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

by Dillon, Patrick

  Spirits were fiery, hot and dry. That explained why people in northern climates turned to spirit-drinking. ‘[People] cannot live without it,’ one tract pointed out, ‘through the intemperance of the air, viz. coldness and moisture in these northern countries … Our bodies would become like bogs, or pools, if we did not drain them … by the frequent use of hot spirits and cordial drams.’9 For women, though, spirits were dangerous. Heat and dryness were male attributes. Their disposition – anger – was the most masculine of qualities, the most unladylike. Women were generically cold and moist; spirits were anathema to their natures.

  Hence Stephen Hales’ advice against drinking spirits during pregnancy. Wet nurses were usually told to eat light herb soups and salads, wet and cold foods – the opposite of fiery spirits. It was no surprise to eighteenth-century campaigners that the child of a gin-drinker should have ‘half-dried bones … [a skin] all shrivelled and black;’ nor that such a baby should came out ‘half burnt and shrivelled into the world.’

  And that, too, was the risk which awaited gin-drinkers themselves. Terrible stories began to circulate in the years of the Gin Craze. If women drinkers didn’t kill themselves by gin itself, by syphilis or by exposure, a still more dreadful fate awaited them. Death by fire.

  Grace Pitt was ‘about fifty’, the wife of an Ipswich fishmonger. She had always been fond of a dram, and enjoyed her pipe as well. Every night she would go downstairs and have a last pipe before she went to bed. On the morning of 10 April 1744, her daughter, who slept with her, woke up to find her mother’s side of the bed empty. She called, but there was no answer. So she ‘put on her clothes,’ it was later reported, ‘and [went] down into the kitchen.’ A terrible sight met her eyes. Her mother was ‘stretched out on the right side, with her head near the grate; the body extended on the hearth, with the legs on the floor.’ But it took her a moment to realise that the thing on the hearth was indeed her mother. Grace Pitt’s body seemed to have been consumed by fire. It had ‘the appearance of a log of wood, consumed by a fire without apparent flame … The trunk was in some measure incinerated, and resembled a heap of coals covered with white ashes. The head, the arms, the legs, and the thighs had also participated in the burning.’10 All that was noted in painstaking detail by Pierre Aimé Lair, who collected examples of ‘the combustion of the human body, produced by the long immoderate use of spirituous liquors.’

  The first case of spontaneous combustion had been reported in England in the Gentleman’s Magazine in June 1731. It was taken seriously enough for the Royal Society to debate the phenomenon in 1745. Both for them and for Pierre Aimé Lair, there were obvious links between the various cases. All the victims were women. All of them were old – the theory of humours dictated that everyone dried up as they aged. And, most important of all, ‘the persons who experienced the effects of this combustion, had for a long time made an immoderate use of spirituous liquors.’ Grace Pitt had been celebrating because another daughter had just come back from overseas.

  Reformers hated women who drank because they threatened social order. But maybe older memories and fears lingered in the background. Crouched over her market barrow, the old basket-woman with a bottle in her hand evoked the memory of other old women who had dispensed magic potions. She, too, transgressed social norms; she held the power of transformation and her end was death by fire. In the same year it passed the Gin Act, Parliament finally outlawed the burning of witches. But it was easier to erase witches from the statute book than to pluck them from the popular imagination. Grace Pitt, charred to ash on her own hearth-stone, had met the fate of all her kind. Spontaneous combustion had become the threatened end for women who turned to spirits. They carried their own stake and flames within them.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  REPEAL

  Seven years into prohibition, in 1743, production of British spirits hit more than eight million gallons a year. Gin was supposed to have been outlawed, but every man, woman and child in London was drinking two pints of the stuff every week.

  The Gin Act was a dead letter. In 1741–2, only two of the £50 licences were taken out. Even more depressing than that, Excise men managed to collect the twenty-shilling duty on just forty gallons of spirits. The special sessions of magistrates were long over. For Madam Geneva, it was business as usual. For politicians, it was time for a new approach.

  There was one reason in particular why they needed a new approach in 1743. Sir Robert Walpole was gone, ousted the year before by the same combination of patriot Whigs and Tories, City opposition and excited public opinion which had driven him into the war he never wanted. And that war was now spreading. In summer 1742, England had been drawn into active support for Maria Theresa, the new ruler of Austria and Hungary. Hanoverian and English armies were committed on the Continent for the first time in thirty years. Now Carteret, Secretary of State and dominant figure in the new ministry, had to find a way of paying for them.

