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Question
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I have heard that there is smuggler from Rowde, near Devizes, buried at Poole. Why would a man from the centre of Wiltshire be engaged in this coastal activity?
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Question asked on
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04 July 2011
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Answer
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Although smuggling appeared to be a coastal activity many inland people were involved in distribution and storage and many smugglers from the Dorset coast would have travelled into Wiltshire with their contraband. The people of Rowde, like those in other Wiltshire villages, engaged in this trade. One such man Robert Trotman, has a memorial in a Dorset churchyard for on 24th April, 1765 he died in a fight with customs officers. The sympathetic inscription says that he was 'barbarously murdered on the shore near Poole' and continues in verse:
'Put tea in one scale, human blood in t'other
And think what 'tis to slay a harmless brother.'
The t'other; it has the authentic ring of Wiltshire but, as a fellow Wiltshireman, I hope that he was not only smuggling tea. How scornful William Cobbett would have been for he detested tea drinking, holding it to be responsible for many of the ills of the early 19th century.
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Bibliography
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The Wiltshire Village Book, by Michael Marshman. Countryside Books, 1999, 1 85306 583 8.
