The constant failure of local justice to put down crime of this kind was the occasion of this extra visitation of the Judges. A hundred pages of small print give the story, as told in court by two of the actors in it, who had turned King's evidence, confirmed by some of the less guilty prisoners and others incidentally connected with the business.
It is a horrible tale of barbarous and studied torture on two unoffending men, such as one is not prepared to find an entire group of Englishmen capable of uniting in, and the way it came about was this.
A cargo of tea in which Sussex smugglers were interested had been seized off Poole and consigned to the Custom House there, whereupon the late owners, assisted by friends from various parts, numbering in all some sixty mounted men, rode into the town. Thirty of them guarded the roads of approach as scouts, while the rest broke open the Custom House and carried off the tea. The whole cavalcade then rode to Fordingbridge, where hundreds of people assembled to see them pass.
It was four months before a man was discovered in Hampshire who would give evidence against them, one of the gang, Diamond, a Sussex shepherd, having been seen to speak to him as they passed : the said Diamond being then in jail on suspicion at Chichester. This witness was a shoemaker of Fordingbridge named Chater, probably a Sussex man, and the authorities decided to Send him, together with a Custom House underling named Galley, as bearers of a note to a magistrate at Chichester who knew Chater, and would take his evidence. The word got abroad that the couple were bound for Chichester with a note concerning Diamond, Chater, as he himself admitted, unwillingly, and Galley as a mere Crown-servant.
On nearing the Sussex border, the landlady of an inn they halted at suspected their mission and sent for some smuggling neighbours, who proceeded to make the two men incapably drunk by means there is no need to describe, while they laid their plans.
Next day the devilry began. It is difficult to convey in brief the horrors these miserable men were subjected to, and undesirable as well as impossible to go into the protracted and hideous details. It is enough that after being seated upon one horse with their legs fastened under its belly and their hands tied, they were thrashed mercilessly with horsewhips over head, face, and body as they rode along for some three miles, till the poor wretches in their agony fell down with their heads under the horse's belly.
The smugglers female friends had urged at the inn that they should be hung at once, which would have been infinitely kinder, though not meant that way. Propping the poor souls up again on the horse's back they then cut and slashed them for another half-mile, till they fell once more head downwards.
But the brutes were nothing like glutted. Too weak to ride, the victims,
now covered with blood, were carried hanging over the saddle bow and submitted
to further and nameless torture.
Night found them at an inn on the Downs with Galley's now dead body, and the wretched Chater suffering agonies worse than death. The miscreants then buried the former, and chained up the latter still alive in a shed and maltreated him yet more. Later on he was dragged from there with a rope round his neck and suspended down a well.
This not finishing the business, they then threw him down head first, and as his groans were still audible they hurled down stones on top of him and departed; the bodies were found a few months afterwards. Informers and King's evidence came forward. The six ruffians, innkeepers, horse-dealers and the like, were sentenced to death at the special assize alluded to. One cheated the gallows by dying in prison, the others were hung, mostly in chains at the various spots associated with their hideous crime, and the Dean of Chichester wound up the business with a sermon on it in the Cathedral, which lies before me, a monument of stilted and commonplace futilities.
Later in the same year 1740, others of the gang, one of whom in the interval
had whipped and kicked another man to death, were caught and convicted at
East Grinstead and hung in chains. Three more on the old charge of breaking
the Custom House at Poole were hung at Tyburn.
This spelt the beginning of the end for the lawless gangs as the general public realised things had gone too far and having begun the backlash against the smugglers they were not going to stop now.
It is said that the ghost of Chater haunts the 'Mermaid Inn' at Rye. He roams the old rooms, still angry for his treatment at the hands of his murderers.
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