J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY c14

Chapter 14: The Dizzy Heights
In opting for the vacancies at Deputy level I was following my settled policy of looking for promotion wherever it appeared and accepting the risk of domestic upheaval, albeit reluctantly. I had looked at the worst outcome, an appointment to Glasgow for the rest of my career, and decided that I could live with it if it fell out that way. There were indications that I might get back to Newcastle after a year or so and I hoped to thereby avoid a permanent move of home. Vacancies did arise, but the board refused my application for them and appointed men of my own age group, so that was that. I deferred moving house to Glasgow for 18 months until my daughter completed her schooling and we then moved to Newton Mearns. Up to now -1990- we are still here.
I had only made one visit to Glasgow prior to 1984. In 1959, I did three weeks in the P.T. Centre here while an unattached Surveyor. I saw little of the rest of the Collection and had a vague idea that it was mainly concerned with huge whisky warehouses and landing and shipping on the Clyde, by 1984 the latter had largely disappeared. The warehouses were still going strong but as I was then the junior of two Deputies, my senior colleague, who was a warehousing man from way back, handled most of that side of the business. My share was a large LVO with two Assistant Collectors, and various odds and ends.
Initially, therefore, I was faced with a very similar job on a larger scale. Glasgow itself was really very similar to Newcastle. A city founded on shipbuilding now largely run down and replaced by lighter industries located on industrial estates away from the old city centre. The difference for me was that I knew nobody in Glasgow, whereas I had known everybody on Tyneside. The fact that I speedily established a rapport with the traditionally 'bolshie' Glaswegians shows that I had come on a lot in the 40-odd years since I was a power-drunk P.O. boy at school. It also shows what nice people the Scots really are and gives the lie to the idea that they hate the English. Glaswegians profess to hate their compatriots in Edinburgh, of course, but that's just a family affair.
Until October, 1985, I commuted from Newcastle returning home at weekends. For the first three months of 1984 I was in excellent digs with a Mr. and Mrs. Logan, who were out most evenings playing bridge and left me in full charge of the house, the TV, the Alsatian dog, the Siamese cat and the budgie. The dog barked the place down when I first cane looking for accommodation but, once I was admitted, he greeted me like an old friend ever after. If the Logans were out when I got home for tea the outer front door was open, the inner door key was in the porch and the dog was patrolling the hall ready to greet
you or eat you, defending whether you were friend or foe. Whereas Mr. Logan, though an elderly man, seemed to have the digestion of a shark and never left anything on his plate, I tend to accumulate a pile of fat and gristle on the side of mine, which naturally endeared me to the dog. Much more surprisingly, the cat took a liking to me. It was normally even more stand-offish than most cats and I had never taken any notice of it except to hit it with a rolled-up copy of the Glasgow Herald to discourage it from eating the budgie.
From the Logan's I moved into a rented flat where I enjoyed a belated spell of bachelorhood and was very comfortable. I got this place as a result of writing to six addresses culled from the yellow pages of the 'phone book. None of the six had anything to offer and two of them didn't handle flats anyway, but they all replied and three of then suggested other firms I might try. One of these proved ideal, and the whole thing was typical of Glasgow tradesmen. I have never had a shopkeeper here say, 'No, we haven't got it ' and leave it at that. They either go out of their way to get it for you or, more often, direct you to some nearby competitor who has got it in stock.
Another pleasant experience to me was to find that Glasgow drivers, In general, are surprisingly tolerant. If a newcomer like me is in the wrong lane, they automatically let him into the right one. If yon are waiting to get into the stream from a car park, they stop and let you in. Londoners, in particular, are usually rather contemptuous of provincials, implying that they themselves are top drivers. My own view is that pushy Cockneys are not better than others; they simply have a different, much more dangerous, set of faults.
Glasgow traffic lights tend to stay red much longer than those elsewhere and drivers seem very slow to react when they finally do turn green. I thought at first that they had dozed off whi1e stopped but I now realise that the pause is to avoid collisions with stragglers crossing on the red, a chronic local habit. As a visitor once put it to me, 'The rule seems to be that any vehicle within two feet of the one in front counts as part of it'.
