Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (16 page)

Things could hardly have gone better. The brewers had been persuaded to stump up printing costs for the campaign. On 11 December, Joseph Jekyll told Thomas Wilson ‘that he had seen the Queen, who seemed to be an hearty enemy to distilled and spirituous liquors. [She] said she had seen a great deal of bestialities and indecencies as she has gone by in the streets.’ (‘The Master,’ Thomas Wilson added, ‘took the opportunity of recommending me strongly for preferment.’) Parliament was due to meet in mid-January; the Queen was going to ask George II to mention gin in his speech.

The report of the Middlesex magistrates was due to come out as the MPs gathered. Thomas Wilson’s own tract,
Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation
, would follow immediately afterwards. He spent the Christmas holidays adding the finishing touches. If he
heard the noise of revelry in the streets, he comforted himself with the thought that it was the last time the mob would toast the New Year in gin. Two weeks later, the King opened the 1736 session of Parliament.

CHAPTER EIGHT

PROHIBITION

A
frightening new statistic awaited MPs as they gathered for the new session on 15 January in St Stephen’s chapel. The same number was being read in the
London Evening Post
in coffee-houses all over London. In the last ten years, almost a thousand new gin-shops had opened in Middlesex.

The Middlesex magistrates, led by Thomas Lane, had published their report. There were now 7,022 gin-sellers in Middlesex alone. And even that statistic came with a word of caution. It wasn’t just that constables had left out street-hawkers and old ladies in attics. ‘Upon enquiry into the respective trade and callings of the several constables,’ the report admitted, ‘it appears to us, that over half of those employ’d in this enquiry are retailers of those liquors themselves.’
¹

Apart from that, the report told the same dismal story of social decay that the magistrates had revealed ten years earlier. If anything, Madam Geneva’s grip on the slums had tightened. Now, even more than in 1726, it was ‘scarce possible for persons in low life to go anywhere, or to be anywhere without being drawn in to taste, and
by degrees to like and approve this pernicious liquor.’ But if gin was responsible for all the ills of the age – in the opinion of men like Thomas Lane – now, at least, they knew how to put the age to rights. Prohibition had become their panacea. Banish Madam Geneva and the nation would return to sanity. ‘In consequence of this remedy,’ the magistrates promised, ‘trade must increase with the labours of the poor, our soldiers will still be renowned for their strength and real courage, servants will be more obedient, honest and faithful, and all sorts of persons in low life will become more strong & robust, better inclined to industry and labour, and be less induced to rob & commit murders and outrages … In time our morals will be better secured, and we may, with great reason, hope once more to see religion, sobriety and industry flourish once more among us.’

A fortnight later, the reformers unleashed their second broadside against Madam Geneva’s defences. It was Thomas Wilson’s big day. Just before publication, he had shown the final manuscript of
Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation
to his new patron. The Master of the Rolls had approved it, only asking ‘that its moral reflections might be kept to the last and not intermixt in the body of the treatise.’
²
Not even Sir Joseph Jekyll could stomach Thomas Wilson’s moral reflections. All the same, Wilson couldn’t help feeling pleased with himself. He had heard from the Bishop of Durham that Sir Joseph had been singing his praises, and had ‘said that if he had £500 a year he would give it me.’
³
Sir Joseph had even agreed to underwrite printing costs for the pamphlet, so Thomas Wilson had the printer, Rivington, run off a thousand, including ‘100 in large paper and sticht in Marble Covers.’ He spent Thursday 5 February delivering them around town. Any young cleric would have felt pleased with himself as he looked down the list of subscribers. As well as SPCK stalwarts like James Vernon and John Thorold, Thomas Wilson could count no fewer than ten
bishops, including not only the Archbishop of York but Edmund Gibson, influential Bishop of London. The Bishop of Durham had signed up, as had Thomas Secker, Thomas Sherlock and Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Winchester. The Master of the Rolls had signed for six copies, and Arthur Onslow, Speaker of the House, for one. Philip Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor, must have added his name when Thomas Wilson met him just before Christmas. Lord Egmont recorded in his own diary that ‘in the evening Dr Wilson, son to the Bishop of Man, came and presented me his book against the baneful spirituous liquor called gin.’ Thomas Wilson had some news to spread round, as well as his tract. ‘He told me,’ Egmont added, ‘Sir Joseph Jekyll has a Bill to discourage the drinking it, which he brings this day sennit into the House.’
⁴

For once, Thomas Wilson had good reason to feel pleased with himself. He was no fool.
Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation
was the most sustained and damaging attack on gin-drinking so far.

