A warning to guinea pigs, or How to avoid a Tory Tax
A lesson could be learnt from our Enlightenment ancestors on how to avoid spurious Tory taxes.
In 1795 Prime Minister William Pitt, that lover of new means of taxing the public and favourite of William Hague, introduced a guinea-per-user tax on hair powder.
The Georgians were not to be so easily mulct, however. On this date 215 years ago The Times reported that “A club has been formed in Lambeth called the Crop Club, every member of which is obliged to have his hair docked for the purpose of opposing – or rather evading – the tax on powdered heads.” (Strictly speaking, it is avoidance rather than evasion, but definitions were probably more fluid back then). Soon, “Crop Clubs” were (forgive me!) cropping up all over the place!
Among the rest of society, the powder tax proved equally divisive, with English society becoming polarised between non-wearers and wearers (who became known as “guinea pigs”). As Scots poet Robert Burns put it:
Pray, Billy Pitt, explain your pranks
This new poll-tax of thine!
“I mean to mark the ‘guinea pigs’
From other common swine”
James Gillray, William Pitt's Policy of Income Tax (1799)