The Rest Is History - 150. Smuggling

Episode Date: February 10, 2022

Did you think smuggling in Britain was confined to the Jamaica Inn and the beaches of the Cornish coast? If so, you might want to listen to today's podcast, where Tom and Dominic are joined by author and smuggling oracle, Alex Preston. The discussion is wide-ranging, including wrecking, the Hawkhurst Gang and coastal militias. Alex's new book, Winchelsea, is available at all good book retailers.  Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. If you wake at midnight and hear a horse's feet, don't go drawing back the blinds or looking in the street. Then that asks no questions isn't told a lie. Watch the wall, my darling, when the gentlemen go by. Five and twenty ponies trotting through the dark. Brandy for the parson, backy for the clerk

Laces for a lady, letters for a spy And what's the wall, my darling? Well, gentlemen, go by If you make King George's men dressed in blue and red You'll be careful what you say And mindful what is said If they call you pretty mate and chuck you beneath the chin don't you tell where no one is nor yet where no one's been

that is a chilling reading that was that was magnificent uh and and dominic we should uh we should explain to the listeners so that was about your sixth attempt. And you kept corpusing every time you began. That is a smuggler's... No, that was absolutely masterful. And that is a smuggler's song by Rudyard Kipling, a very moving and powerful poem about smuggling, Tom, which is our... And there's nothing funny about smuggling, is there?

No. I don't know why you were laughing. People might think that I was laughing, but actually that's the distortion of the sound. It was moving, movingly and powerfully read as well. And yeah, wonderfully read. And today's subject is smuggling, the golden age of smuggling, the prehistory of smuggling, today's smuggling, the whole works. And the reason for that is that a very good friend of mine, Alex Preston, brilliant novelist, has a new novel out this week called Winchelsea.

And it's been greeted with rapturous reviews. And Dominic, do you want to know what a top critic, how a top critic described it? Was that you? Maybe. Go on. But only if you can do it in that excellent Rudyard Kipling smuggling voice. Imagine Daphne du Maurier crossed with Quentin Tarantino,

and you will have some idea of just what a thrilling, bloody and heady ride this novel is. Liam Neeson. No, that was me. Okay. Pretending to be a smuggler. So that was, it's a fantastic book. And Alex is joining us.

And Alex, that brilliant poem by Roger Kipling, you said just before we started that you can actually see Kipling's house, Bateman, from where you're sitting. Yeah, I mean, not quite, but it's just over the brow of the hill. So, you know, Dominic's rendition of it, you know, brought it even closer to home.

Of course it did. I imagine the ghost of Kipling is just over the hill there, smiling. Yeah, cheering. And Alex, so this is, you're on the Kent-Sussex border. I guess most people would think that the home of smuggling is Cornwall, not Kent and Sussex. And most people would be wrong. And, you know, I think it's quite interesting having a novelist on a history podcast, because actually one of the things that is most interesting about smugglers is how much is fabricated and how much comes to us filtered and distorted through novels. And so we think of smugglers being in Cornwall. We think of them very much in the mode of Kipling's sort of lovable rogues.

It's all absolute lies. And I hope that we can we can give the rest is history listeners a kind of unalloyed truth about about the history of smuggling. We like alloyed. We like alloyed. I can do both. So so that that's just before we get into the smuggling sort of the genuine history so our image of smuggling comes from what i would say moon fleet and jamaica inn is that is that right is that pretty much yeah moon fleet jamaica inn i would think paul dark um i think dr sin which is largely forgotten russell thorndyke which is they were set on the romney marshes so that was geographically much more uh much more accurate but um but you know daphne de moria is is responsible uh in the

in the large part for this moon fleet is set in in dorset um on chesil beach um and well alex we've got we've got a comment from kate wayne and indeed many others being forced to read and analyze at length moon fleet at gcse ruined smuggling for me so moon fleet is brilliant it's an absolutely Kate Wayne and indeed many others being forced to read and analyse at length Moonfleet at GCSE ruined smuggling for me. Sad about it, Moonfleet is brilliant. I think that that speaks very poorly to your correspondence literary taste because it's an absolute cast iron masterpiece. I love Moonfleet. Okay and Left of Centrist Dad. He's attacking the audience Tom, shocking. I know, that's punchy. Left of centrist dad, to what extent is our image of smugglers and smuggling entirely derived from fiction?

I mean, basically, you've answered that. It is. I mean, it's hugely influenced, isn't it? It's very, very clearly influenced by fiction. I also think there is a kind of willful misunderstanding of the role of smuggler. And this is something we can get onto. But you have to think about when smugglers were absolutely at their apogee. It's the very beginning of the industrial age. It's also the beginning of a kind of centralised government. And so what you've got is localised communities who are suddenly feeling their lives managed from above, from away, from London. You have got this sense that they are losing some of

the traditions that are dear to them. And you have these lovable rogues, you have these kind of salts of the earth who are, you know, sticking two fingers up to the man. And, you know, this is, it's a sense of local people championing people, the kind of, yes, they're outside of the law, but actually, the law itself is an ass in this case. There's a lovely quote from Adam Smith in A Wealth of Nations. He says, a smuggler is a person who, though no doubt highly blameable for violating the laws of his country country is frequently incapable of violating those of natural justice and would have been in every respect an excellent citizen had not the laws of his country made that a crime which nature never meant to be so yes that's very robin hood

isn't it it is very it is very robin hood but it is also a sense you know and this again is why geographically and i think thinking about your your from, you know, we know that they're all corners of the globe, maybe we should just paint a quick picture of the British coastline and where this is happening, and where this is happening in apposition to where people believe it's happening. So the image of the smuggler is of a Cornish, you know, probably a Cornish fisherman who does this as a kind of, as a kind of pastime and then disperses his, his ill-gotten gains within the community, sort of helping the, the lame and the halt. And it wasn't in Cornwall. Cornwall was only ever a very, very minor part of this, certainly in terms of organised criminal gangs, which is what we're talking about in the 18th century.

