“We have been favoured with some particulars of another recent attempt to work contraband goods a few miles eastward of Eastbourne, when it appears the coast blockade succeeded in taking a large boat and upwards of two hundred tubs. We are sorry to add much mischief has occurred, as on the following morning blood was observed near the spot. Two men, it is said, belonging to the boat are taken prisoners, and two of the blockade are reported to be much bruised and beaten, and it is also suspected some of the smugglers are seriously, if not mortally, wounded. The blockade in this instance behaved in the most humane manner, having received a regular volley from their opponents before their officers gave directions for them to fire. We have just heard that five smugglers were killed in the affray.”
On a Sunday night towards the end of July 1826, during a run of smuggled goods at Dover, the smugglers shot dead a seaman of the preventive force named Morgan, for which no one was ever convicted.
A determined and blood-stained struggle took place at Bo-Peep at midnight of January 3rd, 1828. Bo-Peep was the name of a desolate spot situated midway between Hastings and Bexhill. The place is the same as that westernmost extension of St. Leonards now known by the eminently respectable—not to say imposing—name of “West Marina”; but in those times it was a shore, not indeed lonely (better for its reputation had it been so) but marked by an evil-looking inn, to which were attached still more evil-looking “Pleasure Gardens.” If throats were not, in fact, commonly cut in those times at Bo-Beep, the inn and its deplorable “Pleasure Gardens” certainly looked no fit, or safe, resort for any innocent young man with a pocketful of money jingling as he walked.
On this occasion a lugger came in view off shore, when a party of smugglers armed, as usual, with “bats,” i.e. stout ash-poles, some six feet in length, rushed to the beach, landed the cargo, and made off with it, by various means, inland a distance of some three miles to Sidley Green. Here the coast blockade-men, some forty in number, came up with them.
The smugglers drew up in regular line-formation, and a desperate fight resulted. The smugglers fought with such determination and courage that the blockade-men were repulsed and one, Quartermaster Collins, killed. In the first volley fired by the blockade an old smuggler named Smithurst was killed; his body was found next morning, with his “bat” still grasped in his hands, the stout staff almost hacked to pieces by the cutlasses and bayonets of the blockade-men.
At the Spring Assizes held at Horsham, Spencer Whiteman, of Udimore, Thomas Miller, Henry Miller, John Spray, Edward Shoesmith, William Bennett, John Ford, and Stephen Stubberfield were indicted for assembling, armed, for purposes of smuggling, and were removed for trial to the Old Bailey, where, on April 10th, they all pleaded guilty; as did Whiteman, Thomas Miller, Spray, Bennett, and Ford, together with Thomas Maynard and William Plumb, for a like offence on January 23rd, 1828, at Eastbourne. Sentence of death was passed on all, but was commuted to transportation. With three exceptions, they were young men, under thirty years of age.
Again, in broad daylight, in 1828, a lugger landed a heavy cargo of kegs on the open beach at Bo-Peep. No fewer than three hundred rustic labourers, who had been hired by the job, in the usual course, by the smugglers bold, assembled on the beach, and formed up two lines of guards while the landing of the tubs, and their loading into carts, on horses, or on men’s shoulders, was proceeding. If the preventive officers knew anything of what was toward that busy day they did not, at any rate, interfere; and small blame to them for the very elementary discretion they displayed. They had, as already shown, been too seriously mauled at an earlier date for them to push matters again to extremity.
On January 3rd, 1831, in Fairlight Glen, two miles east of Hastings, two smugglers, William Cruttenden and Joseph Harrod, were shot dead, and on February 22nd, 1832, at Worthing, when between two and three hundred smugglers had assembled on the beach, William Cowardson was shot dead, and several others were carried away wounded.
Still the tale was continued, for during a landing on January 23rd, 1833, at Eastbourne, the smugglers, who had assembled in large numbers, killed George Pett, chief boatman of the local preventive station, and ran their cargo safely. Several of both sides were wounded on this occasion, but no one among the smugglers was ever arrested.