The Smugglers: Picturesque Chapters in the Story of an Ancient Craft

CHAPTER IX

The Dorset and Devon Coasts—Epitaphs at Kinson and Wyke—The “Wiltshire Moon-Rakers”—Epitaph at Branscombe—The Warren and “Mount Pleasant” Inn

Not so much smuggling incident as might be expected is found along the coasts of Dorset and Devon, but that is less on account of any lack of smuggling encounters in those parts than because less careful record has been kept of them. An early epitaph on a smuggler, to be seen in the churchyard of Kinson, just within the Dorset boundary, in an out-of-the-way situation at the back of Bournemouth, in a district formerly of almost trackless heaths, will sufficiently show that smuggling was active here:

To the memory of Robert Trotman, late of Rowd, in
the county of Wilts, who was barbarously murdered
on the shore near Poole, the 24th March, 1765.
A little tea, one leaf I did not steal,
For guiltless bloodshed I to God appeal;
Put tea in one scale, human blood in t’other
And think what ’tis to slay a harmless brother.

This man was shot in an encounter with the revenue officers. He was one of a gang that used the church here as a hiding-place. The upper stage of the tower and an old altar-tomb were the favourite receptacles for their “free-trade” merchandise.

Trotman, it will be observed, was of Rowd, or Rowde, in Wiltshire, two miles from Devizes, and was thus one of the “Wiltshire Moonrakers,” whose descriptive title is due to smuggling history. Among the nicknames conferred upon the natives of our various shires and counties none is complimentary. They figure forth undesirable physical attributes, as when the Lincolnshire folk, dwellers among the fens, are styled “Yellow-bellies,” i.e. frogs; or stupidity, e.g. “Silly Suffolk”; or humbug—for example, “Devonshire Crawlers.” “Wiltshire Moonrakers” is generally considered to be a term of contempt for Wilts rustic stupidity; but, rightly considered, it is nothing of the kind. It all depends how you take the story which gave rise to it. The usual version tells us how a party of travellers, crossing a bridge in Wiltshire by night when the harvest moon was shining, observed a group of rustics raking in the stream, in which the great yellow disc of the moon was reflected. The travellers had the curiosity to ask them what it was they raked for in such a place and at so untimeous an hour; and were told they were trying to get “that cheese”—the moon—out of the water. The travellers went on their way amused with the simplicity of these “naturals,” and spread the story far and wide.But these apparently idiotic clod-hoppers were wiser in their generation than commonly supposed, and were, in fact, smugglers surprised in the act of raking up a number of spirit-kegs that had been sunk in the bed of the stream until the arrival of a convenient season when they could with safety be removed. The travellers, properly considered, were really revenue officers, scouring the neighbourhood. This version of the story fairly throws the accusation of innocence and dunderheadedness back upon them, and clears the Wiltshire rural character from contempt. It should, however, be said that the first version of the story is generally told at the expense of the villagers of Bishop’s Cannings, near Devizes, who have long writhed under a load of ancient satirical narratives, reflecting upon a lack of common sense alleged to be their chief characteristic.

Many of the western smuggling stories are of a humorous cast, rather than of the dreadful blood-boltered kind that disgraces the history of the home counties. Here is a case in point. On the evening of Sunday, July 10th, 1825, as two preventive men were on the look-out for smugglers, near Lulworth in Dorset, the smugglers, to the number of sixty or seventy, curiously enough, found them instead, and immediately taking away their swords and pistols, carried them to the edge of the cliff and placed them with their heads hanging over the precipice; with the comfortable assurance that if they made the least noise, or gave alarm, they should be immediately thrown over. In the interval a smuggling vessel landed a “crop” of one hundred casks, which the shore-gang placed on their horses and triumphantly carried away. The prisoners were then removed from their perilous position, and taken into an adjoining field, where they were bound hand and foot, and left overnight. They were found the next morning by their comrades, searching for them.

There are several points in this true tale that suggest it to have been the original whence Mr. Thomas Hardy obtained the chief motive of his short story, The Distracted Preacher.

We do not find consecutive accounts of smuggling on this wild coast of Dorset; but when the veil is occasionally lifted and we obtain a passing glimpse, it is a picturesque scene that is disclosed. Thus, a furious encounter took place under St. Aldhelm’s Head, in 1827, between an armed band of some seventy or eighty smugglers and the local preventive men, who numbered only ten, but gave a good account of themselves, two smugglers being reported killed on the spot, and many others wounded, while some of the preventive force, during the progress of the fight, quietly slipped to where the smugglers’ boats had been left and made off with the goods stored in them.

“The smugglers are armed,” says a report of this affair, “with swingels, like flails, with which they can knock people’s brains out”; and proceeds to say that weapons of this kind, often delivering blows from unexpected quarters, are extremely difficult to fight against.

The captain of this gang was a man named Lucas, who kept an inn called the “Ship,” at Woolbridge; and, information being laid, Captain Jackson, the local inspector of customs, went with an assistant and a police officer from London to his house at two o’clock in the morning and roused him.

“Who’s there?” asked Lucas.

“Only I, Mrs. Smith’s little girl. I want a drop of brandy for mother,” returned the inspector, in a piping voice.

“Very well, my dear,” said the landlord, and opened the door; to find himself in the grasp of the police-officer. Henry Fooks, of Knowle, and three others of the gang, were then arrested; and the whole five committed to Dorchester gaol.

