Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (15 page)

Stephen Hales ended up a celebrity and pillar of the establishment. He would even be talked of as a possible tutor for the future George III. But in his own mind, there was one achievement which overshadowed all his publications and prizes, all the professional acclaim. It was his campaign against gin, he told Bishop Hildesley in 1758, ‘[over] 30 years, in eleven different books or newspapers’ that gave him the greatest satisfaction of his entire life.
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In publishing his
Friendly Admonition
, Hales wasn’t only bringing a scientific reputation to the reform campaign. For the first time he built a detailed medical case against the abuse of spirits. In an age that loved bowing to the marvels of science, Stephen Hales attacked Madam Geneva with medical argument backed up by experiment. Hales found that spirits ‘coagulate and thicken the blood, [and] also contract and narrow the blood-vessels.’ He discovered this ‘by experiments purposely made, with brandy, on the blood and blood-vessels of animals.’
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The experiments had probably been carried out on Hales’ dining-room table. The result for gin-drinkers? ‘Obstructions and stoppages in the liver; whence the jaundice, dropsy, and many other fatal diseases.’ That wasn’t the only effect of gin. Spirits caused problems with circulation, brain damage (‘whereby they spoil the memory and intellectual faculties’) and heart disease. Gin was so addictive that ‘when men had got a habit of it, they would go on, though they saw
Hell-fire burning before them.’ Stephen Hales’ experiments may have been quaint and his explanations curious, but his diagnosis was accurate enough. It even went as far as advice for pregnant women and breast-feeding mothers. ‘We have too frequent instances,’ he warned, ‘where the unhappy mothers habituate themselves to these distill’d liquors, whose children, when first born, are often either of a diminutive, pygmy, size, or look withered and old, as if they had numbered many years, when they have not, as yet, alas! attained to the evening of the first day. How many more instances are there of children, who, tho born with good constitutions, have unhappily sucked in the deadly spirituous poison with their nurse’s milk?’

Gin hadn’t gone away. More was being drunk than ever. In the London tenements, Madam Geneva’s trail of broken hearts and ruined families, of crime and violence, was longer than ever. Stephen Hales’
Friendly Admonition
opened a new front in the battle. The bandwagon against Madam Geneva was rolling again.

But Stephen Hales was no politician. If progress was to be made, the campaign needed a very different kind of champion. It needed someone with a genius for publicity, a man of energy and ambition, someone who had the cunning to guide legislation through a fickle Parliament. And it so happened that a couple of years earlier a young churchman called Thomas Wilson had landed at Bristol on his way to build a career in London. Thomas Wilson had no shortage of energy, cunning or ambition, and in his pocket he was carrying a letter of introduction to Dr Stephen Hales. Madam Geneva was about to meet her most dangerous enemy.

The eighteenth-century Church of England was accused of many things, from sloth to venality, corruption to greed. But at least there was one sin it never had on its conscience. It never made Thomas Wilson a bishop. Horace Walpole described Thomas Wilson in old age as ‘that dirty disappointed hunter of a mitre.’ He came from an impeccable church background. His father was
the venerated Bishop of Sodor and Man. Thomas Wilson senior was an Old Testament prophet, a harsh and unrelenting holy man who kept the Isle of Man in the grip of Bible law. Under Bishop Wilson, prostitutes were dragged through the sea behind boats, and adulterers stood at crossroads holding lists of their crimes. Maybe it wasn’t surprising that Thomas Wilson decided to make his own career elsewhere.

In London, aged twenty-eight, he wasted no time in searching for a good living. He entered a little vow in his diary ‘that I may make no indirect methods to gain preferment.’
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That was one promise Thomas Wilson never broke. His schemes for getting on in the world were anything but indirect.

