Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (24 page)

There wasn’t even any guarantee of how strong the dram was. It depended on how much the gin-seller watered it down. Ambrose Cooper called proof gin ‘Royal Gin’, while most everyday Geneva was diluted by a third, but Ambrose Cooper wasn’t a bootlegger. It was academic anyway, because the first workable hydrometer, Clarke’s, had only appeared ten years before, and it was a long way from perfect. Excise men relied on old tests like dipping a cloth in the spirit and then setting fire to it, but most of those could be faked. The physician Peter Shaw defined proof spirit as fifty per cent alcohol by volume. In his hands, the compounder Thomas Cooke reckoned, it took ‘1 to 6 to reduce [spirits] to the strength gin and compounds in London are constantly sold to the retailer at’
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(known as phial proof). That made 1730s gin about the same strength as modern London Dry. But compounders had plenty of tricks for faking strength as well as taste. ‘Pepper, ginger, and other fiery ingredients are put into the still,’ explained a later reformer, ‘which makes the spirit hot to the palate, and burning to the stomach, though mixed with water, and under proof.’
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Distillers called it ‘the doctor’. They started with powdered quick lime, then mixed in varying proportions of almond oil and sulphuric acid.
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The final ingredient, cocculus indicus, was a poison, and a strong one, but that didn’t stop them from putting it into the stills. Constables counted up gin-shops, and Excise men busily recorded the gallons distilled. But when it came to the numbers of Londoners who were killed, maimed or blinded by bootleg spirits, no one was keeping a tally.

* * *

It didn’t seem to put them off. Three months into prohibition, the gin was still flowing. And if reformers and politicians spent Christmas looking for signs of popular subversion, they didn’t have long to wait. On 17 January 1737, the
London Evening Post
reported a disturbing incident.

It happened in Hanover Square, in the heart of the polite new West End. ‘Yesterday,’ the paper reported, ‘one Pullin, a chairman,
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was carry’d in effigy about the several streets, squares &c. in the parish of St George, Hanover Square, for informing against a victualler in Princess Street for retailing spirituous liquors.’ Londoners never did like informers. The Societies for Reformation of Manners had discovered that. ‘After the procession was over he was fixed on a chair pole in Hanover Square, with a halter about his neck, and then a load of faggots placed round him, in which manner he was burnt in the sight of a vast concourse of people.’

For the authorities, the only good news was that the crowd’s attack on Pullin had been symbolic. The real violence would come later. But it was enough to cause them panic. They had legislated against gin, and they were being ignored. Thomas De Veil was up all night collecting fines and sending gin-sellers to Bridewell, but it didn’t make any difference.

The new session of Parliament opened just two weeks later. On the first day the King declared to the assembled Lords and Commons that ‘it must be matter of the utmost surprise and concern to every true lover of his country, to see the many contrivances and attempts carried on … in different parts of the nation, tumultuously to resist and obstruct the execution of the laws and to violate the peace of the kingdom. These disturbers of the public repose … in their late outrages, have either directly
opposed, or at least endeavoured to render ineffectual some acts of the whole legislature.’ The government was thinking of the riots of the year before: the summer riots in London, the disturbances in Edinburgh, the scare over a Jacobite rising. It didn’t help that for the past four months they had had to sit by and watch a major piece of legislation being ignored.

Distillers had spent nine months waiting for the new session to start. There was no shortage of voices calling for the Gin Act to be scrapped. The
London Magazine
launched a long attack on informers. The
Grub Street Journal
proposed scrapping prohibition and replacing it with increased duties and better licensing controls. No one doubted that the Gin Act had gone too far. ‘[If] rigorous methods are chosen at the same time that moderate methods … offer themselves,’ the
Grub Street Journal
argued, ‘people can never be brought to think that such methods were … designed for the public good.’
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But moderation was the last thing on the government’s mind as the 1737 session opened. It was thinking only of riot and rebellion. ‘His Majesty,’ the King went on, ‘thinks it affords a melancholy prospect to consider to what height these audacious practices may rise, if not timely suppressed.’ Suppression was the key note. In their loyal reply, the Commons could find no words harsh enough for those involved ‘in tumultuously resisting and obstructing the execution of the laws.’

Not everyone saw things the same way. ‘I am as great an enemy to riots as any man,’ declared Carteret, one of the opposition leaders. ‘I am sorry to see them so frequent as they are; but I shall never be for sacrificing the liberties of the people, in order to prevent them engaging in any riotous proceedings.’ Any clamp-down would only drag the nation further from its freedoms. ‘The people seldom or never assemble in any riotous or tumultuous manner unless when they are oppressed,’ Carteret warned, ‘or at least imagine they are oppressed … You may shoot them, you may hang them, but, till the oppression is removed or alleviated, they will never be quiet.’
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A city spinning out of control: Hogarth’s ‘South Sea Scheme’, 1721

Zealot: Sir John Gonson enters to make his arrest in Hogarth’s ‘Harlot’s Progress’, 1732

The reformers (clockwise from top left): Dr Stephen Hales, General James Oglethorpe, Isaac Maddox, Bishop of Worcester, and Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls

The House of Commons, 1749

Westminster Hall.
The Jacobite bomb was placed on the steps between the Courts of King’s Bench and Chancery, at the far end

‘No Saint, no Spartan, no reformer’: Sir Robert Walpole

Thomas Wilson: no Saint, but an ardent reformer