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.

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.

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.