Church livings were only available when someone died. So for the next six years Thomas Wilson’s diary became a roll-call of the sick and dying of the Church of England. When death knocked, Thomas Wilson was sure to be lurking somewhere near the rectory door. In August 1735 he noted ‘that Dr. Brampston, Prebendary of Worcester and Rector of St. Christopher’s and Vicar of Mortlake died at Worcester. Aged 80.’ In October ‘Mr Fynch was very ill and … Dr Sharp was in a declining state of health at Bath.’ The death of a Bishop created the best openings of all. When the Bishop of St Asaph expired, Thomas Wilson ‘waited upon Sir Robt. W[alpole] [and] told him that the Bishop … died Sunday night between 8 and 9 … He told me that he would do what he could for me.’ Another time he heard a rumour that the Canon of Christ Church had passed away. ‘Wrote to Lady Sundon about it,’ he recorded, ‘and to Mr Phillips to speak to Sir Robt. W.’ He only stopped to check the rumour afterwards, when he added the exultant note, ‘Knipe … certainly dead.’ His web of information didn’t often let him down. Once someone told him the Bishop of Durham had passed on. Hurrying to the Bishop’s home, Thomas Wilson ‘found it was a mistake,
he being in very good health.’ Shamefaced, he ‘returned home to dinner.’

Meanwhile he did everything he could to make contacts. And his father’s letters of introduction led him straight to the SPCK offices at Bartlett’s Buildings. There, within weeks of his arrival in London, Thomas Wilson had met not only Dr Stephen Hales, but gin’s oldest enemy, Sir John Gonson.

The SPCK was a tight-knit group. The wealthy philanthropist Sir John Phillips and his son Erasmus were regulars at the weekly meetings, as was the hellfire evangelist, John Thorold. Thomas Wilson turned Bartlett’s Buildings into a virtual home from home. Hales and Gonson weren’t the only gin-haters he met there. James Vernon, an Excise Commissioner, was another regular. James Oglethorpe was in frequent contact from Georgia (his first act on taking charge of the colony was to distribute a hundred copies of Stephen Hales’
Friendly Admonition
). And in January 1735, Thomas Wilson would be present when ‘The Revd Dr Maddox, Dean of Wells … [and] the Right Revd Thomas Secker Rector of St James, now Lord Bishop Elect of Bristol … were chosen … members.’ Isaac Maddox, later Bishop of Worcester, would spearhead the 1751 campaign against gin, while Thomas Secker, as Bishop of Oxford, would speak passionately against spirits in the 1743 House of Lords debate. And on 29 April 1735, the SPCK welcomed another new member who would play a vital part in the fight against Madam Geneva. Thomas Wilson and Dr Stephen Hales were both present that evening to watch Sir John Gonson introduce Thomas Lane, one of the most senior magistrates on the Middlesex bench.
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Gin wasn’t on the formal agenda at SPCK meetings. It was, as one member sniffily put it, ‘foreign to [our] proper business.’
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But there was little doubt what the campaigners talked about as
summer 1735 drew on. In June, Thomas Secker’s parish of St James’s ordered officials to count up gin-shops in the parish and denounce them to the magistrates.
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The new campaign was under way, and from then on the reformers moved at lightning speed. The Queen had been spotted as a possible ally, and Thomas Secker joined a deputation to win her support. Goaded on by Gonson and Lane, the Middlesex magistrates passed a resolution to suppress gin-shops.

And this time there was no doubt in reformers’ minds what they were after. Half-measures were not enough. The first Gin Act had been a fiasco; now they wanted complete prohibition of all spirits. Madam Geneva had come back from the dead once. This time they wanted her six foot under with a stake through her heart.

They had even found the man they needed to steer prohibition through Parliament. Sir Joseph Jekyll was sixty-eight years old and had been Master of the Rolls for nearly two decades. He wasn’t exactly popular, but he could certainly pull strings. At last the campaigners had a parliamentary heavyweight on their side.

It was easy enough to poke fun at Sir Joseph Jekyll. Lord Hervey, who could always find everyone’s bad side, reckoned him ‘an impractical old fellow of four score.’ The Master of the Rolls had ‘no great natural perspicuity of understanding and had, instead of lightening that natural cloud, only gilded it with knowledge, reading and learning, and made it more shining but not less thick.’ But even Hervey had to admit he had the ear of the House. Politically, Sir Joseph was a Whig, but he prided himself on his independence. He liked to boast that he came to the House ‘undetermined, and resolved so to remain, till I am fully informed by other gentlemen … of all the facts which ought to be known.’ For Hervey, that was just flannel. Jekyll ‘argued on both sides and voted for neither.’ There was one thing, though, that the Master of
the Rolls was certain about. In the words of Sir Arthur Onslow, long-standing Speaker of the House, he ‘had much dislike of Sir Robert Walpole.’
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Jekyll spent much of his time at his estate at Bell Bar, north of London. He disinherited his only son, who was blind. There was no evidence for the rumour that he hated Madam Geneva because his own wife had taken to drink. It might have been Thomas Sherlock, Bishop of Salisbury, who first got him interested in gin. Back in April, Jekyll had been present as President of the Westminster Infirmary when Sherlock preached a hellfire sermon against Madam Geneva. By June, Jekyll was firmly enough on board to join the deputation to the Queen.