The Hawkehurst gang, the Mayfield gang, the Sea Salter Company, these were enormous operations with, you know, certainly thousands. Kind of like mafia? Mafia. I think, you know, well, I think organised criminal gangs, because I hope we'll come on to talk about the role that smuggling plays today, which is obviously very different, but which is largely human traffic. I would say that they are very similar to the kind of organised criminal gangs, the networks of organised criminal gangs that arrange people smuggling today. So they were very sophisticated. They were incredibly wealthy. The head of the sea salter company died in sort of 1815 or so, and he left in his will the equivalent of 50 million pounds. So these were people who were really very, very wealthy. I live

just outside of Hawkehurst. And the largest house I think ever built in the area was Seacox Heath, which was built by Arthur Gray, the head of the Hawkehurst gang. It was so huge that nobody after him, after the fall of the Hawkehurst gang, could afford to keep it up. And it was burnt down in an insurance fraud several years after his death. So listen, let's focus in on the southeast coast of England. So where I live, France is visible on a clear day. At the narrowest point at Dover, it's less than 20 miles, 20 miles from coast to coast. You know, there is a real sense that this is a landscape that has only just been separated from the continent. One of the things I want to talk about is the Sink Ports, very regrettably pronounced in the audiobook of my novel,

the Chinkway Ports. They haven't played Kingmaker. No, it broke my heart when I heard it. But the Sink Ports is really important because it is a kind of cooperative of seafaring cities, seafaring towns on the south coast. It's medieval, isn't it? It's yeah. I mean, it's very so Edward the Confessor, it started. I wanted to I wanted to just quickly read you. I got the the initial draft of the of the legislation surrounding the sink ports. They were allowed exemption from tax and tollage, right of sock and sack, toll and teen, blodwit and fledwit, pillory and tumbril,

in fangenta hayoff and out fangenta hayoff, munderbry, waifs and strays, flotsam and jetsam and lagom. You're sure that's 1066 and all that, isn't it? You could imagine Nigel Farage really getting a head up about pillory and tumbril. But so, five towns, Hastings, New Romney, Hive, Dover, Sandwich, two ancient cities, Rye and Winchelsea. And they really were able to manage themselves.

They had a system called the Brotherhood and Gestling. These were local sort of worthies who managed the importation, exportation of goods. They, yes, they paid some taxes to the king, but it was limited for several hundred years. You know, this was an area that was almost an independent state within Britain. And I think if you take that mindset, I think that absolutely flows through to the early days of smuggling. So it's kind of strange comings and goings. It is. And the marshes. You've gone back into your Cornish voice.

I mean, there are similarities between the Cornish and the Sussex accent. Yeah, definitely. Cornish and the Sussex accent. But then the other thing to really, that I think to establish straight away is that smuggling was initially an export business. So David Hume said that Britain had only one industry of any value, and that was its wool trade. And so British wool was renowned throughout the world. If you were in Italy, the one thing you wanted was a gown made of British wool. It feels like it would be hot to me. Yeah, scratchy. But British wool, it was something about the length of the fibres

that it was able to be woven in a way that continental wool wasn't. So the first wool tax was put in place by Edward Longshanks, Edward I in 1275. Another friend of the show another friend of the show in scott not with scottish citizens no well ah okay so that's something i want to get absolutely something i want to get at the other thing really to establish is that the reason for smuggling if you want one reason for it It is the profligacy and warfaring nature of the English monarchy. So basically, they saw goods and particularly the export and import of goods as a way of propping up their fragile finances. And so Longshanks wore firstly in Wales, then in, I guess, Scotland, and then with France, of course, over over Gascony, I think, decided to start charging £12.75, three pounds a bag of wool, £12.98, six pounds a bag. In 1300, they were

exporting 30,000 sacks of wool a year. And naturally, particularly given how close the best wool producing areas of England were to the continent, this just encouraged people to start smuggling it. So if you look at Romney Marsh, Romney Marsh lamb is and Romney Marsh wool still kind of, you know, again, brilliant, the best of the stuff. And it started, it was called owling so owling as in an owl and there are there are several theories behind so the smugglers were called owlers um and it was uh the owling trade was the was the bane of the lives of uh of exactly going out at night well it's potentially it's often thought that it's just that they couldn't really pronounce wool.

Oh, very Winnie the Pooh. Yeah. Wool. We come to friend of the show, Edward III, 1350. He decided that actually what he didn't, he wanted to stop this thing of, you know, basically Italy and Flanders had a near monopoly over high value weaving of wool. And he said, listen, we're producing all this wool. I want to create

our own industry here. So he encouraged the emigration or the immigration of a large number of skilled weavers, particularly from Italy. And then he banned the export of wool entirely. And so that's all the Flanders weavers who come to London and they'll get beaten up. That's exactly, yes. So he was trying to, again, he encouraged it. What he didn't do was then encourage people to welcome them when they came. So that's exactly right. What it, of course, led to was you had almost immediately three years output of unsold fleeces rotting on the docks.

But you also, of course, had people continuing to smuggle. There was almost no customs as we know it at this point. It was very, very poorly enforced. And so by the 1400s, you start to get the first rudiments of enforcement, something like what we would think of as a customs service. So excise men. Ah, well, excise men is a terrible term. No, no, but you're absolutely right. It's what people use.

But of course, excise is something totally different. Customs is for the movement of goods. Excise is a tax at the point of production on certain high value goods. And it's actually introduced, again, thinking about why these taxes were introduced. It was introduced by the Puritan government to pay for the cost of the civil war. So that wasn't until the 1650s that excise was introduced. One other real sort of important date here is 1475, the real wide scale adoption of fore and aft rigging

on boats. So until that date, you really only had square rigged boats, so they could only go really with the wind. You suddenly had these boats that could be much more nimble and much more able to react and change direction because they were able to glide up creeks. Although anyone who knows this part of the world will know that that is, again, something of a Cornish... Sorry. ...invention. You know, this is a very...

These are long, shingle beaches. You've got camber sands, very... Camber sands, one of the great kind of landing places for smuggle goods. You've got Dungeness again, a long beach, and then you've got cliffs. So often they would land at the foot of cliffs at low tide and then derrick the goods up to the top of the cliffs.

But we can get on to that. I've got a question before you continue. Yeah, sure. I know everything we say is wrong. I don't care. I'll ask my question anyway. So when we think about the smuggling, the classic Cornish smuggler, right, from fiction, they are obviously British and they're bringing stuff in.

What you're talking about in the medieval period is English people taking stuff out. So my question is, is that all it is? Or are there also French and Flemish people in boats who want to avoid import taxes, their end, who are coming to across the channel and then going back with the stuff? Or is it just us doing it all? Much lower numbers. So it really is a very British thing. And that's partly because, firstly, it was a relatively, you know, the geography of Britain, the fact that we're an island nation, it makes this sort of tax very attractive. Also, if you think about, you know, certainly Flanders, you know, the Holland as it became, they were much more looking south and southeast in terms of where their products were coming from.

