The Smuggler Who Could Not Escape His Past
On 4th August 1749, Uriah Creed, better known to the authorities as the smuggler Morgan, was executed after being convicted of belonging to one of the most formidable smuggling gangs operating along the Kent coast. Unlike many Old Bailey executions involving murder or highway robbery, Creed’s death sentence arose from Britain’s determined campaign against the heavily armed smuggling organisations that openly challenged the Crown’s authority.
Creed was thirty-seven years old and had been born at Swineshead, Huntingdonshire. He began life honestly as an agricultural labourer before moving to London to work as an ostler at his brother’s inn, the Nag’s Head in Leather Lane. Unknown to him at first, the inn was a favourite meeting place for smugglers transporting untaxed tea and brandy into London. Although he initially resisted their offers of easy money, one simple errand changed everything. Asked to ride a newly purchased horse into Kent, he was persuaded to test the animal by carrying 200 pounds of smuggled tea from the coast. It was the beginning of a criminal career that would ultimately cost him his life.
Over the following years Creed drifted steadily deeper into the smuggling trade. He transported contraband to shops across London, later becoming a trusted “rider”, responsible for collecting valuable cargoes from the Kent coast. Although he claimed he rarely traded on his own account and often earned only a few shillings from each venture, he admitted repeatedly taking part in the movement of much larger consignments for others. Whenever he attempted to return to honest work, old associates drew him back into the lucrative but dangerous business.
His downfall came on 30th March 1747 at a notorious landing place known as The Two Sisters, named after two neighbouring churches on the Kent coast. Around sixty armed smugglers had assembled with more than fifty horses to unload enormous quantities of tea and other contraband from the cutter Old Molly. Before long, Customs officers and local militia arrived to intercept them.
What followed resembled a military skirmish rather than a revenue raid.
Witnesses described dozens of smugglers armed with carbines, blunderbusses and pistols, firing volley after volley at Customs officers, who returned fire from behind a marsh wall. More than 3,600 pounds of tea, together with brandy, cambric and other goods, were eventually seized after the smugglers abandoned their loads and fled. Several witnesses identified Creed among the armed men, loading horses, carrying tea and riding away with another smuggler during the exchange of gunfire.
Declared an outlaw after failing to surrender, Creed fled with his wife and children to Upminster in Essex, adopting the surname Morgan in the hope of disappearing into ordinary life. There he supported his growing family through honest manual labour, believing he had finally escaped his former life. His freedom, however, was short-lived.
One day he saw a large party of men approaching the house where he lived.
Realising immediately why they had come, he calmly admitted his identity to his astonished landlord before surrendering without resistance. According to the Ordinary’s Account, he simply declared:
“Here I am… I may look upon myself from this day as a dead man.”
At his trial on 5th July 1749, Creed denied ever having met the prosecution witnesses and claimed they would “swear anything for the lucre of money.” The jury disagreed. Multiple Customs officers and witnesses placed him among the armed smugglers during the gun battle, and he was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Yet the Ordinary paints a rather different picture of the man awaiting execution. Creed accepted the justice of his sentence, expressed genuine resignation, and hoped that God’s mercy would prove greater than the crimes of his past. His story illustrates how eighteenth-century smuggling had evolved far beyond petty tax evasion into organised, heavily armed criminal enterprises that the government regarded as a direct threat to public order.
For Uriah Creed, what had begun years earlier as a single ride carrying contraband tea ended not with riches, but on the gallows.
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