It was James Oglethorpe who introduced Thomas Wilson to the Master of the Rolls. In London on a visit from Georgia, he met Wilson at the Cheapside Coffee House, the two men ‘talked about the Affair of Gin,’ and Oglethorpe took him up to Bell Bar a few days later.
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For the ambitious young cleric, that meeting was a dream come true.

Thomas Wilson had come to a decision. Madam Geneva was going to make his name. Others drowned in spirits; he was going to build a career on them. Through the reform campaign he would meet movers and shakers, senior politicians, men who could dispense livings. ‘The Master of the Rolls and his lady received us very kindly,’ he gushed into his diary after the visit to Bell Bar. He had presented Sir Joseph with a draft of his new anti-gin pamphlet. He had spent all weekend finishing it off; the working title was
Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation
. Within days, Thomas Wilson was settling happily into a new role as the campaign’s chief co-ordinator. He ran a message from Jekyll down to Thomas Lane, went on to see James Oglethorpe, then took a letter from the Master of the Rolls to Sir John Barnard, the new Lord Mayor. A couple of weeks later he was back at Bell Bar for
a meeting between Jekyll and Lane. Thomas Wilson was going places. ‘Sir Robt. W.,’ he confided to his diary on 12 October, ‘told Mr Oglethorpe that I stood as fair as any man in England for preferment in the Church.’

The pieces of the new anti-gin campaign were starting to come together. The aim was to present a Bill in the session of 1736, and by early September preparations were well advanced. The trigger for legislation would be another tirade from the Middlesex magistrates (hence the meeting between Jekyll and Thomas Lane in early September). Quarter Sessions – the last before Parliament met – came round in late September. In a carefully orchestrated move, the Grand Juries of the City of London, Middlesex and Tower Hamlets all issued simultaneous presentments against gin. In Tower Hamlets, where Sir John Gonson was Chair of Sessions, the text was particularly eloquent. ‘How often,’ Gonson asked, ‘do we see women … lying in the very channels and corners of streets like dead carcasses, generally without cloaths to protect them from the inclemency of the weather, or cover their nakedness and shame? How many breaches of the peace, dangerous assaults, and often murders have been occasion’d by this deluge of debauchery?’
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‘Men and women servants,’ added the Middlesex magistrates, ‘nay even children, are enticed and seduced, to taste, like and approve of those pernicious liquors sold for such small sums of money, whereby they are daily intoxicated and get drunk, and are frequently seen in our streets, in a condition abhorrent to reasonable creatures.’
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Thomas Lane chaired the committee of magistrates set up on 18 October to take the campaign forward. By the time he met Isaac Maddox at the SPCK ten days later, and went on to dinner with Thomas Wilson afterwards, the constables were already out in the alleys of Middlesex, knocking on the dram-shop doors, counting gin-sellers.
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Meanwhile, it was time to work out political strategy. On
17 November, Thomas Wilson dined with Stephen Hales at the Thames Ditton home of the Speaker, Arthur Onslow. With Stephen Hales at the dinner table, conversation was always erratic. They had to talk mathematical experiments and the immateriality of the soul before they could get on to Madam Geneva. But when they ‘began upon the Gin Affair,’ everyone was in complete agreement. ‘Heartily for suppression,’ Thomas Wilson recorded in his diary. ‘All spirituous liquors the highest calamity there are before a nation.’ The campaigners were sure enough about that, but they could also see the opposition that lay ahead. ‘To suppress the distillery at home,’ Thomas Wilson minuted in his diary, ‘will raise great clamour from … the country gentlemen upon account of its taking barley.’

So far, though, nothing had been heard from the country gentlemen, or from the distillers. Madam Geneva seemed to have gone to ground. The prohibitionists were having it all their own way. Speed and co-ordination had given their campaign an unstoppable momentum.