  For reformers, the problem gin presented was how to stop people drinking it; for Londoners, how to get hold of a steady supply. For politicians, the difficulty with gin had always been how to make money out of it.

  It should have been easy. Vast quantities of spirits were being distilled and drunk. There had never been any trouble in transforming beer into hard cash. But so far both government attempts to raise substantial revenue out of the Gin Craze had ended in disaster. The Gin Acts of 1729 and 1736 had both been ignored.

  This time, when they turned their attention to Madam Geneva, the government was going to play safe. Way back in 1729, everyone had known that the obvious answer to controlling gin was through still-head duties and licensing controls. The 1743 Act, repealing and replacing prohibition, would bring in both, but at rates so low as to render them harmless. The volume of spirits being made was now so great that even a small duty could throw up healthy revenues. The 1743 Act would double the duty on low wines made from corn to twopence, and the duty on most spirits to sixpence. On the most recent figures Carteret had in front of him, those modest increases would produce an additional revenue of nearly £140,000 a year. Retail licences had been a dead letter under prohibition. With their cost reduced from £50 to £1 a year, there was every hope that London’s thousands of gin-shops might at last turn out to be some benefit to the country.

  For critics, it was hardly surprising that the 1743 Gin Act took a softly-softly approach. It was said to have been drafted by Kent, one of the great malt distillers. But for the ministry, the important thing was that, however toothless, it should actually work. The Acts of 1729 and 1736 had both promised to hike the price of a dram far beyond the pockets of most drinkers. They had been driven by reform. This time the target was more modest. It would be enough if distillers, gin-sellers and drinkers simply agreed to obey the law.

  Carteret didn’t just need money; he needed it fast. The government brought its measure to the House of Commons on 17 January 1743. It was pushed through, as one opponent complained in the House of Lords, ‘with the utmost precipitation, and … almost without the formality of a debate.’ By 10 February, ministers were already working out how to spend the revenue (the new duties would pay interest on a loan of £1.8m at three per cent). Four days after that, the new Gin Bill was passed on to the House of Lords. But there, on 22 February, the repeal of prohibition suddenly ran into opposition.

  The House of Lords debate of 1743 was one of the big parliamentary set-pieces of the decade. It took place in the hall of the House of Lords, vaulted and lined with Flemish tapestries. Most of the leading politicians of ministry and opposition – and most were now sitting in the Lords – spoke out, and their debates were reported at length in the press. Parliamentary reporting was still banned, but the larger papers had found ways around the restriction. The Gentleman’s Magazine published ‘Debates in the Senate of Lilliput’. Their reporter, writing up the Lords’ speeches from his notes, was Samuel Johnson. The London Magazine published a slightly different version of the debate (parliamentar
y correspondents of 1743 weren’t always reporting what the speakers actually said, but what they ought to have said). A third version survives in the notes of the Bishop of Oxford. Thomas Secker, SPCK member, acquaintance of Thomas Wilson, and ardent foe of Madam Geneva, was present throughout, fuming at the thought of repeal, planning his own contribution, and taking notes.

  The debate was about everything that drugs legislation has ever been about. It was about what happened when governments started to depend on revenue from things they were supposed to be discouraging. It was about whether politicians should swallow the unpalatable truth that a war on drugs had been lost, and accept pragmatism in place of principle. It was about what governments should do when a substantial part of the population has voted with its feet, and walked away from their legislation.

  That wasn’t all, though. It was also about the war. The gin debate followed immediately after a passionate battle over Carteret’s proposal that English money should pay for Hanoverian troops in Flanders. As far as some of the opposition were concerned, the gin debate was simply more of the same. First they had been talking about whether England should be paying foreign troops at all; now they had moved on to where the money was going to come from.

