Counterfeit King whose gang of forgers crashed the pound and wrecked the economy...
Until their brutal murder of a tax collector sent them to the gallows
THE slaying of the tipsy taxman was particularly vicious — ‘ barbarous, bloody and inhuman,’ according to a contemporaneous account — as if someone had a score to settle.
Mr William Dighton, Officer of the Excise, to give him his official title, was waylaid on a dark path just outside the Yorkshire town of Halifax in November 1769. It was late. He’d been drinking with colleagues and was on his way home to his wife and seven children, unaware that men with a grievance against him were lurking in a field and levelling a pistol and a blunderbuss at him across the top of a gate.
From point-blank range, a shot rang out and the excise man fell, a lead slug in his head. He was probably dead before he hit the ground but, to make sure, his assailants stepped out of the shadows, smashed his head in with the stock of the blunderbuss and stamped on him with their hobnailed boots, leaving the marks of their studs across his chest.
When the body was found, four golden guineas he’d been carrying had disappeared. (A guinea was 21 shillings or £1, 1s — about £250 today.)
This, though, was no straightforward highway robbery. The men were paid assassins and behind the killing lay a crime of such huge proportions — symbolised by those golden guineas — that one estimate suggests it may have cost the British Treasury £16 million (£3.7 billion today).
It is claimed it brought the Bank of England to its knees, devaluing the pound by 9 per cent and causing the British economy to totter.
The people of Halifax had no doubt who had slaughtered ‘the unfortunate Mr Dighton’ — money counterfeiters.
HE HAD, that contemporaneous report went on, ‘been surprisingly industrious in finding out a gang of villains who carry out their illicit trade of clipping the current coin of the kingdom’.
The government man had been closing in on them, threatening their incredibly lucrative trade.
He had to go. The brutality of his death indicates how high the stakes were, how deep and personal the animosity.
The story has now been dramatised in a new series, The Gallows Pole, which began on BBC2 last night.
The former weaving village of Cragg Vale high in the Calder Valley was the fraudsters’ base, and their leader was a charismatic man who styled himself ‘King’ David Hartley.
He was acknowledged as such by the locals because, in their eyes, he had saved them from ruin.
This area in the West Riding had until not long before been wealthy enough, a loom in every cottage producing woollen garments for the military.
Then, with the end of the Seven Years War with France in 1763, the mass market for uniforms dried up and Cragg Vale and a dozen surrounding villages were plunged into poverty, barely managing to survive.
Hartley came to their rescue. He was a local man, a bit of a scoundrel, who’d been away for many years in the rapidly industrialising city of Birmingham, making a living as an ironworker in the smelting works but almost certainly forging coins on the side.
He returned to Cragg Vale, probably one step ahead of the law, saw the desperate straits the villagers were in and proposed a way for them to get rich quick.
Coin was usually counterfeited by fashioning a cheap base metal into a round shape and covering it with a thin layer of gold plate to pass it off as the real thing. It was hard to make such fakes convincing.
Hartley’s scheme was to take real golden guineas — largely Portuguese pieces known as Moidores, which were legal tender in England at the time — skilfully clip them at the edge with shearing scissors, then mill the edges with a file.
The idea was that, at a glance, they would look no different from before, even though they were significantly lighter in weight and therefore devalued.
It helped that much of the coinage in circulation was old and worn, making it tricky to tell a clipped coin from a genuine one.
The clippings were then melted down in a crucible and pressed into an engraved die stamp to make fresh gold coins. It was reckoned that as much as a tenth could be skimmed off a coin without anyone noticing. Therefore, for every 10 guineas, one new guinea was obtained by the gang. But for this all to work, a ready supply of real coins was needed.
These either had to be stolen or borrowed. Anyone willing to lend their coins would get a share of the profits. A contemporary account says the coiners paid 22 shillings for a full- size 21- shilling coin, which they would return into circulation after shaving off a sliver of precious metal.
The gold they collected from the ten or so genuine coins would be enough to create a fake Portuguese Moidore with a face value of 27 shillings, though its actual gold content was only worth around 22 shillings.
There were vast profits to be made and it was no wonder whole villages, with anywhere between 80 and 200 men and women in all, were drawn into what amounted to a criminal conspiracy against the British government — and felt entitled to do so because their livelihoods as weavers had been taken away from them, leaving them destitute.
Their sense of injustice is at the heart of The Gallows Pole, which has been adapted from a book of the same name by Ben Myers — a fictionalised account of Cragg Vale’s defiance of authority, as the common folk put aside their differences and pool their talents to outwit the powers-that-be.
The truth about the Cragg Vale Coiners, however, is less winsome. Their story is underpinned by violence, as the savage killing of William Dighton shows. The other unpalatable truth about them is that the whole operation got completely out of hand and blew up in the gang’s face.
If the clipping had remained a smallscale local enterprise, they might have got away with it indefinitely.
But word spread and soon hundreds of clippers and coiners were setting up in business in what one historian has likened to ‘a veritable Silicon Valley for currency entrepreneurs’.
Coin for clipping was arriving from all over the north as everyone sought to cash in and there was so much gold circulating in Yorkshire that one local concluded: ‘All payments in paper will soon be at an end.’ ‘King David’ became almost a banker in his own right, with merchants and capitalists depositing their guineas with him on a regular basis for conversion into pure profit.
And all this despite counterfeiting and clipping constituting High Treason, for
which the penalty was death. This was a risky game everyone was playing.
By now, though, it was so common it was almost becoming normalised: ‘a common practice of the moneyed people’ as one observer put it.
And in georgian England, a country with pretensions to be a modern state, that couldn’t go on.
For 10 years Dighton had been on the case of the coiners. As tax collector for the region, he found himself being paid by traders in lightweight coin.
The exchequer was losing out. He infiltrated the gang with paid informers and in 1769 Hartley was arrested for clipping, along with dozens of other counterfeiters.
As the ‘King’ languished in York Castle awaiting trial, the response from the rest of the gang — now led by his brother, isaac, known as the ‘Duke of York’ — was to pay assassins 100 guineas to kill Dighton on that lane outside Halifax.
Dighton was not the only one to die as the coiners desperately tried to cover their tracks.
A FARM hand threatening to name the tax collector’s murderers was attacked, thrown on a fire, hot tongs clamped round his neck and burning coals thrust down his trousers. He died in unimaginable agony.
For an outraged government in london, the killing of their appointed officer was a challenge it could not ignore.
its very authority was being undermined by anarchists in the north.
Questions were raised in Parliament and the Marquess of Rockingham, lord lieutenant of the west Riding and a former Prime Minister, was ordered to bring in Dighton’s killers and shut down the gangs.
Fuelled by generous rewards in return for information, 30 suspects were soon behind bars. Another 48 quickly followed as the gangs fell apart, confessing their guilt and turning on each other to get off the hook.
Hartley was among dozens hanged for ‘impairing, diminishing and lightening guineas’.
A particularly gruesome fate was reserved for the murderers of excise man Dighton. when eventually convicted, their bodies were tarred and hung in chains on a gibbet overlooking the site of the murder.
This was ambitious Rule Britannia Britain. integrity of the currency was crucial.
in their pursuit of easy money, the Cragg Vale Coiners bit off more than they could chew — and paid the price.
The Gallows Pole is on BBC2 on Wednesdays at 9pm and available on iPlayer.