Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze Read Online Free Page B

on building sites or out in the fields and, like all immigrants before and after them, they were accused of stealing English jobs. Within hours of the trouble starting, Walpole had informers mingling with the crowd, and sending back regular reports from public houses. ‘Some of [the crowd] told me,’ Joseph Bell scribbled hastily to his master, ‘there was such numbers of Irish who under-work them, they could not live and that there was an Irish man in the neighbourhood who employed numbers of them & they was determined to demolish him and drive the rest away.’ It turned out that the contractor for Shoreditch Church ‘had paid off his English labourers and imployed Irish because they worked cheaper.’ 10 The same thing was happening in the weaving industry. Out in the countryside,there were disturbances against low-waged Irish harvest-workers.
    But if the Irish problem had started it, there was plenty more discontent simmering under the surface. As he mingled with the crowd, Joseph Bell heard hints which would realise all Sir Robert Walpole’s worst fears. ‘In other parts of the crowd,’ he wrote to the Prime Minister, ‘they told me their meeting was to prevent the putting down Ginn.’
    On the first night of the riots, Irish public houses were attacked. A squad of fifty soldiers under Major White, officer on duty at the Tower, found itself up against a crowd he estimated at 4,000. On Thursday, a boy called Thomas Larkin was shot dead in Brick Lane. The next night was even worse. Richard Burton, a brewer’s assistant, ‘saw the mob coming down Bell Yard, with sticks and lighted links. One of them made a sort of speech directing the rest to go to Church Lane, to the Gentleman and Porter .’ The crowd was organised by now. These were no longer spontaneous demonstrations. Quite a few of the leaders had papers with lists of Irish pubs on them. ‘One of them was called Captain Tom the Barber , and was in a striped banjan. I would have taken notice of him,’ Richard Burton told the Old Bailey later, ‘but he turned away and would not let me see his face.’ The authorities were having to take ever stronger measures to deal with the situation. Clifford William Phillips, a Tower Hamlets magistrate, was woken by neighbours about ten o’clock, despatched a message to the Tower for help, and then set off towards the riot. ‘The street was very light,’ he recalled afterwards, ‘and I could see (at a distance) the mob beating against the shutters with their clubs and hear the glass fly … I heard the hollowing at my house, and the cry in the street was Down with the Irish, Down with the Irish .’ As Richard Burton remembered, it was only the appearance of magistrate and soldiers that prevented worse violence. ‘Justice Phillips coming down, and the captain with his soldiers, they took some of [the crowd], andthe rest made off immediately, and were gone as suddenly, as if a hole had been ready dug in the bottom of the street, and they had all dropped into it at once.’ 11
    In the end that was the worst night of violence. By the weekend the authorities had flexed their muscles. Irish workmen had been laid off and the trouble was over. But the July riots showed what a powder-keg London had become. Some of Walpole’s informers insisted the trouble was all to do with Irish labour, but others couldn’t get deeper fears out of their minds. ‘It is very difficult to judge whence this riot arose,’ reported the Tower Hamlets magistrates. ‘Some say the Irish … were the causes, but I am afraid there must be something else at the bottom, either Mother Gin or something worse. Captain Littler of the Guards said he heard the words High Church among them.’ ‘High Church’ had been one of the slogans of the Sacheverell riots which broke out against the Whig ministry in 1710. For Walpole, it was a sure sign of Jacobite involvement. Meanwhile, a witness at the rioters’ trial, Peter Cappe, told how he had seen a group