Meanwhile he did everything he could to make contacts. And his father’s letters of introduction led him straight to the SPCK offices at Bartlett’s Buildings. There, within weeks of his arrival in London, Thomas Wilson had met not only Dr Stephen Hales, but gin’s oldest enemy, Sir John Gonson.
The SPCK was a tight-knit group. The wealthy philanthropist Sir John Phillips and his son Erasmus were regulars at the weekly meetings, as was the hellfire evangelist, John Thorold. Thomas Wilson turned Bartlett’s Buildings into a virtual home from home. Hales and Gonson weren’t the only gin-haters he met there. James Vernon, an Excise Commissioner, was another regular. James Oglethorpe was in frequent contact from Georgia (his first act on taking charge of the colony was to distribute a hundred copies of Stephen Hales’ Friendly Admonition). And in January 1735, Thomas Wilson would be present when ‘The Revd Dr Maddox, Dean of Wells … [and] the Right Revd Thomas Secker Rector of St James, now Lord Bishop Elect of Bristol … were chosen … members.’ Isaac Maddox, later Bishop of Worcester, would spearhead the 1751 campaign against gin, while Thomas Secker, as Bishop of Oxford, would speak passionately against spirits in the 1743 House of Lords debate. And on 29 April 1735, the SPCK welcomed another new member who would play a vital part in the fight against Madam Geneva. Thomas Wilson and Dr Stephen Hales were both present that evening to watch Sir John Gonson introduce Thomas Lane, one of the most senior magistrates on the Middlesex bench.8
Gin wasn’t on the formal agenda at SPCK meetings. It was, as one member sniffily put it, ‘foreign to [our] proper business.’9 But there was little doubt what the campaigners talked about as summer 1735 drew on. In June, Thomas Secker’s parish of St James’s ordered officials to count up gin-shops in the parish and denounce them to the magistrates.10 The new campaign was under way, and from then on the reformers moved at lightning speed. The Queen had been spotted as a possible ally, and Thomas Secker joined a deputation to win her support. Goaded on by Gonson and Lane, the Middlesex magistrates passed a resolution to suppress gin-shops.
And this time there was no doubt in reformers’ minds what they were after. Half-measures were not enough. The first Gin Act had been a fiasco; now they wanted complete prohibition of all spirits. Madam Geneva had come back from the dead once. This time they wanted her six foot under with a stake through her heart.
They had even found the man they needed to steer prohibition through Parliament. Sir Joseph Jekyll was sixty-eight years old and had been Master of the Rolls for nearly two decades. He wasn’t exactly popular, but he could certainly pull strings. At last the campaigners had a parliamentary heavyweight on their side.
It was easy enough to poke fun at Sir Joseph Jekyll. Lord Hervey, who could always find everyone’s bad side, reckoned him ‘an impractical old fellow of four score.’ The Master of the Rolls had ‘no great natural perspicuity of understanding and had, instead of lightening that natural cloud, only gilded it with knowledge, reading and learning, and made it more shining but not less thick.’ But even Hervey had to admit he had the ear of the House. Politically, Sir Joseph was a Whig, but he prided himself on his independence. He liked to boast that he came to the House ‘undetermined, and resolved so to remain, till I am fully informed by other gentlemen … of all the facts which ought to be known.’ For Hervey, that was just flannel. Jekyll ‘argued on both sides and voted for neither.’ There was one thing, though, that the Master of the Rolls was certain about. In the words of Sir Arthur Onslow, long-standing Speaker of the House, he ‘had much dislike of Sir Robert Walpole.’11
Jekyll spent much of his time at his estate at Bell Bar, north of London. He disinherited his only son, who was blind. There was no evidence for the rumour that he hated Madam Geneva because his own wife had taken to drink. It might have been Thomas Sherlock, Bishop of Salisbury, who first got him interested in gin. Back in April, Jekyll had been present as President of the Westminster Infirmary when Sherlock preached a hellfire sermon against Madam Geneva. By June, Jekyll was firmly enough on board to join the deputation to the Queen.
