Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (11 page)

That was only the start of the distillers’ woes. At the same time, Daniel Defoe, their most eloquent supporter, began to wobble. The second volume of
The Complete English Tradesman
, published in 1727, still expanded on the importance of the distilling industry, but there were warning signs. ‘I must confess,’ Defoe added, ‘that
the advice to the Complete Tradesman ought to have bestowed a little pains upon these gentlemen called strong-water men, whose share in ruining the people’s morals, as well as their health, is too great … Let them take this gentle hint, they know how to reform it.’

The trouble with Defoe as an ally was that if he changed his mind, he didn’t keep quiet about it. He was a journalist. His opinions might fluctuate, but he always knew how to express them. By 1728, his U-turn was complete.
Augusta Triumphans
was subtitled ‘the way to make London the most flourishing City in the Universe.’ One way was ‘to save our lower class of people from utter ruin, and rendering them useful by preventing the immoderate use of Geneva.’

If 1727 had been bad for the distillers, 1728 was even worse. Sir John Gonson was chair of Quarter Sessions in both Westminster and Tower Hamlets at the same time, and with a platform like that he saw no reason to mince his words. Drunkenness, for Sir John, was the root of ‘blood-shed, stabbing, murder, swearing, fornication [and] adultery … the overthrow of many good arts and manual trades, the disabling of divers workmen, and the general impoverishment of many good subjects, abusively wasting the good creatures of God.’
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Worst of all, in 1728 the door of Parliament finally swung open to reformers. On 8 October the new King, George II, issued yet another proclamation against the evils of London. And by now the work of Sir John Gonson and his colleagues had had its effect. After seven years of campaigning, Madam Geneva was squarely in the frame for the city’s ills. In a follow-up letter to the magistrates, Viscount Townshend, the Secretary of State, was already talking about ‘the shops where Geneva, and other spirits and strong liquors are drunk to excess,’ and instructing the Middlesex magistrates to proceed against them.
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The reformers took up the battle exactly where they had left off. Sir John Gonson was on the committee established in response to the royal proclamation, and the magistrates immediately recommended new legislation. They had already pointed out the problem with the existing laws. They had done what they could; extra petty sessions had been held to suppress unlicensed houses. What they needed was a change in the law.

Reformers had been calling for a Gin Act for years; this time they were going all the way to Parliament. But that didn’t mean that new laws were a foregone conclusion. Parliament in 1729 didn’t have much appetite for social issues, or much of a track record with them. For early eighteenth-century legislators, domestic issues came a poor third to foreign policy and the serious business of raising revenue.

Back in Elizabeth’s reign, Parliament had produced the Poor Laws, it was true, and later the Acts of Settlement. It had set up Houses of Correction late in the sixteenth century, and workhouses more recently. In a way, those all tackled social issues. But the only social agenda for a 1720s Parliament was to maintain the status quo. There was no notion of progress, no idea that social change was desirable, or that it might be engineered by legislation. All parts of the constitution were supposed to operate in balance, like the organs of a healthy body. Change was a symptom of sickness. Then again, gin-drinking was a new problem, and Parliament wasn’t good at novelty. It didn’t have the statistical tools to get to grips with new problems, or social theories to cope with them. There was no Civil Service to go out and rustle up data. Vice was the church’s problem, not theirs; the poor should be dealt with by magistrates.

There were practical difficulties as well. Parliamentary time was limited. There was a single session which ran, in 1729, from January to May. Parliament was dominated by parties, but parties were not
interested in social policy. Sir Robert Walpole, Parliament’s master, reckoned himself ‘no Saint, no Spartan, no reformer.’ If a ‘social’ initiative was brought in, it was usually introduced by a private member, and survived only if he was particularly energetic or influential. Without parties throwing their weight behind reform, it was hard ever to break through the logjam of different interest groups of which Parliament was made up. The result was that when Parliament did address ‘social’ matters, it did so piecemeal – a plethora of lighting acts, a separate private bill to repair every stretch of broken highway in the country. Like the little Dutch boy, Parliament stuck its finger into every leak that appeared; it didn’t think of rebuilding the dyke.

