Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (23 page)

Maybe the ‘mob’ were starting to enjoy the sight of a law sinking without trace. London’s constant undercurrent of subversion and disrespect had bubbled up to the surface. There was even a new anti-hero to admire that autumn. ‘Yesterday morning,’ reported the
Daily Journal
a week before Michaelmas, ‘about nine o’clock, a gentleman with his lady and son, in a coach and six, were attacked by two highwaymen well-mounted … on Barnes Common, and robbed of their watches and money to the value of about £40.’ The paper couldn’t be sure, but the highwaymen were ‘supposed to be
Turpin and his companion.’
³⁴
Dick Turpin, an Essex farmer’s son, was on the path which would take him to the gallows and a place in popular mythology.

Madam Geneva had been blamed for crime and social breakdown, for uppity tradesmen, dishonest servants and the decline of the nation. Outlawing her was supposed to return the country to a better, more wholesome age. But, on 2 December, it was reported in the press that ‘the Commissioners of Excise … have clearly discovered the late act to be ineffectual; and notwithstanding the high penalties inflicted on the retailers by the said act, it is daily sold in garrets, workshops &c.’
³⁵
Two months into prohibition, it was all going horribly wrong.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BOOTLEG

B
efore prohibition there were gin stalls; afterwards there were basket-women with bottles under their skirts and ‘running shabby fellows.’ Before prohibition there were distillers’ shops and apothecaries; afterwards, there was Captain Dudley Bradstreet.

Dudley Bradstreet was an adventurer, a soldier and a con-man. His autobiography read like a work of fiction, and probably was one. His life was as random as any eighteenth-century novel. In the ’45 Rebellion he would be a spy in the Young Pretender’s camp. He was the one – he claimed – who persuaded Bonnie Prince Charlie to turn back at Derby. The irony was how like Colonel Thomas De Veil he was. Captain Dudley Bradstreet was another ambitious chancer with an immigrant background, another military man with ‘a bold address’ but no cash. If things had turned out differently, Dudley Bradstreet could have been the one sitting in a magistrate’s office, sending bootleggers off to Bridewell.

But he wasn’t. In 1736, Dudley Bradstreet was in London, in debt and at a loose end, and when prohibition came he saw an
opportunity. ‘The mob being very noisy and clamorous for want of their beloved liquor,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘which few or none … dared to sell, it soon occurred to me to venture upon that trade.’
¹
He wasted no time about it: ‘I got an acquaintance,’ he recalled, ‘to take a house in Blue Anchor Alley.’ He bought the sign of a cat and nailed it to the window. ‘I then caused a leaden pipe, the small end out about an inch, to be placed under the paw of the cat.’ The other end of the pipe, inside the house, had a funnel on it. Dudley Bradstreet asked around for the best gin in London, and spent the last £13 he had at Langdale’s distillery in Holborn. Then he was ready.

He had the word put about ‘that gin would be sold by the cat at my window next day.’ Business was slow to start with, but when the first customer arrived it was worth the three-hour wait. ‘I heard the chink of money, and a comfortable voice say, “Puss, give me twopennyworth of gin.”’ Two pennies appeared through the cat’s mouth. Dudley Bradstreet raised his bottle and poured two penn’orth of gin carefully into the funnel. By the end of the day he had made six shillings.

That was only the start. Soon Dudley Bradstreet was turning over £3–4 a day. Parliament could pass whatever laws it liked against Madam Geneva, but Londoners hadn’t lost their taste for her company. ‘The street now became quite impassable,’ Bradstreet went on, ‘by the numbers who came out of curiosity to see the enchanted cat, for so Puss was called. This concourse of idle people had such an effect, that my neighbours went to their several landlords and declared, their houses were not tenantable unless they got the cat-man removed; they asked who the cat-man was, but received no other information than that he was the greatest nuisance they ever saw or heard of.’

