FATAL AFFRAYS AND DARING ENCOUNTERS AT RYE, DYMCHURCH, EASTBOURNE,
BO-PEEP, AND FAIRLIGHT—THE SMUGGLERS’ ROUTE FROM SHOREHAM AND WORTHING
INTO SURREY—THE MILLER’S TOMB-LANGSTON HARBOUR—BEDHAMPTON MILL
THE ’twenties of the nineteenth century formed a period especially rich
in smuggling incidents, or perhaps seem so to do, because, with the
growth of country newspapers, they were more fully reported, instead of
being left merely the subject of local legend.
A desperate affray took place in Rye Harbour so late as May 1826, when a
ten-oared smuggling galley, chased by a revenue guard-boat, ran ashore.
The smugglers, abandoning their oars, opened fire upon the guard, but the
blockade-men from the watch-house at Camber then arrived upon the scene
and seized one of the smugglers; whereupon a gang of not fewer than two
hundred armed smugglers, who had until that moment been acting as a
concealed reserve, rushed violently from behind the sandhills, and
commenced firing on the blockade-men, killing one and wounding another.
They were, however, ultimately driven off, with the capture of their
galley, but managed to carry off their wounded.
On another occasion, four or five smugglers were drowned whilst swimming
the Military Canal, with tubs slung on their backs, at a point on Pett
Level called “Pett Horse-race.” They had, in the dark, missed the spot
where it was fordable. Romney Marsh, and the wide-spreading levels of
Pett, Camber, Guilford, and Dunge Marsh had—as we have already seen, in
the account of the owlers given in earlier pages—ever been the smugglers’
Alsatia.
The Rev. Richard Harris Barham, author of the “Ingoldsby Legends,” has
placed upon record some of his meetings with smugglers in “this recondite
region,” as he was pleased to style it; and his son, in the life he wrote
of his father, adds to them. Barham, ordained in 1813, and given the
curacy of Westwell, near Ashford, had not long to wait before being
brought into touch with the lawless doings here. One of the desperate
smugglers of the Marsh had been shot through the body in an encounter
with the riding-officers, and fatally wounded. As he lay dying, Barham
was brought to convey to him the last consolations of religion, and was
startled when the smuggler declared there was no crime of which he had
not been guilty.
“Murder is not to be reckoned among them, I hope,” exclaimed the not
easily shocked clergyman.
“Too many of them!” was the startling response of the dying man.
In 1817 Barham was collated by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the
adjoining livings of Warehorne and Snargate, the first-named situated on
the verge of the marsh; the second situated, moist and forbidding, in the
marsh itself. The winding road between these two villages crossed the
then newly made Royal Military Canal by a bridge. Often, as the
clergyman was returning, late at night, to his comfortable parsonage at
Warehorne, he was met and stopped by some mysterious horsemen; but when
he mentioned his name he was invariably allowed to proceed, and, as he
did so, a long and silent company of mounted smugglers defiled past, each
man with his led horse laden with tubs. The grey tower of Snargate
church he frequently found, by the aroma of tobacco it often exhaled,
instead of its customary and natural mustiness, to have been recently
used as a store for smuggled bales of that highly taxed article.
The _Cinque Ports Herald_ of 1826 records the landing on a night in May,
or in the early hours of the morning, of a considerable cargo of
contraband hereabouts:
“A large party of smugglers had assembled in the neighbourhood of
Dymchurch, and a boat laden (as is supposed) with tubs of spirits,
being observed to approach the shore nearly opposite to Dymchurch,
the smugglers instantly commenced cheering, and rushed upon the
coast, threatening defiance to the sentinels of the blockade; who,
perceiving such an overwhelming force, gave the alarm, when a party
of marines, coming to their assistance, a general firing took place.
