, it had come out that both Gardiner and Darley belonged to a gang of informers. Gardiner had met them ‘[at] the Crown in one of the seven streets*, in the Parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields.’ When Darley asked her if she knew anyone who sold liquors, she ‘told them that she owed Mrs Tyson, at the Red-Cow in Hammersmith, half a crown. And the said Darley said Have you had no liquor there lately, why do not you inform against her?’30

  Thomas Pepper ran a chandler’s shop in St Botolph-without-Aldersgate. A regular informer call’d Mary Pocock claimed that on a Saturday night in May, about nine o’clock, ‘I went to Mr Pepper’s shop, as I usually did, and … call’d for a halfpenn
y brick,** and a ha’p’orth of new cheese. Mr Pepper serv’d me; nobody was in the shop but he, then I call’d for a quartern of gin; he serv’d me, and I paid him 3 halfpence for it.’ Pocock, a self-confessed gin-addict (‘I lost my husband and children by it’), filled her evidence with impressive detail: ‘There was a candle in the shop; and on one side of the shop lies coals, and salt in the other. He brought the bottle from behind the counter, and went into a narrow passage, between the kitchen and the parlour, and there he serv’d me with his own hands.’ But in Thomas Pepper she had picked on a determined man. Pepper had paid a £100 fine earlier in prohibition, but had stopped selling gin when the clamp-down began in April. One of the witnesses he called was his lodger, a Temple Bar watchman who testified ‘that from the beginning of April, to this present day, there were no spirituous liquors in the house.’ A carpenter who had been doing some work in the shop also backed up the story. Pepper’s father dolefully gave evidence that ‘he had not a drop for ME. If I wanted it I was forced to go out and get it where I could.’31

  A Short History of the Gin Act, appearing in October, supplied even more tales of informer skulduggery. ‘Wretches not worth a groat,’ its author complained, ‘women with hardly a petticoat to cover their nakedness, and men as destitute and dissolute as ever crawled upon the earth, have been admitted to swear innocent people out of their bread.’ There were some signs that informing was being taken over by organised crime. In August ‘nine persons, men and women,’ were overheard in a private room in a Hammersmith pub, ‘plotting and contriving to lay false informations against divers people of that town.’ In September, ‘Sarah Clewly, an infamous person under confinement in Bridewell in Southwark for perjury, in falsely swearing an information against an innocent person for retailing spirituous liquors, was detected in offering a bad guinea to be changed, and being carried before a Justice, upon examination confessed she had been concerned among a gang of coiners, and discovered several accomplices.’32