Outrage at Hastings by the Ruxley Gang—Battle on the Whitstable-Canterbury Road—Church-Towers as Smugglers’ Cellars—The Drummer of Herstmonceux—Epitaph at Tandridge—Deplorable Affair at Hastings—The Incident of “The Four Brothers” Sussex was again the scene of a barbarous incident, in 1768; and on this occasion seafaring men were the malefactors. It is still an article of faith with the writers of guide-books who do not make their own inquiries, and thus perpetuate obsolete things, that to call a Hastings fisherman a “Chop-back” will rouse him to fury. But when a modern visitor, primed with such romance as this, timidly approaches one of these broad-shouldered and amply-paunched fisherfolk and suggests “Chop-backs” as a subject of inquiry, I give you my word they only look upon you with a puzzled expression, and don’t understand in the least your meaning. But in an earlier generation this was a term of great offence to the Hastingers. It arose, according to tradition, from the supposed descent The Government in November of that year sent a detachment of two hundred Inniskilling Dragoons to Hastings, to arrest the men implicated, and a man-o’-war and cutter lay off shore to receive them when they had been taken prisoners. The soldiers had strict orders to keep their mission secret, but the day after their arrival they were called out to arrest rioters who had violently assaulted the Mayor, whom they suspected of laying information against the murderers. The secret of the reason for the soldiers’ coming had evidently in some manner leaked out. Several arrests of rioters were made, and the men implicated in the outrage on the Dutch boat were duly taken into custody. The whole affair was so closely interwoven with smuggling that it was by many suspected that the men who had been seized were held for that offence as well; and persons in the higher Thirteen men were indicted in the Admiralty Court on October 30th, 1769, for piracy and murder on the high seas; namely, Thomas Phillips, elder and younger, William and George Phillips, Mark Chatfield, Robert Webb, Thomas and Samuel Ailsbury, James and Richard Hyde, William Geary, alias Justice, alias George Wood, Thomas Knight, and William Wenham, and were capitally convicted. Of these, four, Thomas Ailsbury, William Geary, William Wenham, and Richard Hyde, were hanged at Execution Dock, November 27th. The next most outstanding incident, a bloody affray which occurred on February 26th, 1780, belongs to Kent. As Mr. Joseph Nicholson, supervisor of excise, was removing to Canterbury a large seizure of geneva he had made at Whitstable, a numerous body of smugglers followed him and his escort of a corporal and eight troopers of the 4th Dragoons. Fifty of the smugglers had firearms, and, coming up with the escort, opened fire without warning or demanding their goods. Two Dragoons were killed on the spot, and two others dangerously wounded. The smugglers then loaded up the goods and disappeared. A reward of £100 was at The south held unquestioned pre-eminence, as long as smuggling activities lasted, and the records of bloodshed and hard-fought encounters are fullest along the coasts of Kent and Sussex. Sometimes, but not often, they are varied by a touch of humour. The convenience afforded by churches for the storing of smuggled goods is a commonplace of the history of smuggling; and there is scarce a seaboard church of which some like tale is not told, while not a few inland church-towers and churchyards enjoy the same reputation. Asked to account for this almost universal choice of a hiding-place by the smugglers, a parish clerk of that age supposed, truly enough, that it was because no one was ever likely to go near a church, except on Sundays. This casts an instructive side-light upon the Church of England and religion at any time from two hundred to seventy or eighty years ago. But a tale of more than common humour was told of the old church at Hove, near Brighton, many years ago. It seems that this ancient But in the alternate Sunday period the smugglers of this then lonely shore found the half-ruined church of Hove peculiarly useful for their trade; hence the following story. One “Hove Sunday” the vicar, duly robed, appeared here to take the duty, and found, greatly to his surprise, that no bell was ringing to call the faithful to worship. “Why is the bell not ringing?” demanded the vicar. “Preston Sunday, sir,” returned the sexton shortly. “No, no,” replied the vicar. “Indeed, then, sir, ’tis.” But the vicar was not to be argued out of his own plain conviction that he had taken Preston last Sunday, and desired the sexton to start the bell-ringing at once. “’Taint no good, then, sir,” said the sexton, beaten back into his last ditch of defence; “you can’t preach to-day.” The Drummer of Herstmonceux “Well, then, sir,” said the sexton, “if you must know, the church is full of tubs, and the pulpit’s full of tea.” An especially impudent smuggling incident was reported from Hove on Sunday, October 