Smuggling in the Wight: 1700 - 1850

Imagine a foul-weather black night on the Back of the Wight in the late 1700s. A large sailing ship noses her way carefully around the ship killing ledges towards the towering cliffs.

Aboard the blackened ship expert local pilots stare up at a coastal cottage. In a high narrow window a blue light briefly flashes to indicate the ship is “on the spot” and the “coast is clear”. The ship returns a single blue “flink” of light from a spout lantern.

Aboard the ship the experienced crew lower boats and ropes carrying lines of barrels as the ship gently beaches, carefully anchored so that she can be quickly winched back into deep water.

The cargo’s lowered from the dark skiff’s side
And the tow line drags the tubs thro’ the tide
Now pray ye all that luck may bide
And no revenue men may this way stride

The jagged cliffs of the chine above the shore are now alive with hundreds of men and women climbing and descending to a scene of organised chaos on the beach. Human chains stretch out to the ship, ropes of barrels are dragged ashore cut into twos and lifted on the shoulders of men who return to ascend the slippery chine.

Speed is of the essence in getting thousands of gallons of concentrated alchohol and tons of tea onto the beach, up to the top of the cliff and away across the coutryside before the next Revenue patrol finds them. Pack animals drawn from farms in a ten mile radius are loaded and the cargo dispersed to a thousand secret hiding places before dawn.

Merrily now in goodly row
Away, away the smugglers go
Threading their way through hedge and ditch
Though the night is dark and black as pitch

This scene was repeated many hundreds of times, indicative of a huge illegal industry, possibly the greatest industry on the Island at the time.

For one hundred and fifty years, from 1700 to 1850 virtually the entire population of the Island was directly engaged in or implicated in the criminal activity of smuggling contraband.

The smugglers faced arrest, imprisonment, crippling fines, confiscation of property, transportation to Australia, compulsory service in the navy and possible execution. Yet the Islanders believed they were in the right. The smuggling laws they flouted ran against their deep seated principle of “free trade”.

The Golden Age of Smuggling 1700-1815 saw the culmination of an industry already seven centuries old and still with us today. “The Golden Age” was brought about by exhorbitant taxes on imports creating huge profit incentives. It came to an end after 1815 when the state finally brought sufficient forces to bear to enforce the law. It was followed by the more sophisticated Scientific Age of Smuggling 1815-1850. The industry finally lost purpose with the victory of the free traders in Parliament.

It had been the “custom” for wine importers to give the king the best of their cargo since 979AD. For as long as there have been taxes on trade there has been smuggling. From 1275 this mostly involved the illegal export of wool to the continent.

In 1689 Britian entered a 126 year period of conflict with France, Spain, and the Netherlands for control of the world’s trade. Britain was officially at war for seventy of these years, wars fought in every continent, wars that were ruinously expensive. The landlord dominated Parliament kept the land-tax low and instead piled new taxes onto luxury consumption. Taxes were levied on an amazing range of items, hats, gloves, playing cards, windows... However the most important were the drugs of pleasure, alchohol, tobacco chocolate and tea. For example tea cost two shillings a pound but was taxed at five shillings a pound. Huge profits offered irrestistable temptation from the respectable aristocarcy to the criminal underclass.

By 1760 there were 800 items which had import duty paid on them. By 1810 this had mushroomed to 2,100 items. Every new tax made another item profitable for the smugglers. The smuggling industry reversed from exporting wool to importing these luxury items. France, Britain’s bitter rival, built warehouses for British smugglers to stock up their orders, the goods pre-packaged, waterproofed and designed for being carried on packhorse and human shoulders.

To counter the rise in smuggling Parliament passed increasingly repressive measures. In 1698 the Revenue augmented their staff of Land, Coast and Tide Waiters with Riding Officers to patrol every part of the coast on horseback. In 1713 they were backed up by squadrons of dragoons, a type of mounted light infantry. The Revenue also employed ships, fast sloop-rigged “cutters”, to intercept the smugglers at sea. Whole categories of vessels used in smuggling became illegal. Informants were paid £50 for betraying their comrades. Anyone found within five miles of the coast without good reason could be flogged or imprisoned. One could be hanged for simply dressing in disguise.