Imitators were soon copying Dudley Bradstreet’s idea. The cat caught on. ‘In the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields,’ reported
Read’s Weekly Journal
, ‘and other parts of the town … the buyer comes into the entry and cries
Puss
, and is immediately answered by a voice from within,
Mew
. A drawer is then thrust out, into which the buyer puts his money, which when drawn back, is soon after thrust out again, with the quantity of gin required.’
²
All over town, gin-sellers were finding ways to keep the gin flowing. Londoners weren’t going to give up their favourite dram when the gentlemen who had banned it were still knocking back the port and smuggled French brandy. It was that discrimination between poor and rich that Lonsdale blamed for the Gin Act’s failure when he addressed the House of Lords in the debate on its repeal. ‘It was this invidious distinction,’ he declared, ‘that set the mob so much against the execution of that law.’ If anything, prohibition ‘made them more fond of dram-drinking than ever; because they then began to look upon it as an insult upon the rich.’
³

Insulting the rich was, after all, one of London’s favourite pastimes. Watermen abused their betters as a matter of professional pride. ‘A man in court dress,’ Casanova moaned, ‘cannot walk in the streets of London without being pelted with mud by the mob.’ Another foreign visitor was shocked to see that ‘the people in general testify but little respect for their superiors … Even the Majesty of the throne is often not sufficiently respected.’
⁴
Uffenbach described an election at Tothill Fields where one noble candidate was opposed by ‘a common townsman and brewer called Cross.’ When the nobles appeared, ‘we were amazed to hear the vile remarks and insults that the others hurled at them, and the mob even made so bold as to pursue them with filth and stones.’
⁵

There was a devilish kind of humour flowing beneath early eighteenth-century London. Lord Hervey reported how during one of George II’s extended trips to Hanover, ‘on St James’s Gate this advertisement was pasted: “Lost or strayed out of this house, a man who has left a wife and six children on the parish.”’
⁶
A
Brief Description of London
in 1776 tried to put its finger on ‘that sort of pleasantry in conversation, which is … peculiar to [Londoners]. It … gives its sharpest edge to ridicule. Their comedies abound with it, and it never fails to influence the gesture and the tone of voice in a way that cannot easily be explained, but is irresistibly engaging.’
⁷
It was subversive, and it was satirical. A group of coffee-house drunks hired a hackney coach, dressed coachman and postilion in street scavenger’s clothes, and rode it round the Hyde Park ring, in among all the fashionable equipages. In March 1742 a satirical ‘procession of the scald miserable masons’ tagged onto the real freemason’s parade, lampooning their ceremonial with ‘fellows on jack asses … cow horns on their heads, [and] a kettle-drummer on a jack-ass with two butter firkins for kettle-drums.’
⁸
The undercurrent of subversion was there in London’s flirtations with Jacobitism as well, and in its popular heroes. When Jack Sheppard broke out of Newgate for the last time, he spent fifteen days being feted around London and drinking in the gin-shops of Clare Market before they caught him again. Highwaymen posed as latter-day Robin Hoods. Thomas Easter, told by a victim that he looked surprisingly honest, replied, ‘So I am, because I rob the rich to give to the poor.’
⁹

Maybe the urge to tweak aristocratic noses came from an idea about English liberties. Their rulers, after all, were forever telling Englishmen that they were raised above all other nations by being free. ‘I that am born free,’ a pressed sailor told James Oglethorpe in 1728, ‘are not I and the greatest Duke in England equally free born?’
¹⁰
‘This nation is passionately fond of liberty’
¹¹
was Montesquieu’s comment. It was hard to understand of a nation where real political power was still gripped by a small élite. Disraeli would later raise his eyebrows at the way ‘a people without power or education had been induced to believe themselves the freest and most enlightened nation in the world.’
¹²
But Disraeli was writing at a time when the vote seemed the only measure of political freedom. For
most Londoners in the early eighteenth century, the vote wasn’t even on the cards. Instead, they found other ways of demonstrating their freedom from authority. They hurled verbal abuse; they satirised and they ridiculed. They turned law-breakers into heroes.

