Broadly speaking, a smuggler is a criminal who evades duty imposed upon legitimately imported goods or traffics in materials prohibited from either import or export.

England’s first successful commercial smugglers, the owlers of Romney Marsh, were in this second category. They took advantage of the prohibitions and taxes placed on wool which was intended to pay for the wars of the 13th and 14th century, so as to profit by smuggling raw wool and sheepskins to the Continent where the robust, long-stranded English fleeces were much prized by Flemish weavers.

By the middle of 17th century, wool smuggling had become such an economic problem that, in 1660, the government banned wool exports altogether and, when it became clear that this was no solution, two years later they introduced the death penalty for anyone found smuggling wool, live sheep or their products. Despite these disincentives, the export trade continued to flourish, with periodic highs and lows occasioned by changes in taxation, until 1688, when government imposition of an excise duty on tea, spirits and tobacco as well as staples like salt, soap and leather, led the owlers to begin import smuggling on the back of their export business.

Wool would be loaded for the outgoing trip and items with a high excise duty such as tea, wine, brandy or luxury goods like lace were brought in by vessels on their return. Tea was available in Boulogne for 3p a pound, although it sold in England for 25p because of the government’s excise duty, giving a profit of 800%, with liquor and tobacco sales fetching slightly less. Needless to say, this trade proved very tempting to all sections of society and Prime Minister William Pitt confirmed to the House of Commons in 1783 his belief that more than 80% of all the tea drunk in Britain had never paid duty.

It was not until the early part of the 18th century that the trade began to be properly organised, however. Customs officials were few and far between, only eight being employed to patrol the whole of the south coast, and the amounts of contraband run into the country between 1650 and 1780 simply stagger belief. There is a record of one operation or ‘run’ by the infamous Hawkhurst gang which imported 11 tons of tea in a single night, moving it up the Dover road in a cavalcade of 150 ponies, protected by 300 club-wielding ‘batsmen’, while the Riding Officers could do little but stand by and fume impotently.

Movements of contraband on this sort of scale in Kent were the rule rather than the exception, with the smugglers landing their goods under cover of darkness, then moving them up the Dover road in daylight. Eventually the cavalcades of ponies and porters reached Stockwell, on the outskirts of London, where the goods were stored in purpose-built warehouses until the London merchants crossed the river to make their selections. The continental end of the trade was just as well organised, warehouses in Boulogne and Calais providing tea and spirits pre-packed in waterproof containers, which were designed to be carried by a single man or slung over a pony’s back.

Smuggling in other parts of the country such as Devon and Yorkshire was not quite so well run as the Kentish operation, principally because the distribution network centring around the capital was lacking, but despite problems associated with small-scale local distribution (most West Country smugglers sold their wares door to door, as well as to local merchants who had often also financed the run), everybody was making money.

The Hawkhurst gang
Profits were genuinely enormous and even county families from London and the Home Counties were financing the smugglers. The largest, most violent gangs originated in Kentish villages like Hawkhurst and Mayfield. They came to dominate the trade, employing hundreds of armed men who lined the beaches, protecting the landing and frequently capturing and securing the local Customs officer on the night of a run, only to release him after the contraband was well away to the local hides.

The Hawkhurst gang were amongst the worst of these criminals and on one occasion went so far as to break into the Poole customs house and re-possess themselves of three tons of tea and 39 barrels of spirit impounded there.

Their excessive violence was the cause of this gang’s final destruction, however, their leader, Arthur Gray, and a number of other gang members being tried and eventually gibbeted for the torture and murder of an elderly customs official, William Galley and a shoemaker turned informer called Daniel Chater.

This broke the power of the men from Hawkhurst and when Pitt became prime minister in 1783, he reduced the tax on tea, from 119% to 12.5%, as well as that on wines, spirits and tobacco, thereby ending the profitability of import smuggling at a stroke and increasing customs revenue by over £2 million, which helped Britain’s National Debt significantly.

