Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (9 page)

There were plenty of Londoners, if it came to that, who weren’t sure the magistrates were the right men to cope with Madam Geneva in the first place.

Magistrates didn’t just sit in judgement. They were there to investigate crimes as well, to take evidence and call witnesses. Their business didn’t even end with crime. It extended from street repairs to the price of bread, from neighbour disputes to blasphemy. It was the magistrate who would chastise a shopkeeper for blocking a street, the magistrate who would direct a raid on a brothel – quite often in person. Magistrates were police chiefs, local council, social
services and highways agency all rolled into one. If some new vice reared its head on the streets, it was the job of magistrates to alert the higher authorities by ‘presenting’ it at Quarter Sessions. If the King issued a proclamation against gambling-houses or brothels, it was the magistrate who found himself interviewing drunken young rakes at three in the morning.

To make the life of magistrates even harder, there was a constant risk of being sued for mistakes, and the bureaucracy was nightmarish. London was divided into separate jurisdictions. The City of London took care of its own affairs; the Lord Mayor and Aldermen formed its ‘Commission of Peace’. Across the river, Southwark counted as the City ward of Bridge Without, but the rest of south London fell under the jurisdiction of Surrey. The eastern suburbs were run by the justices of Tower Hamlets. Everything to the west and north fell into Middlesex. The City of Westminster, meanwhile – an island within Middlesex – had its own Commission of Peace, and was usually taken as a kind of junior partner to Middlesex. Most magistrates ended up sitting on two or three different Commissions of Peace just to make sense of it all.

They had no training. Nobody paid them a stipend. Magistrates were supposed to be independent gentlemen, endowed with private means that lifted them beyond corruption or partiality. The trouble was that few gentlemen in London wanted the job. John Evelyn was approached to join the Surrey Commission back in 1666, but refused because of ‘the perpetual trouble thereof in these numerous parishes.’
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There was an income threshold of £300 – to keep out undesirables – but in 1732 that would have to be cut back to £100. Anyone with an income of £300 could find better things to do in London than sit up till all hours being abused by drunken streetwalkers.

The result was that the London Commissions of Peace were taken up not only by altruistic gentry, but by men who saw yet
another chance to make money out of the city’s teeming streets. When the writer Henry Fielding took his place as Westminster’s senior magistrate in 1749, he complained that ‘a predecessor of mine used to boast that he made one thousand pounds a year in his office.’
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A thousand pounds a year put the canny magistrate in the bracket of the most successful doctors and top businessmen. There were plenty of ways for a ‘trading justice’ to wring money out of the bench. The trick with whores was simple. ‘The plan used to be to issue warrants,’ as a House of Commons committee was told, ‘and take up all the poor devils in the streets, and then there was the bailing them, 2/4, which the magistrate had; and taking up a hundred girls, that would make, at 2/4, £11.13.4.’
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In January 1726, Westminster JPs had to put out a warrant against their own clerk, Simon Parry, ‘for extorting money from victuallers & pretending to renew their licences.’
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So it was a disparate group of zealots and cynics, trading justices and reformers, hard-working public servants and bumbling amateurs that took the burden of controlling all the crime and chaos of Middlesex in the 1720s. It wasn’t surprising that their pronouncements should be greeted with a certain amount of scepticism. Nor was it surprising that within the Commission of Peace, Sir John Gonson and some like-minded zealots should decide to form themselves into a tightly knit cabal. A couple of years later, after a campaign against gambling, the Westminster Order Book would record the magistrates who ‘entered into a society to suppress gaming houses in … Westminster & … Middlesex in the year 1723 … who call themselves a convention.’
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Sir John Gonson headed that list of twenty-six names. It was the same group that decided to put Madam Geneva on the rack.

The trouble was the magistrates didn’t have the powers they needed to deal with her. They had pointed the finger. They had complained that ‘brandy shops are … the cause of more mischief
& inconveniences to this town, than all other publick houses joined together.’
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But when they set to work, it turned out there was almost nothing they could do to run Madam Geneva out of town.