We always forget this, but Britain was so unimportant at this time. It was economically powerless, meaningless, you know, really didn't become important. And again, you know, if we think about why the 18th century is so important, it's because, of course, we become a major player in world affairs, a slightly ridiculous player in many cases, but a major player. And the value of goods is... What's your number? Well, we can go on to the war of Jenkins' ear. But, you know, this is a situation which is really about a very, very poor, very rural, you know, even right up. So at the start of the 18th century, you had 80% of the population lived outside of towns and cities. You had about 20% to 25% of the population was claiming parish relief, so effectively living below what was a

very low poverty line. So this was a very, very poor place. And people were desperate. Alex, a question from Sergeant Musgrave. Was supporting smuggling, I guess he's talking about the 18th century, but could push it all the way back. Was supporting smuggling a form of social protest in some areas of England? Now, where that I think is really interesting is when it comes to Jacobitism. It was a way of thumbing your nose to the authorities. So, you know, one of the short things I'm sure we'll get on to talk about was wrecking. And, you know, so if I think about where I first came across smuggling, it was in Tim to the Lighthouse by Edward Ardizzoni.

That is a brilliant book. Isn't it a brilliant book? All those little Tim books are absolutely superb. They're wonderful. And I read them to my children. I actually had proper tears in my eyes the first time I read Tim to the Lighthouse to my son. But they are wonderful. Tim's friend Ginger.

Ginger takes the potion that makes his hair grow. When I was invited into my son's preschool to read a story, all the parents, I chose a little Tim book. It was one in which Tim and Ginger fought some rough boys for Charlotte's honour, I think. Yes, it's a wonderful book. It teaches valuable lessons.

I think the teachers thought it was an inappropriate choice of reading that matter because it ended with a massive fight. Oh, you should have read Alexander the Great. I should they thought it was an inappropriate choice of reading that matter because it ended with a massive fight. Oh, you should have read Alexander the Great. I should have done. I should have done. Well, anyway, sorry, we've gone off piste.

No, but Tim to the Lighthouse. So there it's a smuggling gang, but they're wreckers. So there is this image of, and it's always about moving lights or hiding lighthouses. It's all totally false. There is a fantastic book called

Cornish Wrecking by Catherine J. Pearce, which absolutely put me straight on this because I really didn't. I didn't. I sort of presumed that it must have happened in some places, but just not very much. But there really is almost zero record of this happening ever. And I also want to say you open the book and it says didn't happen. Well, no. At least you're saying there's no wrecking in Cornwall. There is no wrecking in Cornwall. I used to take my summer holidays at a place called Nag's Head in North Carolina, in the States. And it was said that it was called Nag's Head because they would lead a horse with a light on it up and down the beach, tempting ships onto the rocks.

And again, apparently complete rubbish. Not true. Not true. Not true at all. So wrecking really didn't happen. But what it was, and I think this is really established in Catherine Pearce's book very well, the people who owned the ships and also the people who insured the ships needed to make sure that there was a really kind of nasty, thuggish air around the people who would raid the wrecked ships. So whilst ships weren't tempted onto the rocks, every time a ship was shipwrecked, and that was very often given, you know, the storms, the relatively unsophisticated levels of marine technology,

you know, particularly, and again, this was much more in Cornwall. When a ship landed, it was fair game. The entire population came down from highest to lowest in the social scale and they took it all. But Alex, that still happens, doesn't it? There was a ship that got wrecked in Dorset, I think. Yeah, and people... Was that 12 years ago or something? It was full of washing machines or something like that yes i remember that they all caught but no

it was very much a kind of uh a sort of fairground atmosphere um except for the poor people who were on the boat who were sometimes murdered uh if they tried to hang on to their to their goods so um everyone would ride down and and these ships. But it was created, the idea of the wrecker was created as an image to make this a kind of socially unacceptable thing. Now, I think the image of the smuggler is kind of the mirror of that, whereby it was a figure that was dashing and counter-establishment and was a representation like Robin Hood of somebody who was outside the law and yet, you know, as Adam Smith says, within the kind of spirit of the law, or certainly was a local figure that people could admire and who was making good at the expense of, you know, foreigners and London.

And are you going to say that's not true? I mean, they were, it is absolutely not true. Okay. Because, because... There's definitely a theme here, Tom. Well, because if you, if you actually look at the heyday of smuggling in Sussex, these were, these were monsters and there was a reign of terror, the Hawkehurst gang. Okay, well, Alex, Alex, I've got a question for you. I think we should take a break. But I'm

going to leave this question hanging. From Simon Girdleston, what is the history of the infamous Hawkehurst gang? So that's your first half volley that you can smack to the boundary. How were they perceived at the time as romantic Robin Hood figures or as dangerous and murderous criminals? And they are probably the most famous smuggling gang. So we'll take a break. And when we come back, let's talk about the Hawkers gang. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free

listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com That's therestisentertainment.com Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We're talking smuggling with alex preston that voice is totally inappropriate alex because as you said there were no uh liam neeson impersonators involved with smuggling whatsoever but you were about to answer a question about the hawkehurst gang who i know have inspired your novel when she'll see which we're just giving you another plug for. Bless you.

So now tell us about the Hawkeyes gang. Who are they? Are they Robin Hood figures or are they absolute utter villains? No, they're total monsters. And, you know, let's zero in on the 1740s in Kent and Sussex, which was the time when they were absolutely

kind of at their apogee. They ran this as a kind of private fiefdom. There was, you know, so we're talking about a time when there were overseas wars. So Jenkins' Ear and War of Austrian Succession. So by this point, Britain is rich. Yeah, because we've leaped forward. Yeah, I feel like we've, I feel like we, can I just quickly fill in a couple of gaps? Yeah, because we've leaped forward. Tom catapulted us forward about two centuries. Yeah, I feel like we've... Can I just quickly fill in a couple of gaps? Yeah, because we've leaped forward.

