Press Pass
Young inventor James Watt’s life in London was overshadowed by the perpetual fear of being snatched.
1756
King George II 1727-1760
Via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
A caricature of impressment. This dates from 1780, shortly after the American Revolution; this same year, the British Army stopped using impressment to recruit. In 1756, however, The Seven Years’ War was just beginning, and recruits were desperately needed. James Watt noted that had he been snatched from the streets of London, he might have claimed the protection of the law because he was a skilled labourer, except for the fact that he was practising within the City of London without a licence, for which the Mayor would probably have shipped him off without a second thought.
Introduction
In 1756, James Watt was not yet the creator of the first commercial steam engine, but a lowly maker of scientific instruments in London. The Seven Years’ War was just getting under way, and Watt was so afraid of being scooped up for service at sea or in some colonial plantation that he dared not go out of his door.
DURING Watt’s stay in London he was in a great measure prevented from stirring abroad by the hot press for sailors which was then going on.* As many as forty pressgangs were at work, seizing all able-bodied men they could lay hands on. In one night they took not fewer than a thousand men.
Nor were the kidnappers idle. These were the agents of the East India Company, who had crimping-houses* in different parts of the city for receiving the men whom they had seized upon for service in the Indian army.
Even when the demand for soldiers abated, the kidnappers continued their trade, and sold their unhappy victims to the planters in Pennsylvania and other North American colonies. Sometimes severe fights took place between the pressgangs and the kidnappers for possession of those who had been seized, the law and police being apparently powerless to protect them.
From ‘The Lives of Boulton and Watt’ by Samuel Smiles (1812-1904).
This practice was first legalised under Queen Elizabeth I. It was used by Cromwell to stock his New Model Army, and the Recruiting Act of 1703 confirmed the practice, naming rogues and vagabonds as fair game. Army impressment was discontinued in 1790, but the Navy went on using it until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Impressment can be made to sound quite civilised when rephrased as national service.
‘Crimping’ is another term for impressment. In the mid-nineteenth century, many sailors found themselves transported to China, giving rise to another term, ‘shanghai’.