She was protected by law. When the Middlesex magistrates met to consider Sir John’s report on 13 October 1721, they resolved ‘to suppress all houses, shops and other places where these sorts of liquors are retailed without licence.’
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But most gin-sellers didn’t need a licence anyway. Under the Act of 1701, distillers and chandlers’ shops were exempt. Even if the magistrates found an unlicensed dram-shop and tried to shut it down, they ended up gagging on red tape. ‘The certificate of conviction,’ they complained to the Lord Chancellor, ‘amounts to above threescore sheets of paper writ copywise, and the expense attending them, which no person or parish is obliged to disburse, in effect renders this method impractical & encourages the offenders to continue selling liquors without licences.’
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With the very first action of their campaign, the magistrates had run up against a brick wall.

The licensing exemption was bad enough, but there was more than that to make a reformer’s blood boil. Sir John Gonson soon spotted another legal loophole. Troops in the early eighteenth century were billeted on public houses. It was one of the constant laments of alehouse-keepers and victuallers; the billet filled their houses with unruly soldiers, and always ended up costing them money. But the Mutiny Act – which was passed each year to regulate such matters – exempted distillers’ shops and chandlers from having to house soldiers. It was based on the Licensing Act. So drink-sellers had only to buy a still and they could laugh at the billeting officer who turned up with six hulking soldiers in search of a home.

The law was actively encouraging the spread of back-room stills. ‘[Brandy-shops] distil small quantities only,’ complained a letter which the magistrates fired off to the Secretary at War the day they approved Sir John’s report, ‘& yet insist they are thereby
distillers within this exception, and as such to be exempted from quartering soldiers & taking licences, the two greatest inconveniences which attend those who keep any kind of publick house.’
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To make matters worse, the powerful malt distillers were throwing their weight behind gin-shops. ‘Almost all that sell brandy or Geneva shelter themselves from quartering of soldiers,’ the letter went on, ‘& on all occasion threaten the Justice & Constables with actions, if they quarter upon them, wherein they [claim] to be supported by those … distillers, of whom they buy the waters they sell.’ Threatened with legal action, constables backed down.

And for the moment, that was where the magistrates had to back down as well. There was nothing else they could do but write angry letters. All the 1721 campaign achieved was to highlight the charmed circle in which Madam Geneva lived. No action could be taken against her until the law was changed. The campaign of the zealots was over almost before it had begun.

Not everybody in London was sorry about that. For many, Sir John Gonson and his ‘convention’ sounded too much like the Societies for Reformation of Manners. The zealots’ ‘busy care and officious instruction’ were criticised in the
London Journal
. ‘Every man must carry his own conscience,’ the paper warned. ‘Neither has the magistrate a right to direct the private behaviour of men; nor has the magistrate, or any body else, any manner of power to model people’s speculations, any more than their dreams.’
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Others had already complained about the way reformers of Sir John’s stamp picked on the poor. After all, it wasn’t only the poor who drank and gambled. ‘Your annual lists of criminals appear,’ had been Defoe’s early riposte to the Societies for Reformation of Manners. ‘But no Sir Harry or Sir Charles is here.’
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A
Poor Man’s Plea
in 1703 had been that ‘We don’t find the rich drunkard carried before my Lord Mayor, nor a swearing, lewd merchant punished.’
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In any case, not everyone in London joined the backlash when the South Sea Mountain erupted; a good number set off for the alehouse instead. Porter, a draught rival to bottled imports, was invented in Shoreditch in autumn 1722. Much stronger than ordinary beer, it sold for 3d a ‘pot’, or quart. The same year saw growth in spirits production hit a new peak. While the ink was drying on Sir John Gonson’s report, output of raw spirits was going up by twenty per cent a year. More than three and a quarter million gallons of spirits were distilled in England in 1723, four-fifths of them in London. And those were just raw spirits – turning them into gin increased the volume by a third. Not all of London’s spirits were being compounded into gin, of course, nor drunk in London. But for that matter, official figures didn’t pick up what the distillers managed to hide from Excise men, and left out imports from Holland. It all meant that by 1723 each man, woman, child, market-woman and magistrate in London was getting through something like a pint of gin a week.

