Historical English crime: Smuggling on Romney Marsh (part 2)

The smuggling of wool out of England declined in the early eighteenth century, as European weavers found cheaper sources of wool elsewhere and other clothing materials, such as cotton, started to appear in Europe. That did not mean that smuggling was at an end, though – in fact, smuggling as it is popularly perceived today was just getting started, for by that time there was more money to be made smuggling goods into Britain (and it was indeed Britain by this point, the UK having been created as a result of the Act of Union in 1707). Products like alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea all had high import duties imposed on them, which led to much smuggling of such goods. Tea in particular was an expensive drink, yet in the early eighteenth century the English were well on their way to becoming a nation of tea-drinkers.

The smuggler, therefore, came to be seen as a public benefactor who could supply tea – or brandy, or tobacco – at a reasonable price. Not everyone thought well of smuggling, though. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, often preached against it, although for the most part his words fell on deaf ears; more than a generation after him, attitudes towards smugglers were better summed up by the essayist Charles Lamb, who described the smuggler as an “honest thief” who robbed “nothing but the revenue – an abstraction I never greatly cared about”. Smugglers could also pay quite well, and many a farm labourer supplemented his meagre income by way of some nocturnal fetching and carrying (quite literally ‘moonlighting’).

Being located on the edge of Romney Marsh, the Sussex port of Rye was very much a smugglers’ town where the magistrates and the riding officers struggled and often failed to keep things under control. Two such magistrates were James Lamb and Allen Grebell, who we have previously encountered as (respectively) the intended victim and the actual victim in the ‘murder by mistake’ case. These gentlemen, who both served as Mayor of Rye in the early-to-mid eighteenth century, are on record as having acquitted those accused of smuggling due to insufficient evidence on more than one occasion, such decisions perhaps being taken more out of fear for their personal safety than any other consideration. Both knew what happened to Gabriel Tomkins, a bailiff who’d arrested one Thomas Moore for a smuggling-related offence at Rye in 1735. After being bailed, Moore went to the Mermaid Inn, nowadays a famous old pub-cum-hotel but then a notorious smuggler hang-out, where he met with several others. Unfortunately for Tomkins, he happened to be staying at the Mermaid Inn. Moore and his friends forced the bailiff out of his room, dragged him out into the street, relieved him of the bail-bonds and arrest warrants that he had on him, took him down to the harbour and put him on a ship to be taken overseas. He was only rescued from that last bit because the captain of the local revenue ship heard what had happened and ordered all of the ships in the harbour to be searched.

The smugglers were violent men, notorious for killing riding officers and anyone else who took too close an interest in their affairs – so much so that many ordinary people were only too happy to turn a blind eye to their activities, such was their fear of incurring the wrath of the smugglers. Lamb and Grebell, and others like them, would have found themselves and their families in danger had they taken a firmer approach to smuggling (Tomkins was lucky he wasn’t killed). At the time, the most notorious group of smugglers operating in the Romney Marsh area were the Hawkhurst Gang, named after the Kentish village of the same name, who during the 1730s and 1740s terrorised Kent and Sussex. They were regular customers at the Mermaid Inn – and when they drank there, they’d sit with their weapons on the tables, clearly with no fear of the authorities.

The seeds of their downfall were sown in October 1747 when they were expecting a large consignment of tea which was due to be landed in Sussex but which in the event was seized when the ship that was carrying it was intercepted at sea and taken to Poole in Dorset. The tea was taken to the custom house at Poole, and it says something for the audacity of the Hawkhurst Gang that they decided to go to Dorset, attack the customs house and steal ‘their’ tea. They duly managed to pull off this heist, but several months later one of their number was arrested in connection with the raid and imprisoned at Chichester. The rest of the gang decided that in order to protect themselves, anyone stepping forward with evidence against their incarcerated comrade should be killed.

Two men – the custom house keeper and a shoemaker – came forward as witnesses to the raid. They were on their way to have their evidence taken by a magistrate when they stopped at a pub called the White Hart in a village called Rowlands Castle (then in Sussex, now in Hampshire). Unfortunately for them, the pub landlady was an ally of the smugglers and she quickly sent a message to the Hawkhurst Gang. It wasn’t long before seven of them turned up; posing as locals, they plied the witnesses with booze until they passed out. When they came to, they found that they’d both been tied astride a horse. The smugglers whipped them and took them to a well where they threatened to throw them in. They then whipped one of them to death and attempted to hang the other; they botched that, so they threw him down the well, and then threw some big stones in after him to finish him off.

When the bodies were found, the sheer brutality of what the smugglers had done turned many against them, and one by one they were rounded up. All seven went on trial for murder at the Chichester Assizes; they were all found guilty and six of them were hanged (the seventh died in prison before he could be taken to the gallows). Of the remaining members of the Hawkhurst Gang still at large, one of them accused another of stealing some of the tea that had been taken in the raid; he beat him to death and hid his body in a pond. He was later arrested for that murder, and he too ended his life on the gallows almost two years after that fateful consignment of tea had been seized. That, more or less, was the end of the Hawkhurst Gang.

But their downfall did not deter others – indeed, it left a vacuum that other smuggling gangs were quick to fill. The situation on land was bad, for even if a smuggler was arrested it was notoriously difficult to secure a conviction, such was the intimidatory nature of the smuggling gangs. At sea, meanwhile, the revenue men were invariably outnumbered – in 1720, for example, the captain of the Rye revenue ship reported: “3 large Calais sloops loaded with brandy &c lye now off this Harbour, about 30 men in each sloop watching for my comeing out. If I have not more men or a Man of Warr ordered to cruise with me I am useless, & the rideing officers dare not appear on ye coast.” Throughout the eighteenth century, there were never enough revenue ships to deal with smugglers, with the various overseas wars in which Britain was involved meaning that for long periods of time the Royal Navy wasn’t able to help out in any great numbers.

