Hawkhurst E-Book

Joseph Dragovich

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 344

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

South-east England, 1740s: war and heated politics bring the old practice of smuggling to new and dangerous heights. Violent gangs of smugglers terrorise communities and confound government attempts to stop them. The most famous of these, the Hawkhurst Gang, operate like a modern drug cartel fuelled by illegal tea. They threaten witnesses and authorities, brandish weapons in public, and fight battles in the streets, murdering and kidnapping those who get in their way. Enter a world filled with gangsters, corrupt politicians, crooked law enforcement, and vigilantes, brought to the brink by Britain's most notorious smuggling gang.

Leseprobe

First published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Joseph Dragovich, 2023

The right of Joseph Dragovich to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 8039 9394 2

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

A Note on Dates

A Note on Money

Glossary of People

Prologue

1   Murder

2   Tea

3   Empire

4   Corruption

5   Smuggling

6   The Gang

7   War

8   Escalation

9   London

10   Mafia

11   Bolton

12   Rebellion

13   Returning Home

14   Downfall

15   On Trial

16   Poole

17   The Hunt

18   Aftermath

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to my readers, Steve Schiavoni, Ryan Sardón Keller, Chris Holden, Neil Greenwood, Nick Dorrington, Will Morgan, my wife Jess, and my father Rick Dragovich, whose feedback has helped improve the many drafts of this book.

Thanks to all the people I have consulted over the course of writing this book: Lyndy Kessell at Parham House for her advice on Cecil Bishopp, Mike Huxley at the Cranbrook Museum for his advice on sources, and Professor James Walvin for his advice on race in the eighteenth century.

Special thanks to Paul Muskett for his advice and suggestions on sources.

Most of all thanks goes to my wife, Jess, without whose patient love and support this book would not have been possible, and to my 4-year-old daughter Annabel.

Map Data

Maps in the book are produced with OpenStreetMap data, which is ©OpenStreetMap contributors. More information on the map data can be found at www.openstreetmap.org/copyright

INTRODUCTION

On 28 April 1847 the town of Goudhurst in Kent gathered for a celebration. Church bells rang, the townspeople hoisted flags and illuminated the belfry towers. They were celebrating the centenary of a battle. Not a battle against a foreign enemy, but against a gang of smugglers.1

The town was celebrating a momentous anniversary: the first time a local population had resisted violent intimidation by a vast network of organised criminals, the Hawkhurst Gang. For years, the gang had criss-crossed the countryside, operating with impunity and threatening anyone who dared to even look at them. The Hawkhurst Gang fought a guerrilla war with the government for years.2 Goudhurst was the first community to challenge their dominance.

It is easy to look at the events that took place in Kent and Sussex in the 1740s through traditional romantic notions about smuggling: smugglers were part of the community, committing a victimless crime, prosecuted as much for their challenge to the social hierarchy as the laws they broke.3 These ideas have been disproved by previous work on the subject. Smugglers throughout the eighteenth century were violent men, existing in a complex social and political web that saw people of all walks of life interact with the illicit trade. Successive governments would struggle throughout the century to keep the practice under control, launching spasms of enforcement that often coincided with other, external political crises. Yet the 1740s stand out in the history of smuggling as a period when the practice, and one gang in particular, rose to be a crisis in their own right that challenged the British state itself.

The period was an inflection point in the history of Britain, where immense political and social upheavals shaped the trajectory of the country for decades, and perhaps centuries to come. Foreign wars, economic downturn, and political revolution crackled throughout the decade. In this simmering potential, a band of criminals from a small Kentish village would sear itself into the historical record. The Hawkhurst Gang would not be the last gang of smugglers to terrorise the British countryside, but they were one of Britain’s first mafias that would leave an impression on the region for centuries afterwards.

The Hawkhurst Gang is to Kent and Sussex what the Krays are to London, Al Capone is to Chicago, or John Gotti is to New York. They became a symbol of the bad old times of the mid-eighteenth century and a warning about the consequences of crime. Their memory is deeply rooted in the region. An obituary from the nineteenth century mentioned how the deceased personally remembered the depredations of the gang, and artefacts from Goudhurst’s successful defence from the gang were being auctioned as relics 100 years after the battle.4

But the story of the gang is not limited to the south coast; at their height, stories of their activities were being published in newspapers all over the United Kingdom. A gang based in a village that, in the early twenty-first century, only has around 5,000 people, was the talk of London, the largest city in the world, and the entire United Kingdom.