Despite these extreme laws the smuggling industry grew so fast that by the late Eighteenth Century the law had been almost completely subverted. In 1787 Prime Minister William Pitt estimated that 400,000 of the 600,000 gallons of brandy imported into Britiain was smuggled. The trade was so profitable that it only needed one cargo in three getting through. Everyone benefitted. The rich could acquire their luxuries, while poor labourers could earn in one night more than a week’s pay on the land, plus some tea and brandy and a hot meal thrown in.

The smugglers used a wide variety of vessels. The biggest were wide-beamed shallow draft 300 ton luggers. They could each carry 3,000 four gallon keg barrels and twelve tons of tea and could cross the channel in just eight hours. They were armed with light cannon and manned by highly trained crews.

In contrast the fourteen foot gigs of Bembridge also made a profitable trade with Cherbourg and Harfleur. Each could carry twenty tubs enough to finance “many of the rows of Bembridge cottages”. The larger rowing galleys could be up to 120 feet in length with a beam of twenty feet. Unlike their pursuers they could row into the wind and once beached, the rowers could carry the craft inland. A Revenue captain compared chasing a galley with a cutter to “sending a cow after a hare.”

All of Britain’s intricate coastline was exploited by the smugglers but the main highway was across the Channel particularly the coast from Hurst Castle to the Isle of Purbeck. The Island’s location made it an ideal storage depot “as if the Island were a huge smuggling lugger anchored just off the coast of the mainland” (Morley)

The industry involved every section of society. It was led by the wealthy landed “Venturers” who organised the capital and facilitated the trade through their powerful positions in local society, for example as magistrates. Their bailiffs often doubled as “Agents” the gentlemen responsible for collecting in the shares from the farmers and wealthier people. The Agents also accompanied the Captain of the smuggling ship to the great depots in France and the Channel Islands to complete the order. The local clergyman or school teacher would become the “Clerk” who would secretly record the complex accounts.

When the time came for a landing the bulk of the labouring population and farm animals were employed in moving the contraband inshore. “Tubmen” carried the tubs of brandy, guarded from attack by “Batmen”, thugs armed with clubs, and later, despite the death penalty, with pistols. Once these “Gentlemen of the Night” had dispersed the cargo the detailed processing and distribution involved most of the rest of the population.

“Practically all the houses on the east and West coasts of the Island were used as places of concealment”. Houses were built with secret storage spaces incorporated in their design. Tubs were also hidden in haystacks, ploughed fields, tombs, disguised as chalk rocks, or dug into holes in gardens. The women watered down the 98 degree proof brandy and added the burnt sugar to provide the brown colour the British market expected. Then the contraband had to be dispered in ever smaller amounts, hidden in baskets and clothing to escape detection on the road.

On the Island each village had its own gang and gang leader, who was probably the “Lander”, the beachmaster controlling the movement of the contraband from ship to secret cache. As their power grew, the law became a joke. The Revenue service was riddled with corruption and if its officers could not be bribed they were opposed with violence. For example in 1754 when two Riding Officers attempted to arrest Tim Dyer in the hamlet of Ventnor they were beaten up by his family and friends.

Even in Cowes, where the Revenue head-quarters was based, the law was flouted. When William Goodwin raided the house of Thomas Francis the Constable refused him entry to a particular room until all the brandy within had been poured away. In 1770 when two officers arrested John Hall in the Plume and Feathers they were assualted in the street and the liberated Hall fired a couple of pistols at them for good measure.

When William Arnold took up the Post of Collector of Customs at Cowes in 1777 he found the smugglers building their ships in the port and trading contraband to Hampshire in broad daylight. He felt powerless as the revenue cutters had been withdrawn for service in the American War of Independence (1775-1783).

