In Deuteronomy, Chapter 31, Moses claims ‘the Lord’ promised a swath of land west of Jordan to the Israelites, saying ‘the Lord shall do unto them as he did to Sihon and to Og, kings of the Amorites, and unto the land of them, whom he destroyed’. In Chapter 34, ‘the Lord shewed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan; And all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost Sea; And to the south, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar.’ In the next book, Joshua says ‘unto the children of Israel’ that ‘the living God is among you, and that he will drive out from before you the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Hivites, and the Perizzites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Jebusites.’

This assault, expulsion, and genocidal war on local tribes by another tribe ‘out of Egypt’ led, by the Iron Age, to a Kingdom of Israel that covers at its northern extremity all the land within its current borders, down to a few miles north of Jerusalem, with a small zone extra to the east. Below, and including Jerusalem, belonged to the kingdom of Judah (and, east of the Dead Sea, Moab) and on the coast ‘the Philistine city states’, including Gaza. South of that was the land of the Arubu tribes.

UNPICKING PAST INJUSTICES LEAVES EVERY EMPEROR NAKED

The Canaanites are sometimes claimed as the predecessors of modern day ‘Palestinians’, who then would precede the Israelites claim to the territory. Modern day Zionism was birthed in Europe, so all sides in a debate on ‘whose land is it?’ face complications. The transfer of tribal lands through war has been part of our history throughout the world for millennia. Modern international law regards such displacement as criminal, and unpicking past injustices leaves every emperor naked.

Of more use is genetics. And, in those terms, ones that ignore contingent religious affiliation. Today’s Palestinians in the main have two roots. The Christian Palestinians are one, and the other share genetic features with, maternally, a proportion of sub-Saharan DNA and, primarily, the same genetic markers as the pre-WWII indigenous Jewish population (Ashkenazi, Iranian, and Moroccan Jews). Some of the European genetic stock in today’s Israel are more complex. However, the takeaway here is that, bar religion, these are to a significant degree the same peoples.

Irony – and ancient history – aside, the current crises emerged from the 1930s and 1940s. This puts the British Empire in the frame for a good deal of the instability in the Middle East, which is not news. The Germans, too, had suggested Israel as a deportation spot (and Argentina, amongst other locations) when ‘negotiating’ migrations as ‘a solution’ to Hitler’s ‘problem’ to senior rabbis in Germany. Even before 1948, some of those frontier settlers already in the Palestine were waging a low-intensity war against the British, as well as covert collective punishment against those already resident. Palestine and Lebanon had cities that looked much as ours did, wore western clothing, and drove cars: they were not generally a population of nomadic Bedouin with no fixed home. It was short work destroying them.

RIGHT FROM THE PAGES OF DEUTERONOMY AND JOSHUA

The first real blowback went badly for the natives and rather well for the embryonic Israeli state. The first major war left an Israel that was to a degree exclusionary, and far greater in extent than the British had planned. The next serious blowback, in 1967, had dramatic impact too. Israel’s position has never been conciliatory toward its neighbours. This has, clearly, been reciprocated, and cause-and-effect is opaque at best. But the roots of today’s Gazan War precede the cross-border attacks on Israel by Hamas, a body that as tightly controls the people of Gaza as Israel does the incredibly-shrinking Palestinian settlements in the West Bank. Settlers from Israel, and the Jewish diaspora, seem to have jumped right from the pages of Deuteronomy and Joshua. In today’s international order, this is not acceptable, although pragmatically accepted by Israel’s chief western allies, Britain and the USA. Nor is Islamist territorial expansionism.

It is, and will remain, a mess for as many generations ahead as behind, though the current conflict as persecuted by Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government aims to ‘solve’ a significant proportion of the mess. In ‘eye-for-an-eye’ terms, the assault on Gaza goes way beyond a proportionate response, ‘collective punishment’ being business as usual since the mid-1940s. The West’s attitude is similar to that felt after 9/11, where ‘the others’ are, weighed in the balance, apparently much less important or valuable than ‘us’. The rest of the world, especially in the middle-east, have of course seen and been offended by this exceptionalism, so we can expect more ‘blowback’ any time soon.

In the meantime, you could do a lot worse than gen up on the background to the conflict than grabbing a copy of Michael Scott-Baumann’s Palestinians and Israelis, which is updated to October 7th, and is far more worthwhile than reading, for example, Howard Jacobson’s irrational Zionist screeds or propaganda from Hamas!

Available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

By Joseph Dragovich
Published by The History Press, 2023 rrp £16.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON

In the middle of the eighteenth century existed a smuggling gang, out of Hawkhurst, described by the author as being ‘to Kent and Sussex what the Krays are to London, Al Capone is to Chicago, or John Gotti is to New York’. Such gangs today appear to become celebrities, with as many fascinated onlookers regarding them as some kind of cultural heroes as there are those aghast at their often terrifying actions. To an extent, an unhealthy obsession with, frankly, scum is not new, though modern media does amplify the numbers of people exposed to news of their crimes and, I suspect, magnify the effect. Surely, any sane observer could only wish, for example, that the Krays had been gifted concrete boots rather early in their ‘career’?