The smugglers retreated into the marshes, followed by the
blockade-men, and, from their knowledge of the ground, were indebted
for their ultimate escape. We regret to state two of the blockade
seamen were wounded; one severely in the arm, which must cause
amputation, and the other in the face, by slug shots. There can be
no doubt but that some of the smugglers must have been wounded, if
not killed. One of their muskets was picked up loaded—abandoned, no
doubt, by the bearer of it, on account of wounds. The boat, with her
cargo, was obliged to put to sea again, without effecting a landing,
and, notwithstanding the vigilance of Lieutenants Westbrook, Mudge,
and McLeod, who were afloat in their galleys on the spot, from the
darkness of the night, effected its escape. We have also heard that
a run of five hundred tubs took place on the Sussex coast last week,
not far from Hastings, the smugglers losing only eleven tubs. This
was also effected by force, and with such a superiority in number
that they completely overpowered the blockade force.”
[Picture: Barham meets the Smugglers]
The _Brighton Gazette_, of a few days later, contained the following:
“We have been favoured with some particulars of another recent
attempt to work contraband goods a few miles eastward of Eastbourne,
when it appears the coast blockade succeeded in taking a large boat
and upwards of two hundred tubs. We are sorry to add much mischief
has occurred, as on the following morning blood was observed near the
spot. Two men, it is said, belonging to the boat are taken
prisoners, and two of the blockade are reported to be much bruised
and beaten, and it is also suspected some of the smugglers are
seriously, if not mortally, wounded. The blockade in this instance
behaved in the most humane manner, having received a regular volley
from their opponents before their officers gave directions for them
to fire. We have just heard that five smugglers were killed in the
affray.”
On a Sunday night towards the end of July 1826, during a run of smuggled
goods at Dover, the smugglers shot dead a seaman of the preventive force
named Morgan, for which no one was ever convicted.
A determined and blood-stained struggle took place at Bo-Peep at midnight
of January 3rd, 1828. Bo-Peep was the name of a desolate spot situated
midway between Hastings and Bexhill. The place is the same as that
westernmost extension of St. Leonards now known by the eminently
respectable—not to say imposing—name of “West Marina”; but in those times
it was a shore, not indeed lonely (better for its reputation had it been
so) but marked by an evil-looking inn, to which were attached still more
evil-looking “Pleasure Gardens.” If throats were not, in fact, commonly
cut in those times at Bo-Beep, the inn and its deplorable “Pleasure
Gardens” certainly looked no fit, or safe, resort for any innocent young
man with a pocketful of money jingling as he walked.
[Picture: A Landing at Bo-Peep]
On this occasion a lugger came in view off shore, when a party of
smugglers armed, as usual, with “bats,” _i.e._ stout ash-poles, some six
feet in length, rushed to the beach, landed the cargo, and made off with
it, by various means, inland a distance of some three miles to Sidley
Green. Here the coast blockade-men, some forty in number, came up with
them.
The smugglers drew up in regular line-formation, and a desperate fight
resulted. The smugglers fought with such determination and courage that
the blockade-men were repulsed and one, Quartermaster Collins, killed.
In the first volley fired by the blockade an old smuggler named Smithurst
was killed; his body was found next morning, with his “bat” still grasped
in his hands, the stout staff almost hacked to pieces by the cutlasses
and bayonets of the blockade-men.
At the Spring Assizes held at Horsham, Spencer Whiteman, of Udimore,
Thomas Miller, Henry Miller, John Spray, Edward Shoesmith, William
Bennett, John Ford, and Stephen Stubberfield were indicted for
assembling, armed, for purposes of smuggling, and were removed for trial
to the Old Bailey, where, on April 10th, they all pleaded guilty; as did
Whiteman, Thomas Miller, Spray, Bennett, and Ford, together with Thomas
Maynard and William Plumb, for a like offence on January 23rd, 1828, at
Eastbourne. Sentence of death was passed on all, but was commuted to
transportation. With three exceptions, they were young men, under thirty
years of age.
Again, in broad daylight, in 1828, a lugger landed a heavy cargo of kegs
on the open beach at Bo-Peep. No fewer than three hundred rustic
labourers, who had been hired by the job, in the usual course, by the
smugglers bold, assembled on the beach, and formed up two lines of guards
while the landing of the tubs, and their loading into carts, on horses,
or on men’s shoulders, was proceeding. If the preventive officers knew
anything of what was toward that busy day they did not, at any rate,
interfere; and small blame to them for the very elementary discretion
they displayed. They had, as already shown, been too seriously mauled at
an earlier date for them to push matters again to extremity.