It was James Oglethorpe who introduced Thomas Wilson to the Master of the Rolls. In London on a visit from Georgia, he met Wilson at the Cheapside Coffee House, the two men ‘talked about the Affair of Gin,’ and Oglethorpe took him up to Bell Bar a few days later.12 For the ambitious young cleric, that meeting was a dream come true.
Thomas Wilson had come to a decision. Madam Geneva was going to make his name. Others drowned in spirits; he was going to build a career on them. Through the reform campaign he would meet movers and shakers, senior politicians, men who could dispense livings. ‘The Master of the Rolls and his lady received us very kindly,’ he gushed into his diary after the visit to Bell Bar. He had presented Sir Joseph with a draft of his new anti-gin pamphlet. He had spent all weekend finishing it off; the working title was Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation. Within days, Thomas Wilson was settling happily into a new role as the campaign’s chief co-ordinator. He ran a message from Jekyll down to Thomas Lane, went on to see James Oglethorpe, then took a letter from the Master of the Rolls to Sir John Barnard, the new Lord Mayor. A couple of weeks later he was back at Bell Bar for a meeting between Jekyll and Lane. Thomas Wilson was going places. ‘Sir Robt. W.,’ he confided to his diary on 12 October, ‘told Mr Oglethorpe that I stood as fair as any man in England for preferment in the Church.’
The pieces of the new anti-gin campaign were starting to come together. The aim was to present a Bill in the session of 1736, and by early September preparations were well advanced. The trigger for legislation would be another tirade from the Middlesex magistrates (hence the meeting between Jekyll and Thomas Lane in early September). Quarter Sessions – the last before Parliament met – came round in late September. In a carefully orchestrated move, the Grand Juries of the City of London, Middlesex and Tower Hamlets all issued simultaneous presentments against gin. In Tower Hamlets, where Sir John Gonson was Chair of Sessions, the text was particularly eloquent. ‘How often,’ Gonson asked, ‘do we see women … lying in the very channels and corners of streets like dead carcasses, generally without cloaths to protect them from the inclemency of the weather, or cover their nakedness and shame? How many breaches of the peace, dangerous assaults, and often murders have been occasion’d by this deluge of debauchery?’13 ‘Men and women servants,’ added the Middlesex magistrates, ‘nay even children, are enticed and seduced, to taste, like and approve of those pernicious liquors sold for such small sums of money, whereby they are daily intoxicated and get drunk, and are frequently seen in our streets, in a condition abhorrent to reasonable creatures.’14 Thomas Lane chaired the committee of magistrates set up on 18 October to take the campaign forward. By the time he met Isaac Maddox at the SPCK ten days later, and went on to dinner with Thomas Wilson afterwards, the constables were already out in the alleys of Middlesex, knocking on the dram-shop doors, counting gin-sellers.15
Meanwhile, it was time to work out political strategy. On 17 November, Thomas Wilson dined with Stephen Hales at the Thames Ditton home of the Speaker, Arthur Onslow. With Stephen Hales at the dinner table, conversation was always erratic. They had to talk mathematical experiments and the immateriality of the soul before they could get on to Madam Geneva. But when they ‘began upon the Gin Affair,’ everyone was in complete agreement. ‘Heartily for suppression,’ Thomas Wilson recorded in his diary. ‘All spirituous liquors the highest calamity there are before a nation.’ The campaigners were sure enough about that, but they could also see the opposition that lay ahead. ‘To suppress the distillery at home,’ Thomas Wilson minuted in his diary, ‘will raise great clamour from … the country gentlemen upon account of its taking barley.’
So far, though, nothing had been heard from the country gentlemen, or from the distillers. Madam Geneva seemed to have gone to ground. The prohibitionists were having it all their own way. Speed and co-ordination had given their campaign an unstoppable momentum.
Things could hardly have gone bett
er. The brewers had been persuaded to stump up printing costs for the campaign. On 11 December, Joseph Jekyll told Thomas Wilson ‘that he had seen the Queen, who seemed to be an hearty enemy to distilled and spirituous liquors. [She] said she had seen a great deal of bestialities and indecencies as she has gone by in the streets.’ (‘The Master,’ Thomas Wilson added, ‘took the opportunity of recommending me strongly for preferment.’) Parliament was due to meet in mid-January; the Queen was going to ask George II to mention gin in his speech.
