The Hawkhurst Gang was the most feared smuggling organisation in England, operating from the Kentish village of Hawkhurst on the Sussex border between about 1735 and 1749. At their peak they could muster hundreds of armed men and ran contraband from the Channel coast across Kent and Sussex and up to London, openly drinking and firing their guns at inns such as the Mermaid at Rye.
The story
Their power rested on terror. They tortured informers, extorted whole villages, and in their most notorious exploit broke into the Custom House at Poole in 1747 to recover a seized cargo of tea. When a witness, the shoemaker Daniel Chater, and a customs officer, William Galley, threatened to expose them, the gang murdered both with appalling cruelty — an outrage that finally turned the country against them.
The villagers of Goudhurst, drilled into a militia by a former soldier, William Sturt, beat off a gang assault in a pitched battle in 1747. Within two years the leaders, including Arthur Gray and Thomas Kingsmill, had been hanged, and the Hawkhurst Gang passed into folklore as the byword for the violent golden age of English smuggling.