FEMALE SMUGGLERS OF THE 19TH CENTURY

• 220 pages
• Pen & Sword Publishers, Nov 2025
• £25 RRP (hardback)
• Available from pen-and-sword.co.uk, Amazon and from all good bookshops

“… contains delicious anecdotes of female resourcefulness, cunning, and daring…Women played an integral part, not so much in the sailing and landing (although this book illustrates how some women did just that) but on the landed side or smuggling goods under their crinolines. Indeed, the fashion for hooped crinolines was a gift, Women played an integral part, not so much in the sailing and landing (although this book illustrates how some women did just that) but on the landed side or smuggling goods under their crinolines. Indeed, the fashion for hooped crinolines was a gift.  This is a worthwhile and deeply researched book pertinent to anyone interested in female social history or smuggling.”
(Scrollingbooks – 2025, Instagram)

♦ “Highly recommended for history enthusiasts, particularly those interested in women’s history, maritime history, and social history, offering a unique and engaging perspective.”
(AI Review, 2025)

♦ “Smuggling is a notorious part of Essex history and some pretty memorable criminal characters there were too, operating across the county.  From female Fagin housewives and bootleg gin empires, women smugglers were among the most interesting, as Dee Gordon explores in her latest book… The book explores the inventive and ingenious methods used by women smugglers, including those from right here in Essex.”

[Note: there is a chapter for each county plus chapters on Europe and the U.S.]
(Southend Echo, 27.11.25)

♦ “I recently finished reading Female Smugglers of the Nineteenth Century and felt compelled to reach out….
What I found most fascinating was the social range you trace across the century. The shift from working women helping husbands unload goods on beaches as a matter of survival to well-heeled women on superior vessels exploiting the fashion for bustles to conceal luxury fabrics and jewellery for themselves is not just an amusing detail. It maps a genuine transformation in who had access to smuggling, what was worth smuggling, and what motivations drove it as duties on the old staples slowly eroded and the trade became more inventive. That arc from subsistence necessity to bourgeois self-interest gives the book a social history argument that runs beneath the individual cases.”
(Author and Reader Cheryl Rider – May 2026)

THE LIVERPOOL MERCURY OF 23 JUNE 1854
Born in London (probably Paddington), Mother Redcap is described as ‘an old woman… wearing a sort of red coif, or cap’ living in a house which ‘stood by itself, no other being near it for some distance’ where ‘Mother Redcap drove a thriving trade. Her house was the resort of smugglers, fishermen and others of the like employment; but the house was especially noted as a place of refuge for runaway sailors, and those who were in hiding to avoid the pressgang, which in the time of the first American war was very actively employed in this neighbourhood’.  The article goes on to describe Mother Redcap as ‘the sailor’s friend’ who ‘like an old hen with a brood of chickens, spread the wings of her protection over them and defied the hawk to the death.’  It refers to her being trusted with large sums following profitable ‘voyages’ and it was well known that she had ‘accumulated a considerable amount of wealth’.

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WOMEN ARE MENTIONED IN A REPORT from the Customs House at Weymouth in 1804. ‘The articles generally smuggled from this part of the coast are chiefly brandy, rum and geneva, to which may be added a small quantity of wine, tobacco and salt, the whole from the islands of Guernsey and Alderney, which are imported in casks containing from four to six gallons each in vessels from ten to thirty tons burthen in the winter, and in the summer season in boats from three to eight or nine tons carrying three hundred and fifty casks, which are generally sunk on rafts till a convenient opportunity offers for taking them up, which they put into boats and distribute them along the coast at Portland and on the beach called Chiswell Beach as far west as Burton Hive [south of Burton Bradstock], which is about sixteen miles in extent. It then gets into the hands of women and others, who disperse it in small quantities in the country for five or six miles round, and what is not got rid of in this manner is conveyed on horses forty or fifty miles up the country; but when from tempestuous weather the smugglers cannot sink their goods, they then work to the eastward of that island and sink and disperse it in like manner.’

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THERE WAS A PARTICULAR PRACTICE in vogue between Calais and Dover, in particular, around 1819 and 1820. This was rather an evasion of the customs’ duties than actual smuggling. It was then fashionable for ladies to wear Leghorn hats and bonnets of enormous dimensions. They were huge, made of strong plaited straw, nearly circular, and commonly about a yard in diameter; often decorated with feathers, and sold in England at from two to three guineas each, and sometimes even more. A heavy duty was laid upon them, amounting to nearly half their value. It was a concession made by the custom-houses of various countries that wearing apparel in use was not liable to duty, so leaving a loophole for these to be smuggled in. Dealers would hire, cheaply, a numerous amount of women and girls who were in need of extra cash to travel daily to and from Dover and Calais, and would even enter into a contract with the owners of the steamers for cut-price tickets for a whole band of them. The sight of these women leaving the town in the morning with the most deplorable headgear and returning in the evening gloriously arrayed was for some few years a familiar and amusing one to the people of Dover.

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CASES AT THE THAMES POLICE COURT were reproduced in newspapers nationally. As in the Durham Chronicle of 13 August 1858.  This account was regarding ‘Ellen Carey, neatly-dressed young woman’ who had been charged on Custom-house information with smuggling 22.5lbs weight of cigars, on which she had incurred a penalty of £l00. ‘She pleaded guilty to the information, and the magistrate at once sentenced her to pay a fine of £l00 to the Queen, and in default of payment to be imprisoned for six months. Gardner, a tide-surveyor of customs, introduced to the notice of the magistrates three large petticoats, lined with cigars, and said the prisoner was passenger by the General Steam Navigation Company’s ship, the Moselle, and on her arrival St Katherine’s wharf, was about to step on shore, when her immense rotundity of dress excited his suspicions, and be asked her if she had anything about her liable to duty. She declared she had not, and explained that her blown appearance arose from crinoline, which she and every lady in the land considered as very becoming, whatever the gentlemen might say on the subject. He hinted to her that her crinoline petticoat was of extra dimensions, and handed her over to a female searcher, who stripped her in a private cabin, took the three petticoats lined with cigars from her person, and brought her out again with her size diminished to reasonable proportions, as she now appeared.’ A Mr Yardley [presumably one of the magistrates] said to Gardner that ‘You will have no faith in crinoline again,’ the reply being that ‘Never, sir. I shall always suspect every woman who wears crinoline.’