All that was bad enough for reformers. Worse was to come. In 1723, the Grand Jury of Middlesex furiously proscribed a poem by the little-known doctor and writer, Bernard Mandeville. The poem,
The Fable of the Bees
, had first been published back in 1714 but had attracted little notice, possibly because no one could see what Mandeville (Man-Devil, he was soon being dubbed) was getting at. Reissued in 1723 with copious explanatory notes, it caused a storm. The book was sub-titled
Public Vices and Private Benefits
, and Mandeville’s subversive notion was that national prosperity might come not from frugal living and hard work, but from the very vices, fashions and luxuries that reformers abhorred. Whores made work for seamstresses (and doctors). The consumer society had found its first apologist. When it came to gin, the ‘large catalogue of solid blessings that accrue from … [this] evil’ included ‘the rents that are received, the ground that is tilled, the tools that are
made, the cattle that are employed, and, above all, the multitude of poor that are maintained, by the variety of labour, required in husbandry, in malting, in carriage, and distillation.’
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It was bad enough that Madam Geneva should be tolerated in London at all. Now she was being held up as a pillar of the economy.

Maybe that was what stung Sir John and his convention of magistrates back into action, or maybe they were inspired by a 1724 sermon against strong-water shops by Dr Chandler, Bishop of Litchfield (the occasion had been the annual address preached to the Societies for Reformation of Manners). Either way, when Westminster Quarter Sessions met in February 1725, the magistrates returned to the attack. They started by ordering their constables out onto the streets to make a tally of shops which sold gin.
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But this time Sir John Gonson and his colleagues knew what they were after. To clamp down on unlicensed gin-shops wasn’t enough. This time they wanted a change in the law.

Before the Westminster report could be written, the magistrates’ campaign widened to the whole of Middlesex. ‘The cry of [this] wickedness,’ proclaimed Sir Daniel Dolins, Chair of Middlesex Quarter Sessions, in October 1725, ‘I mean excessive drinking gin, and other pernicious spirits; is become so great, so loud, so importunate; and the growing mischiefs from it so many, so great, so destructive to the lives, families, trades and business of such multitudes, especially of the lower, poorer sort of people; that I can no longer doubt, but it must soon reach the ears of our legislators in parliament assembled; and there meet with … effectual redress.’
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The survey of gin-shops was also widened to cover the whole district. Constables tramped up and down the alleys of Middlesex, noting down names, asking questions. Some of the constables scribbled their notes on rough scraps of paper (‘a list of the Chandler shops that sell drams in Suffolk Street Ward by John Cameron Constable’). Others embellished their returns
with pompous flourishes (‘Civitas et Libertas Westm. in Com Middx. The Returns of Rich Dew Constable of Exchange Ward in the Parish of St Martins in the Fields in the Liberty & County aforesaid, of all those that sells Geneva’). There were scatter-brained officers who scrawled down a rough list of householders, and more meticulous types who added trades, addresses and shop signs. The constables struggled with foreign names. They were jeered at when they went into brandy-shops. The pompous Richard Dew left Church Lane laughing up their sleeves the day he was taken in by ‘Will Wildgoose, victualler.’
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But the numbers were serious enough. On 13 January 1726, the Middlesex committee delivered its report. In Westminster and Middlesex alone – leaving out the whole of Southwark and the City of London – there were 6,187 properties where gin was sold. In St Giles-in-the-Fields, you could buy a dram in every fifth house.

That sounded bad enough, but the shops and houses in the constables’ returns were just the tip of the iceberg. ‘Altho’ this number is exceeding great,’ the report went on, ‘we have great reason to believe, it is very short of the true number … [for] ’tis known there are many others who sell by retail … in the streets … some on bulks and stalls set up for that purpose, and others in wheelbarrows … and many more who sell privately in garrets, cellars, back rooms, and other places.’