Women and the Smuggling Trade

by Marie-Louise Jensen

In Smuggler's Kiss, I have a young woman on board the smuggling vessel, taking part in cross-channel smuggling as well as land-based work. This was probably rare and would have mainly been the province of men. The tub carriers were probably exclusively male for good reasons. The tubs that they carried, one on their chest and one on their back, roped together, were heavy. The actual volume they contained seems to have varied, but each would have been approximately 5 litres. You only have to lift a 5-litre water container and imagine carrying two - in wooden barrels - up a steep cliff ascent to see why men carried the tubs. Even for them this work often had health consequences over time as it crushed the rib cage.
It was still sought-after employment however. A labourer could only earn some 7 or 8 shillings a week on the land at the time. Smuggling often paid as much as 5 shillings a night.
There was plenty of work for women in the trade, however. The brandy that was brought in from France was near proof (to save space) and clear to boot. It needed diluting and the English liked their brandy honey-coloured. The women usually did the work of heating the caramel mixture and colouring the liquor and also watering it down.
When tea was smuggled, the women in their costal cottages often cut and dried ordinary leaves to mix in with the actual tea to increase profits. I imagine that must sometimes have tasted nasty and could even have been toxic.
But as regulations around smuggling were tightened, the smugglers needed to become more devious. In this situation, women were suddenly very useful to them.
I've mentioned here before that revenue officers weren't allowed to rummage (search) women. That could have resulted in all kinds of abuse and irregularities. But it was very handy for the smugglers.
Bearing in mind that women wore very voluminous petticoats in the early Georgian era, it became standard practice to use these for concealment. Thus my character Isabelle wraps lengths of French lace around her legs and waist to smuggle it in through the ports. The revenue men suspect her bulky figure, but aren't allowed to frisk her.
Even more outrageous was a slightly later practice whereby women tied bladders filled with brandy and gin under their skirts and walked brazenly through the town with them swinging under their skirts, safe in the knowledge that the revenue men were - naturally! - forbidden from putting their hands up the good wives' petticoats.
This became a risky procedure. The danger wasn't from the revenue men, but from local youths who thought the greatest joke ever was to pierce the bladder with a knife or other sharp implement and watch the booze flood out over the carrier's shoes, stockings and onto the ground. Such a waste!

Smugglers Ahoy!

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I had a new book published on March 7th! No prizes for guessing what it's about.
Smugglers were so much fun to research. I began with my memory of the Rudyard Kipling poem A Smuggler's Song, which you can read here: http://www.sheerpoetry.co.uk/junior/literacy-hour/year-5/longer-classic-poetry, I worked my way through various novels, including Moonfleet by John Mead Faulkner and watched an old BBC series called Smuggler which reduced my sons to tears of laughter it was so dated. I enjoyed it nonetheless.
There were also plenty of non-fiction books to read about smuggling in various parts of the country. The problem for me with a lot of these was that they described the practice without clear timelines. It's no good writing about the smuggling of tea in 1720, when my book is set, because duty wasn't put on tea until 1724 Also I needed to be very clear about which laws were in force when my tale was set. Was smuggling a capital offence and when did that come into force? When was the law governing signalling ships at sea passed? When was the coastguard brought into existence?
And many quite surprising details aren't known. What uniform did revenue officers wear? What did the pennant look like that they flew from their ships? Not recorded. There are only theories.
And of course the history of the smuggling activities themselves are shrouded in a certain amount of secrecy. It was a clandestine trade carried on mainly on wild, dark winter nights with nothing incriminating written down. Fascinating stuff!
Enough has emerged from trials and confessions to paint a picture, though who can say how reliable this information is? And a great many stories have become local lore and legend, but much of this is even more unreliable.
One book, for example, devotes a whole chapter to debunking the myth that smugglers used long tunnels, pointing out the resources such tunnels would have required to build. And where did these intrepid engineers dump all the earth they supposedly dug out? Besides, no significant tunnels have ever been found. The truth is that in the early years of the 18th century especially, smugglers worked quite openly, sometimes even landing cargo in ports in broad daylight. The overstretched revenue officers simply didn't have the resources or manpower to prevent them. And when they began to tighten up a little, there were still so many hundreds of miles of wild, inaccessible coast to patrol. The smugglers, or free traders, still had plenty of options.