16th, 1819, in the following words: “A suspected smuggling boat being seen off Hove by some of the custom-house officers, they, with two of the crew of the Hound revenue cutter, gave chase in a galley. On coming up with the boat their suspicions were confirmed, and they at once boarded her; but while intent on securing their prize, nine of the smugglers leapt into the Hound’s galley and escaped. Landing at Hove, seven of them got away at once, two being taken prisoners by some officers who were waiting for them. Upon this a large company of smugglers assembled, at once commenced a desperate attack upon the officers, and, having overpowered them, assaulted them with stones and large sticks, knocked them down, and cut the belts of the chief officer’s arms, which they took away, and thereby enabled the two prisoners to escape.” A reward of £200 was offered, but without result. The cargo of the smugglers consisted of 225 tubs of gin, 52 tubs of brandy, and one bag of tobacco. Many of the ghost-stories of a hundred years and more ago originated in the smugglers’ The churchyards of the Sussex coast and its neighbourhood still bear witness to the fatal affrays between excisemen and smugglers that marked those times; and even far inland may be found epitaphs on those who fell, breathing curses and Divine vengeance on the persons who brought them to an untimely end. Thus at Tandridge, Surrey, near Godstone, may be seen a tall
The prudery of some conscientious objector to the word “wretch” has caused it to be almost obliterated. At Patcham, near Brighton, the weatherworn epitaph on the north side of the church to Daniel Scales may still with difficulty be deciphered:
Daniel Scales was one of a desperate smuggling gang, who had had many narrow escapes, but was at last shot through the head.
The rest is not now readable. Among the many tragical incidents of the smuggling era was the affray aboard a fishing-smack off Hastings in March 1821, in which a fisherman named Joseph Swain, supposed by the blockading officers of the preventive force to be a smuggler, was killed. Fishing-boats and their crews were, as a matter of course, searched by these officials; but the boat boarded by them on this occasion belonged to Swain, who denied having any contraband goods aboard and refused to permit the search. So strenuous a refusal as Swain offered would seem, in those times, of itself sufficient evidence of the presence of smuggled articles, and the boarders persisted. A sailor among them, George England by name, pressed forward to the attack, and Swain seized his cutlass and tore it out of his hand; whereupon England drew a pistol and fired at Swain, who instantly fell dead. An epitaph in the churchyard of All Saints, Hastings, bears witness to this incident:
England was subsequently put on his trial for wilful murder at Horsham, and was sentenced to death, but afterwards pardoned. In short, in one way and another, much good blood and a great quantity of the most excellent spirits were spilt and let run to waste, along the coasts. The affair of the Badger revenue cutter and the Vre Brodiers, or Four Brothers, smuggling lugger was the next exciting event. It happened on January 13th, 1823, and attracted a great deal of attention at the time, not only on account of the severe encounter at sea, but from the subsequent trial of the crew of the smuggler. The Four Brothers was a Folkestone boat, and her crew of twenty-six were chiefly Folkestone men. She was a considerable vessel, having once been a On January 12th, of this momentous voyage, she sailed from Flushing with over one hundred tons of leaf-tobacco aboard, snugly packed for convenience of carriage in bales of 60 lb., and carried also a small consignment of brandy and gin, contained in 50 half-ankers, and 13 chests of tea—all destined for the south of Ireland. Ship and cargo were worth some £11,000; so it is sufficiently evident that her owners were in a considerable way of business of the contraband kind. At daybreak on the morning of January 13th, when off Dieppe and sailing very slowly, in a light wind, the crew of the Four Brothers found themselves almost upon what they at first took to be French fishing-boats, and held unsuspiciously on her course. Suddenly, however, one of them ran a flag smartly up her halliards and fired a gun across the bows of the Four Brothers, as a signal to bring her to. It was the revenue cutter Badger. Unfortunately for the smuggler, she was carrying a newly stepped mainmast, and under small sail only, and accordingly, in disobeying the summons and attempting to get away, she was speedily outsailed. The commander of the Badger thereupon called upon the Four Brothers to surrender; or, according to his own version, the smugglers themselves called for quarter; and the mate and some of the cutter’s men went in a boat and received their submission, and sent them prisoners aboard the Badger. The smugglers claimed that they had surrendered only on condition that they