🌹🎶 Hoppers, Smugglers & Suffragettes

A Ramble through the Rebellious Songs and Stories of Deal

Back in the mists of the pre-Covid world, my friend author

Anna Sayburn Lane

suggested we collaborate on a singing-writing event in Deal. So I’m delighted to share news of our Seaside Songs & Tidal Tales Workshop on 20th July. We’ll be voyaging out on the wings of word and song on the seafront at Down’s Sailing Club. With writing prompts and songful explorations, accessible to any level of musical/ writing ability, we will spin nautical tales and ride the waves of seasong. Do join us!

Inspired by a recent day trip to cook up plans with Anna, I took a ramble through the historical mists to discover some of Deal’s tidal tales and seaside songs.

The tall tales of many a historical celebrity are embedded in the landscape and architecture of Deal. Caesar came, saw and laid the foundations for Roman conquest just 5 miles away in Richborough. Walmer Castle, one of three built by Henry VIII, hosted the likes of Wellington, a young future Queen Victoria, Churchill and War Poet Rupert Brooke. Nelson’s “gallant good friend and able assistant" Captain Parker lies in St George’s Church Yard and antiseptic surgery pioneer Joseph Lister lived out his retirement days in Walmer. Beyond the well-buttressed fortresses of power, rebellious voices rise on the sea mist.

From sketchy beginnings - L.S Lowry (1887-1976) sketched Deal Beach in 1912 which formed the basis for his later painting The Beach in 1947

In 950AD, a wooden boat loaded with hops was abandoned and accumulated centuries of mud until discovered in marshland near Graveney, North Kent in 1970. Residues of quern rock suggest it had sailed as far as the Rhineland, home of Abbess Hildegard of Bingen who included uses of “De Hoppho” in her book Physica Sacra/ The Natural World in 1150. Traces of the long rambling roots of hop brewing in Europe were found in a Celtic beaker dated 550BC in Pombia, Northern Italy. However, the only solid evidence of British Brews is dated to the 1500s, when Flemish hoppes brewing practices hopped across the North Sea. From stuffing pillows, soothing insomniacs or dying fabric, it could be that the multiple uses of hops beyond brewing account for the mysterious Graveney Boat lode.

From this silted history, Kent’s Home of Hops took root in the first garden in Westbere outside Canterbury in 1520, with Smeeth hops farmer Reginald Scot publishing instructions for establishing A Perfite Platforme of a Hoppe in 1574. Travellers and migrant workers initially provided the labour for intensive harvesting and by the 1800s, thousands of East Londoners were arriving for seasonal working holidays. A communal tradition, families arrived by ‘Hopping Special’ trains from London Bridge to work on the same farms year after year. Often resented by the locals, they lived in overcrowded sheds and worked in harsh conditions whilst the Tally Man totted up their baskets. In 1908 thousands of hop-workers took to the streets in protest at the threat of imported hops, gathering in Trafalgar Square and Tenterden. No wonder then that the lyrics of Hopping Down in Kent conclude:

Now Hopping’s all over.
All the money’s spent.
I wish to God I’d never done
No hopping down in Kent.
I say one, I say two
No more hopping shall I do.

Fresh hops harvests are now rising from old roots in Deal, which takes its name from the Old English dael/ dale. In 2017, a community brainstorm by the environmental group ‘Deal With It’ led to the founding of Deal Hop Farm. Hops grown by 400 people across 250 sites have been transformed by Time and Tide Brewing into 95,000 pints of 17 types of beer.

Whilst hops workers worked by day, Owlers traded by night. Wool exports were forbidden in 1614, and nocturnal smugglers were first recorded loading wool onto a Dutch vessel in 1697 as part of a well-established smuggling trade with the continent. Praising the Kent smugglers as “a terrible people with the courage and the ability to do anything for money,” Napoleon encouraged the trade of espionage, English guineas and POWs in exchange for French textiles and alcohol during the Napoleonic Wars (1769-1815). I like to imagine the smugglers singing their own rough ‘n’ ready variants of the many songs and shanties about Napoleon.

