The 1736 act required all gin sellers to get a license, and that license cost £50 a year, which was a huge amount of money by the standards of the time – well north of £10,000 in modern terms. People got around this one by the cunning expedient of not getting a license and selling gin anyway. In fact, only two licenses were ever taken out.
So the government, needing to show they were in charge, offered a bounty to anyone who was prepared to rat on an illegal gin seller. The bounty was substantial and a lot of people became informers. The public got around this one by cunningly banding into mobs and beating informers to death. Meanwhile, to get their gin, they resorted to fake cats.
As the inventor of the fake cat, Dudley Bradstreet, wrote an autobiography, I feel it only fair to tell his story in his words:
The mob being very noisy and clamorous for want of their beloved Liquor, which few or none at last dared to sell, it soon occurred to me to venture upon that trade. I bought the Act, and read it over several times, and found no Authority by it to break open Doors, and that the informer must know the name of the person who rented the house it was sold in. To evade this, I got an acquaintance to take a house in Blue Anchor Alley in St. Luke’s Parish, who privately convey’d his bargain to me; I then got it well secured, and… purchased in Moorfields the Sign of a Cat, and had it nailed to a Street Window; I then caused a leaden pipe, the small end out about an inch, to be placed under the paw of the cat; the end that was within had a funnel to it.
When my house was ready for business, I enquired what Distiller in London was the most famous for good gin, and was assured by several, that it was Mr. L---dale in Holborn: to him I went and laid out thirteen pounds, which was all the money I had, except two shillings, and told him my scheme, which he approved of. This cargo was sent off to my house, at the back of which there was a way to go in or out. When the liquor was properly disposed, I got a person to inform a few of the mob, that gin would be sold by the Cat at my window next day, provided they put the money in its mouth, from whence there was a hole that conveyed it to me. At night I took possession of my den, and got up early next morning to be ready for custom; it was near three hours before anybody called, which made me almost despair of the project; at last I heard the chink of money, and a comfortable voice say, “Puss, give me two pennyworth of gin.” I instantly put my mouth to the tube, and bid them receive it from the pipe under the paw, and then measured and poured it into the funnel, from whence they soon received it. Before night I took six shillings, the next day above thirty shillings, and afterwards three or four pounds a day.
He blew his money on whores and oysters.
Puss-and-mew machines, as they were called, became popular all over London. Crowds of poor people gathered around drinking from a cat. It made the Gin Act look rather silly; it made the government look powerless; and it must have made London look extraordinary.
Source:
Forsyth, Mark. “The Gin Craze.” A Short History of Drunkenness. Three Rivers Press, 2017. 165-67. Print.
Further Reading:
A hero in m book!