In the office, where I remained until my retirement in 1982, I was most concerned initially with running Vat, which was rather new ground to us all. Fraud investigation also loomed 1arge for the first time in my experience and this involved the rudiments of Scots law, which is not just a slight variation on English but a quite different system. Over the years, I became first the senior of two deputies and then the only one, with increasing concern with staff management on the one hand and relations with the public on the other. The public concerned were usually dissatisfied customers, their lawyers and occasionally their MP's.
(a) Vat in Action.
Vat differed from Purchase Tax in the number of returns and frequency, or rather infrequency, of visits, but these were mere differences of scale. The most important change from all previous duties was that 'enforcement' was laid to the LVO's. Traditionally outdoor officers checked the correctness of declarations of liability and the collection of the money due was left to indoor staff in the Collector's office. This had produced few problems in the past with only the odd straggler requiring a reminder. In Vat it became a growth industry and each LVO had an Enforcement Section.
Traders who did not make prompt, returns were required to pay amounts officially assessed. Unlike the Inland Revenue, we were not allowed to assess on a maximum liability basis, which would normally bring in a prompt return, but had to make a 'guestimate' of the amount likely to be due. These were usually far too low and some traders paid them for years. When we caught up with them, they frequently owed us thousands, which might be collected by 'poinding'.
This is a Scottish legal process in which a Sheriff's Officer seizes goods of sufficient value to cover the debt and, in the last resort, sells them by public auction on the debtor's premises. The mere threat of this was usually enough to produce the money.
As returns were submitted to HQ in Southend and enforcement was laid to local offices, there was ample scope for error between the two. We once poinded a transport firm who had actually made a belated return which had gone astray, Moreover, it happened that the trader had bought a brand-new 1110 ton coach in the period in question and thus incurred so much input tax that, for that quarter only, we owed money to him. The item seized was, of course, the new coach. In the words of Samuel Pepys, I ‘did order its immediate release'.
Revenue laws apply to the whole of the United Kingdom, but in Scotland they have to be enforced under the Scottish legal system. A significant practical point in Scotland is that uncorroborated evidence of a single witness is not admissible. In most cases a second witness is required, which is why Traffic wardens in Scotland hunt in pairs, and so do Vat enforcement officers.
Failure to render a Vat return on time is a criminal offence, although payment of the money is only enforceable as a civil debt. Thus, where a persistent offender had actually collected the Vat and, by refraining from making a return, had kept it for his own use, he cou1d only be prosecuted for failure to make the return. As Scots generally regard taxes as a burden imposed on them by the English, it was easy for the defense to convince the Sheriff that the honest trader was being persecuted over a technicality. If the Sheriff himself was registered for Vat, as some were, he at least knew what it was all about but tended to have even more sympathy with the accused so it didn't help us much. Results of such cases were a very mixed bag.
Some offenders were admonished; others paid derisory fines of £3 or so. One was acquitted because only one of two officers in court was able to positively identify him as the trader responsible for making the return, he was a well-known local figure, did not dispute his identity and had indeed been summoned to attend the court under his correct name and address. If he was not the right man it is difficult to see how he got there at all. On the other hand, some Sheriffs were quite severe. In a case where the maximum penalty based on the time the return was overdue was £3,500, the Sheriff remarked that that was clearly excessive and fined the trader £1,750, the largest sun we ever got in such a case.
(b) FRAUD
There was so much scope for fraud in Vat that the Department had a major problem in inducing ordinary officers to become more fraud-conscious and in setting up specialist units to investigate such matters, if you asked a Purchase Tax officer to define the object of his control visits, he would probably say, 'To see that the returns submitted were correct'. In Vat, we had to educate them into thinking that they went there to see what was wrong with the returns, not what was right with them.