And they drank gin. When gin was banned, subversion almost became too easy. To cock a snook at the ruling classes in winter 1736, all you had to do was buy a dram. If Parliament was going to outlaw Madam Geneva, that would only make Londoners love her more than ever. By disobeying the law, Londoners could take control of it. The ‘mob’, as Henry Fielding would lament in 1751 – by then he had changed sides and joined the reformers – ‘have not as yet claimed that right which was insisted on by the people or mob in old Rome, of giving a negative voice in the enacting laws, [but] they have clearly exercised this power in controlling their execution. Of this it is easy to give many instances, particularly in the case of the Gin-Act some years ago.’
¹³

Londoners took to prohibition like ducks to water. A subversive counter-culture grew up around illegal gin, a culture of passwords and Puss and Mew houses. And as with any banned drugs, counter-culture names for it proliferated. Londoners didn’t just drink Geneva anymore. They drank Max, Partiality, Blue Ruin, and Flashes of Lightning. They drank White Satin, Bob Makeshift and South Sea Mountain. They got topsey-frizey on My Lady’s Eye-water, the Baulk, the Last Shift, Old Tom. They ended up in the straw on Cock-my-Cap, Kill-Grief, Comfort, and Poverty.

Maybe the fancy names made the drams taste better. The taste of rebellion might have been the only thing which made them palatable at all. Thomas Wilson once claimed that gin was made ‘not so much … from malt, as rotten fruit, urine, lime, human ordure, and any other filthiness from whence a fermentation may be raised, and by throwing in cochylus indice, and other hot poisonous
drugs.’
¹⁴
For once Thomas Wilson was hardly exaggerating. He didn’t need to. The truth about 1730s gin was already bad enough. When a market-woman pulled a brown bottle out from under her skirts, the name was usually the only fancy thing about it.

A hundred years before, distillers had published careful recipes for how to make compound waters. But times had changed since then. For a start, the old, slow way of purifying raw spirit by repeated distillations was out. Bay salt and quick lime – anything alkaline – would do the same trick faster. ‘Calcined and well purified animal bones’ didn’t cost anything at all. When the flavours went in, things went from bad to worse. Even twenty years later, the distiller Ambrose Cooper reckoned that more gin was flavoured with turpentine than with juniper berries. ‘It is surprising,’ he added, ‘that people should accustom themselves to drinking it for pleasure.’
¹⁵

It wasn’t all that surprising. Londoners had spent four years drinking Parliamentary Brandy. But the old way of flavouring spirits by slow distillation was too expensive for bootleggers, and it took too long. It was simpler to add neat flavourings to the raw spirits and give them a quick stir. ‘The only still used in all the … houses in London,’ according to one report at the end of the century, was ‘a glass or brass pestle and mortar.’ That way anyone could brew up gin themselves on the kitchen table at home. One guide for publicans published a recipe. To 120 gallons of raw spirit, twenty under proof, it added a splash of turpentine (for taste), half an ounce of sulphuric acid (for kick), the same of bitter almonds (for bite), a gallon each of lime and rose water (for the bouquet), plus eight ounces of alum boiled up in water and a pint of wine spirits.
¹⁶
That was a fancy drink. In St Giles’s, they didn’t bother with the rose water. It was a moot point, anyway, whether any of the drinkers much cared what their gin tasted like.
‘The delicacy of flavour,’ as a ‘bystander’ put it, ‘is not courted by the vulgar. What they chiefly regard is its being a dram.’
¹⁷
Maybe it was no surprise that bottle labels made their appearance in April 1738, when a Hungary-water producer advertised that ‘to prevent counterfeits, the Black Boy and Comb is pasted on all bottles.’
¹⁸
There was no shortage of counterfeits in St Giles’s.