The Preventative Men

 

 

There were considerable differences regarding the Customs and Excise officers, the men of the blockade, riding officers and the coastguards, it will be as well to briefly describe the duties and development of the various detachments used by the Governments of the time to countercheck smuggling.

 

The riding officer was the original preventive man. He was a free-lance mounted policeman, and was a member of a corps which was probably in existence in the year 1600 or thereabouts. We know that the riding officers were an important force in 1608 for their maintenance cost the country an annual sum of £20,000.

 

The riding officers worked in conjunction with the officers of the Customs and Excise on shore, while the Revenue cutters (who were not above suspicion of possessing contraband proclivities of their own) were supposed to do what they could to cope with the free-traders afloat. This was the arrangement which existed prior to the formation of the Coastguard service.

 

The next step was the establishment of the blockade system on the coasts of Kent and Sussex in the year 1816. For this purpose a man-of-war (H.M.S. Hyperion, forty-two guns) was stationed at Newhaven, and her crew, broken up into detachments, were quartered in the Martello Towers.

 

The blockade lasted till 1831, when the men were paid off and the Hyperion was towed to Portsmouth. After this came the " era " of the preventive men, the personnel of the Preventive Water-Guard, who fell into the places of the old blockade men.

 

The " Water Guard " was a volunteer service, formed of willing men from the Revenue cutters and men-of-war, while the old blockade was chiefly formed of Irish landsmen and blue-jackets who had been compulsorily detailed for the service. The blockade men took over the coast when smuggling was at its most lawless and prevalent pitch, and, it must be said to their credit, they checked the operations of the free-traders very considerably, indeed, it may be said that they were the first force to strike terror into the hearts of the intrepid smuggling mariners on the South Coast.

 

The Sussex smugglers had regarded the riding officers and excise as " sportsmen " who were inclined to sympathize with them up to a point, but they found the men of the blockade " tough nuts," and what was more awkward still, " foreigners " who were devoid of any territorial compassion.

 

On the other hand the blockade men loathed their jobs firstly on account of the wearisome night work, and secondly owing to the terrorism which, under the guise of discipline, was a regular factor in the naval life of that period.

 

The " cat " was a regular ration and it was awarded by a well-known naval martinet, Captain McCulloch, who had earned an unpleasant reputation on the South Coast as an artist in flagellation. Above all, the blockade men missed the shifts and adventures of a roving sea life as all deep-water sailors have done when cooped up ashore. In spite of the fact that deep-sea life was perhaps much more monotonous and rough than the blockade work these men desired the deep-sea, and despised the land smugglers and their ways.

 

Right or wrong they had trained themselves to believe that a sailor's life is a free one, and would have despised the great Doctor's dictum that a ship was no more than a prison, with a chance of being drowned.

 

When the blockade was broken up and the places filled by men from the navy, civilians, and revenue details, the designation of the force was altered to " coastguard," a name which brings us to the origin of the coastguard service as we know it at the present day.

 

The system of employing dragoons in conjunction with riding officers came in about 1700 and extended to 1822, but the horse-soldiers made poor policemen. Many of them were local enlisted and chips of the old Sussex log which rolled naturally towards contraband.

 

Their officers were country people, and not very partial towards the officers of the Customs or the Naval sections, so between the two grades many smuggling bands were allowed to carry on their work almost unmolested.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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