Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze
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But the opposition didn’t have a chance, in the end. Underneath all the rage about vice, this was a money Bill. The Lords couldn’t amend it without provoking a constitutional storm; they could only reject the 1743 Gin Act out of hand. By the last day, ministers had even come clean about their real priorities. Carteret admitted that he had already negotiated the three per cent loans, and couldn’t be sure of getting so good a deal if there was any more delay. William Pulteney was ‘against a delay … into this affair … because of the dangerous and ticklish situation we are in with regard to foreign affairs.’ Without English finance – dependent on the new gin revenues – the Dutch might pull out of supporting Maria Theresa, and Austria might make terms with the French. The whole balance of power might change; suddenly Madam Geneva was at the centre of world events. ‘As trifling as this motion may seem to some of your lordships,’ Pulteney declared, ‘yet upon the fate of it may depend the fate and the liberties of Europe.’
Thomas Secker didn’t give a damn about Europe. He voted against the Bill and ten other bishops joined him, Isaac Maddox among them. There was even a formal protest. The hardliners could see that 1743 was a pivotal moment. With the repeal of prohibition and the passing of the new Gin Act, the authorities had accepted that the war on gin had failed. They had conceded that it was less damaging to accept gin-drinking than to let the relationship between governors and governed be undermined by scorn. They accepted that Madam Geneva was here to stay, whatever ills she brought with her. Their priority now was to decriminalise gin and bring the industry back within the law. They even accepted that an industry controlled by respectable and profitable businesses would provide its own form of control.
It was a pact with the devil. 1743 would be the peak of the eighteenth-century Gin Craze. From that year onwards, spirit production would decline for the next forty years. Not until the mid-1780s would it start to rise again, and by then the population of London was exploding as well. Not until 1840 would London – by then a city of well over a million – drink as much gin as it did in the year the Lords ended prohibition. But it was a turning-point of another kind as well, and the bishops knew it. Never again would a British Parliament set out to eradicate gin-drinking. Madam Geneva had been given the freedom of the city. She was never going to get back on the boat to Holland. She was here to stay.
Fall-out from repeal of the Gin Act was muted. Most reformers pinned the blame on the Chancellor, the hapless Samuel Sandys. ‘Deep, deep in S—’s blundering head,’ sneered the London Evening Post,
The new Gin Project sunk;
O happy project! sage, he cry’d,
Let all the realm be drunk.2
Sir Charles Hanbury Williams circulated a satirical ballad which had Sandys visited by the ghost of Sir Joseph Jekyll, who warned him that:
Riot and slaughter once again
Shall their career begin
And every parish suckling babe
Again be nursed with Gin.3
There was a certain amount of apocalyptic prophecy. The opposition Champion threatened that hordes of ragged gin-drinkers would one day ‘pour forth unexpectedly from their gloomy cells, as from the body of the Trojan Horse, with design to lay the city in flames, that they might share in the plunder.’4 As always, the decline and fall of Britain would follow.
For their part, the Company of Distillers had been taken by surprise by the new Act. Their lobbying machine was rusty; they hadn’t paid their parliamentary lobbyist for four years. They settled Mr Kenn’s bill, but when he failed to warn them that distillers would be banned from taking out retail licences, they ‘express’d their resentment at [his] neglect & came to a resolution that he be from henceforth dismissed from being soll[icito]r to the Company.’5 Another man was appointed in his place, but the counter-attack had to wait for another day.
The authorities, meanwhile, set about putting the new spirits régime in place. The 1743 Gin Act had always been more business-like than previous Acts. In 1743, for the first time, the government had actually taken expert advice, sending a draft of the Bill to the Excise Office in January. Now they accompanied introduction of the Act with a clamp-down on illegal gin-sellers. When it came to issuing the new licences, Middlesex and Westminster magistrates were exhorted ‘not to grant licences for selling … spirituous liquors to any but such as are strictly qualified according to law, and as are not known to be guilty of any disorderly practices, or likely to suffer them in their houses.’6 The 1743 Act put magistrates in a stronger position to control the trade than before. It wasn’t just that no respectable gin-seller had any excuse for avoiding the twenty-shilling licence. Licences would only be issued, now, ‘to such as keep taverns, victualling houses, inns, coffee houses or alehouses.’ The days of the chandler’s shop with a bottle behind the counter, the gin-selling grocer and tippling market-woman were over. When magistrates met at St Martin-in-the-Fields to issue the first batch of licences, a lot of applicants were disappointed. ‘When many applied for licences not within the said act,’ the London Evening Post reported, ‘they were absolutely refused, and put entirely out of hopes of obtaining any.’7
With memories of Edward Parker still fresh, the Excise Office, too, saw the importance of cleaning up their act. Even before the Bill had passed into law, news came through that they had ‘appointed Mr Nurse, Surveyor in the Distillery, to be General Surveyor in those duties in the room of Mr Webb, who is removed.’ That was just the start of a wider purge. ‘It is said,’ the London Evening Post reported a week later, ‘there are orders for a general remove of all Excise Officers throughout the kingdom, on the Gin Act taking place.’8
Zealots had warned of catastrophe when prohibition ended, but no catastrophe came. Even Tobias Smollett, fervent campaigner against gin, couldn’t help admitting, later, ‘that it has not been attended with those dismal consequences which the Lords in the opposition foretold.’9 And on the ministry’s own terms, the Act worked. Their first priority had been to bring the gin industry back inside the law. In the days of prohibition only a handful of gin-sellers had ever taken out retail licences; the rest of London’s 10,000-odd gin-sellers had been on the black market. But when the Commissioners of Excise made their first report, in January 1744, more than 1,000 London gin-sellers had already taken out the new licences. Many of the rest would not, in any case, have been eligible. Nationwide, more than 20,000 licences had been handed out. The new Act was delivering all the rewards ministers had hoped for. They had found out how to milk Madam Geneva for cash. The £90,000 they made from duties was more than enough to pay interest on their war loans.10 By contrast, the Gin Act’s old twenty shilling-a-gallon duty had brought in less than £40 a year.
