Bristol in 1730 would have been well aware of the dangers of fire, a city still largely built with timber buildings, close packed and with a harbour likely to have more than a few combustible products in its ships and warehouses. October 1730 however brought a new menace, particularly to the wealthy.
On the 3rd October just after midnight, a series of brilliant fireballs were seen arching through the air on St Augustines Back and over the wall of the mansion house of merchant George Packer on the Butts. There was ‘a noise like the report of several guns‘, as these hand-made grenades exploded spreading flames everywhere. Within minutes the house was ablaze and Packer and his family were in full flight. Thankfully a favourable wind stopped the flames reaching other nearby warehouses and the wooden ships crowding the quayside.
This was the first incident of what would become know as the work of the ‘incendiarys’ and in the Bristol Press, the ‘Bristol Firemen’. It was an organised extortion racket where the victims either left sums of money in designated places or face being burnt out.
A fortnight earlier, George Packer had received a series of anonymous letters threatening to burn his home and murder his family unless he left six guineas, either in a hole in the wall in Swan Lane or in the wall of St Augustine’s churchyard on the other side of the river.
Packer and his family fled first to the house of a fellow merchant, John Clements, and from there to Packer’s country estate, but the threats continued. He might run into twenty different houses, asserted one letter, but they would burn them all, ‘and pursue him till he had nothing to subsist on’.
Then, on 5th October Clements’ house was also targeted. Packer remained on his country estate but more letters began arriving in Bristol still targetting him. One was posted on the gates of Sir Abraham Elton’s house in Queen Square, while others were received by Clements, a maltster in Temple Street, several owners of shipping anchored at Sea Mills, and a Marsh Street merchant named Boltley who was also suspected of sheltering Packer.
If he would only agree to pay the ten guineas demanded of him, the letter ran,
‘neither he nor his family should come to any further harm and that, by G_d, if he did not, they would murder him the first Opportunity that happen’d’.
The letter writers felt themselves safe from discovery, as one letter stated…
‘I would not have you fill yourself with such fancies as to think you will catch us, for you will never, as long as Bristol stands, tho’ £1000 rewards shall be offered, it is past the art of man to find us out, for we give the letters to boys in the street, unknown to us and we to them’.
Rewards were offered and such was the feeling against the crime that even the Crown contributed. As one newspaper reported…
“ We learn by the last post from Bristol … with no small surprise, that notwithstanding the Chamber of that City has offered Thirty-one Pounds Ten Shillings, the Bristol Fire-Office Fifty Pounds, and Mr. Packer Twenty-one Pounds, besides his Majesty’s One Hundred Pounds, for detecting and bringing the vile Incendiaries to Justice, they have dared to send two more letters threatening the Life of Mr. Bothy, and to burn his House, and the Warehouses of several other Merchants, if they did not put each twenty Guineas in a certain Place, with which Mr. Boltley comply’d, but the Money was not taken away, perhaps through fear.”
The city watch was doubled and soldiers were brought in and deployed at night to guard Marsh Street, and several other places that had been threatened. People were arrested almost on a daily basis often on the flimsiest of evidence, though no hard evidence was found. One one occasion, a man was seen at Boltley’s back door one evening before running off through Marsh Street, and soldiers were quickly ordered to seal the approach roads while constables conducted a house-to-house search. Even so, the suspect could not be found.
Latimer in his Annals of Bristol in the eighteenth Century records that…
“During the alarm caused by the incendiaries, the Common Council was inspired by the happy thought that it would be useful to the citizens to know where they could find a constable in an emergency. It was therefore ordered that a “painted staff” should be affixed at the door of each constable. Those officials, however, disliked a regulation which, in times of riot, exposed their dwellings to the vengeance of the rabble, and the symbol of law and order seems to have often disappeared when it was most sought for.”
It wasn’t just the merchants that were affected. Letters with Bristol postmarks supposedly from some ‘poor b’leag’d tradesmen’ were delivered to the Duke of Beaufort in November. They demanded that he leave ten guineas at the sign of the Elephant in Old King Street, or they would visit his house and ‘have your heart or money’. Beaufort appealed for help from William Brydges, a Gloucestershire JP, who wrote immediately to the secretary of state.