Cross-channel trips
The huge coastal runs were now a thing of the past but undeterred, smuggling gangs cast around for another source of income. They found it, surprisingly enough, in the economic struggles of the new French Republic. Bonaparte was short of gold coin to pay his armies and a number of unscrupulous London bankers undertook to supply this deficiency, the men of Deal running these shipments in specially constructed ‘guinea’ boats, 40ft-long galleys shipping up to 12 oars a side and capable of speeds of 12 knots. Some of these cross-channel trips netted over £30,000 and considering that a 12-oar galley could be built in Deal or Boulogne for £40, profits were staggering. However, the end of the Napoleonic wars terminated the guinea runners’ profits and also brought a huge influx of trained seamen and soldiers into the country, all looking for employment. Jobs were hard to come by and this led to a major increase in crime, with smuggling again coming to the forefront.

The character of the trade had changed once again and now the emphasis was on high value contraband run in boats which were also carrying a legitimate cargo. Customs officials were now much more numerous and better equipped, with fast Revenue cutters patrolling the Channel that were quite capable of dealing with the smugglers’ vessels, however well armed they might be, so subtle, covert operations had to replace the violence. Hiding places were ingenious, tobacco being plaited into ropes or concealed in casks with false sides, barrels of spirits hidden in false keels, bows or other parts of a vessel’s superstructure, with smaller, more valuable items even being concealed amongst a well-to-do passenger’s personal luggage. This set the pattern for the future, only the cargoes changing, with cigarettes, watches and lately drugs, people and illegal weapons, replacing the lace and plug tobacco of the late Georgian era.

Smugglers during the 17th and 18th centuries were opportunists, the success of their operations being dependent upon evasion of what most people saw as an unfair tax on everyday goods. In a very real sense, they were business men taking advantage of government inefficiency to line their own pockets and would probably have been highly insulted if anyone implied that their activities were the least bit criminal.

Searching for a smuggler
Although the major gangs during smuggling’s heyday were mainly confined to Kent, the east coast and the West Country, it is not impossible to find a smuggler working in another area. Criminal records are available to search at The National Archives and in some cases online, but before embarking on what can be a long process it may be as well to examine the background of an ancestor to see how likely he or she is to have been involved in this sort of criminal activity. It pays to remember that much of the trade involved ordinary labourers or farmhands, hired overnight for a few shillings and these people were almost never caught, so criminal records are not much help. There are features in an individual’s past, however, which may serve as a pointer to his or her nefarious activities:

• During the 18th century, people tended to stay in one place, usually the village where they were born. People needed a very pressing reason for leaving the region where they were known and finding an ancestor with a birth certificate in one parish but no corresponding death certificate or grave marker may be indicative of someone on the run, although, of course, not all such movements were due to illegal activities.
• An unexplained improvement in status may also be the result of participation in smuggling, especially if the individual concerned is quite young and therefore could not account for his sudden affluence by hard saving, such as: a farm labourer suddenly taking on a small holding or farm; a journeyman settling down to possession of premises and the status of a master craftsman; and particularly a common sailor suddenly coming into possession of his own boat.

Any unexplained change in circumstances is a possible indicator of ill-gotten gains and may bear a closer look.

Having once gained a possible insight in an ancestor’s criminal past, proving his involvement, if he was ever caught and tried, is fairly simple, if time consuming, although the further back one needs to look the more tedious searching becomes.

TNA provides a series of instructive guides to searching its archives for a criminal’s record and details from some 2500 other archives and sources are also available using its Discovery search engine. Once an ancestor is located in the court records, the next step is to examine local newspapers. These are a good if, of necessity, more localised source, and they tend to be far more detailed than a simple court record.

Unfortunately, only those who were caught and brought to trial can be located by this method and even more frustrating for the researcher, many who came to trial used an alias, which makes revealing their identity almost impossible.