Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (17 page)

Other stories of gin-drinkers were more salacious. Few of the papers could resist the one about Jane Andrews, ‘servant maid to Mr William Bird, a brewer at Kensington Gore.’ When her master went on a journey, ‘she shut up his doors, and went to Kensington Town to a Gin-shop she usually frequented, and there found a
drummer of the guards of her acquaintance, a chimney-sweeper, and a woman traveller. She invited this guest [sic] home to her master’s house where they drank plentifully from ten in the morning till four in the afternoon, when Jane Andrews proposed to the company … they, and she, should all go to bed together; and thereupon they shut up the doors and windows, and tho twas but about four o’clock in the afternoon, they stript, and all four went into one bed together (as the Maid called it
to ring changes
) and lay there till a mob, hearing of this affair, surrounded the door, and disturbed the happy pairs.’
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But one thing was clear from all the tracts and column inches. Supporters of Madam Geneva were on the back foot. The speed of the reform campaign had caught them by surprise. Just three years before, Parliament had sat as ‘a committee for encouraging home-made spirits.’ In the space of seven months, the reformers had shifted the agenda all the way to prohibition.

The press hadn’t helped. ‘As to the many frightful stories which have been published in the newspapers,’ complained the author of the
Impartial Enquiry
, ‘they are generally exaggerated far beyond the truth, and oftentimes invented by those whose interest it is to inflame the nation … or by the runners employed to pick up domestick news, who are obliged to bring every day a number of fresh paragraphs, and coin and adapt these to the prejudiced belief and opinion of the public.’ He even claimed that the notorious signboard promising customers they could be drunk for a penny and dead drunk for twopence was a myth. ‘On the most diligent enquiry,’ the writer declared, ‘I cannot find any reason to believe there ever was such a sign.’

The Company of Distillers shared his mood of frustration. Their parliamentary committee had failed, for once, to anticipate the reform campaign. Maybe they couldn’t afford a full-scale counter-attack. There were rumours of vast payments being made by distillers to MPs – there was talk that one member had been
given £5,000
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– but sums like that weren’t coming from the Company of Distillers. Only at the last moment did they come up with
The Case of the Distillers Company and Proposals for Better Regulating the Trade
, but the argument it made (back-street drinking was caused by distillers ‘of mean fortune, and worse character;’
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give the Company back its monopoly and it would control the trade) was the wrong line at the wrong time. No one was handing out monopolies in 1736.

For the reformers, there had been only one disappointment. Despite, or maybe because of, his wife’s interest, the King had refused to mention gin in his opening speech to Parliament. Apart from that, everything had gone according to plan. A week after the session opened, the Middlesex magistrates put in their formal petition calling for legislation.

That was the easy part. ‘Whatever difficulties may be stated,’ wrote the author of a prohibitionist tract published a few days later, ‘the greatest … is Parliamentary Faith.’
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It hadn’t got any easier to push legislation through the House. At least one person, though, was confident. Thomas Wilson dined with Sir Joseph Jekyll the weekend before it all started. The Secretary to the Treasury was against their Bill, Sir Joseph told him, ‘but he does not doubt carrying it.’
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It was the Master of the Rolls himself who opened the two-day committee debate on the ‘total suppression of all distilled spirituous liquors.’ Thomas Wilson was in the gallery to hear him. Few voices were raised against prohibition. Micaiah Perry, member for the City of London, supported the Company of Distillers (as he had before) and worried about smuggling. But Jekyll had no trouble in winning the four resolutions he put before the House: that the root of the problem was the low price of spirits; that the price should be raised drastically by duties; that gin-selling should be restricted
to brandy-shops, alehouses and victuallers; and that such vendors should be forced to take out an expensive licence.

Only a few of the sharper members might have noticed what was missing from the list. Back in 1729 Walpole had considered taxing the malt distillers at the first point of spirits production, but had backed off. In 1733 the same idea had been trailed as the obvious way to bring Madam Geneva under control. When Sir Joseph Jekyll first unveiled his own plans to Thomas Wilson, in August 1735, Wilson had noted in his diary that ‘I believe it will be by laying on a greater duty.’
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Now the Master of the Rolls had backed off as well. The malt distillers were still too powerful to touch.

