Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (28 page)

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.’
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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 rather 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.’
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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.’
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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
.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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
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, 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?
’
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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 halfpenny brick,
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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.’
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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.’
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Informers had alienated the public and dragged the whole enforcement effort into disrepute. But for the authorities, there was worse news to come. As autumn set in, an even darker rumour started going the rounds. The whole apparatus of prohibition was about to be undermined. The talk was of corruption deep inside the Excise Office.

Excise corruption wasn’t new. There was always the danger of Excise men getting to know their patch too well. But prohibition introduced new temptations. In February 1737 John Lloyd, a surveyor in the 13th Division, lost his job for ‘proposing a person to be prosecuted for offences which upon examination appeared to be vexatious, frivolous and groundless.’
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In December the same year, when two gin-sellers were convicted
by Justice Engier at St Thomas’s, one of the informers confessed they had been plotting the entrapment for a month. They had been ‘influenced by a superior Officer of Excise.’ The same ‘superior Officer of Excise’ would get more publicity than he wanted in January, when the
London Evening Post
reported that he ‘has been instrumental in convicting to the number of 96 persons … whereby, at £5 penalty for each person, his share will amount to £480.’ That, as the paper commented acidly, was ‘a fine sum raised out of the ruin of several poor families.’ The Officer would be dismissed in February for ‘indirect practices.’
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But even that scale of malpractice paled into insignificance beside what the
Short History of the Gin Act
revealed in October 1738. ‘The Act against spirituous liquors,’ the author thundered, ‘has produced a villain … never, God be praised, heard of in a Christian country before … This man ha[s] a large banditti which [is] kept in weekly pay, to swear against whomsoever he pick[s] out for sacrifice; some [have] twelve, others, more expert in perjury, [have] fourteen shillings a week … we are told this fellow, who is well known at a certain Office has been concerned … in not much less than 4,000 informations.’