"Not with their property, but with their lives"

While researching smuggling for The Ghost and Miss Moore, there's one problem I run into again and again: the bulk of the records of the customs service were lost in the 1814 London Customs House fire. To me the greatest loss is that every revenue officer was required to keep notebooks detailing his daily activities and submit them to his superior officer. There are almost none extent from before 1814 because of this fire.

"The fatal Conflagration of the Custom House, on the Morning of the 12th February 1814"
(British Museum)

The fire was discovered by the porter at 6AM. By 7 the fire engines had arrived, and by 8 the flames were so high they had given up on saving the Customs House and began trying to save the surrounding buildings.

[A] report was circulated that many barrels of gunpowder were deposited in the vaults, and that consequently an explosion might soon be expected. This report had nearly a magical effect. All withdrew to a distance, both firemen and spectators. At half-past nine the report which had been circulated was confirmed not to have been an idle one. The explosion of about two barrels and a half of gunpowder was tremendous. The shock was distinctly felt on the Royal Exchange, and by persons who came to London by the Whitechapel Road; it was felt four miles in that direction. Many of the buckets were carried as far as Billingsgate; and one man was hurt or killed by two bricks falling on his head. The concussion spread devastation around the neighbourhood breaking many windows in Cannon Street, East Cheap and the adjoining streets, and exciting in the breasts of the inhabitants apprehensions of the complete destruction of that quarter of the City.

[...]The explosion of the gunpowder carried the burnt papers, ships registers, and a variety of matter, as far as Dalston, Shacklewell, Homerton, Hackney, and all the adjoining villages in the direction of the wind. A bundle of signed debentures is said to have been picked up by a gentleman at as great a distance from the scene of destruction as Spital Square.

(From the British Fire Service's contemporary accounts on their website, which are definitely worth reading all the way through. I couldn't find any citations of whose accounts they are, though, and they are clearly a composite of several authors' work since there are two different stories about Colonel Kelly's "(late of the Guards)" actions. He was the housekeeper's brother and one writer claims he "hurried to his sister and found her in such a senseless state from the fright, that it was with extreme difficulty he could drag her out almost naked."  In the other, he was paralyzed with fear in his burning room when the porter found him, and then ran to a window from which he was "saved by a ladder with the greatest difficulty and shockingly burnt in the face and hands," while the porter went and got his sister and the servants. While I am not by any means criticizing the guy for freaking out while his room was on fire, if I were the porter I might be annoyed by that face-saving story, although I'd feel guilty about being annoyed since Colonel Kelly died a few days later of his injuries.)

It later turned out that there were only about 10 or 12 pounds of gunpowder stored in that nearby building, for use by the volunteers, but rumors that there were barrels and barrels spread quickly and kept many of the firemen from wanting to get very near the fire, with the result that it spread fast and far.

The flames soon communicated to the houses in Thames Street opposite the Custom House, and embraced, in a short time, warehouses in Globe Yard, and the whole of the tenements extending from Beer Street to Water Lane from which it required the utmost activity of the inmates to escape, not with their property but with their lives.

The flames didn't get under control until around 3PM, by which time the Customs House was ashes.

The Customs House before the fire, by Rowlandson, 1808. (Wikimedia Commons)

Some of the amazing non-archival things lost in the fire:

The actual loss to government by the sudden destruction of the Custom House cannot be calculated; books, bonds, debentures, pearls, coral, valuable property of every description and securities of all kinds have been consumed.[...]The private property lost within the buildings is very considerable: several gentlemen had left large sums of money in their desks, ready to make payments on the following day. One individual has lost upwards of six thousand pounds in bank notes, which will be irrecoverable, as the memorandum of the numbers was in the desk with the notes and met the same fate. 

A very fine collection of pictures was also lost, which the Commissioners had permitted a gentleman to leave in deposit till it would be convenient for him to pay the duties, amounting to one thousand five hundred pounds. A genteel young man, in appearance, was stopped by some police officers, in Thames Street and, on searching him, his pockets and breeches were found to be stuffed with coral beads, silk handkerchiefs, and other valuables of small bulk. It appeared that his boldness in venturing nearer than even the firemen dared to do, had enabled him to obtain this booty.

Fortunately a new Customs House was already being built, the Napoleonic Wars (and resulting embargoes) and increased trade having vastly increased the work of the Customs. The new building was completed in haste...which may or may not have led to the design flaws that caused a huge part of the floor of the Long Room to collapse and fall into the King's Warehouse below in 1825, leading to major repairs, a new, much more classically Neoclassical facade, and the ruin of David Laing's career as an architect. But that's another story! (Which you can read a bit more about here, along with looking at many more engravings and drawings of the Custom House through the years.)