Instead, Sir Joseph had decided to target the other end of the spirit chain: not tuns of raw spirit but drams of gin. His final proposal, put to the House on 8 March, was for a massive new retail duty applying to spirits sold in small quantities. With twenty shillings a gallon added to their price, a dram of gin would cost the same as a week’s lodging. On top of that there would be an annual licence for spirit retailers costing £50. Most Londoners didn’t earn that much in a year. On paper it could hardly have looked more convincing. No one doubted that Sir Joseph’s plan added up to prohibition.

Only a few MPs heard alarm bells ringing. William Pulteney had been an ally of Walpole, once, but they had fallen out in 1725. Pulteney agreed that gin-drinking ‘has of late years grown to a monstrous height.’ There didn’t seem to be anyone in London who disputed that. But he couldn’t persuade himself to make the leap from that to ‘a total prohibition upon the retail of such liquors.’ It seemed unfair to ban spirits all of a sudden, when successive governments had encouraged the distilling industry for so long. ‘Likewise,’ he went on, ‘the retail of them has been so much encouraged, or at least connived at, [that] there is not now an inn,
an alehouse, or a coffee-house in the kingdom, but what owes a great part of its profits to the retail of such liquors.’
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He was worried about sugar imports, and about employment. He thought reformers were probably exaggerating the problem. He couldn’t understand why they were dodging the obvious solution of a still-head duty on the malt distillers.

And, alone in the House, William Pulteney also stopped, just for a moment, to wonder how people were likely to react to prohibition. ‘I foresee [they] will raise great dissatisfaction to the present government,’ he warned, ‘and may produce such riots and tumults, as may endanger our present establishment.’ Alone in the House, he was struck by the injustice of a wealthy Parliament legislating to curb the habits of the poor: ‘A poor journeyman or labourer shall not have a dram … whereas if a man is rich enough to lay out eight or ten shillings at a time, or profligate enough to pawn his coat … he may drink as much … as he pleases … If spirituous liquors … are of such a pernicious nature, that they ought never to be tasted without the advice and prescription of a physician, we ought to take care of the rich, as well as of the poor … I can see no reason for our making any such invidious distinction.’

None of that worried the reformers. And on the evening of 8 March, with Jekyll’s four resolutions in the bag, they began their celebrations. Lord Egmont recorded that, ‘Dr Hales, minister of Teddington, who dined with me, had tears in his eyes for joy.’
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Within a few days newspapers noted that, ‘all manner of grain fell at Bear Key, and distiller’s barley bore no price at all.’
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Thomas Wilson published the second edition of
Distilled Spirituous Liquors
a week later, and sent a copy to every MP. He had a celebratory dinner with Stephen Hales, who ‘liked my pamphlet very well.’
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But they had let off the fireworks too soon. They should have been paying attention to Sir Robert Walpole. Sir Robert was no
reformer. He wasn’t interested in Madam Geneva’s looks or her morals, only in her fortune.

In the very first debate the Prime Minister had quietly wondered what would happen to royal revenues if the distillery was closed down. ‘If the House … intended it as a total Prohibition … he hoped they would seriously consider of replacing this duty in some other way.’
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He had reckoned the loss as high as £292,000 a year, but the House hardly noticed. ‘Flushed with success,’ as Pulteney recalled in a letter he published later that year against the Gin Act, ‘and not being opposed in this first righteous essay, they thought it impossible that there should be any fallibility in any part of so well-intended a scheme.’
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As business moved to a close on 8 March, Sir Robert raised his hand again. ‘The Chairman of the Committee being about to make a report of the … resolutions to the House,’ reported Chandler’s
Proceedings
, ‘Sir Robert Walpole stood up.’ The Prime Minister moved ‘that the Committee might sit again before any report was made to the House.’ He was worried about revenues. ‘As the duties proposed to be laid upon spirituous liquors would certainly very much diminish the consumption of such spirits, it was not to be expected that the duties upon such spirits would produce so much yearly as they had formerly done.’ He asked for a committee ‘to consider of ways and means to make good the deficiencies.’

Most MPs still hadn’t noticed, but – timing his move with his usual care – Sir Robert Walpole had just hijacked prohibition.