should have their boats and personal belongings and be allowed to go ashore; but it seems scarce likely the Lieutenant could have promised so much. The Four Brothers was then taken into Dover Harbour and her crew sent aboard the Severn man-o’-war and kept in irons in the cockpit. Three of her wounded died there. The others, after a short interval, were again put aboard the Badger and taken up the Thames to On Friday, April 25th, 1823, the twenty-two prisoners were arraigned in the High Court of Admiralty; Marinel Krans, master of the Four Brothers, and his crew, nearly all of whom bore Dutch names, being charged with wilfully and feloniously firing on the revenue cutter Badger, on January 13th, 1823, on the high seas, about eight miles off Dungeness, within the jurisdiction of the High Court of Admiralty of England. Mr. Brougham, afterwards Lord Brougham, defended, the defence being that the Four Brothers was a Dutch vessel, owned at Flushing, and her crew Dutchmen. A great deal of very hard swearing went towards this ingenious defence, for the crew, it is hardly necessary to say, were almost all English. At least one witness for the prosecution was afraid to appear in consequence of threats made by prisoners’ friends, and an affidavit was put in to that effect. It appeared, in the evidence given by the commander of the Badger and other witnesses for the prosecution, that the prisoners all spoke excellent English at the time of the capture, and afterwards; but they, singularly enough, understood little or none In summing up, Mr. Justice Parke said the crime for which the prisoners were tried was not murder, but was a capital offence. Two things, if found by the jury, would suffice to acquit the prisoners. The first was that no part of the vessel which they navigated belonged to any subject of His Majesty; the other that one half of the crew were not His Majesty’s subjects. For if neither of these facts existed, His Majesty’s ship had no right to fire at their vessel. But if the jury believed that any part of the vessel was British property, or that one half of her crew were British subjects, then His Majesty’s ship Badger, under the circumstances that had been proved, being on her duty, and having her proper colours flying, was justified in boarding their vessel; and their making resistance by firing at the Badger was a capital offence. The reason for the evidence respecting the distance of the vessels from the French coast being given was that, by the law of nations, ships of war were not, in time of peace, permitted to molest any vessel within one league of the coast of any other power. The jury, after deliberating for two hours, returned a verdict of “Not Guilty” for all the prisoners, finding that the ship and cargo were wholly foreign property, and that more than one half the crew were foreigners. They were, accordingly, at once liberated, and returned to Dover town was, about this time, the scene of stirring events. One Lieutenant Lilburn, in command of a revenue cutter, had captured a smuggler, and had placed the crew in Dover gaol. As they had not offered armed resistance to the capture, their offence was not capital, but they were liable to service on board a man-o’-war—a fate they were most anxious to avoid. These imprisoned men were largely natives of Folkestone and Sandgate, and their relatives determined to march over the ten miles between those places and Dover, and, if possible, liberate them. When they arrived in Dover, and their intention became known, a crowd of fisherfolk and longshore people swarmed out of the Dover alley-ways and reinforced them. Prominent among them were the women, who, as ever in cases of popular tumult, proved themselves the most violent and destructive among the mob. Nothing less than the destruction of the gaol was decided upon, and the more active spirits, leaving others to batter in the walls, doors, and windows, climbed upon the roof, and from that vantage-point showered bricks and tiles upon the Mayor and the soldiers who had been called out. The Mayor, beset with tooth and claw by screeching women, who tore the Riot Act out of his hand, fled, and Lieutenant Lilburn exhorted the officer The prisoners were triumphantly liberated, taken to a blacksmith’s, where their irons were knocked off, and then driven off in post chaises to Folkestone, whence they dispersed to their several hiding-places. Romney was, about this time, the scene of another desperate affair, when an attempted seizure of contraband brought all the smugglers’ friends and relations out, in violent contest with the excise and a small party of marines in command of which was one Lieutenant Peat. A magistrate was sent for, who, amid a shower of stones, read the Riot Act. The Lieutenant hesitated to resort to extreme force, but one of the smugglers was eventually killed by him, in response to the magistrate’s order, in respect of one of the most violent of the crowd: Secure your prisoner, sir. Run the rascal through! |