Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark -
Brandy for the Parson, 'Baccy for the Clerk.
Laces for a lady; letters for a spy,
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!
(Rudyard Kipling, A Smuggler's Song, 1906)

Kipling's poem was written in 1906, but it refers to the Georgian era, when taxes on imports were high and smuggling was rife. Many people turned a blind eye to the trade, often profiting from smuggled goods themselves. Susannah Fullerton, in her fascinating book Jane Austen and Crime, tells us that at least half of the tea imported into England was obtained illegally. Normally, tea cost at least seven shillings a pound, but contraband tea could be bought by smugglers at seven pence a pound and sold for two shillings. That’s 24 pence – over three times the legal price. Tea merchants could not compete with these prices, so much of the tea they sold was of dubious origin. 

A case from the Old Bailey law court records of 1799 reports that William Strick was arrested in Cornwall for smuggling. His case was not tried in Cornwall, however, but in London. It was thought that no jury would dare to convict him in Cornwall, since the smuggling trade had such a hold. In this case, Customs and Excise officers found sixteen casks of brandy and gin buried in a field. A party of smugglers threatened the officers, who retreated to a nearby village.

"The smugglers followed them, and having set down the casks openly in the town at a public-house door, they drank out of them; here there were so many smugglers of different descriptions, crews of vessels employed for that purpose, that it was utterly impossible for the officers to do any thing, and they were obliged to leave these people quietly in possession of the goods."

Strick was recognised later and arrested. He was found guilty of smuggling and sentenced to death, but, as no violence was involved, his sentence was commuted to military service.

In another case, an Excise officer saw "five horses loaded with casks, such as are used to contain smuggled spirits".

"Q. Did you tell them you were Excise officers? - A. Yes, we did; I told them the consequence of their conduct, and Heals [the prisoner] said, he could not be worse off than he was, conceiving himself in poverty, I should suppose."

When life was so hard, smuggling was a tempting option.

All kinds of goods could be smuggled. In one ingenious case, a group of Jesuit missionaries returned to Spain from Mexico. Their ship was unloaded, but the porters struggled under the unusual weight of eight large cases containing chocolate. This roused the suspicions of the customs officers, who opened the cases and picked up a bar of chocolate. It was unusually heavy, so the officer tried to break it. It proved unbreakable, but in the process the outside of the bar peeled away, revealing a bar of gold surrounded by an inch of chocolate. The Jesuits denied all knowledge of it, so the gold was given to the king. No one knows what happened to the chocolate.

When I wrote Crime and Prejudice, I searched for crimes in the Old Bailey records and then imagined potential matches to Jane Austen’s characters. Mr Bingley, with his cheerful attitude and trusting nature, seemed a good candidate for an inadvertent link to the smuggling trade. And Cornwall, where Mr Bingley flees in my story to escape the pain of his interrupted romance with Jane Bennet, made me think of Ross Poldark. The stage was set for a meeting between Mr Bingley and “a handsome young fellow with a black three-cornered hat, wavy dark hair that reached to his shoulders, a high forehead, an unshaven chin and a frowning, serious expression”. You can read the story for yourself by clicking here, or listen to the audiobook here.

References

Fullerton, S. (2004). Jane Austen and crime. Jones Books.
Old Bailey Proceedings Online. (1800). Trial of William Strick (t18000528-6). https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t18000528-6?text=smuggling

Old Bailey Proceedings Online (1799). Trial of John Heals, Peter Avery, John Chapman (t17990109-30). https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17990109-30?text=smuggling

Sánchez, G. & Mursell, I. 2023. Chocolate and crime. Mexicolore. https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/maya/chocolate/chocolate-and-crime