Tom catapulted us forward about two centuries. Yeah, sorry about that. Shamefully. Because I want to lead us from this point where smuggling is an export business, where it is just literally the smuggling of wool. And, you know, by 1600, there were 120,000 sacks of wool being smuggled annually. The customs service was by

that stage up and running. So you had customs houses along the coast in kind of principal ports. You had, each of them had a controller of customs and a collector of customs. A comptroller. A comptroller and a tide waiter, which I like very much, who would board the ships and bring them in. Tide waiter is like one of those weird gradations they have in American restaurants. So anyway, you had, so by 1566, owling is punishable by having your left hand chopped up and pinned in a, chopped off and pinned up in a public place. Chopped up, I think chopped up was better. It would be hard to pin it up having chopped it up. So 1650, we talked about excise being introduced initially on chocolate, coffee, tea, beer, cider, spirits and then on salt, leather and soap.

So, you know, luxury goods began to be began to be taxed. And, you know, as soon as this this excise tax was introduced, the smuggling of goods into the country began. So that's the really crucial moment where suddenly the boats still go out carrying wool, but they come back laden with brandy, with gin, Genova. I was going to, you know, had we been doing this in person, I would have insisted that you both had a Kopstut, which is a Genova followed by a jug of ale. And of course, Lace was something that was, you know, and unfortunately, Tea. It's slightly unsexy, I think, but Tea was absolutely the most smuggled thing. And so this is driven by excise,

not by customs, right? It's driven by both. So there is a customs toll and an excise toll. So it's paying off the national debt. It's paying off the national debt. It's paying for the wars. So it's paying for these very, very costly international wars. We've got a bigger state, right?

Yeah, exactly. But Alex, is it like kind of income tax that it gets introduced to pay so cromwell or whoever you know the yeah introduce it and and then every successive government thinks well this is a great way to make money and we're not going to so there was a lot of there was a lot of pressure uh when the restoration came for for that for charles ii to outlaw the excise. And he instead established the Board of Customs. So he said, no, I like this. It's bringing a huge amount of money.

Let's enforce it much more, much more sort of powerfully and effectively than we had. Now, when we say powerfully and effectively, 1690, there were eight riding officers in the whole of Kent. It was incredibly badly paid, £42 a year. And the riding officer also had to buy and pay for the upkeep of his own horse.

And presumably dangerous. Unbelievably dangerous. So one of the things that was really problematic for them is that they were from the communities that they then policed. And so the pressure on them either to peach on, so peach is to tell tales on, to peach on people who were their friends, who were their family, everyone smuggled in these Sussex and Kent communities. And so usually they would just take bribes. So they were all fantastically corrupt. There was a land guard of 300 men for the whole of the coast, a water guard of 21 vessels. We began to see the imposition of or the enactment of

laws that tried to limit the ability of people to smuggle. Now, it was still a relatively small scale. When I say small scale, it was not an organised process at this point. It was done by these very poor fishing communities. It was just the way that they made a bit of extra dosh. So they might go on a fishing run. You go out fishing and then all just pop in and get some lace or tea absolutely yeah or usually it was it was seasonally and it was done with the shearing of the sheep so you would take the wall over to france and you would come back with tea or or tom said tom said tom said pop in and i think that that raises an interesting question where are they going to get this stuff

because that tom's suggestion, which I endorse, implies that there's somebody the other end. There's basically a supply as well as a demand, right? So what's the other end of that relationship? Yeah, that's really interesting. So it was largely France and Flanders. So it was basically the main trading ports, certainly for Sussex, were Calais, Boulogne, Dieppe and Dunkirk. You had Ostend, increasingly as the 18th century played out.

And then, of course, you had Roscoff and Le Havre and Saint-Malo. And that was the Cornish side of things. But again, we can say that that was... And then are they criminal gangs, Alex? Or are they just merchants? No, they're just merchants. So this is just, you know, they would sell a portion of their goods on the quayside to smugglers. They would sell the rest of their goods to be legally imported. Presumably at this time, the city of London is becoming larger and larger and wealthier and wealthier. And what you have in Kent and Sussex is proximity to London yeah in a way that you don't say in Cornwall so even if you have kind of poor fishermen who are doing this surely also you must be having kind of organized gangs or even um I don't know kind of merchant adventurers

it was initially absolutely the latter and then you know, the sort of the spark behind initially actually the Mayfield gang, who were the first real organised criminal smuggling gang, was was land was landfall so when they uh when they landed the goods because of course that you're relatively static and you're right you're visible um so that was the most dangerous part and then they would channel them you know remember that the landscape has changed totally since this time it, heavily wooded. All of this area, the Weald was a wild and totally lawless place. You know, you started to get toll roads built in the 1700s, but it was still, you know, people would take these trains of ponies up. And the reason the Mayfield gang and the Hawkehurst gang, the reason they were named after these inland places rather than being the Rye or the Winchelsea gang was because of this sense of being a staging post and a a management point on the road from the coast to London right okay yeah

absolutely um because because there's a story isn't there was so much gin was smuggled in that people in Winchelsea would use it to wash to clean their windows yep absolutely and um and and also that so much cash went out whenever there was a uh a whenever a raid was landed because of course local people would be buying this stuff as well that whole towns would be would be emptied of uh of money that they would be you know unable to pay their bills for for weeks afterwards because they would have all bought so much brandy and tea so have we got have we got to the hawkers gang well i was just about to say before we get to the hawkers gang so what has really driven this to its apogee as it were are you've got to i'm trying to get my head around it there's you've got a bigger state which is trying to impose the tax burden is greater and greater presumably demand for luxury goods is

greater uh for lace for for wine, for spirits, because people have more money, because you've got an increasingly urban population. So this stuff is finding its way to London. And presumably the supply is greater as well. More of the stuff's being produced on the continent, I guess, more lace. And of course, tobacco,

which didn't even exist before, or existed, certainly wasn't in the country before. And that suddenly. Same with tea, isn't it? Tobacco and tea. Absolutely. These are new things. The, you know, tax on tea was was 129 percent at one point. You know, this was that the taxes were extraordinary. And yet there was this incredible, you know, it was so voguish, it was so part of the way of life that absolutely it was, you know, it was all the things you said. I think maybe the one thing to add to that in terms of why it suddenly becomes this golden age of smuggling is the sense of a state that believes that the way to stamp out smuggling is by ratcheting up the pressure on the smugglers. And actually what that does is it organises them

and it makes them increasingly brutal. So when you say golden, I mean, you use the expression yourself, a golden age of smuggling. When we're talking about a golden age of smuggling, rather like we do a golden age of pirates, are we doing, I mean, is this the equivalent of people in the 25th century if they say, ah, the golden age of pirates are we doing i mean is this the equivalent of people in the 25th century if they say ah the golden age of people trafficking i mean are we basically doing that we're so the craze isn't it it's uh do you know what i think it is absolutely like uh

