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.”

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.

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.

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.

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 y^e 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 y^e trumpet fhall begin to found
’Twill not avail where’er y^e 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.

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.”

Bedhampton Mill