J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY c10

Chapter 10. Unattached Surveyor.

Before one could be trusted on the road as an Unattached Survey it was necessary to receive a week of theoretical instruction in the Surveyor's Branch in London, followed by three weeks 'assisting' an experienced Excise Surveyor and another three with a Customs man. These six weeks were, of course, practical instruction, which was of more value than any amount of classroom stuff. The only point I remember which we learnt in London was that travelling expenses and subsistence allowances were even more complicated for U/Surveyors than they were for U/0's.
I did my excise stint with a Newcastle Surveyor whom I already knew quite well. Surveyors did not keep books, they mere1y checked those kept by Officers, but they did have a quarterly diary in which they recorded their activities, taking care
to use a time-honoured form of jargon. When I noted an inspection I had made 'Satisfied' the Surveyor mildly corrected me saying ‘Customs officers are 'satisfied'. Excise Surveyors find things regular'.
Just as ratings in the Navy professed to despise their equals in other branches of the service, so the civilian Outdoor Service looked down on the uniformed Waterguard in the Customs and both hated the Indoor Staff and the board, using that term for the entire headquarters set-up. The Customs Surveyor in Hu11 who indoctrinated me suffered from this complaint in its most virulent form. The only people for whom he had any respect were other Landing and Shipping Surveyors. He had little use for the Excise side of the Outdoor, was at loggerheads with the Collector, and especially with the Collector's clerk, and disliked the Waterguard. As my immediate predecessors had all been promoted Excise officers and I had been a Customs Landing officer tending to share his views, he regarded me as almost human and we got on famously.
The only reason he ever gave for his antipathy for the Waterguard was that a new young A.P.0. had once questioned his identity in the docks. If the Surveyor had simply said who he was the thing would have passed off with a laugh, but he made quite a fuss about it. Against that he himself told me that once when he returned from a package ho1iday via a busy airport, the P.O. there, learning that he was a Surveyor, gave VIP treatment not only to him but to the whole coach load he was with, thus making him the hero of the hour. Even so, he continued to sneer at the Waterguard. I think he did it to keep up a long-standing tradition rather than from any real feeling in the matter.
After being gently broken in, so to speak, U/Surveyors moved about the country at the behest of an appointer in the Surveyor’s Branch and were not attached to any one Collection. They usually had a fair spread of work and location relieving for leave and sickness mainly in three-week spells for the first few months.
After that they were kept closer to their homes, subject to the exigencies of the service.
I spent most of my three years of unattachment in or around Newcastle, but one of my contemporaries whose home was in Birmingham was seldom or never there. The appointer always protested that he was keen to keep people in their home areas, which cost less than having them in distant hotels of course, but few believed him. Some thought he deliberately sent them to far-flung places but a story I heard suggested otherwise. A man who specially asked to be in Southampton when his wife was due to give birth, was told that there was nothing going there, but he was being sent to Northampton as the next best thing.
When that appointer retired the U/Surveyors had a whip round and bought him an atlas.
I entered on my travels with some trepidation and visions of whole districts of very senior officers old enough to be my father, resenting having been passed over for promotion and ready to take it out on me. None of them ever did. There were really not many such officers about and most of them were charmingly old-fashioned gentlemen who had never wanted promotion anyway. Even the few who were awkward with their regular Surveyors were rarely so with young upstarts like me. They would have regarded getting the better of an unattached Surveyor as like shooting a sitting bird, I suppose.
My first trip was to Montrose, where much had changed in 11 years since the drowsy days of 1948. Then it was Inverness where my district included both Brackla and Dalwhinnie. After that in Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool, I learned how limited my knowledge of the Department really was. More importantly, I realised how careful one had to be in exercising even limited authority, a far-cry from my power-drunk days as a P.O. boy at Holbrook.
Once I was considered to be sufficiently experienced I became virtually re1ief Surveyor for Newcastle Collection, where I was more at ease with the work, but had to be even more careful in my dealings with erstwhile fellow officers.