like the craze i think it is that same i mean i find the whole thing we should explain for for non-british listeners our 1960s London gangsters. Or Peaky Blinders. Yeah, I find the whole veneration of the Krays a really creepy thing because these were monsters. And the Hawkeyes gang absolutely were monsters. They would. So let me give you let me give you an example. So actually, the thing that really got me interested in this story, the thing that started me writing Winchelsea was, we moved down to this part of the world five or six years ago. And there's a there's a road I take on my way to the to the beach. And it's called Dumb Woman's Lane. And I, you know,

as is the way of these things, I wanted to know why it was called that. And it was a lady who lived on the lane in the in the 1740s, peached on the on the Hawkehurst gang. So told the excise men that there was going to be a run that night. And they responded by by making sure she never peached again by by cutting out her tongue. So these were and you know, they were murderous. They were brutal. They they ran a proper protection racket as well. So if you think

about, you know, where would they get their horses from? Well, of course, they'd get them from local farmers. And any farmers who would not give their horses for these runs would suddenly find that their crops had burnt, would suddenly find that their, you know, in some cases, their children were disappeared. I mean, this was absolutely horrifying. And yes, we can dress it up as sort of, you know, lovable roguery, but really in this case, it wasn't. It was vile and it was brutal and it was murderous.

And, you know, coming to the Hawkeyes gang, the list of things that they did to local revenue men. I mean, the very least you could hope for was being put on a boat for France and and disappeared. And, you know, if you showed your face again, then you would be killed. But many of them were murdered and murdered with the recognition and acceptance of what was a largely terrified local population. Tom, I wanted just to come back to one thing you said, which was about this idea of them being kind of countercultural figures. And I started talking about Jacobitism.

And I think that's really an important part of this story. Because, of course, you have the first Jacobite rebellion in 1715, the second in 1745. And there's a brilliant paper by Paul Monod, Monod, M-O-N-O-D, called Dangerous Merchandise, who really says that the smugglers wouldn't have reached the stage they got to without the support of Jacobites. And, you know, there were these large landowning Jacobite families who would support them financially, who would give them places to hide, who would give them places to store goods. The Carroll family were a very, very powerful family

down in Sussex. And whenever the Hawkeyes gang needed to get rid of a body, it would be found, it would be drowned in one of the, or dumped in one of the Carroll's lakes. So when I said, you know, it sounds paramilitary. No, that's absolutely what it was. To a degree, it is a kind of insurgency as well as a criminal conspiracy. Yeah. And when you think about, so, you know, when you think about the sophistication, well, I guess at once the sophistication and the just the sheer violence of their operations, the sort of famous story. Well, you know, there are all these sorts of stories. But but the really famous story is that is the Poole Custom House, September 1747, a big shipment from the Hawkehurst gang that was being run into Christchurch Harbour in the West Country.

So the Hawkehurst gang ran all the way along the coast. It was absolutely, you know, this was not just Kent and Sussex. When they were at their max, they were running the whole of the South Coast smuggling trade. It was taken by customs and all of the goods, tea and brandy, were stored in the customs house and the Hawkeyes gang just decided to go and take it back. And so they marched over there. And there was a naval man of war in the in the channel with its guns trained on the customs house. But unfortunately, the tide went out and the ship had to retreat and it couldn't it couldn't reach. They killed and captured tied up the the revenue officers who were in the house, took the tea, left the spirits, I guess,

well, probably drank most of the spirits, actually, because they were all roaring drunk and marched back. Marching through the New Forest, one of the gang, they were marching through Fording Bridge, which I don't, lovely place, one of the gang called Diamond, and they've all got brilliant names, Nasty Face and Diamond. Nasty Face. Yeah, Smoker and Poison. Yorkshire George. Terrifying. Yeah, terrifying. Anyway, Diamond recognised one of his mates in the crowd who were cheering them past as they

went, you know, probably because they were, you know, again, in the sort of slightly criminal gang thing that they would have been punished had they not cheered them. And so he saw this friend called Daniel Charter or Daniel Chater in the crowd and threw him a bag of tea and said, all right, mate. Now, Diamond was later arrested and Chater was seized as somebody who was rumoured to know members of the gang and could identify Diamond as one of those who'd been on the Poole Customs House raid. And William Galley, an aged customs official, you know, I very much get the image that this was his last job before retirement. One last job. Yeah, he was about to settle down with the wife and the garden and it was all going to be peachy. And so he set out to the New Forest to get this Daniel Chater and to bring him to Chichester Court to stand, to bear witness against Diamond. And of course,

the Hawkehurst gang, they marched and intercepted Gally and then went and rounded up Chater as well. They went to the White Hart Inn at Rowlands Castle. And Galley, poor guy, I mean, they were tortured and tortured and tortured. And it's one of these slight kind of knights who say knee things that you just cannot believe that they are still alive. There's one point where they're galloping horses up and down the beach with Chater and Gally underneath the horses, being both dragged along the ground and kicked in the head by the horses as they go. Anyway, Gally buried alive, Chater thrown in a well, dead as well. So Alex, I mean...

It's not Captain Pugwash, is it? It is not Captain Pugwash, who it? It is not Captain Pugwash, who, by the way, was also drawn by somebody from Rye. Was he? Ah, well, everything does connect. I mean, so all this stuff is going on. Surely there must be some kind of kickback. From local people.

Well, or from the state. Yeah, from the state. So, absolutely. So, 1736, the Act of Indemnity. Now, this was major. So, 1736, the act of indemnity. Now this was major. So 1736, act of indemnity, what this said was that you basically got off scot-free if you told the authorities about a run that was going to happen. But that only works if you've got some kind of witness protection. Well, that is the problem that you unfortunately don't have. You know, again, while this is going on, there are foreign wars.