As far as the government was concerned, smuggling was a clear public order problem, especially in Kent and Sussex where smuggling gangs were to all intents and purposes private armies; troops were posted to coastal towns but they could be withdrawn at times of war. On Romney Marsh, it was said, “the smugglers go around in such large gangs and are so daring that it is absolutely necessary to have military force”. There was an obvious solution, and that was to cut the import taxes so as to make smuggling economically unviable. Pitt the Younger understood this, and in the 1780s he cut the duty on tea and reduced the duty on French wine, but any hopes of putting a stop to smuggling by lowering import duties were dashed when Britain found herself at war with Revolutionary France in 1792 (a situation that would last, on and off, until 1815); in times of war, taxes had to go up.

Smuggling as a large-scale criminal activity therefore continued into the early nineteenth century, a time when the threat of a French invasion led to new coastal defences on and around Romney Marsh. A defensive ditch called the Royal Military Canal was dug, and a series of fortifications called Martello Towers were built (some of these can still be seen at various points along the Kent and Sussex coasts). The invasion never came, but after 1815 these defences were combined with an increased military presence in the area and the enforcement of a naval blockade at sea to serve as a significant deterrent to smuggling.

But smuggling persisted – many ex-servicemen who now found themselves unemployed took to smuggling, and bloody encounters between smugglers and government forces were now the order of the day. By this time, the biggest smuggling gang on Romney Marsh was the Aldington Gang, named for the Kentish village of the same name but also known as the Blues on account of either their blue clothing or the blue flares they used for signalling. They were active from around 1817 and were invariably heavily armed and didn’t think twice about shooting a revenue man or a blockader. In February 1821, some 250 of them went to the beach at Camber to unload a smuggled cargo. This attracted the attention of the blockaders, a party of which attacked the smugglers and pursued them inland to Brookland, where the Aldington Gang turned and fought in a skirmish that came to be known as the Battle of Brookland. Five men were killed and around twenty wounded, but in the heat of the fighting the gang’s leader, one Cephas Quested, ordered someone to shoot one of the officers of the blockade force. Unfortunately for him, the man he’d given the order to was a blockader not a smuggler, and Quested found himself under arrest; he was subsequently tried and convicted at the Old Bailey and hanged at Newgate.

Subsequently, the gang was taken over by one George Ransley, the landlord of the Bourne Tap pub in Aldington. Under him, the Aldington Gang prospered for several years, landing contraband on the coast between Rye and Deal despite the blockade. Their success came to an end in July 1826 when a blockade officer was killed when he tried to stop the gang running a cargo ashore at the beach at Dover. The government moved fast, and Ransley and several others were arrested in the months that followed. Nineteen of them went on trial at the Maidstone Assizes the following year, and although all of them were found guilty of offences that carried the death penalty their sentences were commuted to transportation; Ransley ended up in Tasmania.

The Aldington Gang were the last of the big smuggler gangs. In 1831, blockade duties for Kent and Sussex became the responsibility of HM Coastguard which had been founded some nine years earlier; this force was well-armed and well-disciplined. There followed various skirmishes between the Coastguard and the smugglers, the last serious one taking place at Pevensey in 1833. By this time, events were turning against the smugglers. Police forces were being established to keep law and order on land, and attitudes such as those expressed by Charles Lamb (see above) were becoming out-dated, for by the dawn of the Victorian age the smuggler was seen not as an honest thief but as a threat to public order. Finally, in the 1840s the government showed its commitment to free trade by slashing import duties, after which smuggling became a somewhat unimportant activity.

But in a sense, it has lived on. The many tales of smuggling on and around Romney Marsh have long provided a source of literary inspiration. Rudyard Kipling, who lived in Sussex for over thirty years, wrote the poem ‘A Smuggler’s Song’ (“brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk…”) which can be found on the back wall of the Mermaid Inn. 

At around the same time, the Rye-based author Russell Thorndike created the Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn – the mild-mannered vicar of the Romney Marsh parish of Dymchurch who also happens to the ruthless leader of the local smuggler gang. This remarkable character first appeared in the novel Doctor Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh in 1915. A couple of decades later, Thorndike (an actor as well as an author, and the brother of the actress Sybil Thorndike) returned to the character with six other adventures (Doctor Syn Returns, The Courageous Exploits of Doctor Syn, etc) which are set prior to the first novel. There was a movie in 1937, starring George Arliss, and another one in 1963 with Patrick MacGoohan.

Thorndike, by the way, wasn’t the only author to be inspired by Rye and the surrounding area. Henry James and E.F. Benson both lived there, while the town is said to have provided Enid Blyton with the setting for her Famous Five adventure Five Go to Smuggler’s Top. John Ryan, the creator of the ineffectual cartoon pirate Captain Pugwash, also lived in Rye (contrary to urban myth, the characters in Captain Pugwash did not have sexually suggestive names).

Although the Doctor Syn novels have long been out of print, Dymchurch’s most famous resident, and probably Romney Marsh’s most famous smuggler (even though he’s fictional), is still celebrated in a biannual event called the ‘Day of Syn’ which takes place at Dymchurch over the August Bank Holiday weekend in even-numbered years. There’s also a steam locomotive named after him on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway.