The smugglers were not long in solving the mystery of their secret hoards being all at once so successfully located; and, all too soon for the Revenue, a well-aimed shot from the cliffs presently cut the dog’s career short.
“Perhaps the oddest form of the smuggling carried on in later times,” says a writer in an old magazine, “was a curious practice in vogue between Calais and Dover about 1819–20. This, however, was rather an open and well-known technical evasion of the customs dues than actual smuggling. The fashion at that time came in of ladies wearing Leghorn hats and bonnets of enormous dimensions. They were huge, strong plaits, nearly circular, and commonly about a yard in diameter; and they sold in England at from two to three guineas, and sometimes even more, apiece. A heavy duty was laid upon them, amounting to nearly half their value.
It is a well-known concession, made by the custom-houses of various countries, that wearing-apparel in use is not liable to duty, and herein lay the opportunity of those who were financially interested in the import of Leghorn plaits. A dealer in them hired, at a low figure, a numerous company of women and girls of the poorest class to voyage daily from Dover to Calais and back, and entered into a favourable contract with the owners of one of the steamers for season-tickets for the whole band of them at low rates. The sight of these women leaving the town in the morning with the most deplorable headgear and returning in the evening gloriously arrayed, so far as their heads were concerned, was for some few years a familiar and amusing one to the people of Dover.
Another ingenious evasion was that long practised by the Swiss importers of watches at the time when watches also were subject to duty. An ad valorem duty was placed upon them, which was arrived at by the importers making a declaration of their value. In order to prevent the value being fixed too low, and the Revenue being consequently defrauded, the Government had the right of buying any goods they chose, at the prices declared. This was by no means a disregarded right, for the authorities did frequently, in suspicious cases, exercise it, and bought considerable consignments of goods, which were afterwards disposed of by auction, at well-known custom-house sales.
The Swiss makers and importers of watches managed to do a pretty good deal of business with the customs as an unwilling partner, and they did it in a perfectly legitimate way; although a way not altogether without suspicion of sharp practice. They would follow consignments of goods declared at ordinary prices with others of exactly similar quality, entered at the very lowest possible price, consistent with the making of a trading profit; and the customs officials, noting the glaring discrepancy, would exercise their rights and buy the cheaper lots, thinking to cause the importers a severe loss and thus give them a greatly needed lesson. The watch-manufacturers really desired nothing better, and were cheerfully prepared to learn many such lessons; for they thus secured an immediate purchaser, for cash, and so greatly increased their turnover. Other folks incidentally benefited, for goods sold at customs auctions rarely ever fetched their real value: there were too many keenly interested middlemen about for that to be permitted. Thus, an excellent watch only, as a rule, to be bought for from £14 to £15, could on these occasions often be purchased for £10. Naturally enough, the proprietors of watch and jewellery businesses were the chief bidders at these auctions; and, equally naturally, they usually found means to keep down the prices to themselves, while carefully ensuring that private bidders should be artfully run up.
CHAPTER XVI
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.