There really isn't enough money being put into this. You've got 1739, the War of Jenkins here. 1746, they up the ante again, the authorities. There is very clear evidence at this time that the government were recognising that the only real answer here was to lower taxes. And Pelham lowered taxes in several times in the 1740s, but then always had something else to pay for. Pelham, the prime minister at the time, always had something else to pay for. And so would have to raise taxes again. 1746, the Gazetting Act. So So the Gazeting Act was that the name of suspected smugglers was listed in the London Gazette, and you had 40 days to turn yourself in. And if you

didn't, you would be, a bounty would be put on your head, 500 pounds. Now, to give an idea of what that was, you know, a day labourer would earn about seven pence a day. So this was major cash. They also imposed the death penalty. So it was already, you know, being a smuggler was punishable with death. You were penalised. So death penalty for wearing a wizard's mask, which, you know, which of us wouldn't be hit with that now? Wearing a wizard's mask. Is this still on the statute book? I hope so. So hovering within six miles of land. Hovering?

Yes. So hovering, that is to say. Really harsh on the wizards. Really harsh on the wizards. Yeah, imagine if you were wearing your mask and hovering. So that is to say, if your ship was offshore, because of course they would wait wait for signaling to come in. And we can maybe talk about how a run was actually arranged because it was a fairly intricate series of signals. And then a death penalty even for being seen in the area of smuggling gangs.

So they were really trying to ratchet this up. Does it work? Yeah, I think that is what finally works. Alongside a real public upswell of disgust and, you know, just having had enough. Because the climax of your book, am I allowed to say this? Yeah, definitely. Of course, it's historically accurate. There is this kind of high noon type showdown in a village called Goodhurst. Goudhurst, yeah. Goudhurst, yeah.

Goudhurst, sorry. So just tell us about that because it's a very dramatic episode that seems barely credible when you go through rural Sussex. It's a great village, actually. We looked at a house there that had a smuggler's tunnel over to the church that was really exciting that I sort of wish we'd bought it. But no, so Battle of Goudhurst. With your wizard's mask.

Yes, exactly. Battle of Goudhurst. Yes, exactly. Battle of Goudhurst, 21st of April, 1747. It's a wonderful story because it was, again, the Hawkehurst gang reign of terror. Tom, you'll like this. They murdered someone during a cricket match on Horseman and Green. What?

So yeah, actually marched out into the middle and murdered him in front of his teammates. I mean, Tom, I would not let that happen to you. No, I do not. Are you his captain? I'm not his captain. No, I'm not really captain material. Okay.

Tom's not captain, is he? No, no, he's not. He's even less captain material. No, Charlie, I was a captain for years. Were you of that team, the authors cricket team? No, I ran a team for 20 years and then uh various people in that team went off and founded another one i i am i'm kind of like rome to the constantinople that is the authors right yeah that's not quite the analogy i was anyway they murdered they murdered

so they were and and you know rape and pillage um lock up your daughters etc it was really really horrifying so the people of goudhurst decided they'd had enough. And it was under the aegis of this very mysterious figure called William Sturt. He was an ex-soldier, retired after his soldiering to Goudhurst, and founded what he called the Goudhurst Militia, of which my great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather, George Kent, was a member. It was initially to protect their crops and their livestock and their families from the Hawkehurst gang. But George Kingsmill, so the two leading figures of the Hawkehurst gang, three leading figures, the

Kingsmill brothers, Thomas and George Kingsmill, and Arthur Gray, who was this kind of foppish esthete from Rye. The Kingsmill brothers were real sort of, you know, they had hands like hams and faces like hams, and they were basically hams. What are they doing hanging around with this fop then? Was he there for window dressing? I think he handled the continental negotiations and they did the duffing up. But anyway, so... Is Id driselba in the wire yeah you know i mean this is so the way it is the wire meets

poldark down here honestly um so he makes the vicar of dibbly and that's the fun of it yeah that is the fun of it so he heard that this militia had been set up uh they had yet to to meet the the hawkehurst gang face on. And he marched into the church on a Sunday and said, disband or I'll wring your livers out. He's got a Cornish accent, too. He does have a Cornish accent, too. And so the militia got together and they said, well, we can either stand up to these people or we can continue to have our lives ruled by these ruffians.

And William Sturt apparently gave a very moving speech and said, no, we're going to fight them. And so the gang, they sent their message back. They said, we will not disband. And the gang said, right, we're coming for you tomorrow. And so they got together. They sent all of the women, children and elderly out of the town. They got fouling pieces, pitchforks. They heaped up, went down to Battle, which is just nearby, which was the centre of ammunition. And they bought one cannon.

They got a cannon? Yeah, placed it on the church ramparts. There were 25 of them and only Sturt had ever seen had ever seen action before in. But he had drilled them incredibly well. And the church, if you see it, has got this very crenellated top. I mean, it's almost made for it. They stacked up a kind of barricades of gravestones around them. 400 of the Hawkehurst gang arrived against 25 of these guys. This is dramatic. It's Rourke's Drift.

They had been up drinking at Arthur Gray's. It was called Gray's Folly, Seacock's Heath, this enormous house just outside of Hawkehurst. They'd been up drinking all night. They were rolling drunk. They had daubed their bodies with paint. And they were, they were right, many of them riding on horseback, incredibly well armed, armed to the teeth. And the battle started. And it was suddenly seen that the, the, the Goudhurst militia just had this wonderful tactical advantage of A, being not

totally drunk, and B, being on this eminence, because the church is up on a hill anyway, and they were raised. And so they didn't lose a single life from the militia. They killed many of the gang. And then just as the battle was kind of poised to go one way or another, the dragoons turned up at the back of the gang, the gang scattered, Kingsmill and Gray were captured and were executed. And that was the end of the Hawkehurst gang. And really, it was the end of that kind of official smuggling. There were more gangs that it definitely kind of ebbed and flowed. But in terms of as we, you know, inverted commas, the golden age, that was it. So Alex, you have your hero, heroine is a woman. How many women were involved in this? Because there were a few, weren't there? There were a few, but it's also not something, I mean,

I think one can overstate it. I mean, Anne Bonny and Mary Read were were much more privateers than than smugglers, but they did smuggle. Bessie Catchpole. Yeah. I mean, again, there are these there these kind of notorious figures. They were often the landladies of inns. And so, for instance, during the Battle of Mudderford, which was... We've got a question about that. Yeah, Stephen Clark, a friend of the show, has asked about that.

Was it the last battle fought on English soil, he says? 1784. I mean, I will defer as far as the history goes, but it was certainly a battle. And, you know, the captain of the revenue ship was killed. Where was this? Mudderford is just outside of Christchurch. What's that, Hampshire? the captain of the revenue ship was killed. It was... And where was this? Mudderford is just outside of Christchurch.