Often, works on smuggling focus exclusively on the smugglers themselves: their methods and the violence they committed. But the story of the Hawkhurst Gang could not have happened without a confluence of events, crises, and social changes that radically transformed the country.

Today, tea is considered a fundamental part of British life and character. But this affection for the drink is a legacy of crime, empire and national competition. The tea we thoughtlessly put in our mugs warped every level of British society in the eighteenth century.

Tea, for all its banality, is a drug. It is a mind-altering substance (however mild) that is often consumed in a ritualised social setting. This is as true in the twenty-first century as it was in the eighteenth. From high tea, to colleagues gathering to gossip over a cuppa at the office, tea is valuable for its social function as much as its value as a drink. In the 1740s, tea consumption was skyrocketing in the UK, driven by elite tea services and those that sought to emulate them. This demand was satisfied by the ever-expanding colonial project, and eventually, a vast, trans-national criminal network.

As empire was flourishing and goods from around the world flowed into an increasingly wealthy Britain, the government sought to find ways to fund the country’s participation in the interminable great power struggles of Europe. His Majesty’s government needed ever-larger armies to fight on the Continent, and the navy that let Britannia rule the waves was hungry for cash. That money would come from taxing the production and trade of the realm. Tea, being initially associated with luxury, had a heavy duty placed on it, reaching 100 per cent of the price at one point.

Tea was not the only commodity commonly smuggled past the customs men. Everything from brandy to wool to lace was snuck past customs inspectors at one point or another. It was tea’s relatively light weight and sky-high taxes that made it the engine that allowed the Hawkhurst Gang to grow into the force that it was. It is telling that when the gang broke open the customs house at Poole, they took all of the tea, but left the brandy.

There were times when south-east England looked like it was at war –because it was.5 The Battle of Culloden in 1745 is officially the last pitched battle fought on British soil, but soon after Culloden, there were smaller battles between government troops and hundreds of smugglers. The government’s legal and military battle with the Hawkhurst Gang resembles twentieth- and twenty-first-century conflicts with drug cartels in Latin America. It was a fight not just to limit illegal activities, but also one to bring areas of the country back under government control that had slowly slipped away. The Hawkhurst Gang and those like them were different to what had come before, violent paramilitaries that had shaken the foundations of law and order in two counties. It was these stakes that elevated the Hawkhurst Gang beyond the gangs of smugglers that preceded or followed them. Battling the gang wasn’t just about the issue of taxation or law and order, it was a battle for the soul of the United Kingdom. They were more than just thugs running tea into London.

This running battle with smugglers is described in detail in newspapers across the country. Publications as far away as Scotland ran numerous articles about the guerrilla war in the south-east, feeding the nation with news not just of seizures and battles, but the exploits of individual smugglers and customs officers.

That fight would be led by people of all stripes, from grassroots local militias to people in the highest levels of government. They fought back against the Hawkhurst Gang to take back their communities and stop the violence that had taken over the region. Smuggling would still be a problem throughout the century, but it would never again cause the same sort of national crisis as the Hawkhurst Gang.

How Do We Know About the Hawkhurst Gang?

The gang’s story plays out across a variety of sources, the most common being the records and correspondence of the people trying to stop them. John Collier, the Surveyor General of Riding Officers for Kent and Sussex, spoke extensively about smuggling in his surviving letters. His correspondence with customs officers in the field, as well as his political masters, provides an insight into the daily operations of the preventative services and the operational details of the Hawkhurst Gang. The upper levels of government were also concerned with dismantling the Hawkhurst Gang and smuggling as a whole. Parliamentary investigations, debates and letters among the Cabinet show how the wheels of the state sought to curb the abuses of the gang. Reports of seizures, captures and battles with smugglers were frequent fixtures of the national press.