Do you have a favorite disaster, natural or otherwise? Tell me about it!

Wilt thou yet confess?

Hi, Rose here! As I mentioned in my last post, I'm doing research for my next book, about a revenue officer, a governess, and a ghost in Orkney (tentatively titled The Ghost and Miss Moore). I've always liked stories with ghost characters, but real-life ghost sightings have never been much of an interest of mine, so I'm reading The Haunted: a Social History of Ghosts by Owen Davies. It's a fascinating book and it's been giving me lots of ideas for how I want my ghost character to work!

He's a murder victim seeking justice (or maybe vengeance...he's not entirely a nice ghost), which has been a popular kind of ghost over the centuries--so popular, in fact, that murder investigations have been opened because of ghost sightings, up through the early part of the eighteenth century. In one case in 1660, a Westmoreland magistrate investigated the death of Robert Parkin because of a report that Robert's ghost had appeared to a man in the parish church crying "I am murdered I am murdered I am murdered."

In 1728, a Dorset coroner exhumed a body because of several sightings of the boy's ghost. In this case the ghost didn't even speak--its appearance was enough to indicated foul play, despite no previous suspicion about his death. Upon examining the body, the coroner decided he had really been murdered.

"Never shake thy gory locks at me!"

Murder victims sometimes haunted their killers: a servant who had killed his master and gotten clean away  to Ireland was driven to turn himself in by a headless ghost who appeared to him every night demanding "Wilt thou yet confess?" Sometimes they haunted other acquaintances.

David Garrick in his iconic just-caught-sight-of-the-Ghost pose.

One of the most upsetting incidents described in the book is this one:

The astrologer and occultist John Heydon (1629-c.1670) recounted how one of his mother's maids was pulled out of her bed one night by the ghost of a lover named John Stringer, who had recently been murdered by a jealous admirer. Despite three doors leading to her bedroom being locked, the maid 'had the right side of her haire and headclothes clean shaved or cut away' by Stringer's ghost.

That poor woman! Whether you believe in ghosts, or whether you think she imagined the ghost out of guilt and shaved her own hair, it's an awful story. I hope the "jealous admirer" was prosecuted, and didn't get to continue stalking and attacking her and her loved ones.

Sometimes ghosts appeared to strangers at the site of their hidden graves. This tied in with another ghost tradition, that souls who didn't receive Christian burial would walk until their bodies were found and interred in consecrated ground. In 1806, in a town near Manchester, the townsfolk drained a deep pool after a recently missing man's ghost repeatedly appeared over it at midnight, leading to suspicion he had been murdered. His body was actually found at the bottom, although the evidence indicated he had drowned accidentally.

Francis Grose [in his 1787 A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions] wondered why the ghosts of those murdered did not go straight to the nearest justice of the peace, rather than hang about their burial place frightening passers-by. 'Ghosts have undoubtedly forms and customs peculiar to themselves,' he concluded.

Ghosts historically have not talked much, although apparently they talked more in the past!

Great Caesar's ghost! "Aye, at Philippi."

Completely silent ghosts became the norm to a much greater extent over the course of the nineteenth century. Generally ghosts who did speak were wrong-righting ghosts. (Although there were exceptions! In 1706 Mr. Shaw, a fellow of St John's College, Oxford, chatted with the ghost of a dead colleague for two hours before receiving his warning of untimely death.) Murder victims were the most common. (Conflicts over inheritance were also a big one: "Mother's ghost appeared to me and she says I get the antique dining set!") Ebenezer Sibly, eighteenth century writer on astrology and the occult (and huge racist), insisted that only murder victims could speak (and possibly only those who had been killed in "circumstances uncommonly horrid and execrable), because the traumatizing memory did "more powerfully operate upon the faculties of the apparition, so as to enable it to frame the similitude of a voice, so as to discover the fact, and give some leading clue to detect and punish the wicked perpetrator."

My ghost is going to be a bit more talkative, since he's a prominent character in the book, but this research is giving me ideas for how to make him more distinctly ghostly and disturbing.

What's your favorite ghost story? (Either a famous one, or one that happened to you or someone you know...)

The de'il's awa wi' the Exciseman

I've been researching smuggling for my soon-to-be-started WIP (a revenue officer, a governess, and a ghost in Orkney!). Mostly what I'm discovering is how incredibly widespread and shameless smuggling was. It operated in many ways like our modern-day Mafia--but before the 80s mob trials. Revenue officers knew who the smugglers were. Often they even had advance knowledge of smuggling runs. But they were so badly outnumbered that in many cases, the officer or two (even if he was backed by half-a-dozen dragoons) had to simply watch as sixty or a hundred armed men rode by escorting huge cargoes.