Was that Hampshire? Yeah, sort of Hampshire, Dorset, I think. So yeah, and it was brutal. I mean, I think, you know, again, what it shows you is that it absolutely hadn't abated. But I guess what had happened was that the absolute hold that these organised gangs had over this part of the world really fell away in the 1750s. 1781, 100 mounted soldiers and 900 infantrymen went to deal and seized goods from the smugglers valued at £10 million.

So, I mean, it's still £10 million in today's money. And there's a guy, Tom Johnston from Limington, who during the Napoleonic Wars used to smuggle gold from Britain to France. So that's really interesting. So they're called guinea runs. And that was really, and, you know, all the way through the Napoleonic War. I mean, it's really again, if I'm I'm being sort of encouraged to write a follow up to Winchelsea. And I think there is something really fun about this idea of suddenly you had information with huge value on it.

And the smugglers were were were viable. I mean, they felt no kind of. Napoleon tries to hire him to guide the invasion fleet, conquer England. And then if England had won, then he'd be well paid and he patriotically refused. Oh, well, that's interesting because very often the smugglers did not refuse and were very happy to, and you know, the running back and forth of spies as well. You know, it's interesting because obviously there was this constant threat from France. And I mean, the reason Winchelsea only has half a church is because you know the French just knocked the other half down and uh and and you know there were kind of raids on this area part of Rye was was French territory for for hundreds of years um it was owned by the Abbey of Fécond um so there is a real sense of again

these linkages with the continent what's about um oh go go on, Tom, I'll ask you a question. No, no, no, you go. I was about to say we had a couple of questions about so-called smuggling kings. So, for example, I know you're very down on Cornish smugglers, but there is a very famous smuggler called John Carter, the King of Prussia. Do you know about him, Alex? Yeah, I do. Absolutely. So John Carter, the King of Prussia, Tom and my friend Jack Stein was

very happy to hear that we would be talking about the King of Prussia. It was, and I'm sorry, Jack, it was relatively small scale compared to the Southeastern smugglers. He was based in a bay that is now called the Bay of Prussia, or I think it's called the Bay of Prussia after him. He was called the King of Prussia because he liked to play's called the Bay of Prussia after him. He was called the King of Prussia because he liked to play act as the King of Prussia as a child. Yeah, didn't he look like, people said he looked like Frederick the Great. Is that true?

I hadn't heard that, but I certainly heard that in childhood games, he would always be the King of Prussia. Great games. And so, yeah, he was, again, he was running brandy, tobacco increasingly, running it up to Bristol. Got to remember transport. Tom was saying earlier, you know, all the all the money was in London, really. And transporting stuff from Cornwall any distance at all was was incredibly expensive and difficult.

So it was only ever a localised thing. But he is a kind of lovely. And, you know, certainly de Maurier drew on the story of the King of Pr king and he and his family are all methodists aren't they they're all very key methodists and his brother they're there they have some massive fight with um the customs men in 1788 with the navy the royal navy his brother escapes goes to new york and ends up becoming a slave extraordinary yeah he's i didn't know that he's he's well i don't know whether he's technically a slave but he basically ends up on a plantation or a farm working alongside slaves and then somehow manages to get back to he gets back to france and is imprisoned in the it's very it's very poldark it's very i mean i quite want to write his story i mean the the

whole dressing up thing is so to go go back to Bessie Catchpole, her husband was a smuggler. He dies. So she dresses up in his grey coat, smokes a pipe, wears a cutlass, and a Dutchman laughs at her. And so she punches him in the face, knocks out his teeth.

And that's how you treat transphobes. I thought you could say that's how you treat Dutchmen. No i'd never say that you know i love the dutch um i'm sure most dutch wouldn't laugh at a woman just because she wore a cutlass and smoked a pipe um but there's the the kind of that and that's going back to the robin hood thing that you as a famous smuggler you obviously have to have a brand whether you are looking like frederick the great or you know wearing a cutlass if you're a woman or whatever but only posthumously i mean these are these are i mean you don't have to have a brand, whether you are looking like Frederick the Great or, you know, wearing a cutlass if you're a woman or whatever. Yeah, but only posthumously. I mean, you don't have to have a brand at the time. And that presumably takes us back to the idea that, you know, smugglers, as the 18th century turns into the 19th century, so it starts to become grist for the mill of literary fiction

and romance and myth and so on. Yes, absolutely. And, you know, again, thinking about when these books were published, you know, there is a real nostalgia in there. You know, if you read Moonfleet, so published 1899, you know, it's kind of just on the cusp of modernism, end of the century, a real sense of looking back at a time when, you know, the local squire was this sort of all-powerful figure and and and there were these kind of noble uh uh ruffians who who were were doing good things it's a do you know what i i wanted i'm sorry to have another go at your list but it really the end of moon fleet is one of the most extraordinary i mean again spoiler alert but they they they go to jail uh and then it's suddenly you sort of cycle for decades and it's

absolutely beautiful. I mean, it really is a sort of LP Hartley-esque nostalgia for, for, for a, for a golden age. It's, it's a beautiful,

beautiful novel. So Alex, we're coming to the end now, but just a question about the present, because one of the things that's changed, I guess, over the past decade maybe two decades is that we're starting to see smuggling happen again and now it's it's people smuggling or drugs

i suppose or drugs yes or drugs uh and and there's nothing really romantic about any of them i mean they have they have a kind of dark reputation And do you think that that is starting to affect retrospectively how people see the 18th century now? I don't know that people make the linkage, if I'm honest with you, but I certainly fully subscribe to that. You know, I would love to think that people would get a better and truer portrait of the 18th century by understanding how things are now. You can't live where we live in Sussex here and not be aware of the trade in people that goes on. You know, my friend John lives just on the River Rother, right at its mouth in Rye, and he had somebody in his garden just coming out of the waters just the other day. I see this firsthand because really since I moved down here,

I recognised that there were people arriving and I wanted to do something about it. And there's a wonderful charity called Kent Kindness. And we, so what we do is we teach the unaccompanied minors who arrive. We teach them basic kind of, you know, English, English. Yes. Well, believe me, the Afghans have been made very welcome because they've they've been turned out, turning out for the local cricket teams. They're wonderful, wonderful cricketers. But, you know, teaching them how to open a bank account, how to ask for directions in town, you know, basic English, all of this sort of stuff. So the thing that's so fascinating is seeing them every week, as I do, you get a real sense of where they're coming from, of the kind of ebbs and flows of trafficking and of the experiences they've had, which are very different. So you've got you've got kind of three routes that they take. You know, at one point, it was very much coming up from

Eritrea, South Sudan, Ethiopia, you know, that it was it was I would say 90% of the kids that arrived here were from Africa. And that, of course, is a boat from Libya. Libya, from what I hear from the kids, is an absolute hellhole. The gangs that operate there. And by the way, these gangs, really like fascinating network of, you know, there's a lot of Russian and Eastern European mafia operators here. You know, there will always be a local player. So there will be somebody in Sudan who is the kind of first port of call, incredibly networked, incredibly well organised, very, very sophisticated in terms of how it's all managed over to Sicily or to Greece even, but mainly to Italy from Libya, and then making their way up through Europe to Calais.