  And it was about politics. For years, the opposition had promised that when Walpole fell, the Augean stables of Westminster would be cleaned out. But Carteret had taken power alongside many of Walpole’s old ministers, and William Pulteney had ascended to the Lords as Earl of Bath. Most of the patriot opposition – men like Bedford and Chesterfield, Lyttelton and Pitt – had stayed out in the cold, while the Exchequer had gone to Samuel Sandys, a nonentity follower of Pulteney. Meanwhile, those of Sir Robert’s creatures who had lost their places seethed with bitterness. Much of what happened in the 1743 gin debate was about political betrayal.

  Politics achieved some surprising metamorphoses. The summer before, Lord Hervey had lost the Privy Seal. Now, rising on Tuesday 22 February to oppose the second reading of the new Gin Bill, the effeminate little courtier – Pope called him ‘Lord Fanny’ – had suddenly been transformed into a passionate moral crusader. Gin-drinking was ‘an abominable and pernicious vice.’ It was a scandal to use vice as ‘a fund for bringing money into the King’s Exchequer.’ That was the key to the argument for all opponents of repeal, whatever their motivation. The state was condoning vice. As soon as they depended on gin revenues, Lord Hervey warned, ‘ministers will encourage the consumption, and will neglect to execute, or pervert any laws you can make for preventing or diminishing that consumption.’1 Maybe there would be some temporary benefit from tougher licensing restrictions. ‘The Justices of Peace may, perhaps, for the first year or two refuse granting a licence to a house known to be … a gin-shop … but they will soon have private directions, and a licence will be granted to everyone that desires it.’

  So much for the text; Lord Hervey was just as interested in the subtext. During the winter he had published two pamphlets attacking Carteret’s war policy in general and the payment of Hanoverian troops in particular. For him, as for many of the opposition, the gin debate was a chance to renew the attack. The new duties the government proposed were going to be mortgaged to a massive loan. But if the Bill failed to raise any revenue – like all previous Gin Acts – the government’s only option would be to dig into reserves. The Bill, therefore, was ‘a mask … for concealing a design to mortgage the Sinking Fund.’ The question before the Lords was ‘whether you will agree to mortgage the Sinking Fund for supporting Hanover troops.’ It wasn’t about gin at all.

  Ministers would come close to admitting, later in the debate, that the war was their first priority. But for the moment they stuck to defending the new gin policy on its own merits. Opening in favour of the Bill, Lord Bathurst wasted no time in pointing out an obvious truth: prohibition had failed. What they were putting forward was a ‘new experiment.’ It was an experiment in pragmatism. ‘We find by experience, we cannot absolutely prevent the retailing of such liquors; because if we prevent their being retailed in an open, fair way, they will be retailed in a clandestine smuggling manner. What then are we to do?’ Common sense suggested that if prohibition wasn’t feasible, restriction was the next best thing. ‘[The] proper method … is to allow their being publicly retailed, but to lay such a duty upon the still-head and upon licences, as, without amounting to a prohibition, will make them come so dear to the consumer, that the poor will not be able to launch out into an excessive use of them.’

  The most important thing was to bring the gin industry, producers and retailers, back within the pale of the law. Now that they had allowed it to go underground, the government could risk only marginal duties if they were to tempt it back. ‘The duty proposed upon licences,’ Bathurst asserted, ‘is so moderate, that every ale-house and coffee-house in the kingdom will take out a licence.’ The hope was that once they were back in, licensed and respectable operators would help drive out the criminals.

  To the eyes of Thomas Secker, sitting among the bishops with his notebook, the ministry’s argument seemed pitiful. Bathurst suggested that the price of a dram might rise by a third, and consumption drop by the same amount. He was being pragmatic, but zealots like Thomas Secker had never had any time for pragmatism. Seeker was the one who kicked off the 1735 gin campaign by ordering a record to be made of all the gin-shops in his parish of St James’s. He had joined the SPCK alongside Isaac Maddox. He was a friend of Sir John Gonson and Thomas Wilson. Somewhere in his speech, Bathurst had remarked that he ‘never heard that a single moderate dram, even of the pernicious liquor called gin, was either a crime or a sin.’ For Thomas Seeker, that was exactly where the ministry was going wrong. Gin-drinking was more than a crime and a sin. It was worse. It was an evil. Gin was what the devil drank in hell.