Unattached Surveyors relieving for three week leave spells did not really get into the long-term overall responsibilities of the grade and it will be convenient to consider surveyor duties in some detail as they affected me after I was fixed. Meantime, I had a fairly easy ride on the day-to day stuff and was in no hurry to seek fixity. When it was becoming evitable towards the end of 1961, I was resigned to moving home to Scotland when I discovered by chance that Middlesbrough District in Newcastle Collection was falling vacant in 1962. It was not attractive enough to induce any fixed Surveyor to transfer and I was appointed to it in April of that year. Thus the home removal was reduced to about 40 miles and I remained under the familiar, and tolerant, Newcastle management. Oddly enough, Middlesbrough was about the only Newcastle district which I had missed while unattached, so, work wise, it was completely new ground.
b} Surveyor - Fixed.
Having obtained a fixed post as an Officer in my home Collection was an achievement in itself, and to have repeated the trick at Surveyor level was little short of miraculous. The domestic upheaval of moving house was offset by the decided advantage of having a District out of the Collector's residence, which was the nearest I got to an independent command at any level in the Customs and Excise. It follows that I should have jumped at the chance of Middlesbrough District regardless of the nature of its work but, as it happened, there was no cause for complaint on that score either.
In contrast to the 1imited range of my only fixed station as an officer, my only fixed district as a Surveyor covered an unusually wide span of work. Based on a Custom House, I had a sub-office manned by indoor staff; three general Excise
stations covering much of North Yorkshire and a three-officer landing station covering the Tees. There was also one officer stationed in the ICI installation at Wilton. The Waterguard had a separate establishment in Middlesbrough Docks under an
Assistant Waterguard Superintendent, who was roughly equal to me in rank. However, the surveyor was generally regarded as the man in charge of the area and I enjoyed this status immensely. During my eight years there, further variety was provided by continual expansion in the trade of the area and reorganisation in the Department.
Middlesbrough itself was not a very attractive town, but its southern edge where we lived abutted on rural North Yorkshire and was delightful. The Custom House was in the centre of the original planned area, built up around 1840 and thoroughly run down by 1962. The town had developed away from it and it was a s1u m, 1iterally on the wrong side of the tracks. The building had been bought outright by the Crown in 1884 for £4,000 and we must have spent more than that on replacement windows whi1e I was there. The Ministry of Works had a running contract with a local glazier and we simply rang him up most mornings to tell him how many panes of glass to bring. One Monday it was 28 and I don't suppose any of them lasted long enough for the putty to set.
The Custom house yard was often littered with the debris of weekend battles fought by rival gangs of children on the roof. Even so we were luckier than the Church of England church nearby which was vandalised so badly that it had to be demolished. An adjacent Roman Catholic cathedral never got a scratch, but I think this was less due to religious fervour than to the presence of a number of young and muscular priests who lived on the premises.
Soon after my arrival I saw an interview on T.V. in which a local pensioner complained bitterly about being harassed by packs of marauding dogs in North Street where the Custom House stood. Sympathising with him, the interviewer said,’ and think of the danger to children' 'Oh no' said the o1d chap 'The dogs are afraid of the children'. Animals are more intelligent than you might think.
Over the years, the sea-borne trade of the Tees had shifted down river as ships got bigger and land transport more efficient. Sailing ships had worked their way laboriously up the winding river to the ancient towns of Yarm and Stockton, because it was more economical to spend a fortnight doing this, than to discharge cargo nearer the mouth and move it inland piecemeal using horse-drawn wagons. The development of the steel industry in the early 1800's led to the birth of Middlesbrough, and the coming of the railways, pioneered in the north east of England, tipped the balance in favour of landing goods there rather than higher up. When I went there in 1962 virtually all imports and exports centred on Middlesbrough. By the time I left in 1970 much of the trade had moved another 10 miles downstream to Teesport near the mouth of the river.
Incidentally, the use of the Tees by really large vessels, mainly tankers and bulk carriers, was only made possibly by the removal of a rock ledge which had restricted the depth and width of the channel, using powerful screw dredgers which broke up the rock with a huge drill and sucked up the debris. Before these came into use it had been reckoned that the use of explosives might cause Redcar to fall into the sea. Opinion was divided on the desirability of this. Personally, 1 never liked Redcar, a rather seedy seaside resort, known locally as Middlesbrough-on-Sea.