He had gone right to the heart of the problem. Reformers had to break up the love affair between distillers and the landed interest. So Thomas Wilson’s tract, taking no prisoners, would comprise ‘Considerations humbly offer’d to the Hon. the House of Commons, by which it will appear that the Landed Interest suffers greatly by the distilling of spirituous liquors.’

Arthur Onslow had given him some pointers the day the reformers dined at Thames Ditton. The Speaker had been full of good ideas about beer production, the cost of social security, and figures for child mortality. He had also suggested that gin-drinking could be shown to harm farmers ‘if it be considered [that] fewer cloths are worn and much less coarse meat eat [by gin-drinkers] than formerly.’ Thomas Wilson used this slender idea to turn the farming argument on its head. Citing Judith Defour, he claimed that gin-drinkers sold their clothes rather than buy new ones,
which meant gin damaged the wool industry. Gin-drinkers ate less as well. ‘Those that keep large numbers of cows near the town, will tell you, that they have not had near the demand for their milk, and have been forced to sell off some part of their stock; which they attribute to mothers and nurses giving their children gin.’ If London’s Gin Craze continued, the result could only be ruin for farmers, for everyone depended on London. The distillers had never been slow to wheel out figures for the amount of grain eaten up by the London distillery. Thomas Wilson set out to beat them at their own game. Starting with Dr Cheyne’s calculations for how much an average man ate in a day, he was soon reckoning that each gin-drinker, his appetite gone, his earning-power diminished, and his cash spent on booze, cost the landlords threepence a day. If there were 10,000 gin-shops around London and each gin-shop had forty customers, the Gin Craze in London cost farmers nearly a million pounds a year.

It was quite a performance. Thomas Wilson was impassioned (‘War, plague and pestilence rage for a while, and then they cease; but this merciless destroyer threatens misery, sickness, and want, for generations that are yet … to come’). He invoked his readers’ worst demons: high wages, shortage of cheap labour, beggars, street-robbers and housebreakers. He played on country mistrust of London, which sucked in honest countrymen and turned them into gin addicts. Gin was the cause of crime. Gin debilitated the army and left the nation defenceless. Gin added to the burden of social security. Thomas Wilson lifted medical arguments from Stephen Hales’
Friendly Admonition
. And looking to the future of a gin-sodden England, he pointed out the awful example of Rome: ‘It was thrift, sobriety and virtue that laid at first and continued so long the grandeur of the Roman Empire; when they lost their first simplicity, and sunk into effeminacy and luxury, they soon became a prey to the most barbarous nations.’

Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation
was an instant success. Its timing was right. The gin issue had been brought to the boil just as Parliament met. The reformers had mixed up a powerful brew of statistics, moral outrage, family values and patriotism. But they had had it their own way for too long. Madam Geneva’s friends weren’t going to stand and watch while the zealots dragged her off to the stake. The gin war of 1736 would be fought in tract and counter-tract. As Parliament met to consider prohibition, a paper fusillade broke out.

An Impartial Enquiry into the Present State of the British Distillery
argued for ‘a proper regulation in the home-consumption of this manufacture without the total prohibition of it.’ For Thomas Wilson’s statistics its author traded an equally unreliable calculation that had the distillery employing 10,000 people and 3,000 tons of shipping. There was a healthy dose of abuse for ‘the manifest absurdities and gross impositions [of] a printed pamphlet entitled Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation.’ Thomas Wilson’s reasoning was lampooned (‘He [observes] that more children die under three years old since the use of spirituous liquors than before … He might with equal certainty have said, that such increase of deaths happened since the use of narrow-brim’d hats, which therefore was the cause’). He poured doubt on Wilson’s claim that gin-drinkers had died like flies in the recent ’flu epidemic. ‘What were these persons?’ he asked. ‘What hospitals did they die in? Where is the public attestation of the physicians or surgeons attending them?’