The report of the Middlesex magistrates was due to come out as the MPs gathered. Thomas Wilson’s own tract, Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation, would follow immediately afterwards. He spent the Christmas holidays adding the finishing touches. If he heard the noise of revelry in the streets, he comforted himself with the thought that it was the last time the mob would toast the New Year in gin. Two weeks later, the King opened the 1736 session of Parliament.
CHAPTER EIGHT
PROHIBITION
A frightening new statistic awaited MPs as they gathered for the new session on 15 January in St Stephen’s chapel. The same number was being read in the London Evening Post in coffee-houses all over London. In the last ten years, almost a thousand new gin-shops had opened in Middlesex.
The Middlesex magistrates, led by Thomas Lane, had published their report. There were now 7,022 gin-sellers in Middlesex alone. And even that statistic came with a word of caution. It wasn’t just that constables had left out street-hawkers and old ladies in attics. ‘Upon enquiry into the respective trade and callings of the several constables,’ the report admitted, ‘it appears to us, that over half of those employ’d in this enquiry are retailers of those liquors themselves.’1
Apart from that, the report told the same dismal story of social decay that the magistrates had revealed ten years earlier. If anything, Madam Geneva’s grip on the slums had tightened. Now, even more than in 1726, it was ‘scarce possible for persons in low life to go anywhere, or to be anywhere without being drawn in to taste, and by degrees to like and approve this pernicious liquor.’ But if gin was responsible for all the ills of the age – in the opinion of men like Thomas Lane – now, at least, they knew how to put the age to rights. Prohibition had become their panacea. Banish Madam Geneva and the nation would return to sanity. ‘In consequence of this remedy,’ the magistrates promised, ‘trade must increase with the labours of the poor, our soldiers will still be renowned for their strength and real courage, servants will be more obedient, honest and faithful, and all sorts of persons in low life will become more strong & robust, better inclined to industry and labour, and be less induced to rob & commit murders and outrages … In time our morals will be better secured, and we may, with great reason, hope once more to see religion, sobriety and industry flourish once more among us.’
A fortnight later, the reformers unleashed their second broadside against Madam Geneva’s defences. It was Thomas Wilson’s big day. Just before publication, he had shown the final manuscript of Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation to his new patron. The Master of the Rolls had approved it, only asking ‘that its moral reflections might be kept to the last and not intermixt in the body of the treatise.’2 Not even Sir Joseph Jekyll could stomach Thomas Wilson’s moral reflections. All the same, Wilson couldn’t help feeling pleased with himself. He had heard from the Bishop of Durham that Sir Joseph had been singing his praises, and had ‘said that if he had £500 a year he would give it me.’3 Sir Joseph had even agreed to underwrite printing costs for the pamphlet, so Thomas Wilson had the printer, Rivington, run off a thousand, including ‘100 in large paper and sticht in Marble Covers.’ He spent Thursday 5 February delivering them around town. Any young cleric would have felt pleased with himself as he looked down the list of subscribers. As well as SPCK stalwarts like James Vernon and John Thorold, Thomas Wilson could count no fewer than ten bishops, including not only the Archbishop of York but Edmund Gibson, influential Bishop of London. The Bishop of Durham had signed up, as had Thomas Secker, Thomas Sherlock and Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Winchester. The Master of the Rolls had signed for six copies, and Arthur Onslow, Speaker of the House, for one. Philip Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor, must have added his name when Thomas Wilson met him just before Christmas. Lord Egmont recorded in his own diary that ‘in the evening Dr Wilson, son to the Bishop of Man, came and presented me his book against the baneful spirituous liquor called gin.’ Thomas Wilson had some news to spread round, as well as his tract. ‘He told me,’ Egmont added, ‘Sir Joseph Jekyll has a Bill to discourage the drinking it, which he brings this day sennit into the House.’4
For once, Thomas Wilson had good reason to feel pleased with himself. He was no fool. Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation was the most sustained and damaging attack on gin-drinking so far.
He had gone right to the heart of the problem. Reformers had to break up the love affair between distillers and the landed interest. So Thomas Wilson’s tract, taking no prisoners, would comprise ‘Considerations humbly offer’d to the Hon. the House of Commons, by which it will appear that the Landed Interest suffers greatly by the distilling of spirituous liquors.’