He reported to London that the smugglers were using big cutters and luggers of up to 300 tons, and so powerfully armed that the revenue men were powerless to stop them even in daylight. These ships escourted convoys of smaller vessels and were unloaded by gangs of up to three hundred men.

Arnold appealed for not only cutters but also a warship to cope with the superior smuggling ships. At the end of the war the government provided him ships as his methods proved effective. The tipping point came with the deployment of HMS Orestes a 300 ton 18 gun sloop of war.

In 1784 Orestes fought two battles capturing two heavilly armed smuggling ships. By the mid 1780s Arnold had control of the Solent and began to extend his power over the gangs on the Island and established regular intensive surveillance of whole coast. In 1785 this tough policy led to the shooting dead of Thomas Sivell of Binstead when the revenue boarded his ship in the Spithead. His gravestone reads records a great sense of injustice:-

All you that pass pray look and see
How soon my life was took from me
They spill’d my blood that was so dear
But God is Good and just and true
And will reward to each their due

Arnold died in 1801, an early death generally attributed to overwork. He was an exceptional civil servant in an age of universal corruption in public service. He was liked and respected by everyone he dealt with. He is remembered now as the father of the famous Dr Thomas Arnold, later Master of Rugby, who appears in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, who taught a new generation of Victorian civil servants in his father’s values.

The Golden Age of Smuggling came to an end after the final victory over France at Waterloo in 1815. The following year the Royal Navy took over the revenue cutters. The navy was well prepared by years of blockade of the continent and the impact was immediate. Seizures for 1816 included 875 smuggling vessels, 370,000 gallons of spirits, 42,000 yards of silk and 19,000lbs of tea.

The result was a new era of smuggling, known as Scientific Smuggling. This involved smaller cleverer operations, greater secrecy and guile. Contraband was now often hidden within legal goods such as hollowed and waterfroofed hams. Parts of ships were built hollow, even down to the handles of oars being used to hide brandy. Tobacco was plaited into the hemp rigging and cargoes of contraband increasingly dragged underwater and dropped in shallows for retrieval later.

In 1822 the Preventive Water Guard, established in 1809, was transformed into the Coastguard. Along the south coast they added 151 manned stations and 65 vessels to the forces of the Revenue and Navy. The Island landscape is dotted with their neat military terraces.

Despite these measures the extent to which the Island was still ruled by free traders is well illustrated by the trial of Lieutenant Josiah Dornford in 1836 at Yarmouth. Dornford commanded the Freshwater Coastguard and one night managed to miss a two hour gunfight when his colleagues at Totland were overwhelmed by a gang of smugglers. Two of the Totland Coastguards were badly beaten and Dornford was accused of collusion with the free traders.

What is most telling about the trial is the fact that so many of the Island’s gentry and clergy came to the trial to show their support for Dornford that his acquittal was assured.

Dornford’s boss, Commander Deare wrote to his superiors that year. Despite the fact that his men had arrested ten ships and eighty-one smugglers in the period 1834-36, he still felt it was a losing battle, “eight out of ten of the population are consumers of contraband... and they consider there is no harm in it.” He noted that spirits on the Island were £1 cheaper per tub “less than in any part of the coast of Hampshire” which shows that the Island continued to act as an offshore wholesale depot for the south of England.

In the following years Parliament was increasingly divided on the issue of free trade. In 1846 the Tories split, many joining the liberal Whigs to repeal the Corn Laws and other restrictions to trade. In 1848 alone 450 items were liberated from liability to tax.

Smuggling continued but declined. As late as 1860 it was still the fulltime occupation of the men of Niton but in the 1870s the Niton gang were partly gaoled. After 1875, smuggling yarns were acquiring the stuff of legend. The code of secrecy ensured that most of the old protagonists took the true stories to their graves. As a result little is known as nothing was written down. We are just left with some stories and popular poems.

Up to this year the Island had a pretty unique Museum of Smuggling at Ventnor Botanic Gardens, but this year, a day before opening for the season the owners packed their collections and disappeared to Texas!