EAST COAST SMUGGLING—OUTRAGE AT BECCLES—A COLCHESTER RAID—CANVEY
ISLAND—BRADWELL QUAY—THE EAST ANGLIAN “CART GAPS”—A BLAKENEY
STORY—TRAGICAL EPITAPH AT HUNSTANTON—THE PEDDAR’S WAY
THE doings of the Kentish and Sussex gangs entirely overshadow the annals
of smuggling in other counties; and altogether, to the general reader,
those two seaboards and the coasts of Devon and Cornwall stand out as
typical scenes. But no part of our shores was immune; although the
longer sea-passages to be made elsewhere of course stood greatly in the
way of the “free-traders” of those less favoured regions. After Kent and
Sussex, the east coast was probably the most favourable for smuggling.
The distance across the North Sea might be greater and the passage often
rough, but the low muddy shores and ramifying creeks of Essex and the
sandy coastwise warrens of Suffolk, Norfolk, and Lincolnshire, very
sparsely inhabited, offered their own peculiar facilities for the shy and
secretive trade.
Nor did the East Anglian smugglers display much less ferocity when their
interests were threatened, or their goods seized, than was shown by the
yokels of those other counties. The stolid, ox-like rustics of the
country-side there, as along the margin of the English Channel, were
roused to almost incredible acts of brutality which do not seem to have
been repeated in the West.
We do not find the hardy seafaring smugglers often behaving with the
cold-blooded cruelty displayed, as a usual phenomenon, by the generally
unemotional men of ploughed fields and rustic communities who took up the
running and carried the goods inland from the water’s edge whither those
sea-dogs had brought them. In the being of the men who dared tempestuous
winds and waves there existed, as a rule, a more sportsmanlike and
generous spirit. Something of the traditional heartiness inseparable
from sea-life impelled them to give and take without the black blood that
seethed evilly in the veins of the landsmen. The seamen, it seemed,
realised that smuggling was a risk; something in the nature of any game
of skill, into which they entered, with the various officers of the law
naturally opposed to them; and when either side won, that was incidental
to the game, and no enmity followed as the matter of course it was with
their shore-going partners.
Perhaps these considerations, as greatly as the difference in racial
characters, show us why the land-smugglers of the Home Counties should
have been so criminal, while from the Devon and Cornish contrabandists we
hear mostly of humorous passages.
[Picture: The “Green Man,” Bradwell Quay]
At Beccles, in Suffolk, for example, we find the record, in 1744, of an
incident that smacks rather of the Hawkhurst type of outrage. Smugglers
there pulled a man out of bed, whipped him, tied him naked on a horse,
and rode away with their prisoner, who was never again heard of, although
a reward of £50 was offered.
Colchester was the scene, on April 16th, 1847, of as bold an act as the
breaking open of the custom-house at Poole. At two o’clock in the
morning two men arrived at the quay at Hythe, by Colchester, and, with
the story that they were revenue officers come to lodge a seizure of
captured goods, asked to be shown the way to the custom-house. They had
no sooner been shown it than there followed thirty smugglers, well armed
with blunderbusses and pistols, who, with a heavy blacksmith’s hammer and
a crowbar, broke open the warehouse, in which a large quantity of
dutiable goods was stored. They were not molested in their raid, and
went off with sixty oil-bags, containing 1514 lb. of tea that had been
seized near Woodbridge Haven. No one dared interfere with them, and by
six o’clock that morning they had proceeded as far as Hadleigh, from
which point all trace of them was lost.
Canvey Island, in the estuary of the Thames, off Benfleet, with its
quaint old Dutch houses, relics of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century
Hollanders who settled there and carried on a more than questionable
business, was reputedly a nest of smugglers. The “Lobster Smack,” a
quaint old weatherboarded inn built just within the old earthen sea-wall
for which those Dutchmen were responsible, and standing somewhat below
the level of high water, has legends of smuggling that naturally do not
lose by age or repetition.
The Blackwater estuary, running up from the Essex coast to Maldon,
offered peculiar facilities for smuggling; and that, perhaps, is why a
coastguard vessel is still stationed at Stansgate, half way along its
length, opposite Osea Island. At the mouth of the Blackwater there
branch other creeks and estuaries leading past Mersea Island to
Colchester; and here, looking out upon a melancholy sea, and greatly
resembling a barn, stands the ancient chapel of St. Peter-upon-the-Wall,
situated in one of the most lonely spots conceivable, on what were, ages
ago, the ramparts of the Roman station of _Othona_. It has long been
used as a barn, and was in smuggling times a frequent rendezvous of the
night-birds who waged ceaseless war with the Customs.
Two miles onward, along sea and river-bank, Bradwell Quay is reached,
where the “Green Man” inn in these times turns a hospitable face to the
wayfarer, but was in the “once upon a time” apt to distrust the casual
stranger, for it was a house “ower sib” with the free-traders, and Pewit
Island, just off the quay, a desolate islet almost awash, formed an
admirable emergency store. The old stone-floored kitchen of the “Green
Man,” nowadays a cool and refreshing place in which to take a modest
quencher on a summer’s day, still remains very much what it was of old;
and the quaint fireplace round which the sly longshore men of these Essex
creeks foregathered on those winter nights when work was before them
keeps its old-time pot-racks and hooks.