Most scholarship on smuggling extensively uses the rich government records to glean information about smuggling gangs and how government forces attempted to combat them: sources like customs records and Treasury petitions (CUST and T series in the UK National Archives). There is comparatively little use of newspapers and other printed ephemera, partly due to how dispersed smuggling material is in daily newspapers throughout the period, and for past scholars, the difficulty of processing such a large corpus of material. This has coloured past smuggling research into looking at the smuggling conflict and the customs service in the way that it was supposed to work on paper. However, evidence described in newspapers suggests that the customs service, and its fight with the smugglers, did not function in the way described by government documents. On paper, John Bolton, who was captured and tortured by the Hawkhurst Gang, was a minor customs official. In reality, he was doing dangerous and complex police work that frequently put his life at risk.

Then there are the words of the smugglers themselves. Many of the Hawkhurst Gang were tried in the Old Bailey, the main court in London. During the eighteenth century, summaries of these trials were published and sold for public consumption as The Proceedings of the Old Bailey. Those sentenced to death were given a biography in The Ordinary of Newgate’s Account of the Behaviour, Confession and Dying Words of the Condemned Criminals Who Were Executed at Tyburn.i Both of these publications provide some of the only recorded words from the smugglers themselves. Through these sources we can glean some insights into the minds, motivations and structure of the Hawkhurst Gang. The Ordinary’s Accounts had a moralising, cautionary intention to them, but they are the only voices we have from the Hawkhurst Gang itself. They should be used carefully, but it would be foolish to ignore them.

Some Ordinary accounts are constructed from newspaper stories when the subject was uncooperative, like Arthur Grey, one of the leaders of the gang. However, some contain details and events that are not found elsewhere, such as those of Sam Hill and John Cook. Comparative work has shown how Cook’s and Hill’s accounts often contradict newspaper accounts and other sources.6 Rather than invalidate them as sources, this suggests that they are an authentic voice of the smugglers in question, instead of a government fabrication. The ones that are largely constructed, like Arthur Grey’s, are almost identical to contemporary newspaper sources. It is unlikely the Ordinary was more creative with just Hill and Cook.

This book builds on the work of many local historians in south-east England over the last 160 years. The evidence around the Hawkhurst Gang is often fragmentary, but there is a lot of information available from combing over parish records, wills and other paper trails from the period. Mary Waugh provides the most complete account of smuggling in Kent and Sussex over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.7 Henry Jones’s articles in Bygone Kent are some of the most detailed studies of the Hawkhurst Gang available.8 Paul Muskett writes about specific issues around smuggling, including military campaigns against the gangs and the lawyers that represented them in court.9

These authors were writing in the 1980s and ’90s, before the advent of a mature internet and mass digitisation of historical materials. Their studies were limited in scope to the materials that could be easily searched in physical archives. While this book also uses those sources, it uses digital research methods as well. The digital archives of Old Bailey Proceedings Online allows for a wider search of relevant material, not only for the Hawkhurst Gang, but also for the smuggling economy of London and its hinterland.

The Old Bailey trials provide a glimpse into how the smuggling economy functioned once it reached London. With the advent of digitisation and searchability, we can see a complex world of street dealers, crooked tea merchants, thieving dock workers and a whole host of other cogs in the illegal economy. The archive can also help answer some unanswered questions around smuggling that have plagued historians, such as how smuggling affected the markets for frequently trafficked goods. By studying theft trials where defendants stole tea, we can get a reasonable understanding about the ‘street price’ of tea during this period. This is information not available in higher-level government estimates on trade volumes.

Google’s effort to digitise and distribute books has also been a boon to the study of the Hawkhurst Gang. Google Books is an invaluable database of more obscure sources that have enriched the story of the gang. Contemporary books and pamphlets contain a wealth of information about smuggling, the Hawkhurst Gang and the fraught politics of the early eighteenth century. Treatises on tea, magistrates’ manuals, parliamentary debates and reports, and magazines all give rich details about the world in which the gang operated.

By incorporating new and more obscure material, this book tries to give a broader, fuller story of Britain’s most notorious smuggling gang. Rather than take the previous approach of examining smuggling through a national or regional lens, it takes a deeper dive into the most well-known example of the period’s smuggling gangs, looking more broadly than their crimes to encompass the political, social and military reaction to them.

i    Often shortened to the Ordinary’s Accounts.

