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Along the cliffed coast of East Thanet another individualist was building up his smuggling empire. The seamen of Broadstairs and the villagers of St Peters and Reading Street continued to depend on the trade as they had done when Defoe made his enquiries in 1723. A favourite landing place was Stone Gap, just north of Broadstairs. Stone House, which still stands on the corner of Lanthorne Road, dates from the late 17th century, when it was a farmhouse surrounded by outbuildings. A large tunnel leading down to the sea was accidentally discovered when a bulldozer clearing a building site fell into it in 1954. There was recognised storage sites nearby in Elmwood Road (where one at least of the caves beside the road was used in this way), and also in Reading Street and St Peters. This was the territory in which Joss Snelling became leader of a local gang.
He was born at St Peters in 1741, and survived the hazards of his profession to die peacefully in 1837. Indeed, he was still smuggling on Thanet in his nineteenth year. Presumably he took his name from a favourite landing site in Joss Bay; he lived in Lanthorne Road at Callis Court Cottage (now Farm Cottage), and recruited extra help, when required, at the Fig Tree Inn in Callis Court Road.
Many of his activities went unrecorded, but in 1769 his gang became involved in what became known as the Battle of Botany Bay. This began in the early hours of a spring morning on the shore between Kingsgate and Foreness Point further north. Joss Snelling and his men had almost finished the unloading of a vessel when they were challenged by a patrol led by an Excise officer. In the fight which followed ten smugglers were fatally injured and eight were captured. Joss Snelling and four other men escaped up Kemp's Stairs onto the clifftop, only to be challenged by the local Riding Officer. They promptly shot him and fled inland to Reading Street, while he was carried into the parlour of the Captain Digby Inn at Kingsgate, where he died.
The house-to-house search at Reading Street which followed revealed one dead smuggler and another seriously injured, but Joss himself got away. For a time his gang was severely depleted, but he went on to a lifetime in the trade, eventually recruiting his son and grandson into the business. He was even presented to the future Queen Victoria as the famous Broadstairs smuggler! His activities have been chronicled by Mr WH Lapthorne, and are now commemorated in the Smuggling museum at Bleak House in Broadstairs.
Meanwhile, other developments in north Kent had an influence on the pattern of smuggling. Margate was becoming one of the first coastal resorts. Sea bathing had begun there in the 1720s but the bathing machine was not perfected until thirty years later. Thereafter, visitors could at times watch signal being exchanged between a clifftop lookout and a vessel offshore. A gardener working behind a house off Trinity Square in central Margate fell to his death through the roof of a series of caverns whose presence had long been forgotten. The householder found an immediate use for storage facilities close to the seafront, as visitors to the Smugglers' Caves of Margate can see today.
Higher customs dues and fewer preventivemen led everywhere to an increase in smuggling during the 1780s. The best known episode from this time took place in February 1780, when the local Excise Supervisor was taking a load of captured gin from Whitstable to Canterbury with an escort of nine soldiers. Where the road climbs steeply out of Whitstable (towards the roundabout at the crossing with the A299) fifty-three smugglers caught and attacked the convoy. They killed two soldiers and wounded others, before escaping with the gin. Retribution followed, and eighteen year old John Knight was tried and executed at Maidstone. His body was hung in chains on Borstall Hill as a warning to others.
During the long years of the war with France between 1793 and 1825 barracks were built, defences strengthened and signal stations set up along the Kent coast. The older house along the seafront in Herne Bay were built mainly for officers and their families, when the West Kent Regiment was stationed here. The Swalecliffe and Whitstable smugglers now found a new and highly profitable line business in shipping out French prisoners-of-war. Their oyster boats made regular and frequent trips to the London markets, and also maintained invaluable contacts with Flushing, Dunkirk and Ostend. For large numbers of desperate prisoners, kept manacled and in hideous conditions on hulks moored along the Thames estuary, this represented the best hope of escape. Men jumped into the river, feigning suicide, and held on to the anchor chains while almost totally submerged.
If relatives had sent the necessary ransom money, a wagon might be there to meet a prisoner and take him onto a Kent port. Other men found their way as best they could. Pye Alley Farm (on the A290 at the foot of Clapham Hill two miles from Seasalter) was a key point on the escape route. From here the Frenchmen struggled along the valley of the Bogshole Brook to reach the sea and embark on a vessel partly hidden by a shingle bank at Swalecliffe. When an old house in Castle Road, Whitstable, was demolished in 1945, a huge quantity of rusty iron manacles were found beneath the floor, probably left after a gang of men changed together had been landed on the offshore shingle bank known as The Street.
The Seasalter Company continued its discreet and profitable activities. By the time William Baldock took over the lease of Seasalter Parsonage Farm in 1792, he could make use of the new Canterbury turnpike, and divert the contraband traffic to his brewery at St Dunstan's, using horses and carts hired from local farmers. The route up to the turnpike on Pean Hill was along well screened byways via Fox's Cross, and there were hides in Ellenden Woods, but the summit of Pean Hill was dangerously exposed. Accordingly, two houses with stabling were built, and 'signal stations' were established to link Canterbury with Whitstable. These centred on Honey Hill Farm and messages were passed by raising or lowering a besom, and it was claimed that a warning could reach Whitstable before the oncoming preventive party had left the outskirts of Canterbury.
