Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze by Dillon Patrick

Author:Dillon, Patrick [Dillon, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 0747235694
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2013-08-06T23:00:00+00:00

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It didn’t seem to put them off. Three months into prohibition, the gin was still flowing. And if reformers and politicians spent Christmas looking for signs of popular subversion, they didn’t have long to wait. On 17 January 1737, the London Evening Post reported a disturbing incident.

It happened in Hanover Square, in the heart of the polite new West End. ‘Yesterday,’ the paper reported, ‘one Pullin, a chairman,* was carry’d in effigy about the several streets, squares &c. in the parish of St George, Hanover Square, for informing against a victualler in Princess Street for retailing spirituous liquors.’ Londoners never did like informers. The Societies for Reformation of Manners had discovered that. ‘After the procession was over he was fixed on a chair pole in Hanover Square, with a halter about his neck, and then a load of faggots placed round him, in which manner he was burnt in the sight of a vast concourse of people.’

For the authorities, the only good news was that the crowd’s attack on Pullin had been symbolic. The real violence would come later. But it was enough to cause them panic. They had legislated against gin, and they were being ignored. Thomas De Veil was up all night collecting fines and sending gin-sellers to Bridewell, but it didn’t make any difference.

The new session of Parliament opened just two weeks later. On the first day the King declared to the assembled Lords and Commons that ‘it must be matter of the utmost surprise and concern to every true lover of his country, to see the many contrivances and attempts carried on … in different parts of the nation, tumultuously to resist and obstruct the execution of the laws and to violate the peace of the kingdom. These disturbers of the public repose … in their late outrages, have either directly opposed, or at least endeavoured to render ineffectual some acts of the whole legislature.’ The government was thinking of the riots of the year before: the summer riots in London, the disturbances in Edinburgh, the scare over a Jacobite rising. It didn’t help that for the past four months they had had to sit by and watch a major piece of legislation being ignored.

Distillers had spent nine months waiting for the new session to start. There was no shortage of voices calling for the Gin Act to be scrapped. The London Magazine launched a long attack on informers. The Grub Street Journal proposed scrapping prohibition and replacing it with increased duties and better licensing controls. No one doubted that the Gin Act had gone too far. ‘[If] rigorous methods are chosen at the same time that moderate methods … offer themselves,’ the Grub Street Journal argued, ‘people can never be brought to think that such methods were … designed for the public good.’22

But moderation was the last thing on the government’s mind as the 1737 session opened. It was thinking only of riot and rebellion. ‘His Majesty,’ the King went on, ‘thinks it

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