Coast Blockade—The Preventive Water-Guard and the Coastguard—Official Return of Seizures—Estimated Loss to the Revenue in 1831—The Sham Smuggler of the Seaside—The Modern Coastguard

The early coastguardmen had a great deal of popular feeling to contend with. When the coast-blockade was broken up in 1831, and the “Preventive Water-Guard,” as this new body was styled, was formed, officers and men alike found the greatest difficulty in obtaining lodgings. No one would let houses or rooms to the men whose business it was to prevent smuggling, and thus incidentally to take away the excellent livelihood the fisherfolk and longshoremen were earning. Thus, the earliest stations of the coastguard were formed chiefly out of old hulks and other vessels condemned for sea-going purposes, but quite sound, and indeed, often peculiarly comfortable as residences, moored permanently in sheltered creeks, or hauled up, high and dry, on beaches that afforded the best of outlooks upon the sea.

Very few of these primitive coastguard stations are now left. Their place has been pretty generally taken by the neat, if severely unornamental, stations, generally whitewashed, and enclosed within a compound-wall, with which summer visitors to our coasts are familiar. And the old-time prejudice against the men has had plenty of time to die away during the eighty years or so in which the coastguard service has existed. There are still, however, some eleven or twelve old hulks in use as coastguard stations; principally in the estuaries of the Thames and Medway.

The Preventive Water-Guard, from which the existing coastguard service was developed, was not only the old coast-blockade reorganised, but was an extension of it from the shores of Hampshire, Sussex, Kent, and Essex, to the entire coast-line of the United Kingdom. It was manned by sailors from the Royal Navy, and the stations were commanded by naval lieutenants. Many of the martello towers that had been built at regular intervals along the shores of Kent and Sussex, and some few in Suffolk, in or about 1805, when the terror of foreign invasion was acute, were used for these early coastguard purposes.

That the preventive service did not prevent, and did not at first even seriously interfere with, smuggling, was the contention of many well-informed people, with whom the Press generally sided. The coast-blockade, too, was—perhaps unjustly—said to be altogether inefficient; and was further said, truly enough, to be ruinously costly. Controversy was bitter on these matters. In January 1825 The Times recorded the entry of the revenue cutter, Hawke, into Portsmouth, after a cruise in which she had chased and failed to capture, owing to heavy weather, a smuggling lugger which successfully ran seven hundred kegs of spirits. To this item of news Lieutenant J. F. Tompson, of H.M.S. Ramillies, commanding the coast-blockade at Lancing, took exception, and wrote to The Times a violent letter, complaining of the statements, and saying that they were absolutely untrue. To this The Times replied, with considerable acerbity, on February 3rd, that the statement was true and the lieutenant’s assertions unwarranted. The newspaper then proceeded to “rub it in” vigorously: “There is nothing more ridiculous, in the eyes of those who live upon our sea-coasts, than to witness the tender sensibilities of officers employed upon the coast-blockade whenever a statement is made that a smuggler has succeeded in landing his cargo; as though they formed a part of the most perfect system that can be established for the suppression of smuggling. Now be it known to all England that this is a gross attempt at humbug. Notwithstanding all the unceasing vigilance of the officers and men employed, smuggling is carried on all along the coast, from Deal to Cornwall, to as great a degree as the public require. Any attempt to smuggle this Fact may answer the purpose of a party, or a particular system, but it will never obtain belief.

“It was only a few days since that a party of coast-blockade men (we believe belonging to the Tower, No. 61) made common cause with the smugglers, and they walked off altogether!”

Exactly! The sheer madness of the Government in maintaining the extraordinary high duties, and of adding always another force to existing services, designed to suppress the smugglers’ trade, was sufficiently evident to all who would not refuse to see. When commodities in great demand with all classes were weighted with duties so heavy that few persons could afford to purchase those that had passed through His Majesty’s Custom-houses, two things might have been foreseen: that the regularised imports would, under the most favourable circumstances, inevitably decrease; and that the smuggling which had already been notoriously increasing by leaps and bounds for a century past would be still further encouraged to supply those articles at a cheap rate, which the Government’s policy had rendered unattainable by the majority of people.

An account printed by order of the House of Commons in the beginning of 1825 gave details of all customable commodities seized during the last three years by the various establishments formed for the prevention of smuggling: the Coastguard, or Preventive Water-guard; the Riding-officers; and the revenue cruisers and ships of war.

