Smuggling Trade in 1779

 

 

Large distilleries were erected in France and Holland at this time solely for the English smuggling trade. In 1779 it was estimated that nearly all of the four million gallons of gin annually distilled at Schiedam found an illicit market in England. English smugglers had their regular agents in the foreign ports, while fast sailing luggers designed for the trade were built in great numbers upon the south shore of the Channel.

 

The more respectable classes in Kent and Sussex were perpetually torn between their practical interests in smuggling and the demoralization it wrought on the rougher elements, reacting on society in the shape of murders, arson and robbery. Even the labour market was sometimes denuded for the more profitable and exciting service with the "free-traders." In parts of the country people were even driven to repudiate smuggling by declaration and band themselves together as a sort of informal militia to protect private property.

 

The Jacobite intrigues in the eighteenth century too were greatly assisted through these channels of communication, while well-paid spies in the Napoleonic Wars regularly transmitted English news and English papers to France by the same means. The London Press paid large sums up to £100 for early copies of the French papers, and no doubt Parisian editors were not less niggardly.

Militant smuggling was still ripe in the twenties and thirties of the last century, often with considerable casualty lists, for firearms were freely used by both sides. As late as 1828 nine Sussex smugglers were sent up for trial at the Old Bailey and all condemned to death, though sentence was commuted to transportation, which at that time was practically the same thing. Two years earlier, a smuggling galley chased by a guard boat ran ashore at Camber. The watch there turned out to seize the crew, but two hundred men dashed out of the sandhills and opened fire on the Guard House. They were compelled, however, to retreat, carrying their wounded with them. The last recorded fight in these parts was at Camber Castle in 1838, when a Rye man was killed.

 

These, however, are but stray examples out of a lengthy list, Mr.Durrant Cooper, in a paper on the subject written in the 1830's says :

 

"I have been present myself at a house in Rye, when silks for sale were mysteriously produced from their hiding-places, and it has been the custom of the farmers to leave their gates unlocked at night and to broach without scruple the half anker of Schiedam (tub), considerately left in a rick or outhouse as an acknowledgment. This and the brandy were carried in four-gallon tubs, swung over men's shoulders or over the backs of pack-horses."

 

This must have been almost in Victorian times. After all, one cannot wonder at the state of things upon the south coast throughout most of the eighteenth century. We are apt to think complacently of England during such comparatively recent times as a kind of model for its neighbours, whereas it was in some respects far the most lawless of the more civilized nations of Europe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top of Page       main page:  www.yeoldesussexpages.com