First in 1ine to deal with the Customs aspects of the trade, I had my Sub Office, manned by 4 or 5 clerks under a Departmental Clerical Officer (DHCO). This grade, which has now been phased out, was purely supervisory, and the incumbent, whom I shall call Reggie because that was his name, was a bit of an anachronism himself. The traditional Hostility between outdoor and indoor was well maintained and the landing officers gleefully informed me that Reggie was wont to refer to me as his new outdoor man when talking to outsiders. I laughed this off, pointing out that Reggie and I both know who was in charge of whom and so did they. In the naval tradition of respect for experience and seniority as well as rank, I said that I expected officers young enough to be Reggie's sons to make allowances for him to avoid any further friction. I never heard any more of it.
Officers were not bound to accept the Surveyor's view of things like that, all the while they carried out their duties efficiently and their promotion was by written examination.
When the examination was abolished and promotion was by selection based on annual reports, the Surveyor became Reporting Officer for all members of the Officer Grade, so his position was enormously strengthened. All the officers at Middlesbrough, both Customs and Excise, were good or better and indeed they all became Surveyors by selection in the fullness of time.
Although regarded as a Customs man, I had sufficient experience of the Excise side to cope with that part of the district, and Betting Duty, which became a significant item, was introduced in the mid-sixties so we all started fair on that but I had very little knowledge of oil refineries and the petrol trade generally in 1962, so the single-officer station in the ICI complex at Wilton was my biggest challenge.
ICI had two establishments on Teesside. The one at Billingham was laid to West Hartlepool for Customs purposes, and I had seen it from time to time when I was unattached. It was not one installation but a kind of trading estate on which there
were a number of plants all belonging to the various divisions of ICI. Official interest was largely confined to the use of hydrocarbon oils for the production of chemicals, plastics and man-made fibres. Large quantities of petrol and diesel oil
were produced as by-products and the duty involved ran into millions of pounds. Billingham was festooned with pipelines which ran overhead on gantries, making the whole area permanently wet, gloomy and smelly. All these pipes seemed to drip 1iquids on to the roads beneath and if any fell on you, you could only hope it was something harmless, like sewage, for example.
Wilton was a more recent set-up and its pipelines were laid in open trenches between the roadways. The whole effect was much less depressing but the atmosphere w as probab1y equally obnoxious. I once admired the tulips growing around the officer's office, but he told me that the gardeners had planted them out the day before and they, the tulips not the gardeners, would be dead by the end of the week.
Having had previous experience of both Customs Landing and Shipping and General Excise work, I soon settled into the role of supervisor rather than worker in these fields and had few problems, either below or above, so to speak. Sub Office functions were so closely allied to the outdoor Customs side that, having established a good working relationship with Reggie, I felt reasonably secure on that front too. The deadly ICI hydrocarbon oils sector was another matter altogether, not only because I knew 1ess about it but because it was more complicated and the money at stake was colossal. The risks to the revenue and the Surveyor's career were about equal. He was in the same position as the captain of a ship. If it sank it was his fault, whatever the circumstances. It used to be said that Naval ships' captains, having signed for then, preferred to go down with them rather than pay for them. I was safe from that, at least.
In 1962 the rate of duty on imported hydrocarbon oi1s, petro1, diesel oil etc. was 2/9 a gallon. 0n indigenous oil produced from shale and coal it was 1/6. These duties were generally only charged when the oil was delivered for road fuel, and all oils used in an approved refinery were duty-free. Moreover, as imported oils were thus relieved of the duty of 2/9 indigenous oils so used attracted an allowance of 1/3 a gallon to maintain the advantage of using home-produced oils. Millions of gallons of both kinds of oil were swilling around Billingham and Wilton all the time, so any pilferage or irregular deliveries amounted to smuggling. Natural losses by evaporation from storage tanks and in processing ran into tens of thousands of gallons monthly, so control based on stocks was clearly hopeless.
ICI employees parked their cars inside the premises and were thus able to steal small quantities of petrol by putting it in their tanks and avoiding the risk of taking cans through the gates. Offenders caught were fined by the revenue and sacked or suspended by the company. Moreover, the vehicles concerned were usually seized by the Customs and only returned on payment of a further penalty based on the duty involved in the offence. This action was covered by an ancient law which empowered the department to seize any vehicle used to convey smuggled goods, under which the Customs used to seize and destroy the carts used to convey goods from the beach in the good old days. As these carts had often been forcibly 'borrowed' from local farmers, the practice didn't do much for the Department's image.