In that period the following articles were seized and dealt with:

The cost of making these seizures, and dealing with them, was put as follows:

The produce of all these articles sold was £282,541 8s. 5¾d.; showing a loss to the nation, in attempting during that period to suppress smuggling, of considerably over one million and three quarters sterling.

This return of seizures provides an imposing array of figures, but, amazing as those figures are by themselves, they would be still more so if it were possible to place beside them an exact return of the goods successfully run, in spite of blockades and preventive services. Then we should see these figures fade into insignificance beside the enormous bulk of goods that came into the country and paid no dues.

Some very startling figures are available by which the enormous amount of smuggling effected for generations may be guessed. It would be possible to prepare a tabulated form from the various reports of the Board of Customs, setting forth the relation between duty-paid goods and the estimated value of smuggled commodities during a term of years, but as this work is scarce designed to fill the place of a statistical abstract, I will forbear. A few illuminating items, it may be, will suffice.

Thus in 1743 it was calculated that the annual average import of tea through the legitimate channels was 650,000 lb.; but that the total consumption was three times this amount. One Dutch house alone was known to illegally import an annual weight of 500,000 lb.

An even greater amount of spirit-smuggling may legitimately be deduced from the perusal of the foregoing pages, and, although in course of time considerably abated, as the coastguard and other organisations settled down to their work of prevention and detection, it remained to a late date of very large proportions. Thus the official customs report for 1831 placed the loss to the Revenue on smuggled goods at £800,000 annually. To this amount the item of French brandy contributed £500,000. The annual cost of protecting the Revenue (excise, customs, and preventive service) was at the same time between £700,000 and £800,000.

An interesting detailed statement of the contraband trade in spirits from Roscoff, one of the Brittany ports, shows that, two years later than the above, from March 15th to 17th, 1833, there were shipped to England, per smuggling craft, 850 tubs of brandy; and between April 13th and 20th in the same year 750 tubs; that is to say, 6,400 gallons in little more than one month. And although Roscoff was a prominent port in this trade, it was but one of several.

So late as 1840, forty-eight per cent. of the French silks brought into this country were said to have paid no duty; and for years afterwards silk-smugglers, swathed apoplectically in contraband of this description, formed the early steamship companies’ most regular patrons.

The seaside holiday-maker of that age was an easy prey of pretended smugglers, cunning rascals who traded upon that most wide-spread of human failings, the love of a bargain, no matter how illegitimately it may be procured. The lounger on the seaside parades of that time was certain, sooner or later, to be approached by a mysterious figure with an indefinable air of mystery and a semi-nautical rig, who, with many careful glances to right and left, and in a hoarse whisper behind a secretive hand, told a tale of smuggled brandy or cigars, watches or silks. “Not ’arf the price you’d pay for ’em in the shops, guv’nor,” the shameless impostor would say, producing a bundle of cigars, “but the real thing; better than them wot most of the shops keep. I see you’re a gent. as knows a good smoke. You shall ’ave ’em”—at some preposterously low price. And generally the greenhorn did have them; finding, when he came to smoke the genuine Flor de Cabbage he had bought, that they would have been dear at any price. To that complexion of mean fraud did the old smuggling traditions of courage, adventure, and derring-do come at last!

The modern coastguard, known technically as the First Naval Reserve, is still under Admiralty control, but proposals are, it is understood, now afoot for entirely altering its status, and for reorganising it as a purely civil force, under the orders of the customs and excise authorities. At present the coastguard establishment numbers some 4,200 officers and men, and is understood to cost £260,000 a year. It is not, perhaps, generally understood that the coastguardman is really a man-o’-war’s man, attached to a particular ship, and liable at any moment of national emergency to be called to rejoin his ship, and to proceed on active service.

It is not really to be supposed that the coastguard succeed in entirely suppressing smuggling, even in our own times. Few are the articles that are now subject to duty, and the temptation is consequently not now very great. Also, the landing of such goods as tea, tobacco, and spirits in bulk would readily be detected; but smuggling of spirits and of tobacco in small quantities is commercially remunerative while the duties are as high as from 11s. to 17s. a gallon, and from 3s. 6d. to 5s. a pound in respect of tobacco and cigars; while large quantities of that entirely modern article, saccharine, on which there is a duty of one shilling and threepence an ounce (with a minimum legal weight on import of eleven pounds, designed to render clandestine traffic in it difficult), must, in the very nature of things, be illegally introduced.

That there will be a phenomenal increase of smuggling when the inevitable happens and protection of the country’s trade against the foreigner is instituted, seems certain. It will seem like old times come again.

THE END