The last fatal happening in this way along the Sussex coast appears to have been in the marshes at Camber Castle, on April 1st, 1838, when a poor fiddler of Winchelsea, named Thomas Monk, was shot in the course of a dispute over run goods, by the coastguard.
But we may quite easily have a surfeit of these brutal affrays, and it is better to dwell on a lighter note, to contemplate the audacity, and to admire the ingenuity and the resource often displayed by the smugglers in concealing their movements.
To especially single out any particular line of coast for pre-eminence in smuggling would be impossible. When every one smuggled, and every one else—owing to that well-understood human foible of buying in the cheapest market—supported smuggling by purchasing smuggled goods, every foreshore that did not actually present physical difficulties, or that was not exceptionally under excise and customs surveillance, was a free port, in a very special signification. The thickly peopled coast-line of Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire of our own time was then sparsely populated, and those shores that are now but thinly settled were in that age the merest aching wildernesses, where not only towns, but even villages and hamlets, were few and far apart. A coast-line such as that at Brighton would seem to us to present certain obvious difficulties to the smuggler, but close at hand was the low-lying land of Shoreham, with its lagoon-like harbour, a very shy, secretive kind of place, to this day; while away to Worthing, and beyond it, stretched a waste of shingle-beach, running up to solitary pasture-lands that reached to the foot of the noble rampart of the South Downs. On these shores the free-traders landed their illegal imports with little interference, and their shore-going allies received the goods and took them inland, to London or to their intermediate storehouses in the country-side, very much at their leisure. Avoiding the much-travelled high-roads, and traversing the chalk-downs by unfrequented bridle-tracks, they went across the level Weald and past the Surrey border into that still lonely district running east and west for many miles, on the line of Leith Hill, Ewhurst, and Hindhead. There, along those wooded heights, whose solitary ways still astonish, with their remote aspect, the Londoner who by any chance comes to them, although but from thirty to thirty-five miles from the Bank of England in the City of London, you may still track, amid the pine-trees on the shoulders of the gorsy hills, or among the oaks that grow so luxuriantly in the Wealden clay, the “soft roads,” as the country folk call them, along which the smugglers, unmolested, carried their merchandise. On Ewhurst Hill stands a windmill, to which in those times the smugglers’ ways converged; and near by, boldly perched on a height, along the sylvan road that leads from Shere to Ewhurst village, stood the “Windmill,” once the “New” inn, which had a double roof, utilised as a storehouse for clandestine kegs. A “Windmill” inn stands on the spot to-day, but it is a new building, the old house having unfortunately been burned down some two years since. Surveying the country from this spot, you have, on the one hand, almost precipitous hill-peaks, gorsy to their summits, and on the other a lovely dale, deeply embosomed in woods. The sub-soil here is a soft yellow sandstone, streaked with white sand, breaking out along the often hollow paths into miniature cliffs, in which the smugglers and their allies were not slow to scoop caverns and store part of their stock. We have already learnt how terrible these men could be to those who informed against them or made away with any of their property, and by direct consequence the goods thus stored were generally safe, either from the authorities or from the rustics, who had a very wholesome and well-founded dread of the smuggling bands. But they had a way of their own of letting these justly dreaded folk see that their stores were evident to some, and that silence was supposed to have a certain market value. Their way was just a delicate hint, which consisted in marking a tub or two with a chalk cross; and, sure enough, when the stock was removed, those chalk-marked tubs were left behind, with possibly, if the country-folk had been modest and the smugglers were generous, a few others to keep them company.
An old brick-and-tile-hung farm, down below Ewhurst Hill, older than it looks, known as Barhatch, was in those times in possession of the Ticknor family; and still, in what was the old living-room, may be seen the inglenook, with its iron crane, marked “John Ticknor, 1755.” The Barhatch woods were often used by smugglers, and the Ticknors never had any occasion to purchase spirits, because, at not infrequent intervals, when the household arose, and the front door was opened in the morning, a keg would be found deposited on the steps: a complimentary keg, for the use of the Ticknor property and the discretion of the Ticknor tongue.
One of the choicest landing-places along the Sussex coast must undoubtedly have been just westward of Worthing, by Goring, where the shore is yet secluded, and is even now not readily come at by good roads. In a line with it is Highdown Hill, a rounded hump of the Downs, rising to a height of two hundred and ninety-nine feet, two miles inland; a spot famed in all guidebook lore of this neighbourhood as the site of the “Miller’s Tomb.” This miller, whose real business of grinding corn seems to have been supplemented by participation in the stern joys of illegal importation, was one John Olliver. His mill was situated on this hill-top: a very remote spot, even now, arrived at only along lanes in which mud and water plentifully await the explorer’s cautious foot, and where brambles and intrudant twigs, currycomb his whiskers, if he have such.
John Olliver, miller, was an eighteenth-century eccentric, whose morbid fancy for having his coffin made early in life, and wheeled under his bed every night, was not satisfied until he had also built himself a tomb on the hill-top, on a twelve-foot square plot of ground granted him by the landowner, one W. W. Richardson, in 1766: a tomb on which he could with satisfaction look every day. Yet he was not the dull, dispirited man one might for these things suppose; and Pennant, in his Tour in Sussex, is found saying, “I am told he is a stout, active, cheerful man.” And then comes this significant passage. “Besides his proper trade he carries on a very considerable one in smuggled goods.” Let us pause a moment to reflect upon the impudent public manner in which John Olliver must have carried on his smuggling activities. To this impudence he added also figures on his house-top, representing a miller filling a sack and a smuggler chased by an exciseman with a drawn sword; after the exciseman coming a woman with a broom, belabouring him about the head. The tomb the miller had built for eventual occupation by his body was in the meanwhile generally occupied by spirits—not the spirits of the dead, but such eaux de vie as hollands and cognac; and he himself was not laid here for many years, for he lived to be eighty-four years of age, and died in 1793. He had long been widely known as an eccentric, and thousands came to his funeral on the unconsecrated spot. Here the tomb, of the altar-tomb type, stands to this day, kept in excellent repair, and the lengthy inscriptions repainted; at whose costs and charges I know not. A small grove of trees almost entirely encircles it. At one end is a gruesome little sculpture representing Death, as a skeleton, laying a hand upon an affrighted person, and asking him, “Whither away so fast?” and at the other end are the following lines:
Why fhould my fancy anyone offend
Whofe good or ill does not on it depend
(A generous gift) on which my Tomb doth ftand
This is the only fpot that I have chofe
Wherein to take my lafting long repofe
Here in the drift my body lieth down
You’ll fay it is not confecrated ground,
I grant ye fame; but where shall we e’er find
The fpot that e’er can purify the mind?
Nor to the body any luftre give.
This more depends on what a life we live
For when ye trumpet fhall begin to found
’Twill not avail where’er ye Body’s found.
Blefsed are they and all who in the Lord the Saviour die
Their bodief wait Redemption day,
And fleep in peace where’er they lay.
On the upper slab are a number of texts and highly moral reflections.