The Hawkhurst Gang – Tea tax fuelled unique (British) Mafia

The stone stands subsequent to a bus cease on the outskirts of Chichester. Today, post-war semi-detached homes, a group centre and a way of Home Counties order prevails on Broyle Road on this nameless nook of Sussex.

Yet, in the event you can pick the inscription on the light stone, you’ll be able to nearly make out a minatory warning.

Dated AD 1749, the stone proclaims that it stands, “as a memorial to posterity and a warning to this and succeeding generations”.

Two centuries in the past, this now placid slice of suburbia was the placement of a mass execution of the main members of what’s now believed to be the earliest British mafia gang.

“The Hawkhurst Gang was the first time something that looks like modern organized crime appeared in Britain,” says Joseph Dragovich, writer of a brand new e-book on the gang’s murderous deeds and supreme downfall.

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“They were the most successful gang to take advantage of huge changes in British life. They built a criminal empire in Kent and Sussex and were the most violent and destructive gang of the era.”

Robbing customized homes, brutally killing supposed informants, overtly ingesting in pubs alongside the Sussex and Kent coast and marshalling paramilitary type horse-back raids have been all emblems of the gang’s ruthless strategies, overtly mocking the authorities of the age.

Yet the contraband that made them wealthy was nothing greater than tea – a product which, within the 1700s, held a cachet that’s onerous to understand right this moment. “The key to the gang’s success was tea and tax,” explains Joseph. “Europe was almost constantly at war in the 18th century and the British government needed to pay for the army and navy.

“Income taxes were almost a century away because most people didn’t have incomes in the way we think of them today.

“So the government taxed imports like tea, coffee and brandy because they were relatively easy to see coming and going in the ports.

“As the government needed more money, they cranked up the taxes.”

This was the period when the British love affair with ingesting limitless mugs of scorching tea started in earnest.

Yet it was taxed by weight as an alternative of worth, that means tea lovers have been charged the identical quantity, no matter how a lot the product truly value to import. This anomaly resulted within the taxation on tea making up virtually 50 per cent of the value handed right down to clients.

The Hawkhurst gang realised that anybody who prevented paying the tax may make some huge cash. On their most well-known raid on Poole customs home, the gang left the stolen vats of brandy however took the tea.

The gang’s leaders – Thomas Kingsmill, William Fairall and Arthur Gray – knew the federal government was not geared up to cope with a heavily-armed mafia committing against the law only a few individuals felt was even against the law in any respect.

“In the 18th century there were no professional police, much less law enforcement, that knew how to deal with something like the Hawkhurst Gang,” says Joseph.

“Local magistrates weren’t able to conduct large investigations, and the customs service was using a relatively small number of
people to patrol a lot of difficult coastline. Using the military was not a great option either, because people saw that as a slide into dictatorship. For this was an era when we started to see something resembling our modern expectations of the rule of law.

“The government couldn’t just arrest people – they needed evidence to convict people of crimes.

“Arresting the Hawkhurst Gang was really difficult if there were no willing witnesses.”

It was this connivance of locals that enabled the Hawkhurst Gang to function with virtually complete impunity, culminating within the Poole Custom House raid of 1747, the place the gang broke right into a lockup to retake the contraband that had been seized from one other native gang.

“During the raid they were just acting as hired guns for another smuggling gang,” says Joseph.

“They were the only gang that had the skills and bloody-mindedness to rob a government facility. That is because the gang weren’t just successful smugglers, they were fearsome paramilitaries.

“That was pretty new in British history and not something that has happened much since.”

But it might be the Poole raid that will sign the sluggish destruction of the gang.

Several months later one member of the gang, John Diamond, was arrested and jailed. Another, Daniel Chater, supplied himself as an alibi however was seen by a neighborhood informant speaking in a pub with a customs workplace named Galley.

Assuming that Chater was leaking secrets and techniques to the authorities, gang members arrived and plied the pair with drink. Chater and Galley awoke to seek out themselves tied to a horse being ferociously whipped.

Believing they’d killed Galley the gang buried him, although it later transpired the officer had nonetheless been alive whereas earth was being piled on high of him.

Chater was saved in chains for an extra three days earlier than being attacked with a knife, then thrown head first down a 30ft nicely. The gang hurled down rocks till his screaming stopped. “The gang was ready to beat people senseless and subject them to prolonged pain to make a point,” says Joseph.

However, after tales of the horrific deaths of Chater and Galley received out, the temper of locals who had hitherto tolerated the Hawkhurst gang, started to fade.

Appalled on the violence, info on the gang’s whereabouts began to be leaked and the gang leaders have been arrested and tried.

Some have been hanged at Tyburn whereas six have been hanged north of Chichester on the Broyle Road.

Their lifeless our bodies have been hung in chains at numerous places round Sussex and Kent as a warning.

“I think the lesson we can learn from the Hawkhurst Gang, and organized crime more generally, is that you can destroy specific gangs, but it is very difficult to stop the underlying issue that created them in the first place,” concludes Joseph. “Destroying the Hawkhurst Gang did not end smuggling in the region, any more than putting Al Capone in jail ended bootlegging.”

Stories of the legends of smugglers’ tunnels endure to today within the pubs of Rye and Chichester.

Joseph believes among the spoils seized should be ready to be found.

“Arthur Gray built a large house called Seacox Heath near Hawk-hurst itself,” he reveals.

“After he died the house fell into disrepair but was rebuilt in the 19th century. It was given to the Soviet government after the Second World War and has been a Soviet/Russian embassy since.

“Gray likely built that house for smuggling. Maybe some tunnels and hidden chambers are in there.”

• Order Hawkhurst by Joseph Dragovich (The History Press Ltd, £16.99) from the Express Bookshop for £16.99. Visit expressbookshop.com or name 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on on-line orders over £25