Such an approach revealed that a high proportion of returns were incorrect, but, in the absence of evidence of deliberate Fraud, most of them were accepted as honest mistakes and adjusted by payment of any tax due. Since more than 90% of such 'honest errors' were against the Crown, one might view them with suspicion, but that was all. If items of output tax were omitted this could be passed off as an oversight, but if fictitious items of input tax had been claimed, that was different.
Even when an officer had detected fraud and prepared a case which he considered watertight, his troubles were only just beginning. If the case got to court, the Sheriff normally treated it as a serious matter and imposed an adequate penalty, but before it got that far it had to be accepted by our own Solicitors' Office in London.
This office was staffed by lawyers who were fulltime employees of the Department and was regarded with suspicion and contempt by the Outdoor Service. In view of the vast sums lawyers could earn in private practice it was not likely that such posts would attract the cream of the profession and the general view that they were mostly people who were not good enough to earn a living outside, was probably not far wide of the mark. In England, they actually conducted revenue prosecutions in the courts and, whatever their knowledge of the law, their knowledge of the case was usually nil.
I met several at Middlesbrough and the only one who was any good had qualified for the bar while ' serving officer in the Waterguard. Another man from the Solicitors' Office once conducted two cases for me on the same day at Stockton. In the first the accused pleaded 'Not guilty' in a blatant case of smuggling a watch and was acquitted. In the second a Purchase Tax trader pleaded 'Guilty', and after our Council had finished with the case, I half expected him to get off too.
In Scotland, all prosecutions were conducted in the Sheriff Courts by procurators fiscal, who always seemed to be well informed and competent, but our cases still had to be accepted as sound by the Solicitors’ office before we could go ahead. As far as I know there was no-one qualified in Scots law in that office, and most of them had barely heard of it. They tended to advise the board not to proceed in any case where there was any conceivable line of defence.
I heard of a case where a lorry driver with a load of whisky in casks was detected in a lay-by in the act of siphoning some out into bottles. As the load was under bond between warehouses, the Collector, Greenock proposed to prosecute him for diverting bonded spirits in transit. The Solicitor advised against this, pointing out that the spirits had not actually been diverted at the time of the detection and that the accused might say that he had intended to deliver all the spirits to the warehouse of destination, including that in the bottles. The Collector was severely reprimanded by the board for describing this ruling as 'arrant nonsense', but I would dearly like to have seen a Sheriff faced with this preposterous defence. I think the accused would certainly have got the maximum sentence and might even have been gaoled for contempt of court.
One of our Vat cases was turned down by the Solicitor but we got permission to refer it to the Procurator Fiscal direct. He accepted it without hesitation; the accused pled 'Guilty' and was heavily fined.
Once a case had passed the Solicitor, and only then, the department had to decide whether to take it to court or to offer to 'compound' proceedings under the Comissioners' own powers. The accused could reject an offer to compound for a stated sum and elect to take his chance in court, but he rarely did. This was not because the, Commissioners' penalty was lower than the court was expected to exact. On the contrary, it was usually higher, but whereas the court might imprison the offender, the Department couldn't.
As we were in the business of collecting money rather than filling the gaols, there was an obvious temptation to compound wherever possible, but this could be taken too far. By restricting fraud action to the most blatant cases, and compounding most of those, we gave the courts the impression that Vat fraud was a rarity. There was a school of thought which favoured more prosecutions to convince them that it was rampant and induce them to come down more heavily on it. I think we got the balance about right, and each time a Vat swindler was imprisoned, it led to a spate of applications to compound other cases in the pipeline. Subject to legal limits and policy guide1ines actual penalties were fixed locally, in Glasgow, by me. I think I was considered rather rapacious, but my terms were never refused. The common view that diddling the revenue is not really a crime is not generally held by tax collectors, certainly not by this one.
Incidentally, the Commissioners' powers also included 'mitigation of penalties for revenue offences'. In theory, if a man was sentenced to six months, for example, the board could cut it down to three, but in practice they never interfered with the sentence of any court as a matter of policy. I only remember one exception to this rule and that was at the request of the Appeal Court.