A NOTE ON DATES

Dates in the early eighteenth century follow a different pattern to our modern standard. Until 1752, the UK had followed the Julian Calendar, and the legal year began on 25 March, so for official purposes, January in a calendar year would come after March. Dates in the book have been normalised to the year beginning in January.

A NOTE ON MONEY

During the period of this book, the primary currency in Britain was the pound sterling. Prior to decimalisation in the 1970s, one pound (£) was divided into 20 shillings (s) each of which was divided into 12 pence (d), making 240 pence to a pound.

Prices were generally denoted by numbers labelled with the denomination, so an amount of 2 pounds, 3 shillings and 8 pence would be written as £2 3s 8d. Though prices were not always ‘simplified’ into their highest-value currency. For example, the ancient property requirement for voting is listed as 40s not £2.

Prices appear as they were written in the source materials, unadjusted for inflation and in non-decimal notation.

This book deals with historical prices and money. The eighteenth-century economy was very different than the modern one, with different standards of living, material expectations and wealth inequality. Attempting to convert eighteenth-century prices to a modern equivalent would be misleading and lose historical context. On the facing page is a list of sample prices that gives a rough idea of the value of money during the period.

Property value requirement for voting

40s

7 Bushels wheat flour

£310

1 Quarten Loaf, about 4lb of bread, 1740

8d11

3 Linen Shirts, 1740

18s12

Velvet Hood, 1740

2s13

Pair of Stockings, 1740

2s14

‘Piece of Pork’(not further specified), 1740

6d15

GLOSSARY OF PEOPLE

Bishopp, Cecil

Sussex baronet and politician. Ran for a parliamentary seat in Sussex in 1734.

Bolton, John

A customs official in the Port of London and smuggler hunter.

Carey, Thomas ‘Jockey Tom’

One of the leaders of the Hawkhurst Gang.

Carswell, Thomas

Customs riding officer. Killed by the Hawkhurst Gang in December 1740.

Curteis, Jeremiah

One of the leaders of the Hawkhurst Gang. Led the Hastings Outlaws prior to merging them with the Hawkhurst Gang.

Darby, John

Customs riding officer.

Dray, Freebody

Customs riding officer.

Duke of Newcastle

Thomas Pelham-Holles was a powerful landowner and important politician not only in Sussex, but also nationally. He served as Secretary of State for Robert Walpole and for his brother, Henry Pelham, after he succeeded Walpole as Prime Minister.

Duke of Richmond

Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond. Friend and political ally of the Pelhams. Launched a wide-ranging campaign against smugglers in 1748.

Grey, Arthur

One of the leaders of the Hawkhurst Gang. Brother of William Grey.

Grey, William

One of the leaders of the Hawkhurst Gang. Brother of Arthur Grey.

Kingsmill, George

One of the leaders of the Hawkhurst Gang. Brother of Thomas Kingsmill.

Kingsmill, Thomas ‘Staymaker’

One of the leaders of the Hawkhurst Gang. Brother of George Kingsmill.

Murray, William

Solicitor General of the United Kingdom.

Pelham, Henry

Brother of the Duke of Newcastle, MP for Sussex and Prime Minister from 1743.

Polhill, John

Customs riding officer.

Quaif, Thomas

A customs official in the Port of London and smuggler hunter. Friend of John Bolton.

Stanford, James ‘Trip’

One of the leaders of the Hawkhurst Gang.

Ryder, Dudley

Attorney General of the United Kingdom.

Walpole, Robert

One of the first modern Prime Ministers of the UK until 1742.

PROLOGUE

On a spring day in China, a man picks a leaf from a bush. It is not a leaf idly picked. The man is a plantation worker and the bush in question is camellia sinensis, known more commonly as tea. He, along with many others working at the plantation, will pick several pounds of the fresh shoots during the day.