As it happened, the session of 1729 almost managed to crack the mould. In 1729 the House of Commons was presented not only with Madam Geneva bound and gagged, but with a rare example of a social issue around which MPs could unite: prisons.

Prisons, like everything else in London, were a business. In 1713 John Huggins bought the wardenship of the Fleet jail for £5,000. It was a lucrative asset. Prisoners could be blackmailed to improve their accommodation; concessions could be sold for food and drink. In 1728 Huggins sold the wardenship to his deputy, Thomas Bambridge. It didn’t take long for rumours about conditions in the Fleet to start leaking out. Sir William Rich, unable to pay for better conditions in the jail, was threatened with a poker, then shackled and thrown into a freezing hole above an open sewer. Robert Castell, scholarly author of
The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated
, was forced to sleep in a sponging-house where smallpox was rife, even though he begged the Warden for mercy. He died.

In the ensuing outcry, a parliamentary Committee was appointed to investigate what was going on in the Fleet. The Committee laid before the House a catalogue of brutality, incompetence and
corruption. Huggins admitted ‘that so many prisoners had escaped, during the time he was warden, that it was impossible to enumerate them.’
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Healthy women had been forced into smallpox wards; casual cruelty was an everyday occurrence. When the Committee moved on to look at the Marshalsea and King’s Bench, they found the same thing. Investigating the overall management of London’s prisons, they uncovered a Byzantine web of lets and sub-lets, transfers of ownership and corrupt charities.

During the session of 1729 some energetic MPs started to take an interest in reform. On 27 February the Prisons Committee had been painted at the Fleet by a rising young artist called William Hogarth. Hogarth’s sketch caught the moment when Bambridge was brought face to face with his accusers. Ranged around the table in front of him were William Pulteney, who would lead the Whig opposition to Walpole, and share power in the government that replaced him, Henry Pelham, who would be Walpole’s anointed successor, and several MPs who would take an active part in reform over the next thirty years.

But the most colourful and energetic of all the Prisons Committee was its Chair. Major-General James Oglethorpe wasn’t just a soldier, adventurer, Jacobite and bully. He was also an evangelical Christian, friend of Sir John Gonson and sworn enemy of Madam Geneva.

After meeting him for dinner in 1755, Dr Johnson urged Oglethorpe, then almost sixty, to write his autobiography. He even offered to write it himself. He told Boswell that he knew ‘no man whose life would be more interesting.’ It did turn out to be quite a life. In 1722, when he became an MP, Oglethorpe was only in his mid-twenties and already had a military career behind him. That year he wounded another MP in a fight. Three years later he killed a linkman when he got caught up in a brawl at a London brothel. Following his work on the Prisons Committee, Oglethorpe would
move to America to found the colony of Georgia as a Christian refuge for the poor of England and the persecuted Protestants of Europe – it was Oglethorpe who persuaded the young John Wesley to go there. He would be a leading member of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Along the way, he would campaign against gin and in favour of Protestant minorities, prison inmates and the rights of lower deck sailors. When the
General Magazine
ran a competition for poems on ‘The Christian Hero’, the prize was a gold medal engraved with James Oglethorpe’s head.

The reports of Oglethorpe’s Committee held Parliament spell-bound all through the 1729 session. Reform was in the air. For once, MPs were having their faces rubbed in London’s seamy side. They were mesmerised; but despite the horrific descriptions of torture and brutality they took no action. Not even the Prisons Committee could break the inertia of the House of Commons. The hours of evidence and cross-examination, the long reports to Parliament and stories in the press, still didn’t result in a Prison Reform Act.

If prison campaigners couldn’t win legislation from the House of Commons, there seemed little chance for the enemies of Madam Geneva. Luckily for the gin reformers, though, the Gin Act wasn’t going to have much to do with reform in any case. Madam Geneva was about to become embroiled with interests far closer to Parliament’s heart: money and power.