  Thomas Seeker’s speech was a catalogue of fallen women in back-room dram-shops, of murdered children and maddened men. If prohibition had driven Madam Geneva underground, rather than exiling her, then that, at least, was better than giving in the fight. ‘Vice,’ in his opinion, ‘[should] always be … confin[ed] … as much as possible to holes and corners.’

  Not all of the opposition lost their cool quite so comprehensively as Thomas Secker did. The Earl of Chesterfield brought the debate back to high politics and high finance. ‘We have already the Civil List Fund,’ he quipped, ‘the Sinking Fund, the Aggregate Fund, the South Sea Fund, and God knows how many others. What name we are to give to this new fund I know not, unless we are to call it the Drinking Fund.’ He even gave the House a spoof introduction to the new Act (‘Whereas his Majesty has occasion for a large sum of money for maintaining his Hanover troops and the British troops sent, for what purpose we know not, to Flanders; and whereas a very considerable new revenue may be raised, by permitting the people of England to poison themselves with a liquor called gin’). He wondered whether there were any other breaches of the Ten Commandments the government could raise revenue from.

  And so the battle lines were drawn up. It was a struggle between pragmatism and principle – although pragmatism and principle masked cynicism on both sides. It was a war on two fronts, an open battle raging over gin, a struggle over money and foreign policy bubbling below the surface. Defending a pragmatic line on gin, Carteret couldn’t see the point in a government clinging to an absolutist moral position which had failed. Prohibiting gin had, in the end, stopped the authorities influencing events. They’d ended up writing themselves out of the script. ‘The people will indulge themselves in this wicked habit,’ Carteret concluded, ‘and since there is no preventing it, the government ought to avail themselves of it; but … in such a manner as by degrees to put a stop, at least to the excessive use of this pernicious liquor.’ For Carteret, as for Bathurst, the priority was to bring the industry back within the law. The answer, for him, was ‘to begin with laying a small duty upon the still-head, and another small duty upon licences. By this means you will put an end to the clandestine retail; for spirituous liquors
will be retailed openly and fairly at so many places, and at so cheap a rate, that the clandestine retailers will meet with no encouragement.’

  With battle joined, the debate went on at some length. Several speakers raised and cursed the spirit of Bernard Mandeville. Mandeville’s prophecy was coming true before their eyes; private vices were indeed being harvested for public benefits. Thomas Sherlock, bishop of Salisbury, called it ‘the most unchristian Bill that ever was thought of by any government.’ Against that, supporters of the government could point to the political damage of a government pursuing a hardline policy that the people ignored. ‘What has been the consequence, my lords?’ asked one. ‘It has raised among the people such a contempt of law, order, and government, as has spread itself among all degrees of men, and in everything that relates to public affairs … The very dregs of the people pretend to be better judges of the interest of the nation, and the nature of our constitution, than those of the best estates … This I take to be in some measure owing to the impunity and success the populace have met with in transgressing the late act against spirituous liquors.’

  There was agreement only on one point. Not even opponents of repeal pretended that prohibition had worked. Whatever their Lordships said, whatever Thomas Secker scribbled in his notebook, outside the doors of the House, ‘punch and drams of all sorts, even common gin not excepted, are … sold openly and avowedly at all public houses, and many private shops and bye-corners; and … [are] sold as cheap as they were before the present law was enacted.’

  Prohibition had failed; everyone knew it had failed. But the idea of giving in to vice simply stuck in the hardliners’ throats. To men like Thomas Secker, it was just plain wrong that a government should give up fighting a social evil and watch the people set off on the road to perdition. One opponent, Lord Lonsdale, had even gone out into the parishes of Middlesex to look at the problem for himself. What he saw there caused his righteous indignation to flare up all over again. This was vice that no government could condone. ‘To see men enfeebled and consumed, or rioting in all the most horrid sorts of wickedness; to see women naked and prostituted; to see children emaciated, starved, or choked; and all by the use of this pernicious liquor called gin, would surely make you reject [this Bill] with disdain … The physicians and nurses of our hospitals … will inform you, that a vast multitude of diseases and accidents proceed from gin-drinking; the overseers of the poor … will tell you, what numbers of poor objects are brought upon the parish … and if any of the gin-shop-keepers themselves are honest enough, they will tell you, that when poor creatures fall once into the habit of gin-drinking, they never leave it off as long as they have a rag to wear, or a leg to crawl on.’