At the end of his day’s picking, he takes the leaves to the roasting house, which is just beginning its work. The leaves need to be processed as soon as possible, lest they get too warm and spoil.16 The roast house workers toil throughout the night, causing them to complain bitterly.17 They blanch the leaves in hot water to wilt them.18 Then the roaster takes over. He is the boss of the roasting house, and has the most skilled job in the whole operation.19 Stirring the leaves in a shallow iron pan over a fire until his hands can’t stand the heat, he is careful not to burn the leaves and ruin them. Once the leaves are roasted, he removes them with a fan-shaped shovel.20

While the leaves are still hot, rollers take each leaf and roll it into a little ball. The juice that seeps out of the rolled leaves is slightly caustic and burns the rollers’ hands, yet they endure. As the rollers roll, another worker fans the finished leaves. The faster they cool, the more they hold their shape. If they aren’t dry, the roaster roasts them again, then the rollers re-roll the leaves that uncurl. They repeat this cycle until the leaves are free of moisture.21 Another worker then spreads the roasted leaves on a mat, sorting them for quality and carefully removing those that, despite the roaster’s care, are burned.22 They then store the tea to age it. When it is ready, they roast it again to drive out any moisture it might have accumulated during the aging process and pack it into tin chests protected by a fir-wood box.23 The boxes contain about 100lb of tea, and any cracks in them are carefully sealed with paper in order to protect the contents on its long voyage.24

The tea makes its way from the plantation to the port of Amoy.i Waiting in the port is the trade mission to Batavia,ii the capital of the Dutch East Indies.25 The fleet of junks is packed with merchants, their goods, and immigrants bound for the colony. Its departure is a festive event. Sailors eat celebratory meals and make sacrifices to Ma-tsu, the goddess of the sea, to ensure a successful voyage.26 After three weeks of hugging the coast, the fleet arrives at Batavia.

In Batavia, a ship, the last Dutch ship to return to Europe that year, waits patiently for the Chinese trade fleet. This last ship, colloquially called the Tea Ship, wants the Chinese fleet’s cargo of tea.27 It is loaded with hundreds of tons of tea, beginning its long journey.28 Stopping in Ceyloniii for supplies and making its way around the Cape of Good Hope towards Europe, it arrives in Holland. The Tea Ship’s long journey ends at the island of Texel,29 a barrier island just north of Amsterdam, where smaller boats take the tea to the city’s busy wholesale markets. Some of the tea is bound for Dutch coffee houses, but much of it is ultimately headed for Britain.

An Englishman living in Middelburg buys a large quantity of the tea, a few tons. He intends to send it to London, but he won’t use the London Docks. His crew open the chests and pack the tea into loose cloth bags, which are themselves wrapped in a bag made from oilskin, a waterproof material. Each bag contains 25–50lb of tea.30

The crew load the bags into a small, fast cutter. Waiting for their moment, they quickly cross the English Channel to the coast of Kent, where they land at an isolated beach during the night. A gang of men are waiting.31

i    Present-day Xiamen, China.

ii   Present-day Jakarta, Indonesia.

iii  Present-day Sri Lanka

1

MURDER

25 December 1740

On Christmas night, as most people were sleeping off a day of celebration and festive revelry, the Hawkhurst Gang unloaded a cargo of tea near Hastings. Labouring under a near-full moon, the smugglers brought their cargo, almost a ton of tea, a few miles inland to a barn, where they stashed it and returned home for a well-earned drink and some rest.32

Not yet the most feared smugglers in Britain, the Hawkhurst Gang were one of many gangs making money by defying the tax laws, sneaking a wide variety of untaxed goods past the customs service. The gang was led by the Grey Brothers, Arthur and William. Sons of pub owners, they had fallen into smuggling at an early age.33 There was also James ‘Trip’ Stanford, scion of a local wealthy family.34

However, they were not the only ones out on that cold winter’s night. Thomas Carswell, customs riding officer, was on the hunt. Assisted by around a dozen dragoonsi and customs agents, he followed the smugglers’ tracks from the beach. Having found the stash, Carswell’s men loaded a wagon and began making their way back to the secure customs house in Hastings.35

But word of the seizure reached the gang, who quickly gathered in a local pub to discuss what to do. Their shipment was big, worth a small fortune, too much money to just let go. They would need to take it back, even though it was guarded by armed government agents. As they came up with a plan, Carswell and his men passed by the pub, unaware that they were taking their seizure right past its former owners. Spotting the revenue men, the gang would need to act fast if they were to save their goods.36

Trip Stanford and another smuggler rode back to Hawkhurst, their home and base of operations, as fast as they could, offering tremendous rewards for anyone who would come and help the gang recover the tea. They gathered weapons and met in a field just outside the nearby village of Hurst Green. What would happen next was going to be messy and violent. Preparing for a fight, the gang took off their heavy coats, stripping down to their shirts in the cold night. Drinking brandy, they swore damnation on anyone who fled before the tea was recovered.37 It was theirs, and they rode off to take it.