Smuggling operated via a web of local networks - Dover officials complained, “As most of the inhabitants of Folkestone, Sandgate and Hythe are in the confidence of the smugglers, no information can be expected of them.” In 1820 smugglers imprisoned by Lieutenant Billy ‘Hellfire’ Lilburn were liberated by their families and local community who stormed and destroyed Dover Gaol. A local anonymous poem reports:

For bricks and tiles flew so fast,
From every point you see,
And these poor men from Dover gaol,
They gained their liberty.

Officials in Deal faced similar resistance - in 1817 officials attempting to seize smuggled goods were forced to take refuge in a shop and arrested by the Mayor of Deal for interfering with ‘free trade.’

Prime Minster William Pitt the Younger was not to be deterred. In 1784, despite resistance from Deal locals, who’d been tipped off by carrier pigeon, a naval contingent torched a fleet of pirate ships drying out on the beach after a storm. On the advice of tea trader Richard Twinings, soon-to-be director of the English East India Company (more about these colonialist tea thieves in my Tea Ramble) the PM halved the 100% tea tax, commuting the loss by raising taxes on windows, candles and coal. As previously an estimated two-thirds of Britain’s cuppas had arrived in dollops aboard smugglers’ ships, the Commutation Act of 1784 brought on the Smugglers’ downfall and boosted EEIC profits.

Deal in a Storm, 1825 - J.M.W Turner (1775-1851) who sought privacy by moving to Deal from Margate.

Tales of smugglers tunnel through hiding places of Deal - legend has it that Walmer pub The Rattling Cat used to be an old coaching inn whose owner kept many cats with pieces of bone attached to their collars. The rattling of cats running away from strangers alerted everyone to the possible presence of Excise men. A fascinating song, published in nineteenth-century broadsides, tells the tale of a Female Smuggler. Whilst disguised as a man, she shoots a commodore, who on recovering and discovering his assailant is female, saves her from the hangman’s noose by marrying her.

They beat the robbers, and took their store,
And soon return’d to old England’s shore;
With a keg of brandy she walk’d along,
Did the female smuggler, and sweetly sung a song.

Emily Juson Kerr in a photograph which accompanied her obituary in The Vote, 27 Jan 1928, shared in an article by Dr Anne Logan from the University of Kent

In November 1913, another rebellious woman, Emily Juson Kerr, was arrested outside 10 Downing Street for protesting the treatment of female suffragettes in prison with the Women’s Freedom League. Taken to Cannon Street Police Office, she was bound over to keep the peace but refused and was released after a few hours. Continuing to campaign for the vote with WFL and the Tax Resistance League, Emily chaired many meetings and attended London trials of women such as Dr Winifred Patch who in 1917 said:

“I am a suffragist, I love my country, but I claim the right to give to my country in my own way what she has no right to take from me by force until women are represented in the Councils of the nation.”

Emily made a second home with her husband Richard in Walmer and won the Folkestone Tradesman’s Cup in the Folkestone angling competition of 1911 wearing her ‘No Vote, No Tax’ badge. When the outbreak of WWI suspended suffragette activity, she founded the Tipperary Club in Hammersmith for female partners and relatives of servicemen which spread across the country, merging with an organisation led by Lady Jellicoe. After the war, she established Deal Housewives’ Union to protest escalating food prices and ran a dairy to enable local women to buy products at lower prices. In 1924 she became a Justice of the Peace for Deal and founded a Council of Women Magistrates in East Kent and the Deal WFL branch.

Having witnessed the winning of suffrage for women over 30 with property in 1918, Emily died in January 1928, just months before the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 widened the vote to women above the age of 21. She had played her part in a movement whose spirit fellow WFL member Gertrude Colemore accurately predicted would ‘be incarnate in the life of the world.’ I like to think of our Female Smuggler singing with that same spirit.

“You may kill, one woman or many; but you cannot kill the Movement. Nor can you slay the song that women are singing. Blood you may have if you will, but never silence...”

Gertrude Coleman, The Vote July 14th 1913

Do join us to find your own wonderfully rebellious and creative voice on 20th July

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