[Picture: Kitchen of the “Green Man”]
Among the very numerous accounts of smuggling affrays we may exhume from
the musty files of old newspapers, we read of the desperate encounter in
which Mr. Toby, Supervisor of Excise, lost an eye in contending with a
gang of smugglers at Caister, near Yarmouth, in April 1816; which
shows—if we had occasion to show—that the East Anglian could on occasion
be as ferocious as the rustics of the south.
The shores of East Anglia we have already noted to be largely composed of
wide-spreading sandy flats, in whose wastes the tracks of wild birds and
animals—to say nothing of the deeply indented footmarks of heavily-laden
men—are easily distinguished; and the chief problem of the free-traders
of those parts was therefore often how to cover up the tracks they left
so numerously in their passage across to the hard roads. In this resort
the shepherds were their mainstay, and for the usual consideration,
_i.e._ a keg of the “right stuff,” would presently, after the gang had
passed, come driving their flocks along in the sandy trail they had left:
completely obliterating all evidences of a run of contraband goods having
been successfully brought off.
Blakeney, on the Norfolk coast, is associated with one of the best, and
most convincing, tales ever told of smuggling. This coast is rich in
what are known as “cart gaps”: dips in the low cliffs, where horses and
carts may readily gain access to the sea. These places were, of course,
especially well watched by the preventive men, who often made a rich haul
out of the innocent-looking farm-carts, laden with seaweed for manure,
that were often to be observed being driven landwards at untimeous hours
of night and early morn. Beneath the seaweed were, of course, numerous
kegs. Sometimes the preventive men confiscated horses and carts, as well
as their loads, and all were put up for sale. On one of these painful
occasions the local custom-house officer, who knew a great deal more of
the sea and its ways than he did of horses, was completely taken in by a
farmer-confederate of the smugglers whose horses had been seized. The
farmer went to make an offer for the animals, and was taken to see them.
The season of the year was the spring, when, as the poet observes, “a
young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love”—and when horses shed
their coats. Up went the farmer to the nearest horse, and easily, of
course, pulled out a handful of hair. “Why,” said he, in the East
Anglian way, “th’ poor brute hey gotten t’ mange, and all tudderuns ’ull
ketch it, of yow baint keerful.” And then he examined “tudderuns,” and
behold! each _had_ caught it: and so he bought the lot for five pounds.
That same night every horse was back in its own stable.
Searching in graveyards is not perhaps the most exhilarating of pastimes
or employments, but it, at any rate, is likely to bring, on occasion,
curious local history to light. Not infrequently, in the old churchyards
of seaboard parishes, epitaphs bearing upon the story of smuggling may be
found.
Among these often quaint and curious, as well as tragical, relics, that
in Hunstanton churchyard, on the coast of Norfolk, is pre-eminent, both
for its grotesquely ungrammatical character and for the history that
attaches to the affair:
In Memory of William Webb, late of the 15th Lt. D’ns,
who was shot from his Horse by a party of Smugglers
on the 26 of Sepr. 1784.
I am not dead, but sleepeth here,
And when the Trumpet Sound I will appear.
Four balls thro’ me Pearced there way:
Hard it was. I’d no time to pray
This stone that here you Do see
My Comerades erected for the sake of me.
Two smugglers, William Kemble and Andrew Gunton, were arraigned for the
murder of this dragoon and an excise officer. The jury, much to the
surprise of every one, for the guilt of the prisoners was undoubted,
brought in a verdict of “Not guilty”; whereupon Mr. Murphy, counsel for
the prosecution, moved for a new trial, observing that if a Norfolk jury
were determined not to convict persons guilty of the most obvious crimes,
simply because, as smugglers, they commanded the sympathy of the country
people, there was an end of all justice.
A second jury was forthwith empanelled and the evidence repeated, and
after three hours’ deliberation the prisoners were again found “Not
guilty,” and were, in accordance with that finding, acquitted and
liberated.
It is abundantly possible that the foregoing incident had some connection
with that locally favourite smugglers’ route from the Norfolk coast
inland, the Peddar’s Way, which runs a long and lonely course from Holme,
near Hunstanton, right through Norfolk into Suffolk, and is for the
greater part of its length a broad, grassy track, romantically lined and
overhung with fine trees. Such ancient ways, including the many old
drove-roads in the north, never turnpiked, made capital soft going, and,
rarely touching villages or hamlets, were of a highly desirable,
secretive nature. The origin of the Peddar’s, or Padder’s, Way is still
in dispute among antiquaries, some seeing in it a Roman road, others
conceiving it to be a prehistoric track; but the broad, straight
character of it seems to point to this long route having been Romanised.
Its great age is evident on many accounts, not least among them being
that the little town of Watton, near but not on it, is named from this
prehistoric road, “Way-town,” while that county division, the hundred, is
the Hundred of Wayland.