Carswell’s men were climbing the large hill into Hastings when the smugglers caught up with them: the thunder of hooves rose behind them as thirty smugglers charged up the road. Carswell had a choice: he could either abandon the wagon full of tea to the gang and flee, or stand and fight. He chose the latter, ordering his men to turn and fire. The crackle of gunfire and the smell of smoke pierced the still of the night, as the gang charged through the hail of shot with their pistols and blunderbusses.ii38 Horses whinnied, guns blazed, and a round bored deep into Carswell’s skull.39 He fell from his horse, dead. The remaining customs men could only surrender to the overwhelming onslaught of the smugglers.40

The Hawkhurst Gang had done it. They took the tea, the captive customs men and their new wagon back to the stash house in triumph. The gang made good on their promise, and rewarded those that came to help, giving them either 100lb of tea or 20 guineas, more than a year’s wage for most people.41 After killing Carswell, the gang would have taken the tea to a gathering just south of London. It is the sort of place where one could buy smuggled tea, wholesale. The London tea merchants bought half a ton of tea at a time.42

Carswell’s death launched a nearly decade-long manhunt for his killer, pursuing a gang that would become the terror of Kent and Sussex, the two counties between London and the English Channel. The Hawkhurst Gang were already known locally for their bloodthirstiness,43 but the coming years would spread that bloody reputation nationally. In the 1740s smuggling would become a national crisis, bringing Britain to a fever pitch of anxiety.

In January 1741, the customs service published a wanted ad for Carswell’s killers, offering £50 for anyone apprehending the suspects and £50 and a pardon for any of the suspects that informed on their fellows. As an aid to any would-be informants, the ad described the suspects that informers had already identified, providing some of the only physical descriptions of the gang. They were a group of men that would have been ordinary had they not also been gangsters. Ranging in age from their 20s to their mid-40s, they were multi-ethnic iii and in a variety of trades; some scarred with smallpox, some with fair faces. They had a variety of nicknames and identities: Trip, Old Oatmeal, Beggerman.44

These men took on a lucrative but dangerous way of life. There were huge potential rewards for men that got into the smuggling trade in the mid-eighteenth century. Most smugglers were temporary workers, farmers and tradesmen that hauled cargo at night for some extra money. The ones that charged at Carswell, guns blazing, were more involved in the gang life.

Carswell’s murder marks the start of the Hawkhurst Gang’s rise as the most dangerous smugglers in Britain, followed by their bloody fall. They were largely a group of humble men, tradesmen from a small village roughly halfway between the English Channel and London. Men that saw a change in the criminal world of Britain and seized their moment. Some would become wealthy far beyond their station. Most would hang, die in prison, or find another violent fate. Some beat the odds and died in their beds. All were men who shaped their time in their own way, crossing paths with illiterate farmers, the most powerful men in the highest levels of government, and everyone in between. They made their mark with sword, shot and an enormous amount of tea.

i    A type of mounted infantry that carried short muskets and were often used for anti-smuggling duties.

ii    An early type of shotgun.

iii    Richard Wenham is described as being of ‘of a black complexion, with course hair’,which indicates that he would potentially identify as Black today. Richard Wenham was almost certainly not a slave, but not what we would consider white today. He could have been from a variety of backgrounds; he could have been North African or Middle Eastern. It is an intriguing hint that London’s rural hinterland was more ethnically diverse than we commonly assume. George Chapman’s ‘brown complexion’ could also be an indication that he would not consider himself white today.

2

TEA

The gang were willing to kill over tea, a commodity the British take for granted today as their national drink. However, the tea we casually fill our cups with each day warped every level of British society for nearly 100 years. It made criminal empires, bedevilled governments and turned eighteenth-century Kent and Sussex into a place that resembled the cartel-controlled areas of twenty-first-century Latin America.