The plan became clearer a week later. The Prime Minister had been doing some calculations. Spirit duties, according to his figures, had raised £70,000 a year for the Civil List. Prohibition was going to leave the crown short. Walpole knew exactly when to bore the House. His speech was, as Pulteney recorded drily, ‘a long, laborious account, full of infinite knowledge.’ But William Pulteney, for one, could see exactly what was going on. Buried
within the speech was not only a covert raid on the sinking fund which was supposed to be paying off the nation’s debts, but another free gift for the Civil List.

When realisation dawned on the House what Walpole was up to, it immediately ‘put a stop to the unanimity, which had long reign’d upon this subject … open’d the eyes of many, and made the bill to be consider’d entirely in a different light.’ The move to ban gin, backed by almost the entire House, had suddenly turned into a political flashpoint. Walpole had used Jekyll and the reformers as a front for his own political game – a plan to increase revenues and profit the crown. ‘I am fully convinced,’ a Pulteney supporter wrote, that the Master of the Rolls ‘had no share in, nor knew anything of [these] designs.’
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Jekyll had been duped. The ‘grant of … a large annual sum to the Civil List was the chief, tho the secret and conceal’d … motive’ of the Ministry all along.
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The Gin Bill was no longer about gin. It was 1729 all over again; it was about money and power. The opposition were too weak to stop Sir Robert Walpole, but they could delay a second reading, and that delay gave the distillers time to fight a rear-guard action. The American sugar planters came in with a petition and a tract, and the sugar ports of Bristol and Liverpool backed them up. Early in April, ‘such of the Distillers as are of the Younger Branch of the Trade’ produced a pamphlet bemoaning the plight of those who ‘have taken long leases of houses, shops, and warehouses … at advanced rents … and have also laid out great sums of money in fitting up the same,’ and asked Parliament for compensation. One amendment got the definition of small quantities – which attracted the new retail duty – reduced from five gallons to two. Another allowed distillers to pursue other trades without going through apprenticeship. The introduction of the Act was put back from June until Michaelmas – 29 September.

But those were rearguard victories. They didn’t stop prohibition, any more than the opposition could stop Walpole’s Civil List gambit. On 10 April the committee debate ended, and ‘it was observable,’
Read’s Weekly Journal
noted, ‘that the distillers of this city and suburbs, who on Wednesday swarmed in the courts of request and lobby of the House of Commons went away under a very visible mortification.’ The Act for Laying a Duty upon the Retailers of Spirituous Liquors had become law.

The Act’s severity didn’t just show in the twenty-shilling duty on gallons of gin sold in small quantities, or the £50 retail licence. It was in the penalties for anyone who evaded the Act. There was a £100 fine for unlicensed retailers, and a £10 fine for anyone selling gin ‘about the streets, highways, or fields, in any wheelbarrow or basket … on any bulk or bulks, stall or stalls, or in any shed or sheds.’ Magistrates had the right of summary conviction and could summon Excise men at will to help secure a conviction. A hawker who defaulted on the fine made himself liable to two months’ hard labour.

For William Pulteney, prohibition was ‘one of the boldest experiments in politics that was ever made in a free country: and seems as if intended to try the submission and obedience of our people.’ He had no doubt ‘that before next session it will be found necessary to alter the whole scheme of this Bill, and to contrive some new method for preventing the excessive use of spirituous liquors among our common people.’
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But William Pulteney was wrong. It would be seven long years before prohibition was repealed.

In 1743, considering the achievement of Sir Joseph Jekyll – who had been dead for five years by then – the Earl of Chesterfield would tell the House of Lords, ‘If the promoter of the Bill against gin had not been known to be a very sober man, I should have suspected him to be an excessive gin-drinker; because when all the
world were crying out for a law to put a stop to that abominable vice, he, in order to stifle that cry, contrived a law which evidently appeared to be inexecutable.’ In the same debate, the Earl of Ilay exactly caught the odd, symbiotic relationship of the Gin Craze and the Gin Panic. ‘The law … was passed in a sort of mad fit, and has been an affront to our government ever since it was passed. Every man that could foresee any thing, foresaw, that it was such a law as could not be executed. But as the poor had run gin-mad, the rich had run anti-gin-mad, and in this fit of madness, no one would give ear to reason.’
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