Two issues dominated the parliamentary session. The first was Sir Robert Walpole’s need to secure his position with a new monarch. The second was the likely collapse of the sixteen-year peace which had lasted since the Treaty of Utrecht. When he came to the throne in 1727, George II had tried to replace Walpole with the colourless Sir Spencer Compton. Walpole, showing his usual combination of charm, ruthlessness and brains, had quickly outmanoeuvred his rival. He had survived a general election. But he still needed to consolidate his position with a monarch who
had got on badly with his father, and saw Walpole as his father’s creature.

Understanding that kings, like everyone else, have their price, Walpole had immediately proposed to increase the Civil List, which covered the King’s own expenses. Even this settlement, though, hadn’t been enough to secure his position. Eighteen months later, George II was complaining about arrears in the Civil List payments. No one took it very seriously. In private, Walpole had always held out against any reimbursement. But that had suddenly become risky. As Lord Hervey recorded, ‘the King … intimated to him, if he could not or would not do it, his Majesty would find those who were both able and willing.’
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The King was preparing to sell the ministry to the highest bidder.

Madam Geneva was exactly the woman Walpole needed. By this time drinkers were getting through 4,750,000 gallons of spirits a year, and on most of it they paid less than fivepence a gallon in tax. On 4 February Sir James Oglethorpe put forward a proposal that distillers should pay sixpence a bushel when they worked with unmalted corn. If that didn’t bring gin to the Prime Minister’s attention, it would certainly have caught his eye a week later. That was when the Grand Jury of Middlesex laid before the House a representation against ‘the number of shops or houses selling a liquor called Geneva, in and about this city.’

Sir Robert Walpole had no interest in reform, but he did need money, and was soon weighing up options for raising it. The Excise Office had already sent through statistics for spirit production over the last ten years. He now asked them to work out ‘an estimate of what may be raised by an additional duty of 2d per gallon on low wines from foreign materials, 1d per gallon on low wines from malted corn, 1d per gallon on spirits.’ A new ‘still-head’ tax, to be imposed on spirit production at source, would, they calculated, raise nearly £39,000 a year.
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It wasn’t a bad scheme, but there was a snag. The problem was the malt distillers.

By 1729 there was a clear split in the London distilling industry. The compound distillers – who bought proof spirits and turned them into gin – were everywhere. It didn’t cost much to buy a small still, and making gin wasn’t rocket science. One calculation reckoned there were 1,500 of them in London, with most owning less than a hundred pounds’ worth of equipment. If you believed Sir John Gonson, every chandler’s shop and alehouse had a still set up on the kitchen table. Making raw spirits, though, was a different matter. With vats and stills, sheds and bulk corn-buying, the set-up costs alone could come to over £4,000. That made malt- or corn-distilling one of the most costly investments in London. By 1729 the industry was dominated by no more than a couple of dozen large operators. But the rewards were equally inflated. Fifteen years later, Lord Hervey would reckon ‘that [distilling] is the most profitable trade of any now exercised in the kingdom, except that of being broker to a prime minister.’
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The malt distillers (they were called malt distillers even when they used unmalted corn) were wealthy, and they used that wealth to control the whole industry. ‘The smallness of their number,’ complained a compound distiller in 1733, ‘makes them easily capable of combining together, and they neglect not the advantage; this union is facilitated among them by their meeting at Bear-Key, on market-days for corn, three times a week, where they … arbitrarily settle the prices of spirits.’ If anyone new tried to break in, they squeezed them out by a spirits price war, or by pushing up the price of corn. Nor was it only the distilling industry they controlled. As one of the major purchasers on the London corn market, they could ‘oblige the factor to take what price they please for their corn … Every factor in Bear-Key knows their power,
knows they make their own prices, and destroy all that would be a check upon their proceeding.’
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There had been plenty of signs already of how far the malt distillers would go. The Middlesex magistrates had seen them threatening constables and protecting their customers from prosecution. Others blamed them for the whole Gin Craze. The malt distillers, it was rumoured, ‘supplied [an agent] with means to open warehouses for the sale of spirituous liquors in every part of the town, underselling the compounders.’ That was what ‘brought the prices of spirituous liquors to that vile price as has … made them the bane of the vulgar.’