The link between the British love of tea and the extensive organised crime that supported it was obvious even to people at the time. The tea that the Hawkhurst Gang were unloading in the moonlight had turned the United Kingdom into a quasi narco-state, an empire that projected itself into the world and was irrevocably changed by the new products, people, and plunder that came back. Tea was not the only stimulant that came in from far away, nor was it the only item that people smuggled in bulk past the revenue service. But the boom in demand, the nature of the product, and the political framework around it conspired to spin parts of mid-eighteenth-century Britain into a deepening cycle of crime and violence.

Tea, much like modern illegal drugs, was the perfect product to fuel a criminal empire. It was brought from abroad and could not be produced domestically, because long sea voyages spoiled the seeds.45 It had a relatively high value to its weight and was legal to possess and use. But there was a good margin to be made if one could avoid paying the high taxes. Tea, being a stimulant, was also mildly addictive.

What made tea the driver of an entire criminal industry was its role as the lubricant of a vibrant, sometimes tumultuous public and private culture during the eighteenth century. Tea was a drink over which to socialise, conduct business, gossip, flirt, and debate the issues of the day. It was the drink of reasonable, civilised people – that was supplied by an uncivilised, violent, trans-national criminal network.

Tea fuelled the vibrant and raucous political culture that flourished in the hundreds of coffeehouses scattered throughout London, and the private, female-dominated social sphere in the home.46 Having a cup of tea with a slice of toast for breakfast started in the first half of the eighteenth century. As early as 1712, a London tea dealer proclaimed: ‘Drinking tea has grown so general, that it needs the less recommendation.’47 By the 1730s, the stuff was everywhere. There was a tea for every taste and budget.48

As the wave of tea drinking crashed over Britain, people genuinely wondered whether this new drink was actually good for you. The early eighteenth century abounds with doctors debating over whether tea was better than tobacco or coffee or chocolate,49 stories of housewives nearly driven insane by their tea addictions50 and pundits pining for the good old days when British people drank beer for breakfast.51

The boom in tea consumption invited a tremendous amount of graft and dirty dealing. The rising demand for tea meant that many people were using it for the first time, and didn’t know much about what they were drinking;52 fertile ground for numerous fraudsters that would cut teas with any leaf that sort of looked like tea,53 or use a variety of chemicals, like green vitriol, to dye cheap teas to look like expensive ones.54 There was so much knock-off tea around that one anti-tea polemic declared the tea that ‘the vulgar’ drank ‘neither in taste, smell or size of leaf, seemed to have any tea in it’.55 Expensive tea wasn’t much better. A treatise in 1750 noted that fine teas were a crapshoot; some tasted good and some would ‘make any delicate person’s stomach puke’.56

Smugglers were the most dangerous criminals attracted to Britain’s tea craze. Smuggling was rife among most commodities during the period, but was especially prevalent around tea. Tea was the smuggled commodity in the mid-eighteenth century. It had no domestic competitor (if you don’t count the various local leaves passed off as it) and was tremendously profitable to smuggle due to a quirk of how it was taxed.

Until 1745, tea was taxed by weight, rather than by its sale value.57 That is, all tea had a flat 4s per lb tax in the 1730–40s. This tax got left behind as tea transformed from a rarefied luxury item to an everyday staple. It meant that all types of tea were taxed at the same weight, so that lower-quality, cheaper teas were in effect taxed more than their more expensive counterparts. Also, the level of taxation did not adjust for tea getting rapidly cheaper over the first half of the eighteenth century.

As late as 1707, a pound of tea would cost upwards of 60s, something only the very wealthy could afford with any regularity.58 In that circumstance, a few shillings per pound was a reasonably small tax. However, in the 1710s, tea consumption rose dramatically outside the wealthy.59 By the 1720s, the price had dropped to between 4–10s per pound. At those prices, a 4s tax becomes a significant part of the price, particularly at the bottom end of the market. The British government sleepwalked into making tea a lucrative item to smuggle.i

Much like modern drug cartels, eighteenth-century gangs could bring tons of untaxed tea into Britain. They benefited from a virtuous cycle in tea prices that increased the scale of smuggling operations throughout the early part of the century.

As the price of low-grade tea dropped, the tax became a higher proportion of the price. The more the tax was a proportion of the price, the more money could be made by avoiding the tax. The more money there was in smuggling, the greater the scale smuggling gangs could operate at. The greater the scale, the more tea could be brought in, which lowered the price.