‘His Lordship and family have been placed under apprehensions that can be better imagined than expressed…these villainous practices … very much terrify his Majesty’s subjects in these parts, especially when attempts of this nature are made upon persons of rank and quality’.
Suspicion fell in due course on Bristol’s Irish community who were to be found in and around Marsh Street. Several were arrested and since the Irish had helped and sympathised with the French they were an obvious target and many started leaving Bristol in a hurry. Rumours that the Irish were implicated spread quickly to neighbouring towns, so that when a letter was discovered at Frome at the end of October,
‘the Town rose in great number and … were resolved if they found any strangers of a certain nation, that could not well account for themselves, to tear them to pieces’
John Power, the son of an Irish attorney, finally became the principal suspect. He was arrested on the Quay after a ten-year-old girl recognised him as the man she had seen throwing a letter into Boltley’s shop. Two boys, already in custody for delivering a letter to George Packer, then identified him as the man who had instructed them. It emerged that he had lodgings in Swan Lane, opposite the hole in the wall in which the money was to have been left. Magistrates were convinced of his guilt and sent him to Newgate.
Confined for very nearly a year on the flimsiest of evidence and repeatedly protesting his innocence, Power initially refused food and ‘behaved in a very insolent manner’ when questioned. Indeed, given that he was lodged at first in the gaol’s ‘pit’ or condemned cell, chained to a staple, ‘without pen, ink, paper, fire or candle, far distant from my relatives and destitute of money’, Power may have felt he had much to be insolent about. ‘I fear there are some clandestine dealings devised against me’, he wrote.
By the end of October, a number of wealthy men in other South Western towns received copycat letters. In most of these there was no Irish community to blame however and it looks likely that others were simply trying their luck after reading about the Bristol incidents in the newspapers. Explicit references to the misfortunes of George Packer gave provincial letters the impression of confederacy. ‘We will serve you as we did Packer’, said a demand for £6.00 to a physician at Bridgwater; while in Macclesfield a victim was assured, ‘You may expect Mr Packer’s fire‘.
Possibly as a result of the widespread reporting in the nations newspapers similar letters began appearing in such places as London, Monmouth, Worcester, Chester and Basingstoke. Few were accompanied by actual fires, but the local authorities in each place sought out the poor and the strangers.
At Gloucester, constables were sworn in to ‘clear petty alehouses on the outskirts of the city’, and take up ‘all strolling people‘, guards were appointed at Bridgwater to ‘clear all suspicious persons’ from the town and its surrounding villages, and at Northampton the mayor ordered the taking up and whipping of every vagrant they could find.
By January 1731, across the country, large numbers of men and a handful of women had been detained for writing threatening letters, but relatively few of them went to court and even fewer were actually convicted. Nor was Bristol any closer to catching those responsible for destroying Packer’s house.
In December, two Cornish horse thieves, John and Roger Lorrey, were taken at Devizes. Under examination, they alleged that, together with a third man known only as Ned, they had been involved in the drafting of at least fourteen letters and that Ned, together with an Irishman named George, was responsible for the fire at Packer’s house. Two more men were accordingly arrested but no convictions were to follow, and Power was eventually acquitted in September 1731 nearly a year after his arrest. In the end all those arrested throughout the south-west were acquitted and released.
The affair eventually died down, but a precedent had been set and letters again appeared in 1734 during a time of anti-turnpike rioting in Bristol and Gloucester and one last incident three years after that.
References
- British Journal, 12 Dec 1730
- Poole, Steve and Rogers, Nicholas. Bristol from Below : Law, Authority and Protest in a Georgian City. Boydell & Brewer, 2017
- Ipswich Journal – Saturday 17 October 1730
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000191/17301017/004/0002 - Poole, Steve ‘It is past the art of man to find us out’: anti-Catholicism and the ‘Bristol Firemen’ in 1730. Regional Historian, Issue 18, Summer, 2008 pp. 24-29.
- Latimer, John. The Annals of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century. 1893.
https://texts.wishful-thinking.org.uk/Latimer1800/Annals1721.html