Incidentally, cars used to smuggle spirits, tobacco etc. through the docks are still frequently seized outright and sold on behalf of the revenue, even where the smuggler is not the owner. A good example of the Draconian powers of officers which the Board, and Surveyors, were constantly reminding their headstrong juniors to use with restraint, lest they should be lost.
I was aware that a much more serious fraud had been discovered at Billingham in 1960. Road fuel was charged with duty at the point where it left the bonded refinery. ICI did not sell petrol under their own brand at that time. It was sold, mostly to Shell, and at the Road Filling Station there were Shell checkers to see that the full quantities invoiced were loaded and ICI, men to see that they were not exceeded. Duty was charged on the declared loaded gallonage and officers working on the installation made physical spot checks by dipping the tankers. Filling was direct from huge storage tanks subject to natural loss by evaporation, so no accurate check on them was feasib1e, but we felt the system was as safe as we could make it.
Most tankers had five separate compartments and if due to make deliveries to five garages the appropriate quantity was loaded on the basis of one compartment for each. This avoided the need to measure by dipping at the point of delivery. In part-loaded tankers the bow compartment was always left empty to keep the weight on the back wheels of the vehicle. Sometime, probably soon after the war when petrol was rationed, someone hit on the idea of putting 100 gallons in the 'empty' compartment of such tankers in the hope that, even if it were spot checked the officer would accept that it was empty and not dip it. With the connivance of checkers and drivers it worked like a charm for years.
The drivers sold the petrol to any garage to which they were makings legal delivery for £12.10s and gave £5 to the checker at Billingham on their next visit. I believe Shell drivers competed to get put on the Billingham run,which was like being on a permanent bonus.
In 1960, an anonymous letter was received by the Customs from one who complained that a Shell garage near his own was dealing in cheap petrol to the detriment of his own trade. The writer had clearly heeded the old saying 'If you hear of a good racket, get in on it. If you can't get in on it, bust it up' T h e Customs do not despise anonymous letters; they check them out. An Investigation branch officer showed the letter to a Stockton detective who speedily traced the writer and put him to the question. The next illicit delivery was intercepted, the tanker was seized and the driver arrested. Apart from this one case, there was no evidence of theft, as no one could say how much, if any, was missing, but then everyone questioned began to talk.
I myself, officiating for the Surveyor, West Hartlepool, went to Billingham with the police and the I.E. officer. We arrested an ICI checker and I heard him questioned at the Police Station. The police approach was quite fair, with no attempt to intimidate, but very effective. The Inspector said that he knew the thefts had been going on for years, but now it was all over and everything was bound to come out. If the accused understated his part in it, he would face further separate charges later when all was known. The accused said 'I've only been on this job for three months. Before me, X was on it for years', uniformed men who had been called in as the case grew were sent to arrest X, and so it went on.
Eventually three checkers, a dozen or more drivers and as many garage-owners pled guilty to theft and receiving a total of some 10,000 gallons of petrol. The drivers and garage-owners were fined and the checkers imprisoned. On the assumption that
the thefts had extended over at least ten years, the C. and E. calculated a loss to the revenue of some £12,000, on 100,000 gallons, and the Board demanded this sum from ICI. The latter resisted on the grounds that only 10,000 gallons had been
admitted in court, but the Collector, Newcastle pointed out that natural losses of about 50,000 gallons a month over the ten years had been written off only because the officer was 'satisfied that no part of the loss had gone into home use' .
As it was now clear that some part of it, albeit a very small part, had been so used, he threatened to charge the lot if there was any further argument. There wasn't, and the Board rubbed it in by fining the company £500 'to mark the irregularity'.
As it happened Wilton did not make deliveries of petrol for road fuel. Imported crude oil and indigenous benzene were
processed into non-oils such as ethylene gas and other things
all the way down the line to in man-made fibres. At the point where it ceased to be hydrocarbon oil, the imported material was written off as having been used duty-free in an approved
refinery. The indigenous oils qualified for the allowance of
1/3 a gallon at the same point. The Department actually charged the Excise duty of 1/6 a gallon on benzene received at Wilton and paid 2/9 on each gallon shown to have been converted to non-oil, and I soon learned that this complication had led to disaster some years before.
