Whitstable Alleys – A Secret History of Smuggling

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ike every small port along the south-east coast, Whitstable has a rich history of smuggling — the “free trade,” as it was known, that ran for centuries wherever governments put duties on goods and someone saw a profit in dodging them. But Whitstable’s smuggling story has a twist most towns can’t claim: along with the usual brandy, tobacco and lace, its boats are said to have carried a very different cargo back to France — escaped prisoners of war.

The free trade

Smuggling here was old, and it changed with the times: wool and cloth in the Middle Ages, then coinage, spirits and tobacco through the eighteenth century, and mostly tobacco by the nineteenth. The remote, misty Seasalter marshes just west of the town — backed by the dense cover of Blean Forest — made ideal landing country, and the old inns still mark the spots: the Blue Anchor, the Rose in Bloom and the Sportsman all stand near former landing places.

It was dangerous work. In 1780, the body of a young Whitstable man, John Knight, hanged for a murder committed as part of a smuggling gang, was brought back and hung in chains from a gibbet near the brow of Borstal Hill — left there as a grim warning to the town. That same year, on the road to Canterbury, a pitched battle between local smugglers and excisemen left two of the preventive men dead. This was not gentle work, whatever the romance that later attached to it.

Gangs, gentlemen and corrupt officials

There were two kinds of smuggling here. There was the small-scale sort — fishermen and farm workers running a few tubs for extra money and a share of the goods. And there was the organised trade, run by men of means. In 1746 a single gang of around 150 smugglers landed a cargo between Reculver and Birchington and moved it inland with sixty-odd men and ninety horses, some passing through Whitstable itself. An operation like that needed capital, organisation, and a chain of safe houses — and, very often, officials who were happy to look the other way.

Some of the town’s grandest houses were built on fortunes that didn’t quite add up. Thomas King, a customs officer at Seasalter and Whitstable, built the imposing Oxford House (on the site of today’s library) and retired comfortably to Dover on a fortune well beyond his salary. His successor as the town’s revenue officer had his windows broken so often in the night that in 1801 he advertised a fifty-guinea reward — a hint, perhaps, that he’d favoured some smugglers over others. The man who bought the house next, Mr Baldock, rose from herding cows to being worth over a million pounds, and is believed to have run a safe route for contraband all the way to Canterbury. Even the clergy weren’t always above it: one Whitstable parson was reported both to take tithes from the smugglers and to inform on the gangs he disliked.

The signals

Because the whole business depended on secrecy, the town ran on signals. By day, a warning that the Revenue men or the Dragoons were about was given by raising a besom — a broom — on a long pole from a chimney or a treetop; by night, by raising and lowering a lantern at a window. In the streets, the messages were quieter still: a pull of the nose meant danger, a stroke of the chin meant a cargo was on the move.

The prisoners of war

Whitstable’s odd twist came during the long wars with France, from the 1790s to 1815. French prisoners of war were held on the grim prison-hulks moored in the Medway, and escape was a lucrative business for Kent’s smugglers. Men who got away — often brought down from London on the oyster boats — could be smuggled through Whitstable and given passage home across the Channel for a heavy fee. The town’s low beaches and muddy flats made it easy to slip a boat in and out unseen. It’s said that when a house in Castle Road was demolished in the 1940s, a quantity of old manacles was found hidden beneath the floorboards — though what part they played, if any, is a mystery the town has never solved.

Did smugglers really use the alleys?

This is where the romance and the record part company a little. Whitstable’s narrow alleyways grew up, over centuries, as short cuts between the High Street — the old road to Canterbury, where the fishwives trudged — and the sea. They gave quick, easy access to the beach and to the houses and pubs strung along Island Wall and Middle Wall, and smugglers surely used them as everyone else did. But the town’s own museum historians caution against the popular picture of alleys built as smugglers’ escape routes: as they put it, no single alley was used specifically for smugglers to dodge the law. The alleys were the town’s arteries to the shore, not a secret smugglers’ maze.

Their names tell you as much. Most are named for the pubs or shipyards beside them — Red Lion Alley — or for local people, like Collar’s Alley, remembered for the Mr Collar who handed out warmth and cocoa to children in the great freeze of 1895. Coastguard’s Alley is named for the coastguard building, still standing by the tennis courts, that was put up to stop the smuggling. And the most famous of all, Squeeze Gut Alley, which is exactly what its name says it is.

The alleys are a living piece of the town’s history — and still, as they always were, the handiest shortcut down to the beach and the door of the Old Neptune.

If you know more about the town’s smuggling past — or the Castle Road manacles — we’d love to hear.