A Vat trader at Hamilton was prosecuted for fraud, both as an individual and as a limited company. The Sheriff fined both the man and his company £10,000 each. Both appealed on the grounds that this was really two penalties for the same offence and while the appeal was pending, the man died. The High Court in Edinburgh upheld the company’s appeal and reduced its fine to £5,000. Their Lordships regretted that they could not consider the man's appeal, which had in effect died with him, but hoped that the Commissioners might be moved to reduce his fine under their general powers of mitigation. I was informed by the Fiscal's office in Hamilton that it was not their practice to recover outstanding fines from the estates of deceased persons. I was aware that the man had died suddenly, leaving a widow and a child and, in all the circumstances, I recommended that the board should remit the fine altogether. The fact that they agreed to do so pleased the Court as much as it did me.
Vat fraud affected all types of business and ranged from comparatively trivial cases where the trader had overdone the 'accidental omissions', to outright con-men who registered large numbers of completely fictitious businesses and put in claims for input tax they had never paid. It may seem incredible that they frequently received thousands of pounds before disappearing, but most genuine new firms were entitled to such repayments on the costs of setting up, which naturally exceeded their outputs in the first month or two. Vat was a bit like those fences they used to put up across Australia to keep out rabbits. It was just so vast that there were bound to be holes in the net somewhere.
In my area restaurateurs always topped the league of detected Vat fraud. Most of them were Chinese or Indian so we were open to accusations of racism, but I don't think either these two nations or restaurant owners generally are less honest than other men. Nor are they less skilful at concealing fraud. It’s simply that the catering trade is particularly well-suited to the purpose.
Mind you, members of ethnic minorities did sometimes seek to excuse 'mistakes' by pleading language difficulties, and they did seem to grasp the repayment side of Vat more readily than the payment part, but that was only human. Counsel for a Chinaman in court at Hamilton once asked a local officer, 'Do you not concede that Mr. Hong might have had difficulty in understanding you?', and received the reply, 'Well, he never did when we were at school together'.
In general, one man's output was another man's input, and it was possible to get a fair picture of a business from the records of suppliers and customers. If an officer knew that 'clothier bought, and claimed input tax on, clothing which was 80k adult styles, he was not likely to believe that he then sold garments which were predominantly childrens. Restaurants, however, bought in mainly food in bulk, which was zero rated anyway, and sold expensive meals to the final consumer with the minimum of paperwork. It was impossible to balance one against the other. Moreover, take-away meals were themselves zero rated, so if any such were supplied, it was difficult to say how many.
The commonest fraud was to keep a proportion of meals off the record by using separate bill-pads and destroying bills and counterfoils immediately after payment. Two methods of countering this were devised. Test-eating, which was much more fun than test-betting, enabling officers of both sexes to wine and dine at the Board's expense in the hope that the bills would be suppressed, and, very much at the other end of the spectrum, the examination of the contents of swill bins.
This latter was done by slyly, or even openly, removing the entire contents for leisurely examination at our office in search of unrecorded bills, a process only marginally less revolting than dealing with drug-swallowers at airports. On one occasion an officer had unloaded several plastic bags from his car at the back of our building. When he returned after a few minutes, he found that they had been collected as normal rubbish by a passing dustcart. It took him some tine to live that down.
(c) DISSATISFIED CUSTOMERS
Ignorance of the functions of the Customs and Excise was not limited to the man in the street and everyone seemed to be surprised when Vat was laid to us. At a high-level meeting in the City of London, one captain of industry actually asked the Vat Commissioner, 'Why on earth is Vat to be run by the Customs, I should have thought the Purchase Tax people would have done it'. Customs and Excise had,of course, been running P.T. for 30 years and other indirect taxes for centuries before that.
The news media professed to see something sinister in the arrangement and seemed to think that actual control would be exercised by uniformed jackbooted hard men drafted in from the docks, they seized on anything which they believed supported their view and came out with banner headlines about a raid on an antique dealer in Yorkshire. The report stated that officers entered the private residence of the dealer at three in the morning, and searched it, the dealer, of course, being totally innocent of any Vat offence, in fact, the raid took place at three in the afternoon and the dealer's private residence was also his principal, place of business which he himself had registered as such.