Arthur Onslow had given him some pointers the day the reformers dined at Thames Ditton. The Speaker had been full of good ideas about beer production, the cost of social security, and figures for child mortality. He had also suggested that gin-drinking could be shown to harm farmers ‘if it be considered [that] fewer cloths are worn and much less coarse meat eat [by gin-drinkers] than formerly.’ Thomas Wilson used this slender idea to turn the farming argument on its head. Citing Judith Defour, he claimed that gin-drinkers sold their clothes rather than buy new ones, which meant gin damaged the wool industry. Gin-drinkers ate less as well. ‘Those that keep large numbers of cows near the town, will tell you, that they have not had near the demand for their milk, and have been forced to sell off some part of their stock; which they attribute to mothers and nurses giving their children gin.’ If London’s Gin Craze continued, the result could only be ruin for farmers, for everyone depended on London. The distillers had never been slow to wheel out figures for the amount of grain eaten up by the London distillery. Thomas Wilson set out to beat them at their own game. Starting with Dr Cheyne’s calculations for how much an average man ate in a day, he was soon reckoning that each gin-drinker, his appetite gone, his earning-power diminished, and his cash spent on booze, cost the landlords threepence a day. If there were 10,000 gin-shops around London and each gin-shop had forty customers, the Gin Craze in London cost farmers nearly a million pounds a year.
It was quite a performance. Thomas Wilson was impassioned (‘War, plague and pestilence rage for a while, and then they cease; but this merciless destroyer threatens misery, sickness, and want, for generations that are yet … to come’). He invoked his readers’ worst demons: high wages, shortage of cheap labour, beggars, street-robbers and housebreakers. He played on country mistrust of London, which sucked in honest countrymen and turned them into gin addicts. Gin was the cause of crime. Gin debilitated the army and left the nation defenceless. Gin added to the burden of social security. Thomas Wilson lifted medical arguments from Stephen Hales’ Friendly Admonition. And looking to the future of a gin-sodden England, he pointed out the awful example of Rome: ‘It was thrift, sobriety and virtue that laid at first and continued so long the grandeur of the Roman Empire; when they lost their first simplicity, and sunk into effeminacy and luxury, they soon became a prey to the most barbarous nations.’
Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation was an instant success. Its timing was right. The gin issue had been brought to the boil just as Parliament met. The reformers had mixed up a powerful brew of statistics, moral outrage, family values and patriotism. But they had had it their own way for too long. Madam Geneva’s friends weren’t going to stand and watch while the zealots dragged her off to the stake. The gin war of 1736 would be fought in tract and counter-tract. As Par
liament met to consider prohibition, a paper fusillade broke out.
An Impartial Enquiry into the Present State of the British Distillery argued for ‘a proper regulation in the home-consumption of this manufacture without the total prohibition of it.’ For Thomas Wilson’s statistics its author traded an equally unreliable calculation that had the distillery employing 10,000 people and 3,000 tons of shipping. There was a healthy dose of abuse for ‘the manifest absurdities and gross impositions [of] a printed pamphlet entitled Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation.’ Thomas Wilson’s reasoning was lampooned (‘He [observes] that more children die under three years old since the use of spirituous liquors than before … He might with equal certainty have said, that such increase of deaths happened since the use of narrow-brim’d hats, which therefore was the cause’). He poured doubt on Wilson’s claim that gin-drinkers had died like flies in the recent ’flu epidemic. ‘What were these persons?’ he asked. ‘What hospitals did they die in? Where is the public attestation of the physicians or surgeons attending them?’
Thomas Wilson was always thin-skinned. The counter-tract stung him into a revised edition, including a graphic description of conditions in the back-alleys of Middlesex. ‘In one place not far from East Smithfield,’ he reported, ‘a trader has a large empty room backwards, where as his wretched guests get intoxicated, they are laid together in heaps promiscuously, men, women, and children, till they recover their senses, when they proceed to drink on, or, having spent all they had, go out to find wherewithal to return to the same dreadful pursuit; and how they acquire more money the sessions papers too often acquaint us.’
Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze Page 11
