Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (22 page)

If some of these stories seemed to bear out Thomas Wilson’s predictions about life after gin with uncanny accuracy, that was hardly surprising. A good few of them were planted by Thomas Wilson himself. He recorded in his diary for 12 October that he ‘put into the papers a paragraph that whereas there used to be [military] Court Meetings twice a week for the punishment of vices and consequences of drinking gin, there had not been one since the Act took place and there is a visible alteration in the behaviour of the lower kind of people, as I am informed from the constables and watch men.’ The
Daily Journal
ran the story the very next day.

But if the reformers thought they had won an easy victory, they were fooling themselves. Instead of celebrating, they would have been better off looking out for warning signs.

There were plenty of them. Gin-sellers were supposed to have shut up shop on 29 September. But a month later, all the newspapers were still reporting that ‘great numbers of idle and disorderly people … do daily carry [spirituous liquors] in barrows, baskets,
and in bottles about the streets, in contempt of the … Act.’ It was easy enough to clamp down on apothecaries’ shops, but apothecaries had never caused any trouble in the first place. The problem was the dram-shops and chandlers’ shops, the market stalls and basket-women. And nothing there seemed to have changed. ‘The following drams,’ reported the papers in the last week of October, ‘are sold at several brandy-shops in High Holborn, St Giles’s, Thieving Lane, Tothill Street, Rosemary Lane, Whitechapel, Shoreditch, the Mint, Kent Street &c. viz,
Sangree, Tow Row, Cuckold’s Comfort, Parliament Gin, Make Shift, the Last Shift, the Ladies Delight, the Baulk, King Theodore or Corsica, Cholick and Gripe Waters
, and several others, to evade the late Act of Parliament.’
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The Gin Act had given magistrates the sweeping powers against gin-sellers which they had been clamouring for since 1721. Now it was time to use them. They could fine a street-hawker £10 or sentence him to two months’ hard labour. On 18 October, ‘one Samuel Scott, a … sailor, was committed to Bridewell … being convicted for selling Gin last Saturday night in St Paul’s churchyard.’
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Samuel Scott was ‘the first man committed [for street-hawking] in this City on the [Gin] Act,’ but he wasn’t the last. To the magistrates’ consternation, it made no difference. By the end of October, alarm bells were ringing loud and clear. Something odd was going on. Parliament had passed a major piece of legislation to stamp out a major social problem, but the gin-sellers hadn’t packed up their bags and departed. They were still out there in the streets. ‘Gin is still sold in several markets about town,’ the
London Daily Post
reported, ‘especially about four and five of the clock in the morning, by women and others, out of small bottles, which they conceal under their clothes until asked for.’
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It was time for firmer action. And the right man was in place to set it in motion. Sir John Gonson was Chair of Quarter Sessions
for Westminster. ‘Yesterday,’ reported the
London Daily Post
on 26 October, ‘a great number of His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace (Sir John Gonson … being one) met at Col. De Veil’s house in Leicester Fields.’ The aim of the meeting was to agree ‘the most effectual methods to put in execution that clause in the Act of Parliament made against selling spirituous liquors upon bulks, stalls, or in the streets by idle vagabonds.’ The authorities had decided to raise the stakes.

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.’
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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
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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