Dragovich’s book, however, is not a romanticised memoir from the criminal underground, but an engagingly scary and well researched history of one of our locally based criminal cartels. This motley crew were powerful, terrorising whole towns, and shifting smuggled goods all around the country. Where today’s drug barons shift cocaine, cannabis, and heroin, nearly two-hundred years ago illegally imported camellia sinensis was the drug of choice – tea!

THE PELHAM FAMILY AGAINST THE POOR

In order to evade taxes, tea was smuggled into the country and naturally towns like Hastings, and beaches around the east and south-east coasts, were a common location for smugglers to base themselves. The book opens with a customs raid, impounding smuggled goods near Hastings, and the subsequent ambush of the customs men by the Hawkhurst Gang. The murder of Thomas Carswell, customs officer, as he attempted to transport the tea to a Hastings customs house, set off a national manhunt. The gang’s reputation for bloodthirstiness went national. It took a decade to catch up with the murderers.

The author gives an interesting account of the political and economic context for the Hawkhurst gang’s activities. Smuggling was dangerous, but highly lucrative. By the mid-seventeenth century the Cinque ports were famous, but in decline. Enclosure had increased, as the wool trade expanded. This pitched the very rich and corrupt local political forces, led by the Pelham family, against the poor, the desperate, unenfranchised and landless peasants, and ex-sailors and soldiers, as, like tea, sheep too were a catch worth stealing, despite the vindictive punishments meted out by those in power.

BRIBERY, CORRUPTION AND MURDER, A MICROCOSM OF THE ENGLISH STATE

Transportation to the colonies or hanging, to many a Hobson’s choice, were typical punishments around the time of the 1736 ‘law and order bill’. ‘Simply loitering by the coast without a good reason earned you a month’s hard labour’. The degree of poverty and desperation, as well as the size of returns possible to those who would risk smuggling, were high enough that the gangs flourished. Alongside this, the law was extended to give customs men more powers.

The Gang were powerful enough that they effectively declared war on the customs men. The smugglers’ trade was by mid-century taking place ‘on an industrial scale’ with huge numbers of men, and alongside them many teams of horses. Hiding smuggling became a game of bribery, corruption and murder, a microcosm of the English state under the Whigs. Secrecy was no option, force was necessary. The gangs were acting as ‘paramilitary organisations’, and ‘by the mid-1740s their bludgeoning and intimidation had managed to eliminate nearly all government resistance to their business’, with the Hawkhurst Gang controlling much of the coastal smuggling trade from Hastings to Folkestone.

ONE HOPES THE ‘COUNTY LINES’ GANGS ACTIVE TODAY NEVER GET SO POWERFUL

Eventually, when war broke out between England and France, those in power took the opportunity to class smugglers as not ‘just criminals, they were possible enemy agents’. Chapters 7 and 8 in the book are titled ‘War’ and ‘Escalation’, and Chapter 10, ‘Mafia’. The latter relates, amongst other atrocities, military confrontations in towns like Bexhill with 100 smugglers against a detachment of 20 soldiers. Naturally, the smugglers beat them silly then proceeded to the customs house, tortured one officer, and destroyed the house of customs ‘riding officer’ Philip Bailey. By 1745 ‘they were the law, and they knew it’. Hawkhurst itself was, by now, a no-go zone for any state authorities or those perceived as such.

A more edifying story told by Dragovich concerns the residents of Goudhurst, who, as a community, fought back. There, in 1747, the town had raised a militia to combat the lawless gangs. The battle saw two smugglers dead, including one of those involved in Carswell’s murder. Dragovich sees this event as the start of the gang’s downfall, and the last third of the book follows their demise: it is a fascinating bit of history, well told. One hopes the ‘county-lines’ gangs active today never get anything like so powerful as the Hawkhurst Gang, and are defeated more readily. Nevertheless, as in the seventeenth century, today’s venal and corrupt politicians risk as significant levels of disrespect and alienation as existed two centuries back.

Available from Bookbusters, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

In the early 19th century, the America Ground, 8½ acres of Hastings’ town centre, was an open piece of beach, beyond the borough boundary and with no obvious owner. It was gradually occupied by a thousand or more people (many of them squatters) who lived and worked there – until they were all evicted by the government in 1835.

But in the first three decades of the 19th century, the Ground – despite being ‘out-of-town’ – played a key role in the expansion of Hastings during a crucial period in its 1200-year history. The Ground was a combined industrial and housing estate providing many services to the town’s developers, plus much housing for the many workers that were needed. The Ground’s seeming freedom from local authority control also created something of a radical libertarian atmosphere, and one of the names the Ground acquired was ‘America’, after the newly-independent former British colony. 