In one of the processes applied gave a volumetric increase of some 20%, and in error the 1/6 had been paid only on the quantity originally received and the 2/9 on that quantity plus 20%. One of my predecessors had spotted this and had had great difficulty in convincing the Board that it had really happened. When they were convinced they assessed the loss to the revenue at some £400000 and finally recovered about £250000 from ICI.
The Surveyor, who should really have been rewarded, moved south soon after and was never promoted. I suppose the board didn't exactly blame him, but any promotion panel would only have heard of him in connection with this awful clanger, whether he personally dropped it or not. If anything as dire as this occurred during my time at Middlesbrough it remained undiscovered.
Whi1e the Surveyor's duties were mainly supervisory, reporting on app1ications for approvals of plant, storage tanks and the like were laid to him, and he was also heavily involved in revenue concessions. The amount of this work generated by ICI, far exceeded that arising in the rest of the district, so although that firm's affairs occupied only one of the seven officers, they took up a disproportionate amount of my time. ICI, were highly skilled at getting the best out of the law and invariably claimed that their proposals were in the national interest. They frequently were, but at other times they could be positively devious.
Hydrocarbon oil could be used duty-free in approved refineries
to produce heat, light and power but the Wilton complex included both such refineries and other plants and a coal-fired power station supplied the lot. I.C.I, said they proposed to convert part of the power station to oil-firing and an elaborate scheme to segregate energy thus produced and channel it to approved refineries was worked out.
The Board finally agreed to allow the use of duty-free oil, subject to the prior alteration of the plant to achieve this segregation. ICI, did not make the alterations, so the scheme never operated. In reply to official enquiries, the firm said that they h a d negotiated a new contract with the Coal Board and the entire power station would remain coal-fired for the time being. It probably still is. Clearly duty-free oil was cheaper than coal, whereas duty-paid oil was dearer, and ICI had secured the Customs concession only to help them beat down the price of coal. We had been used.
While I was coping as best I might with these known hazards and the fact that Teesside, as a rapidly expanding area, was constantly understaffed, several new problems were invented for my benefit between 1962 and 1967.
On the Customs side, a survey company based itself on
Middlesbrough and began exploring the North Sea for likely spots to drill for oil. This involved the use of much expensive imported equipment which they naturally expected to be duty-free as it was not for use ashore. On the other hand, it was not being exported to any foreign country either and the existing regulations simply did not cover it. The problem was finally solved by the Continental Shelf Act in the late sixties, but until then the Department floundered among all kinds of expedients too humourous to mention.
A small container terminal was opened at Teesport; one example of a general move towards containerisation. During the postwar years there were several dock strikes and, where troops were brought in, they sweated to shift half the tonnage handled by
the regular men. This was no surprise to anyone like me, who had often marvelled at the way a docker of about 70 could balance a half-ton case on a two-wheeled barrow. As dockers were frequently paid by tonnage and containers replaced the barrow with a steel box holding 40 tons, which was swung aboard or ashore by a crane while an 8-man gang watched on, one would have expected dockers to we1come containers as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Actually the welcome was muted, to say the least.
The men had the usual resistance to innovation and their unions realised that, in the 1ong run, redundancies w ere in the wind. The immediate effect was to cut down the casual pilfering which had always been a feature of the docks, and to simplify revenue control of high-risk items such as whisky for export. Steel containers had double doors at one end which could be secured by Crown locks which made undetected theft difficult. Moreover, they could be stacked door-end to door-end in the compound making access impossible without using either the travelling hoist to move them apart, or heavy metal-cutting equipment to cut them open.
Dockers' unions have had a very bad Press over the years and this is not surprising in view of some of their antics. A proposal to remove some 20 dockers from the labour force caused a strike in London, although none of the 20 had done days work for years, all of them were over 70 years of age and some were over 8O. Another strike was in protest at police investigations into wholesale theft of sides of meat. To the public, this looked perilously close to striking for the right to steal.