And the pragmatic policy set out by Carteret (low duties, gradually increasing; strict licence controls) was pursued in the years that followed. With Excise advice, a second Act was put through the next year to plug loopholes and clarify terms. Two years later, in 1746, Henry Pelham’s ministry would start to ratchet up the duties, adding a halfpenny on low wines made from corn, and another penny and a half on spirits. Events seemed to be unfolding just as Carteret had predicted. Spirit production had fallen almost nineteen per cent in 1744, and seemed to have stabilised. The licences were working. Ministers were happily counting their new source of revenue. Gin, it seemed, could be taken off the agenda. With Bonnie Prince Charlie in Scotland and war in Europe, there was plenty else to occupy public attention.
It was all too good to be true. Madam Geneva was not quite ready for a quiet retirement. Men like Thomas Secker and Isaac Maddox had never been interested in compromise. It wasn’t enough to see gin-drinking reduced. They wanted every dram-shop shut down and the stills thrown on the scrap-heap. And they had said all along that you couldn’t trust the government. Ministers might start off with good intentions, but sooner or later the sweet taste of gin revenues would sweep them off their feet. It was only a matter of time.
It took four years. Distillers had never been happy abou
t losing the right to sell spirits from their own shops. They lobbied hard to get them back. When Bonnie Prince Charlie invaded, the Company of Distillers subscribed £100 to the Hanoverian army, just to demonstrate their loyalty.11 In 1746 they petitioned Parliament at length, asking that ‘all reputable distillers [be] indulged with a power of retailing their own commodities.’ They thought they could help in ‘suppressing the iniquitous part of the trade.’ They didn’t seem to be asking too much. They were willing ‘to be confined in the strictest manner can be devised, from any private tippling, or other irregularities, or any disturbance of the publick peace.’12
They weren’t the only ones working to chip away at the 1743 Gin Act. The powerful malt distillers were lobbying behind the scenes. Sugar planters sent in petitions; they wanted a boost for the rum trade. And any government in the last throes of a war is always tempted by extra revenue.
The government gave way to temptation. In April 1747 the Court of the Distillers’ Company received unexpected news. They heard that ‘a Bill is expected to be speedily brought into Parliament for empowering the distiller residing within the limits of the Bills of Mortality* to sell by retail to be drank in their shops.’ London distillers could pay £5 for a licence, and once again they would be able to sell spirits over the counter. There was no shortage of them ready to take up the offer. Almost 600 distillers’ licences were issued in the first year. It wasn’t the only sign of a collapse of good intentions. Back in 1744, spirit licences had brought in revenue of about £22,000 over the whole country.13 By 1749, that figure had shot up to £35,108. Originally, 1,000 retail licences had been granted in London; five years later, London magistrates handed out no fewer than 5,297 spirit licences within the Bills of Mortality.
For reformers, all that was bad enough. But worse was to come. The war was about to come to an end. In 1748, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle brought peace to Europe. In London the result was far from peaceful. In 1748, the soldiers came home.
When soldiers came home, there was a crime wave; everyone knew that. ‘The approach of peace,’ the Gentleman’s Magazine worried, ‘amidst all the joy … has raised … terror in many private gentlemen … [and] those in publick stations, who consider well the consequences of discharging so many men from their occupations in the army, the fleet and the yards … As one half of these poor men will not be able to get employment … necessity will compel them to seize by violence, what they can see no method to attain by honest labour.’14
The government certainly wasn’t going to help ex-servicemen out. When the regiments were broken up and the fleet put in mothballs, they were on their own. It wasn’t just trauma counselling they lacked; they didn’t even get a demob suit. The only comfort thrown their way was the kind of help that suited eighteenth-century Parliaments – the sort that didn’t cost anything. They were allowed to follow any trade, even if they hadn’t served an apprenticeship. Digging deep into their classical educations, MPs came up with a colony for retired soldiers (in Nova Scotia). More imaginatively, there was a scheme to employ sailors in building a British herring fishery.