William Baldock had little to fear on the coast; his nominee lived in Seasalter Parsonage Farm and his nephew was the local Riding Officer! Contraband for local customers travelled under loads of timber and bark from Ellenden Woods. The company's legal affairs were being managed by Edward Knocker, who had already done his stint at the Parsonage Farm, and presently became Town Clerk of Dover.
There were other family businesses operating in the Herne area. At Hampton, just west of Herne Bay, a headland projected seawards and sheltered a small pier used by local oyster boats. This was the preferred landing site of the Mount family of Hampton. The mouth of Bishopstone Glen, just east of Herne Bay, was another useful beach then favoured by Thomas Hancock's gang. He made and lost a fortune during his lifetime between 1774 and 1840. he was a shrewd investor and put his money into property, owning houses in Hunters Forstal Road and Reculver Road at Herne. He then rashly sold off contraband without telling the rest of his gang. They retaliated and burned his barn; later they blackmailed him and he was forced to sell off most of his land in order to placate them.
The crucial development which coincided with the return of the soldiers and sailors after Waterloo was the establishment of the Coast Blockade. By 1718 this had been extended to cover all north Kent coasts east of Sheerness. The small companies of seamen, based in Watch Houses little more than a mile apart along key beaches, posed real problems for the smugglers. The Blockade sentinels were obvious targets for attack. In 1818, two men from the Broadstairs Watch House fell over the cliff and one was killed. This could have been an accident, or something more deliberate. There is no record the that Seasalter Company suffered from interference from the Blockade, though it happens that one surviving Watch House still stands beside the shore a mile west of Seasalter.
For a short period around 1820 there was a resurgence of violence, as the local smugglers and a more determined group from the Wingham and Canterbury areas attempted to maintain their trade. Using the old tactics of a large landing party flanked with armed men, this north Kent gang ran goods offshore at Reculver, Herne Bay and Stangate Creek (in the Medway estuary) during 1820, and another violent landing took place at Hampton in March 1821. The smugglers tied up the sentinel of the Watch House, which stood where Albany Road reaches the Herne Bay seafront. A few weeks later men from the same Watch House were involved in a more serious battle.
Some sixty men, led by James West, a thatcher from Littlebourne near Canterbury, had assembled at Grove Ferry and collected arms there. The plan was to converge on the coast by two separate routes and hide in a meadow behind the shore at Herne Bay (near what is now the Queens Hotel). The two groups would then get into position on either side of the landing. When the boat came ashore at 2.45am, a patrol under midshipmen Snow surprised the party. Snow challenged the smugglers and drew his pistol, but it misfired and he fell, fatally wounded. He was carried to the Ship Inn, and a surgeon was summoned, but his life could not be saved; he was later buried at Herne with full military honours. Meanwhile, five smugglers had been captured, and three were to turn king's evidence. Nevertheless, at the Old Bailey trial which followed, the accused were judged not guilty. However, when the same gang were caught at St Mildred's Bay in Thanet six months later, justice prevailed. Of the eighteen on trial, three were hanged and the rest faced transportation.
From this point on, concealment and deception were essential. In 1822, when officers were searching a Margate house, they found a tunnel leading out from the cellar and running some three hundred yards to a camouflaged opening on the beach. What is more, they found a man on his knees inside! Their estimate was that it must have taken eighteen months to excavate, and cost two hundred pounds. As late as 1850, Coastguards reported their suspicions that repeated runs were using an undiscovered tunnel from the beach to clifftop limekilns at what is now Cliftonville.
Most episodes concerned tubs skilfully sunk offshore or concealed under cargoes of coal delivered to Sheerness. Skeins of tubs were lest bobbing offshore and some broke loose, to become entangled in the legs of the new Herne Bay Pier. Some were found concealed within Ramsgate Harbour, and others in a barge off Birchington, protected by layers of planking and sand, and a cargo of wood three feet deep. In April 1830 Joss Snelling of Broadstairs was caught at his old tricks in St Mildred's Bay, and later fined one hundred pounds.
By the time the Coastguard service had taken over from the Blockade in 1831, most men had been deterred by the likelihood of capture. The Seasalter Company, now led by William Hyder, apparently managed to reach an accommodation with the local men, who allowed themselves to be decoyed away at the crucial moment. Finally, in 1845, the Coastguards of Herne Bay area felt able to report that the free trade had been extinguished. There remained one more bizarre episode. In 1851 (more than forty years after Britain had abolished the slave trade), an armed vessel boarded of Whitstable was found to be equipped as a slaver, with strings of beads for barter. However, since the boat was American-owned it was not possible to detain her!