On January 3rd, 1831, in Fairlight Glen, two miles east of Hastings, two
smugglers, William Cruttenden and Joseph Harrod, were shot dead, and on
February 22nd, 1832, at Worthing, when between two and three hundred
smugglers had assembled on the beach, William Cowardson was shot dead,
and several others were carried away wounded.
Still the tale was continued, for during a landing on January 23rd, 1833,
at Eastbourne, the smugglers, who had assembled in large numbers, killed
George Pett, chief boatman of the local preventive station, and ran their
cargo safely. Several of both sides were wounded on this occasion, but
no one among the smugglers was ever arrested.
The last fatal happening in this way along the Sussex coast appears to
have been in the marshes at Camber Castle, on April 1st, 1838, when a
poor fiddler of Winchelsea, named Thomas Monk, was shot in the course of
a dispute over run goods, by the coastguard.
But we may quite easily have a surfeit of these brutal affrays, and it is
better to dwell on a lighter note, to contemplate the audacity, and to
admire the ingenuity and the resource often displayed by the smugglers in
concealing their movements.
To especially single out any particular line of coast for pre-eminence in
smuggling would be impossible. When every one smuggled, and every one
else—owing to that well-understood human foible of buying in the cheapest
market—supported smuggling by purchasing smuggled goods, every foreshore
that did not actually present physical difficulties, or that was not
exceptionally under excise and customs surveillance, was a free port, in
a very special signification. The thickly peopled coast-line of Kent,
Sussex, and Hampshire of our own time was then sparsely populated, and
those shores that are now but thinly settled were in that age the merest
aching wildernesses, where not only towns, but even villages and hamlets,
were few and far apart. A coast-line such as that at Brighton would seem
to us to present certain obvious difficulties to the smuggler, but close
at hand was the low-lying land of Shoreham, with its lagoon-like harbour,
a very shy, secretive kind of place, to this day; while away to Worthing,
and beyond it, stretched a waste of shingle-beach, running up to solitary
pasture-lands that reached to the foot of the noble rampart of the South
Downs. On these shores the free-traders landed their illegal imports
with little interference, and their shore-going allies received the goods
and took them inland, to London or to their intermediate storehouses in
the country-side, very much at their leisure. Avoiding the
much-travelled high-roads, and traversing the chalk-downs by unfrequented
bridle-tracks, they went across the level Weald and past the Surrey
border into that still lonely district running east and west for many
miles, on the line of Leith Hill, Ewhurst, and Hindhead. There, along
those wooded heights, whose solitary ways still astonish, with their
remote aspect, the Londoner who by any chance comes to them, although but
from thirty to thirty-five miles from the Bank of England in the City of
London, you may still track, amid the pine-trees on the shoulders of the
gorsy hills, or among the oaks that grow so luxuriantly in the Wealden
clay, the “soft roads,” as the country folk call them, along which the
smugglers, unmolested, carried their merchandise. On Ewhurst Hill stands
a windmill, to which in those times the smugglers’ ways converged; and
near by, boldly perched on a height, along the sylvan road that leads
from Shere to Ewhurst village, stood the “Windmill,” once the “New” inn,
which had a double roof, utilised as a storehouse for clandestine kegs.
A “Windmill” inn stands on the spot to-day, but it is a new building, the
old house having unfortunately been burned down some two years since.
Surveying the country from this spot, you have, on the one hand, almost
precipitous hill-peaks, gorsy to their summits, and on the other a lovely
dale, deeply embosomed in woods. The sub-soil here is a soft yellow
sandstone, streaked with white sand, breaking out along the often hollow
paths into miniature cliffs, in which the smugglers and their allies were
not slow to scoop caverns and store part of their stock. We have already
learnt how terrible these men could be to those who informed against them
or made away with any of their property, and by direct consequence the
goods thus stored were generally safe, either from the authorities or
from the rustics, who had a very wholesome and well-founded dread of the
smuggling bands. But they had a way of their own of letting these justly
dreaded folk see that their stores were evident to some, and that silence
was supposed to have a certain market value. Their way was just a
delicate hint, which consisted in marking a tub or two with a chalk
cross; and, sure enough, when the stock was removed, those chalk-marked
tubs were left behind, with possibly, if the country-folk had been modest
and the smugglers were generous, a few others to keep them company.