It was never going to be enough. There were 70,000 servicemen, and they didn’t all want to go to the New World with the convicts, or catch herring. Not many of them could afford to set up in business, whether they were allowed to or not. Most, as the promoter of the fisheries project warned, would be ‘reduced to the sad alternative, either of begging from door to door; or of plunging into crimes.’15
They plunged into crimes. ‘The frequency of audacious street robberies repeated every night in this great Metropolis,’ protested the Whitehall Evening Post in January 1749, ‘call aloud on our magistrates to think of some redress … There is no possibility of stirring from our habitations after dark, without the hazard of a fractured skull, or the danger of losing … property.’16 Hangings soared. More than half Tyburn’s victims in 1749 would be demobbed soldiers. It didn’t help the jittering nerves of wealthy Londoners that crime seemed to be directed most often at them. The banker Sir Thomas Hankey and his wife were mugged, as was the Earl of Leicester and the Countess of Albemarle. The Prime Minister’s eldest daughter started hiding her earrings under the seat when she travelled by sedan chair. Horace Walpole was set upon twice. Returning from Holland House by moonlight, about ten o’clock, he recounted, ‘I was attacked by two highwaymen in Hyde Park, and the pistol of one of them going off accidentally, razed the skin under my eye, left some marks of shot on my face, and stunned me … If I had sat an inch nearer to the left side, [the ball] must have gone through my head.’ Within weeks he would be mugged again in the Royal Mews. Not surprisingly, he wrote to Horace Mann, ‘you will hear little news from England, but of robberies; the numbers of disbanded soldiers and sailors have all taken to the road, or rather the street; people are almost afraid of stirring after it is dark.’ ‘One is forced to travel, even at noon,’ he would add in another letter in March 1752, ‘as if one was going to battle.’17
Anecdotes and urban myths whipped up fear. Everyone knew someone who had been mugged. The newspapers didn’t help. Hack journalists, as the author of a 1752 description of London complained, spent Sunday evening ‘in bed, instead of at their prayers … inventing stories of rapes, robberies, and riots &c. to fill up the newspapers of the ensuing week.’18
London’s neuroses were bubbling to the surface again. Crime produced panic, and a panicking city looked round for scapegoats. And in this febrile atmosphere, just as in 1721, the hand of God intervened. Thirty years before it had been the plague in Marseilles which threatened a sinful town with divine retribution. This time, God’s thunderbolt struck closer to home.
It happened on 8 February 1750, as Thomas Wilson recorded in his diary. ‘At 45 minutes after 12 the two cities of London and Westminster were alarmed with a violent shock of an earthquake … There was first a trembling and then a report like thunder and then a shake … Most people thought it was the blowing up of powder mills.’ Another quake struck exactly a month later, after weeks of unseasonably hot weather. The second tremor was stronger; the coincidence of dates was too obvious to ignore. This time most Londoners knew they were damned.
Horace Walpole reported ‘showers of sermons and exhortations.’ ‘The churches,’ Smollett later remembered, ‘were crowded with penitent sinners: the sons of riot and profligacy were overawed into sobriety and decorum. The streets no longer resounded with execrations, or the noise of brutal licentiousness; and the hand of charity was liberally opened.’19 The final cataclysm was predicted for 8 April. When the Day of Judgement came, the streets out of town were crammed with carts and carriages as Londoners hurried to escape. ‘In after ages,’ Smollett recalled, ‘it will hardly be believed, that on the evening of the eighth day of April, the open fields, that skirt the metropolis, were filled with incredible numbers of people assembled in chairs, in chaises, and coaches, as well as on foot, who waited in the most fearful suspense until morning.’
They all knew what they had done to deserve this doom. Thomas Sherlock, now Bishop of London, had written his diocese a letter to tell them. ‘You never read so imprudent, so absurd a piece,’ complained the sceptical Horace Walpole. ‘The earthquake which has done no hurt, in a country where no earthquakes ever did any, is sent, according to the Bishop, to punish bawdy books, gaming, drinking etc.’20 It sold 10,000 copies in two days. For Thomas Sherlock there was no doubt that the city was being warned. ‘It will be a blindness wilful and inexcusable,’ he told Londoners, ‘not to apply to ourselves this strong summons, from God, to repentance.’21 Among the sins of the town, he stressed ‘the lewdness and debauchery that prevail amongst the lowest people, which keeps them idle, poor and miserable, and renders them incapable of getting an honest livelihood for themselves and their families.’
London contained too many beggars, buggers, boozers and fornicators. The town was being called to account. Madam Geneva was back in the frame again.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
GIN LANE
One writer who cast his eye over London in 1752 described a world where gin-drinking was part of everyday life. In the small hours he watched ‘common whores telling their lamentable cases to watchmen on their stands, and treating them with Geneva and tobacco.’ At three in the morning the gin-shops were still full. At six, as the town woke up, ‘servant women in public houses, who have just got up, [run] about with their stockings about their legs, caps and petticoat half off, drinking of Gin, taking snuff … and playing with fellows who have been drinking, swearing, and playing at cards all the past night.’ By seven there were ‘poor devils of women, with empty bellies, naked backs, and heads intoxicated with Geneva, standing and gossiping with each other in the street.’ All day long Londoners drank, and at the end of the day, they ‘shut up their stalls, and joyfully retire[d] to the Geneva-shop.’1