There were cases of small fleets of smuggling ships coming into an inlet where a Revenue cutter lay at anchor and saying, "Cut your anchor and take off or we'll sink you!" (But with worse language, my book made sure to clarify!) And the ship had really no choice but to do it.

Even if smugglers could be arrested, it was rare to find a jury that would convict them. This was both because of genuine local support for the smugglers (who kept local economies going and stood up to the Man) and because of fear. Smugglers set fire to the stables and ricks of farmers who refused to allow their horses to be used, and tortured and/or murdered informers.

Here's a story that shows how truly out of control the situation was:

One of the most famous smuggling organizations was the Hawkhurst Gang (like Adrian!) in Kent. This gang operated quite openly and violently. In one instance, they beat, interrogated, and flogged some revenue officers who tried to challenge them, then carried them across the Channel and dumped them on enemy French soil in their King's uniforms.





The Mermaid Inn was a popular hangout for the gang, who would carouse there with their weapons out on the table.

In 1747 the town of Goudhurst decided they were tired of the Hawkhurst Gang's reign of terror. They formed the Goudhurst Militia, to be trained and let by a former sergeant in a foot regiment of the line. When the gang heard, they were furious and attacked the town's new defenses, pushing the militia into the town. They managed to capture one of the militiamen and tortured him for information. Once they had gotten out of him all the militia's preparations, they sent him home ("mangled," my book says) to tell the town that the gang would attack on April 20th, kill every person found in the town including women and children, and then burn it down.

The town didn't back down. The women and children were sent away for safety and Goudhurst was speedily fortified, with the church as the final line of defense.






"Kingsmill [the leader of the Hawkhurst Gang] formally called on Stuart [the sergeant] to surrender, in correct military procedure." (Geoffrey Morley's The Smuggling War.) An intense battle ensued, in which Kingsmill's brother was shot down and died beside him. Startlingly (to me) the villagers got the upper hand, wounding most of the smugglers and eventually pursuing the retreating smugglers back to Hawkhurst.

And the government did nothing while all this was going on! Of course, there was no organized police force at the time and bringing the army out against their own citizens...I'm sure no one wanted another Civil War. But it's mind-boggling, isn't it?

Here's what the government did do: they cut the import duty on tea. Smuggling was profitable because import duties on their products were so high: smugglers could sell their tea, brandy, lace and so on for much more than they had paid for it and still be far below the price set by legal merchants. It was estimated at one point that smugglers would still make a profit even if only one in three of their cargoes made it into England. So the smugglers were actually angry at the government for lowering the tea tax, which tells you exactly how seriously to take their "We only smuggle because the taxes are unfairly high" argument.

So a few months later (September 1747), a Revenue cutter captured a Hawkhurst ship and took her to the nearest port: Poole in Dorset. Her enormous cargo of tea and some alcohol and other things was unloaded into the Customs House.

What did Kingsmill do? He got together a group of local smugglers (who had to sign a statement of their intentions as a guard against them informing later) headed by him and six of his men heavily armed thirty of his men and went to storm the Customs warehouse. They were undeterred even by the presence of a warship in the harbor, calculating that if they waited until low tide, the ship's guns would be out of range of the warehouse doors. So they broke into the warehouse, taking only their own contraband (only the tea: they didn't have the horses or carts to take the brandy and other stuff), and went home. (This is actually not the only instance of this happening.)

When someone finally informed on the gang, the Hawkhurst Gang abducted him and the officer (Charles Galley, an elderly man) escorting him, torturing and whipping them as they carried them back to Hawkhurst. The officer finally fell off his horse, and the smugglers buried him alive in a fox earth (some sites say "possibly" still alive).





Galley Grove, site of the officer's grave and now named after him.

They then took the informer, keeping him chained in a shed for a few days while they decided what to do with him. They eventually tried to hang him from the windlass of a well, but the rope was too short so they just dumped him down the shaft and dropped stones on him until the shaft was full. (You can see a series of contemporary illustrations of these events at this site.)

Seven of the men responsible were finally caught and tried for their part in the raid on the Customs House, but only because one of their own turned Crown's evidence!  They were tried in London rather than in their home turf. Kingsmill and three of his men were given the death penalty, and right up until their execution they insisted they were innocent since the contraband they had stolen back was their property which they had bought and paid for.

Like pirates, smugglers are a group of people that are fun to romanticize, but the truth is pretty ugly.  On the other hand, they never would have become so powerful or violent without unreasonable taxes on common items (just enact an income tax already, for realz!), without the death penalty which made smugglers desperate not to be caught, or without widespread desperate poverty to create the large workforce.

Do you have a favorite romance about smuggling? Do you think smugglers make good heroes?