Hawkhurst: Murder, Corruption, and Britain's Most Notorious Smuggling Gang by Joseph Dragovich

Author:Joseph Dragovich
Format: epub

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John Cook stood at the dock of the Old Bailey. This trial was important: it was one of the first Hawkhurst Gang trials under the new law. He stood accused of smuggling by two of the Folkestoners they had beaten up, Robert Worthington and Christopher Barret.vThe prosecution’s star witnesses had almost not made it to London to testify. As they were travelling, they were awakened from their beds by the gang, who marched Barret out into the street, to his likely death. When Barret reached the street, he turned his would-be assassin’s pistol away. The gun went off, grazing Barret’s lip, but giving him enough time to run for his life.viWorthington’s would-be killer was no more successful; when Barret had gone down the stairs, the smuggler fired his pistol at Worthington, grazing his slipper and giving him enough time to also escape.409

Both the Attorney General and Solicitor General were personally prosecuting the case. Ryder gave the opening argument, outlining the smuggling law that had been published the year before and stressing the harms of smuggling and the necessity of doing something about it: ‘for these are Crimes of too high a Nature, to be admitted of in any Country where Laws are made’.410

Ryder also stressed that Cook was no ordinary smuggler: ‘The Prisoner was one of the Gang that went by the Name of the Hawkhurst Gang, where they have made themselves pretty famous, by the Terror they have spread in the Country.’411 The gang weren’t just smugglers, but a band of terrorist thugs. Cook was to be the first of many representatives of the Hawkhurst Gang to grace the dock at the Old Bailey.

The government chose to try Cook for the smuggling charge, rather than his failure to appear. He had broken that part of the smuggling law, but Ryder readily admitted the conditions for his gazetting had not been met. Cook’s name had been published per the letter of the law, but the proclamations that needed to be made in the market towns were botched by the sheriff. The charge was unprosecutable.412

The gazetting system’s complexity made it difficult to use in court. The method of ensuring that the suspect knew that they needed to appear had many moving parts. If one of those parts failed, or the prisoner could show that they genuinely didn’t know what they were meant to do, the charge couldn’t be prosecuted, but that was largely beside the point. The law was meant to give the government the means to break up the big smuggling gangs, not send a horde of part-timers to the gallows.

An East Anglian smuggler, John Harvey, was gazetted the same day as John Cook. An illiterate gamekeeper, he also failed to appear, but petitioned for a pardon soon after he landed in Newgate. Ryder was afraid of the precedent that it would set if ‘I didn’t know’ was a legitimate defence for gazetting. Ryder recommended that the King not grant the pardon,413 though it appears that Ryder was not without his sympathy for Harvey.

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