The other routes, Turkey and Greece, often in lorries. So that's done in lorries and then again to Calais, or through Belarus and, guess Bulgaria, Romania. That's maybe slightly less. At the moment, I would say, again, 90% is from Kurdistan of the people that I'm seeing. So they will have come through that Turkey and Greece route mainly. And, you know, they are they tend to be, you know, firstly from relatively better educated. They sometimes speak quite good English when they arrive here. They have to pay up to twenty five thousand pounds to to these smuggling gangs

to get here. They come over in inflatable dinghies. Um, so literally I, I, you know, the sort of thing that my kids would have on the pond, um, it's that sort of thing. And the reason they do that is because they're not detectable on radar. Um, so, uh, it is a, it is a, you know, absolutely monstrous thing. It is, uh, it is, you know, I always think of that, that golden rule thing of, uh, uh, the Kantian imperative of, you know, treating people as an end in themselves rather than a means. And these are people who just see others as means. There are operators, of course, in the UK. One of the other things that I've done is a project called Refugee Tales, which was set up by the poet David Hurd.

And what he did, and it's with the Gatwick Refugee Detainees Charity as well, they pair you with a refugee as a writer and get you to tell their story. So it's brilliant. Ali Smith has done it. Our friend Kamala Shamsi has done it. Abdul Razak Gurner has done it. And I was paired with a boy from, I won't say which country because I didn't say which country in the story because he was really in major danger.

His brother was killed by the state. And and his story of interacting with the with the smuggling gangs, he actually ended up it was a kind of charitable organisation that got him to the UK because he was absolutely about to be killed. But then he was approached by a gang in London who said, oh, by the way, it's so much better in France, you'll get, you know, you'll get £40,000 a year and everyone's going to look after you, you've got to go to France. He paid them a load of money, got to France, was sent back, was arrested. Just absolutely horrifying situation. So the question is that if you think of Kent or Sussex or, you know, I mean, that's the definition of rural England, calm, peaceful. And that's why there's the sense of shock in reading your book and realising that these were scenes of unbelievable brutality, kind of

paramilitary activity in the 18th century. But now those same kind of pressures perhaps are starting to materialise along the beaches. Well, we just had in Hastings the other day, the lifeboats were trying to go out and rescue a refugee boat and a group of locals uh physically stopped them from going out uh there is a there is a violence down here that is not um that is not there on the postcards but you go to particularly some of the kind of towns uh as you go along the kent coast um and it's a it it's a dark dark place have you read it all the devils are here hey oh that's a novel you should novel a book you read All the Devils Are Here? No. Oh, that's a novel you should read. A novel, a book you should read.

Brilliant kind of memoir of the Kent coast. One last question before we kind of wrap this up. I mean, you're talking about smuggling people. What about smuggling things? I mean, drugs must get into Britain somehow, and there must be other things that are smuggled in. Or has smuggling by sea of goods, as opposed to people, has that kind of died a death now?

It has largely died a death, and that's because smuggling is mainly done in lorries now. So if you look at where particularly drugs, I mean, I'm trying to think about what other smuggling there might be, but really, you know, it does tend to be drugs. Drugs are lorries and, you know. We is it does tend to be drugs, drugs and lorries. And, you know, it's guns. Yeah, I guess weapons and guns. You know, not not my area of expertise. But, you know, of course, it clearly still happens. And again, it's one of those things where

the kind of darker side of I mean, you know, the whole kind of tours of Pablo Escobar's home and all this. I mean, I think that's just, again this is this is sickening, sickening and brutal stuff. But doesn't that answer Tom's question in perhaps not a very cheery way? Because Tom was asking, you know, does our awareness of people smuggling now change our view of the 18th century? And isn't the answer to that? Actually, it won't change our view of the 18th century because we still romanticize criminals now i mean maybe we don't romanticize people smugglers but the whole narcos pablo escobar the wire you know there are there are endless sort of tv programs and things where we peeky blinders where we we we completely glamorize and romanticize no and my not and my novel does it too you know i i'm i'm absolutely part of the problem here. And I

recognise that. But I guess, you know, I feel like on a history podcast, one wants to get at the truth. And I feel like it's important to recognise that there is a kind of a public imagination, a kind of willful miscasting of this historical period. well your novel in no way i mean you know you can't read it and not feel that the smugglers were horrible i mean they're spectacularly horrible um and it's a brilliant book fabulous novel um as i say it's uh daphne de moria across with quentin tarantino except it's not daphne de moria is it because she wrote about cornwall and i've made it very clear cornwall forget it yeah so Alex we've lost all our Cornish listeners yeah thanks so much guys it's it's been a brilliant myth-busting exercise uh and if you love a good novel Winter Sea

go and get it brilliant so we will see you all of you next week for what delights have we got in store Tom uh we got Valentine's Day we We do. We do have Valentine's Day. And we've got American Crusades. America's Holy Wars. And beyond that, we are thinking about the top 10 disastrous parties, aren't we? We are. Yes, we are. Not inspired by anything in the news, of course.

So thank you again to Alex, and we'll see you all next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. If you wake up midnight and hear a horse's feet. I'm going to do that again. No! The listeners want to hear that. I'll do it again.

Tom. So if you're going to laugh, mute yourself. Because otherwise I won't be able to do it. If you wake up midnight. Sorry. Sorry, Alex. Tom, I'm not even going to look at you. If you wake at midnight and hear a horse...

We will get there, Alex, I promise. This is fine. I should say, I have an interview with BBC Scotland at 3.40. OK, I'm going to... OK, press is on. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community,

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