The wild coast of Dorset, if we except Poole Harbour and the cliffs of Purbeck, yields little to the inquirer in this sort, although there can be no doubt of smuggling having been in full operation here. Jack Rattenbury, whose story is told on another page, could doubtless have rubricated this shore of many cliffs and remote hamlets with striking instances; and not a cliff-top but must have frequently exhibited lights to “flash the lugger off,” what time the preventive men were on the prowl; and no lonely strand but must have witnessed the smugglers, when the coast was again clear, rowing out and “creeping for the crop” that had been sunk and buoyed, or “put in the collar,” as the saying went.

A relic of these for the most part unrecorded and forgotten incidents is found in the epitaph at Wyke, near Weymouth, on one William Lewis:

Sacred to the memory
of
WILLIAM LEWIS,
who was killed by a shot
from the Pigmy Schooner
21st April 1822, aged 53 years.

Of life bereft (by fell design),
I mingle with my fellow clay,
On God’s protection I recline
To save me on the Judgment-day.
There shall each blood-stain’d soul appear,
Repent, all, ere it be too late,
Or Else a dreadful doom you’ll hear,
For God will sure avenge my fate.

This Stone is Erected by his Wife
as the last mark of respect to an
Affectionate Husband.

The inscription is surmounted by a representation, carved in low relief, of the Pigmy schooner chasing the smuggling vessel.

Old folk, now gone from the scene of their reminiscences, used to tell of this tragedy, and of the landing of the body of the unfortunate Lewis on the rocks of Sandsfoot Castle, where the ragged, roofless walls of that old seaward fortress impend over the waves, and the great bulk of Portland isle glooms in mid distance upon the bay. They tell, too, how the inscription was long kept gilded by his relatives; but the last trace of it has long since vanished.

Many miles intervene, and another county must be entered, before another tragical epitaph bearing upon smuggling is found. If you go to Seaton, in South Devon, and walk inland from the modern developments of that now rapidly growing town to the old church, you may see there a tablet recording the sad fate of William Henry Paulson, midshipman of H.M.S. Queen Charlotte, and eight seamen, who all perished in a gale of wind off Sidmouth, while cruising in a galley after smugglers, in the year 1816.

A few miles westward, through Beer to Branscombe, the country is of a very wild and lonely kind. In the weird, eerie churchyard of Branscombe, in which astonishing epitaphs of all kinds abound, is a variant upon the smugglers’ violent ends, in the inscription to one “Mr. John Harley, Custom House Officer of this parish.” It proceeds to narrate how, “as he was endeavouring to extinguish some Fire made between Beer and Seaton as a signal to a Smuggling Boat then off at sea, he fell by some means or other from the top of the cliff to the bottom, by which he was unfortunately killed. This unhappy accident happened the 9th day of August in the year of our Lord 1755, Ætatis suÆ 45. He was an active and diligent officer and very inoffensive in his life and conversation.”

So here was another martyr to the conditions created by bad government.The estuary of the Exe, between Exmouth and Starcross, was for many years greatly favoured by smugglers, for, as may readily be perceived to this day, there lay in the two-miles-broad channel, where sea and river mingle, a wide, wild stretch of sand, almost awash at high water, heaped up in towans overgrown with tussocks of coarse, sour grasses, or sinking into hollows full of brackish water: pleasant in daytime, but a dangerous place at night. Here, in this islanded waste, there were no roads nor tracks at all, and few were those who ever came to disturb the curlews or the seabirds that nested, unafraid. In these twentieth-century times of ours the Warren—for such is the name of this curiously amphibious place—has become a place of picnic parties on summer afternoons, largely by favour of the Great Western Railway having provided, midway between the stations of Starcross and Dawlish, a little platform called the “Warren Halt.” But in those times before railways, when the Warren was not easily come at, the smugglers found it a highly convenient place for their business. Beside it, under the lee of Langston Point, there is a sheltered strand, and, at such times when it was considered quite safe, the sturdy free-traders quietly ran their boats ashore here, on the yellow sands, and conveyed their contents to the “Mount Pleasant” inn, which is an unassuming—and was in those times a still more unassuming—house, perched picturesquely on the crest of a red sandstone bluff which rises inland, sheer from the marshy meadows. It was a very convenient receiving-house and signal-station for all of this trade, for it owned caverns hollowed out of the red sandstone in places inaccessible to the authorities, and from its isolated height, overlooking the flats, could easily communicate encouragement or warning to friends anxiously riding at anchor out at sea. The lights that flashed on dark and tempestuous nights from its high-hung rustic balcony were significant. The only man who could have told much of the smugglers’ secrets here was the unfortunate Lieutenant Palk, who lay wait one such night upon the Warren. But dead men tell no tales; and that ill-starred officer was found in the morning, drowned, face downwards, in a shallow pool, whether by accident or design there was nothing to show. As already remarked, the Warren was a dangerous place to wander in after dark.

It is quite vain nowadays to seek for the smugglers’ caves at Mount Pleasant. They were long ago filled up.

In these times the holiday-maker, searching for shells, is the only feature of the sands that fringe the seaward edge of the Warren. It is a fruitful hunting-ground for such, especially after rough weather. But the day following a storm was, in those times, the opportunity of the local revenue men, who, forming a strong party, were used to take boat and pull down here and thoroughly search the foreshore; for at such times any spirit-tubs that might have been sunk out at sea and carefully buoyed by the smugglers, awaiting a favourable time for landing, were apt to break loose and drift in-shore. There was always, at such times, a sporting chance of a good haul. But, on the other hand, some of the many tubs that had been sunk months before, and lost, would on these occasions come to hand, and they were worth just nothing at all: long immersion in salt water having spoiled their contents, with the result that what had been right good hollands or cognac had become a peculiarly ill-savoured liquid, which smelt to heaven when it was broached. The revenue people called this abominable stuff, which, as Shakespeare might say, had “suffered a sea-change into something new and strange,” by the appropriate name of “stinkibus.”

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