CREDIT: Marianne North

The America Ground owes its existence to what has become a forgotten landmark event in the history of Hastings: an attempt in about 1580 by corrupt local businessmen to create a ‘haven’ for ships – a form of marina – where the Priory Meadow shopping centre is today. Queen Elizabeth gave them roughly £2 million in today’s money to create it, and they spent about half of it on building an embankment where Cambridge Road is now – and then ran off with the other million! As a result, in 1589 the Crown forced the local establishment to set up a superficially accountable local authority, which became Hastings Corporation in later years. 

On its north side, the embankment stopped the Priory Stream in the town centre valley from draining properly into the sea, turning it into a marshland that was not developed into what we know today until the early Victorian years. 

On the south side, the embankment was a barrier to the sea, and shingle built up against it over the next two centuries, gradually turning hard enough to build on.

Then, in the 1790s, what had been the small fishing port of Hastings started becoming a popular seaside resort, and much development began in the early 1800s. As the town could not expand to the east, it started spreading west under the Castle Cliff and into the Priory Valley, going as far as the Priory Stream (where Queens Road and Harold Place are today).

At the end of the 18th century, the roads linking Hastings with London and elsewhere were poor quality, so the town was heavily dependent on seagoing vessels to transport people and goods. In 1800 the leading local ship-owners, the Breeds family, took over a large part of the Priory Ground, as the America Ground was then known, and built a long rope walk on it, plus storage warehouses and workshops. It is believed that they arranged a lease for the land with the Earl of Chichester, who it was thought at that time (but wrongly, it transpired) to be the owner of the Ground.

CREDIT: Thomas Hearne

The expansion of Hastings increased from 1814, and work started in 1816 on building up-market housing in Wellington Square and Castle Street, followed in 1820 by Pelham Place, and then Pelham Crescent from 1823. All this construction work on the east side of the Priory Stream needed many labourers, skilled workers, workshops and stores, and as there were few available places in the existing town, the handy Priory Ground west of the Stream started becoming both a housing and industrial estate.

As the town’s boom speeded up in the early 1820s, the need for somewhere to live became especially urgent. But by then it was known that Hastings Corporation had decided not to exercise any local authority rights it might have over the Priory Ground, as the Priory Stream could be regarded, rightly or wrongly, as the town’s western boundary. At the same time, the Ground’s possible landlord, the Earl of Chichester, had adopted a low public profile. 

As there seemed to be no local authority or landlord control over the Ground, many people began squatting unchallenged on it. And as these new residents and businesses had no taxes and little (if any) rent to pay, the financial overheads of running a trade or living there were low, while at the same time their employers could pay them less than usual, giving the developers more to invest.

The Ground was a mutually beneficial financial arrangement for all layers in the local society, rich and poor, and this would be the reason why actual USA-type ‘independence’ does not seem to have been declared for the America Ground, a name it did not acquire until the 1840s.

The only known occasion when the stars-and-stripes flag was flown was during the major town-wide celebrations of the passing of the 1832 Reform Act which made parliamentary representation more democratic. On that day, a procession from the America Ground carried a modified version of the stars-and-stripes flag during the celebrations, and it was then donated to the town hall by the not-so-independent ‘Americans’.

The occupants of the America Ground were by no means all rebellious. Over a third of the Ground was in the hands of prominent members of the local establishment, most notably the three Breeds brothers – James, Mark and Thomas – whose priority was maintaining good profit-generating ties with the many residents and businesses of Hastings and the surrounding countryside.

However, the Ground’s apparent almost-uncontrolled sovereignty meant there was often conflict between the actual occupants as they tried to settle which of them was going to reside in what piece of landlord-free
land. The increasing frequency of these clashes eventually prompted central government – the probable legal owner of the Ground, as it was shingle, which the Crown owned by default – to take control of it in 1828. All the settlers were given notice to quit, and by 1836 all of them had gone, many to what is now central St Leonards, to help with the construction of that new town.

Not much happened on the America Ground – now officially called the Crown Land – until 1849, when a wealthy Scottish businessman, Patrick Robertson, took a 99-year lease on most of it. Earlier he had become affluent from a controversial form of drug trading in the Far East – selling opium to the people of China – which enabled him to semi-retire to Hastings in 1847. Locally he became known as a gentlemanly benefactor of the poor, and he was elected as a liberal-oriented Conservative MP for Hastings from 1852. He laid out and leased Robertson Street and its surrounding area, creating the fashionable shopping and residential district we have today.

CREDIT: The History Press, cover image Paul S Munn

• The full history can be read in Steve Peak’s new book The America Ground, Hastings, published at £9.99 by
The History Press www.thehistorypress.co.uk