[Picture: Smuggler’s tracks near Ewhurst]
An old brick-and-tile-hung farm, down below Ewhurst Hill, older than it
looks, known as Barhatch, was in those times in possession of the Ticknor
family; and still, in what was the old living-room, may be seen the
inglenook, with its iron crane, marked “John Ticknor, 1755.” The
Barhatch woods were often used by smugglers, and the Ticknors never had
any occasion to purchase spirits, because, at not infrequent intervals,
when the household arose, and the front door was opened in the morning, a
keg would be found deposited on the steps: a complimentary keg, for the
use of the Ticknor property and the discretion of the Ticknor tongue.
One of the choicest landing-places along the Sussex coast must
undoubtedly have been just westward of Worthing, by Goring, where the
shore is yet secluded, and is even now not readily come at by good roads.
In a line with it is Highdown Hill, a rounded hump of the Downs, rising
to a height of two hundred and ninety-nine feet, two miles inland; a spot
famed in all guidebook lore of this neighbourhood as the site of the
“Miller’s Tomb.” This miller, whose real business of grinding corn seems
to have been supplemented by participation in the stern joys of illegal
importation, was one John Olliver. His mill was situated on this
hill-top: a very remote spot, even now, arrived at only along lanes in
which mud and water plentifully await the explorer’s cautious foot, and
where brambles and intrudant twigs, currycomb his whiskers, if he have
such.
[Picture: The Miller’s Tomb]
John Olliver, miller, was an eighteenth-century eccentric, whose morbid
fancy for having his coffin made early in life, and wheeled under his bed
every night, was not satisfied until he had also built himself a tomb on
the hill-top, on a twelve-foot square plot of ground granted him by the
landowner, one W. W. Richardson, in 1766: a tomb on which he could with
satisfaction look every day. Yet he was not the dull, dispirited man one
might for these things suppose; and Pennant, in his _Tour in Sussex_, is
found saying, “I am told he is a stout, active, cheerful man.” And then
comes this significant passage. “Besides his proper trade he carries on
a very considerable one in smuggled goods.” Let us pause a moment to
reflect upon the impudent public manner in which John Olliver must have
carried on his smuggling activities. To this impudence he added also
figures on his house-top, representing a miller filling a sack and a
smuggler chased by an exciseman with a drawn sword; after the exciseman
coming a woman with a broom, belabouring him about the head. The tomb
the miller had built for eventual occupation by his body was in the
meanwhile generally occupied by spirits—not the spirits of the dead, but
such _eaux de vie_ as hollands and cognac; and he himself was not laid
here for many years, for he lived to be eighty-four years of age, and
died in 1793. He had long been widely known as an eccentric, and
thousands came to his funeral on the unconsecrated spot. Here the tomb,
of the altar-tomb type, stands to this day, kept in excellent repair, and
the lengthy inscriptions repainted; at whose costs and charges I know
not. A small grove of trees almost entirely encircles it. At one end is
a gruesome little sculpture representing Death, as a skeleton, laying a
hand upon an affrighted person, and asking him, “Whither away so fast?”
and at the other end are the following lines:
Why fhould my fancy anyone offend
Whofe good or ill does not on it depend
(A generous gift) on which my Tomb doth ftand
This is the only fpot that I have chofe
Wherein to take my lafting long repofe
Here in the drift my body lieth down
You’ll fay it is not confecrated ground,
I grant ye fame; but where shall we e’er find
The fpot that e’er can purify the mind?
Nor to the body any luftre give.
This more depends on what a life we live
For when ye trumpet fhall begin to found
’Twill not avail where’er ye Body’s found.
Blefsed are they and all who in the Lord the Saviour die
Their bodief wait Redemption day,
And fleep in peace where’er they lay.
On the upper slab are a number of texts and highly moral reflections.
As for the Selsey Peninsula, and the district of flat lands and oozy
creeks south of Chichester and on to Portsmouth, Nature would seem almost
to have constructed the entire surroundings with the especial objects of
securing the smugglers and confounding the customs. Here Sussex merges
into Hampshire.