On Teesside, the dockers were required to work at West Hartlepool when necessary; Men detailed for this usually refused to go and were laid off Monday to Wednesday of the following week. The others came out in sympathy and they all went back on Thursday and worked through Saturday and Sunday. With weekend overtime rates they regularly made more money for the four days than they would have got for the normal Monday to Friday. Incidentally, so did the Landing Officers.
It is fair to add that the local boss of the Transport and General Workers Union was a very reasonable and practical man, named Barney Ward. Faced with a rotting cargo of bones in a damaged ship, which he could justifiably refused to touch with
a bargepole, he had it all cleared one weekend on special 'dirty cargo' rates which a pop star might have envied.
During a national seamen's strike, the dockers agreed to un1oad incoming ships, on condition that they were afterwards laid up, and no seamen’s duties were carried out by officers on board. Whi1e one bulk carrier was being unloaded at Midd1esbrough, the seamen asked the dockers to black her because officers were doing seamen’s work. When it transpired that they were only cooking their own meals on board in the absence of striking stewards, Barney said 'What do you expect them to do - starve?’
When we had a 24-hour strike by Customs Watchers he asked me who was doing their duties, I explained that no-one was; the Department was simply accepting the risk of doing without them. He said 'O.K. But if your officers do any Watchers duties I'll call my lads out'. If the unions had had a few more like Barney it would have done their image, and their members, a power of good.
On the Excise side, a general betting duty was introduced. We had had a duty on betting at dog tracks for some years, but a similar duty on horse-racing had been successfully resisted on the grounds that it would adversely affect exports of
bloodstock. How the heck it could have done anything of the kind is beyond me and I think it was simply that horses had more political clout that greyhounds. There had been a short-lived tax on horseracing in the 1920's. Officers old enough to remember it told awful tales of truculent bookies assaulting officers, and we viewed the new duty with some concern. But this was one case where the Department had learned from past mistakes, so we need not have worried.
Betting, shops had just been legalised and licensed and off-course bookies were enjoying a respectability which they had never previously known. They had no intention of quarreling with the Excise, particularly as a shop licence could be withdrawn for revenue offences. Moreover, most bookies had chains of shops, large or small, and any fraud was usually by local managers of individual shops, who omitted some losing bets from their records. Thus the owner and the revenue were on the same side, and their checks complemented each other. The point was well illustrated when I was discussing the new tax with a Teesside bookmaker who had about 50 shops. He showed me weekly returns from each shop which were collated in his office and studied for trends, up or down. I said, 'I suppose if one shop became a loser you would consider closing it, and using the licence for other premises'. He looked at me rather quizzically and said 'Well, I would try one or two different managers in it first'.
Official control relied on checks of betting slips and sheet both at shops and at Head Offices, supplemented by 'test betting'. Officers placed bets at selected shops, using public money and subsequently paying any winnings to the cashier. All
Excise officers could be required to place test bets in shops where they were not known, except those who pleaded genuine conscientious objections to betting. One of my officers was a Methodist lay-preacher who was confidently expected to object, but he did not do so. He explained to me that, as he would not be using his own money and did not stand to win or lose, he had no objection to playing his part, and did not wish to push the job on to younger and more vulnerable men. 'Lead us not into temptation'. This was typical of this sincere and clear-thinking officer.
Our efforts to avoid the identification of test betters were not very successful. Officers who called later to make routine checks on betting slips generally and to quietly ensure that the test bets were in the records, sometimes found that the
test slips had been separated from the rest by clerks who had spotted the test better and wanted to save the officer the trouble of digging them out.
The Board had craftily drafted the regulations to make racecourse proprietors responsible for seeing that on-course bookies had a card from the revenue confirming that their duty payments were up-to-date. Without tills the bookie was not allowed to stand. Instead of being abused by bookmakers, an officer attending a race meeting was sometimes welcomed with open arms by one who had lost his card and wanted the officer to vouch for him and pass him in. Any general hassle in the ring could lead to a bookie being warned off the course, a sanction so swingeing that it never happened.
One way and another, I enjoyed my position and duties in Middlesbrough as much as any part of my service. Such troubles as I had during the period were outside the day-to-day management of the District.