Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (12 page)

They certainly weren’t above bringing their power to bear in Parliament. When more detailed plans were presented to the Commons on 15 April, the ‘still-head’ duty on spirit production had mysteriously been dropped. Malt distillers would not be taxed. They would be hit by any fall in consumption, of course, but at least the tax wouldn’t come out of their own pockets. Instead, the proposed Gin Act would target London’s thousands of small compound distillers and gin-sellers. There would be no extra costs for anyone who drank French brandy or punch. Madam Geneva and her devotees stood in the dock alone.

The Company of Distillers had coped with Sir John Gonson, but Robert Walpole on the hunt for cash was a different matter. The Company had a clerk waiting to rush them a draft of the Bill as soon as it was published. What they read was about as bad as it could have been. They embarked on a pamphlet campaign, but it was never more than a rearguard action. The trouble was that by now Sir John Gonson had managed to link Madam Geneva and public disorder inextricably in the public mind. And the Company of Distillers couldn’t, in any case, deny what was going on in Rag Fair and Drury Lane. Nor was there any hiding the fact that
spirits production had doubled in the last ten years. The Company had to make the best of a bad case. They tried to make out that respectable compounders were on the side of reform. They were ‘very desirous the excessive use of any of the said liquors, that enervate and debauch the common people, may, in the most effectual manner, be prevented.’
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They supported moderate restrictions,
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and reminded MPs that it was Parliament who had encouraged the trade in the first place. They had coopers lobby the Commons as an example of the other trades which would be hit by a distilling slump. Then they played their strongest card – the quantities of corn the industry bought from landowners – for all it was worth.

But they suffered from a shortage of fire-power. They didn’t have Daniel Defoe on their side in 1729. The best they could manage was ‘Alexander Blunt, Distiller’, who droned on about William of Orange, and addressed his poem,
Geneva
, ‘to the Right Honourable Sir R — W —.’ ‘O may I live to hail the day!’ he exhorted the Prime Minister, ‘when thou …’

(Suspending the fatigue of state affairs)

Shalt make the city tour, and condescend

To visit my poor mansion, and, beneath

Its humble roof, take a reviving glass

Of anodyne GENEVA!

Unfortunately for the distillers, it was going to take more than a glass of gin to win over Sir Robert Walpole. The Prime Minister was looking for enough cash to buy off a king. A week after the Gin Act got its first reading, on 23 April, the ministry proposed to a shocked House of Commons that they offer George II the lump sum of £115,000 on account of Civil List arrears. Sir Robert had done his calculations. For gin-sellers there was a new retail licence
for £20 a year, which was as much as many of them earned. And ‘for every gallon of mixed or compound … spirits, commonly called Gin,’ the new Act decreed an additional duty of five shillings a gallon, payable by the compounders. The excise duty on a gallon of gin had just been increased by 1,400 per cent.

If only half of English spirits were compounded and paid the new duty, the Gin Act would give Sir Robert £400,000 a year. That was enough to make even a Hanoverian king smile. Not everybody was expecting the same thing out of the first Gin Act, of course. Sir John Gonson assumed that the distillery would slump, and the manners of the poor be reformed. Parliament had, to his joy, overturned forty years of promoting the distillers; it had taken action for the first time against the scourge of spirit-drinking.

But it had also hooked itself up to a drip-feed of new revenue from gin. The unholy trinity of drug abuse, tax revenues, and powerful industry was complete. It wasn’t only the poor of St Giles who could get hooked on gin. Governments could as well.

CHAPTER SIX

CORN

T
he Company of Distillers didn’t waste time crying over spilt milk. They paid their lobbying bills and thanked the MPs who had supported them. They had an advert published in the papers ‘to signify the Company’s good inclination to prevent the excessive drinking of any distilled liquors to the damage of the common people.’ They fired off a memo to the Commissioners of Excise to get various points in the new act clarified.
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The 1729 lobbying campaign had been expensive. Kenn, the political lobbyist, put in a bill for £56. The House of Commons doormen had needed their palms greased. The campaign accounts also explained, at last, how the Company of Distillers always seemed to know what the magistrates were planning. They included a payment, ‘to satisfy Mr Justice Robe … for [his] expences in relation to the Company’s affairs last session in Parliament.’
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Thomas Robe had written tracts for the distillers under the pen-name of Eboranos. He also happened to be a magistrate for the County of Middlesex. He had even
been on the committee which drew up the 1726 magistrates’ report.

It was time to count up Madam Geneva’s friends. Top of the list were Sir John Barnard and Micaiah Perry, influential MPs for the City of London. The City was less affected by the social problems of gin-drinking than Middlesex, and more concerned about business. It was a promising ally. To reinforce the link, the Company sent a memo to the Court of Aldermen to underline their own ‘dislike of … the scandalous practice of tippling.’

It was time, too, to come up with a strategy for the fight-back. A committee was quickly appointed ‘to consider of the present state of the Company & report their opinion.’
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First priority was to make sure everyone knew how much the distillers were suffering. A petition to George II bewailed ‘the miserable and deplorable condition to which we are brought,’ and tugged the royal heartstrings on behalf of apprentices whose families had ‘bestowed their all in giving them a trade by which they thought to have enabled them to lead their lives comfortably.’
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Old friends weighed in to help. ‘Not long ago I knew the day,’ lamented a familiar voice,

When I could rent and taxes pay:

Each morning with my wife drink tea,

And who so happy then as we! …

And whence this wretched change? In fact,

It comes from the GENEVA Act.

In case Walpole, the subject of this call for repeal, was wondering who the author was, he didn’t have long to wait.