[Picture: Langston Harbour]
Among the many smuggling nooks along the Hampshire coast, Langston
Harbour was prominent, forming, as it does, an almost landlocked lagoon,
with creeks ramifying toward Portsea Island on one side and Hayling
Island on the other. There still stands on a quay by the waterside at
Langston the old “Royal Oak” inn, which was a favourite gathering-place
of the “free-traders” of these parts, neighboured by a ruined windmill of
romantic aspect, to which no stories particularly attach, but whose
lowering, secretive appearance aptly accentuates the queer reputation of
the spot.
The reputation of Langston Harbour was such that an ancient disused brig,
the _Griper_, was permanently stationed here, with the coastguard housed
aboard, to keep watch upon the very questionable goings and comings of
the sailor-folk and fishermen of the locality. And not only these watery
folk needed watching, but also the people of Havant and the
oyster-fishers of Emsworth. Here, too, just outside Havant, at the
village of Bedhampton, upon the very margin of the mud, stands an
eighteenth-century mill. It would have been profitable for the
coastguard to keep an eye upon this huge old corn-milling establishment,
if the legends be at all true that are told of it. A little stream,
issuant from the Forest of Bere, at this point runs briskly into the
creek, after having been penned up and made to form a mill-leat. It runs
firstly, moat-like, in front of a charming old house, formerly the
miller’s residence, and then to the great waterwheel, and the mill
itself, a tall, four-square building of red brick, not at all beautiful,
but with a certain air of reserve all the more apparent, of course,
because it is now deserted, bolted, and barred: steam flour-mills of more
modern construction having, it may be supposed, successfully competed
with its antiquated ways. But at no time, if we are to believe local
legend, did Bedhampton Mill depend greatly upon its milling for
prosperity. It was rather a smugglers’ storehouse, and the grinding of
corn was, if not altogether an affectation, something of a by-product.
You may readily understand the working of the contraband business, under
these specious pretences, beneath the very noses of coastguard and
excise; how goods brought up the creek and stored in this capacious hold
could, without suspicion incurred, be taken out of store, loaded in among
the flour-sacks in the miller’s wagons, and delivered wherever desired.
Of course, that being the mill’s staple business, it is quite readily
understood that when the business of smuggling declined such milling as
went forward here did by no means suffice to keep the great building
going.
The house, which appears now to be let as a country residence for the
summer to persons who neither know nor care anything about the story of
the place, has an odd inscription on its gable:
The gift of Mr. George
Judge at Stubbington
Farm at Portsea Hard, in
Memory of his very good Friend,
Mr. George Champ,
Senr. 1742.
That sporadic cases of smuggling long continued in these districts, as
elsewhere, after the smuggling era was really ended, we may see from one
of the annual reports issued by the Commissioners of Customs. The
following incident occurred in 1873, and is thus officially described:
“On the top of a bank rising directly from highwater-mark in one of the
muddy creeks of Southampton Water stands a wooden hut commanding a full
view of it, and surrounded by an ill-cultivated garden. There are houses
near, but the hut does not belong to them, and appears to have been built
for no obvious purpose. An old smuggler was traced to this hut, and from
that time, for nearly two months, the place was watched with great
precaution, until at midnight, on May 28th, two men employed by us being
on watch, a boat was observed coming from a small vessel about a mile
from the shore. The boat, containing four men, stopped opposite the hut,
landed one man and some bags, while the remainder of the crew took her
some two hundred yards off, hauled her up, and then proceeded to the hut.
One of our men was instantly despatched for assistance, while the other
remained, watching. On his return with three policemen, the whole party
went to the hut, where they found two men on watch outside and four
inside, asleep. A horse and cart were also found in waiting, the cart
having a false bottom. The six men were secured and sent to the
police-station; a boat was then procured, the vessel whence the men had
come was boarded, and found to be laden with tobacco and spirits. The
result was that the vessel, a smack of about fifteen tons, with
eighty-five bales of leaf-tobacco, six boxes of Cavendish, with some
cigars and spirits, was seized, and four of the persons concerned in the
transaction convicted of the offence.”
[Picture: Bedhampton Mill]