This cycle fed the nation’s crescendoing tea demand and helped create a crime problem that would reach a breaking point in the late 1740s. A parliamentary committee at the time estimated that out of the approximately 4 million lb of tea consumed in the UK, 3.2 million lb of it was smuggled.60 Tea, and the crime that it caused, insinuated itself into most areas of life in south-east England; from the farm hand working in the fields, to the dukes and duchesses in their parlours. The insatiable thirst for tea would drive political and social chaos, and cost many lives.

i    Because smuggling was so widespread, it can be very difficult to determine what the actual price of tea was during the first half of the eighteenth century. Using trials from The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, we can get a rough sense of tea’s ‘street price’. Trials for theft listed the value of stolen items. By looking at trials where the defendants were accused of stealing tea up to 1760, we can see the rough retail price of tea. There were eleven trials between 1725 and 1750 where bohea and green tea, the two cheaper varieties, are listed as stolen. The price remains relatively stable, between 4–10s per pound. The most common price is 8s. While this sample size is small, it can at least show us the price within an order of magnitude (i.e. the price didn’t shoot up to 40s a pound).

3

EMPIRE

At 12.45 on 14 March 1733, Robert Walpole rose to address the Commons.61 He was about to make the most consequential speech of his political career. He stood in St Stephen’s Chapel, the converted medieval church in central London where the House of Commons sat, the political parties facing each other across converted choir pews. What was once a house of God had become a house of politics. Galleries hung overhead for the men watching the debates.62 Women had to watch through a ventilation hole in the ceiling.63

What Walpole was about to propose had been the subject of speculation for years, both in and outside parliament.64 The road to the most violent tea smuggling gangs Britain had ever seen would not start with a tax on tea, but a tax on wine and tobacco. Walpole faced a chamber of hundreds of MPs, one of the fullest houses in living memory.65 They listened to the speech in the lower part of the wood-panelled chamber. High above, the narrow public galleries contained members of the public that had come to watch the debate, peering down onto the chamber floor. The situation was tense. A crowd gathered outside the House of Commons in anticipation of the debate. They filled the passages surrounding the chamber, including the Court of Requests and Westminster Hall. Justices of the Peace and constables stood ready in the neighbourhood, in case the crowd of vintners and tobacconists descended into a riot.66

Parliament in St Stephens around 1709, Peter Tillemans.

Walpole began by acknowledging the need to better enforce existing taxes, noting how frauds had robbed the British Treasury of significant revenue. He then addressed the tremendous public outcry that had erupted in anticipation of his proposed taxes, and offered a conspiratorial explanation as to who was responsible:

‘The smugglers, the fraudulent dealers, and those who have for many years been enriching themselves by cheating their country, foresaw, that if the scheme I am now to propose took effect, their profitable trade would be at an end; this gave them the alarm, and from them I am persuaded it is, that all those clamours have originally proceeded.’67

What followed was an eleven-hour, forty-five-minute debate about an excise tax on wine and tobacco, a proposed law that would throw British politics into turmoil for years. Walpole gave one of the best speeches of his political career,68 proclaiming the disadvantage that honest merchants suffered from the smugglers, gangsters, fraudsters, and the corrupt customs officials that let it all happen. He described the numerous ways the dishonest skirted the laws and their sophisticated methods of fraud, at one point holding up the account book of a seemingly honest tobacco merchant that had been seized. The merchant had cheated on his taxes by carefully altering the book, pasting thin strips of paper over his previously recorded quantities. It was an alteration that allowed him to claim tax rebates on tobacco that he had never actually imported.69

Walpole was not proposing a new tax. His bill was trying to shift an existing tax from the customs to the excise. Customs duties were collected, and only collected, at the point goods enters the country. Excise duties, on the other hand, were collected in a number of places within the borders of the country. Excise duties could be avoided, but they weren’t as easy to evade as slipping past or bribing a customs officer.70

***

Walpole was one of the United Kingdom’s first modern Prime Ministers. By the eighteenth century, the fraught relationship between the monarchy and Parliament that had sent Britain into ructions of political violence since the 1640s had settled into a workable distribution of power between the two.