‘Do it I say,’ ended the poem, ‘and don’t affront,

The muse of

Your old friend,

A Blunt.’
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Next, the Company did all it could to persuade the world that respectable distillers were part of the solution to gin-drinking, not part of the problem. There was a subtext. The Company of Distillers had never stopped grieving for its lost monopoly. Now they argued that if Parliament would only put the industry back in their hands, they could drive out the crooks and cowboys and back-room distillers. That was what lay behind their request to the crown, ‘that we may be made an incorporated body.’

But the distillers knew all along what was their strongest card. The industry had, after all, been established in the first place ‘for the greater consumption of corn, and the advantage of tillage in this kingdom.’ Their best hope for repeal of the Gin Act was to get the farmers back on their side and, through them, the landed interest.

Farming had gone through changes of its own in the years since the Glorious Revolution. Once, the prices of bread and beer had been fixed by the authorities. But farming was being commercialised, like so much else. Traditionalists complained that ancient corn markets stood deserted. ‘Where … there us’d to come to town upon a day, one, two, perhaps three, and in some boroughs, four hundred loads of corn,’ sighed one writer, ‘now grass grows in the market-place.’ Instead of honest trading, ‘badgers’ – grain merchants – met in inns to strike deals over ‘parcels of corn in a bag or handkerchief, which are called samples.’
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They were middlemen. This was business, not subsistence. Small farmers who couldn’t hang on for the best prices after harvest were squeezed out.

Agriculture had a regular problem of over-production. ‘Nothing is more certain,’ Daniel Defoe wrote in 1713, ‘than that the ordinary
produce of corn in England is much greater than the numbers of our own people or cattle can consume.’
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But grain was hard to store and expensive to transport. A bad year could cause famine. Then, twelve months on, farmers could be scrabbling desperately around to sell off their surplus.

That was the thinking behind William III’s package for farming in the 1690s. Find a new market for excess corn and the surplus in good years would be soaked up. Encourage over-capacity and there was less chance of famine after a bad harvest. He had started, in 1689, by reviving ‘bounties’ – subsidies – for corn exports. Setting up the distilling industry had followed the same logic. It wasn’t just that William had found a new market for English corn. Both policies had, as Daniel Defoe pointed out, the added advantage that ‘if at any time a scarcity happens, this trade can halt for a year, and not be lost entirely.’

Neither went down well with the general public (apart from gin-drinkers). There were stories of dealers picking up the export bounties and then dumping corn at sea. Most people assumed that if distillers were fixing prices at Bear Key, their loaf of bread probably cost more than it needed to. For landowners, though – and eighteenth-century Parliaments were particularly alive to the problems of landowners – the policies were a godsend. Without subsidies, English farmers could never have competed with farmers abroad. As for the distilling industry, to Daniel Defoe it was ‘one of the most essential things to support the landed interest, that any branch of trade can help us to; and therefore especially to be preserved, and tenderly used.’

So it wasn’t surprising that farmers had offered support to the distillers in the past. Back in 1702, when the brewers had promoted a bill against distilling, it was the ‘farmers and maltsters of the counties of Middlesex, Surrey, Essex, Kent, Sussex, Suffolk and Norfolk’ who weighed in with a petition to get it crushed. By 1714, distillers
claimed they bought ‘above one hundred thousand quarters of malt yearly.’ By the time the first Gin Act came in, claims of 300,000 quarters were being bandied around. They were exaggerations, of course, but only by about fifty per cent. It took thirteen quarters of grain to make a tun of spirits, and 15,500 tuns were distilled in London the year before the Act came in.
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That meant 200,000 quarters of corn passing through the London grain market at Bear Key.

In the great scheme of things that didn’t exactly transform English agriculture. Over the whole country farmers produced more than thirteen million quarters of grain a year. But the distilling industry didn’t affect the whole country. It changed things for some farmers in some places. The key factors were what kind of grain the distillers bought, and where it came from.

Four corn crops were cultivated in England on a big scale – wheat, barley, rye and oats. But down in the south of England, for brewers, bakers and distillers, the ones that mattered were wheat and barley. Wheat fetched much the better price. Wheat flour was what London bakers wanted for bread; often it cost almost twice as much as barley. But wheat couldn’t be sown in the same field year after year. Thomas Coke’s tenants in Norfolk were allowed to plant three corn crops every six years. But two of those had to be barley, not wheat. The economics of eighteenth-century farming only worked if a market could be found for an awful lot of extra barley.

In the past, that had meant selling it to the brewers. But since 1690, the distilling industry had opened a whole new outlet. ‘The tenants of this kingdom,’ reckoned one parliamentarian in 1743, ‘pay their rents by their barley: and if we had no distillery our barley would be worth little.’
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Reformers soon twigged that ‘to suppress the distillery at home will raise great clamour from … the country gentlemen upon account of its taking barley.’
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The distillers wouldn’t just buy barley; they would buy bad barley,
and bad malt as well. ‘What would become of our corn injured by bad harvests, were it not for distilling?’ asked one writer in 1736.
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The arrival of the distillers had been ‘sensibly felt by our farmers,’ according to another supporter, ‘because it opened to them a market for spoilt and coarse sorts of corn, which they never before could make anything of.’
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Often that meant barley which was damaged by rain, or which hadn’t fully ripened. But it could also mean barley from poor soil which had never in the past produced a marketable crop. ‘This,’ as Defoe put it, ‘is visible in the northern and eastern counties and coasts of England, where a very great quantity of poor and unimproveable lands, which formerly lay waste, are now plow’d and sow’d.’
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The eastern counties and coasts were the key. The 200,000 quarters of grain distillers bought was a drop in the ocean of overall grain output. It didn’t amount to all that much against the four million quarters of barley which England produced every year. But set it against the barley output of those counties which had cheap and ready access to London, and suddenly the malt distillers at Bear Key meant business.