Thomas Wilson was always thin-skinned. The counter-tract stung him into a revised edition, including a graphic description of conditions in the back-alleys of Middlesex. ‘In one place not far from East Smithfield,’ he reported, ‘a trader has a large empty room backwards, where as his wretched guests get intoxicated, they are laid together in heaps promiscuously, men, women, and children,
till they recover their senses, when they proceed to drink on, or, having spent all they had, go out to find wherewithal to return to the same dreadful pursuit; and how they acquire more money the sessions papers too often acquaint us.’

That, of course, only inspired
A Supplement to the Impartial Enquiry … in a letter to the Reverend Author
, which launched into Thomas Wilson’s ‘insuperable pride and vanity, that officious ill-nature and inclination to be busy at any expence, so well known to govern you in every past station of your life.’ But by now Thomas Wilson and his tormentor no longer had the field to themselves. General pamphlet war had broken out and the air was thick with accusations.
The Trial of the Spirits
, attacking gin, was countered by
A Proper Reply to a Scandalous Libel intituled The Trial of the Spirits
, which only provoked a
Vindication
of the first tract. The gloves were off. A ‘Farmer of Kent’ read
Distilled Spirituous Liquors
with some friends ‘and we agreed one and all, that the Gentleman who took so much pains to write it, was certainly mad.’
⁵
The ‘farmer’s’ enemies then published an advert in the
Daily Journal
unmasking him as a distiller’s servant. ‘’Tis almost as difficult a task,’ the
Daily Post
sighed, ‘to methodise and reconcile the arguments of a mad author … as to bring him back to his senses; nevertheless, as I have begun an examination of the TRIAL OF THE SPIRITS, I shall endeavour to go through it.’
⁶
That author took to the pages of the
Daily Journal
to denounce his tormentor as ‘some little imp formed out of the dregs of Gin as you do Phosphorus from Piss.’
⁷

The newspapers split over the gin issue. The
Daily Gazetteer
and
London Daily Post
espoused the cause of prohibition. The
Daily Post
published an impassioned series of leaders against prohibition in late March. The news columns filled up with sensational cuttings about gin-drinkers. Just one day before Joseph Jekyll launched his campaign in Parliament, the
Daily Gazetteer
came up with another
horrific account of a drunken childminder: ‘Mary Estwick came home on Tuesday last about two in the afternoon, quite intoxicated with Gin, sate down before the fire, and, it is supposed, had the child in her lap, which fell out of it on the hearth, and the fire catched hold of the child’s clothes and burnt it to death. People heard the child cry and run into Estwick’s room, and found the child in the hearth burnt to death, and the fire catching hold of the old woman … When the people that came in had put the fire out, they attempted to rouse Estwick; but she was so intoxicated, she knew nothing of what had been done.’
⁸

There was a spate of stories about deaths from hard drinking. The
Gentleman’s Magazine
reported that ‘four persons drinking Geneva together in an alley near Holbourn Bridge, died next day, and about 10 more were mentioned in the newspapers of this month, to have kill’d themselves in the same manner.’
⁹
The
London Daily Post
fleshed out the details: ‘On Friday in the evening, Fosset a cobbler in Field Lane, and a person known by the name of Joss the Glazier … with one Summers a bricklayer in that neighbourhood, and a carman, who plies at Holbourn-Bridge, and two or three others, met accidentally at a Gin shop in Field Lane, where they drank gin in half pint glasses, without intermission, to so great an excess, that Joss the Glazier fell backward with the eleventh half-pint in his hand, and died on the spot about 8 o’clock at night; Fosset died in the same shop about 3 o’clock the next morning; the others, by advice of Mr Lee a surgeon in the neighbourhood, had oil and warm water poured down their throats, which set them a vomiting, tho one is said to be dead since.’
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