Sometime later the same papers reported that the dealer had been forced to pay over large sums of money to the department. This clearly shoved that proof of an offence had been found and that he had elected to compound the offence rather than stand trial, but the papers made no mention of this. On the contrary, they repeated the original rubbish and left their readers with the impression that, not content with invading and ransacking the man's home at dead of night to the terror of his family, the Customs had now extorted money from him by menaces. Anyone who believed this drivel must have wondered why the officers concerned were not being hunted down by the police.
Fortunately we never got that kind of Press in Glasgow and most Vat complaints were trivial matters arising from misunderstandings, clashes of personality or just plain cock-ups. It was usually easy to see where the blame lay. If several complaints were received from different sources against the same officer, it was probably time he had a session on my mat. If one trader repeatedly complained about different officers, whom nobody else found fault with, he was likely to be a professiona1 complainer. Either way, the soft answer was the best.
Some complained about the actual, regulations, frequently stressing that they had no quarrel with the officer concerned. If they threatened to write to their MP I always encouraged them to do so. After all, he had more to do with framing the law than I had and was better paid anyway.
As Surveyor Middlesbrough, I was once confronted by an irate German who had been asked for a deposit to secure the release of some imported equipment. The burden of his song was that no other country in Europe made such a demand. Resisting an urge to remind him of the outcome of the Second World War, I explained that I was not there to apologise for British custom and law, but to tell him what they were and that they applied to him as much as anybody else. If he preferred the rules in some other country, he was at liberty to go there. His British Customs agent, who was forced to tolerate his arrogance more patiently than me, enjoyed every word of that and afterwards thanked me.
We once received a serious complaint about a named Vat officer from a Glasgow solicitor on behalf of a client. The client ran an off-licence and had refused to cash a cheque for the officer one Saturday evening whereupon the latter threatened to 'do' him for Vat. I called in the officer concerned, who was a late entrant in his fifties, and he admitted the facts. I said, 'Were you drunk at the time?' and he repiled, 'Oh, no, sir'. I then asked, 'Well, had you been drinking?' he looked at me in frank amazement and said, 'It was Saturday night'.
The collector apologised for the threat made, which was an empty
one anyway, and the officer was removed from Vat control duties.
He finished up in a wet warehouse and retired on health grounds shortly afterwards, this may have been a case of killing a cat by choking it with cream.
Mr. White, a Glasgow M.P. called in person to explain a matter affecting one of his constituents. It was alleged that officers had called on him to explain some empty jewellery boxes found in an imported package addressed to him. Being informed that they belonged to his fiancée, who was expected to arrive in the country shortly, they questioned him about her time and place of arrival and ‘threatened to prevent her admission’. Mr. White said he realized that this was only one side of the matter, and invited me to investigate and give him the Customs side of it.
I was much relieved to find that this was not, as I had feared, an idle threat by some young fool who should have known better. My Chief Investigation Officer, who was completely reliable, had handled it personally. The importation of empty jewellery boxes might suggest that the jewellery has been 'worn through' the Customs by the owner and if it is found in the possession of the addressee, it may be seized. In this case, the suspicion was that the lady was in possession of it, and it was necessary to know her date and place of arrival for normal Customs control purposes. Immigration controls are a matter for the Home Office and are no concern of our officers at major airports. I 'phoned Mr. White; he said, 'I thought it might be something like that' and I heard no more of it. It is a pity that the media do not adopt such a sensible approach to our alleged misdeeds.
(d) Relations with Staff.
I use this expression in the nicest possible way and it is fair to claim that my record in this connection in Glasgow was one of my few real successes. In Newcastle I had grown up with the same people for most of my official life and I would have been a real social misfit if I didn't: got on well with them. In Glasgow I knew nobody and nobody knew me. It soon emerged, however, that my long Customs background created a bond which easily overcame any other differences and they accepted me from the start. When the annual 'Gaugers' concert included a few cracks about the way I talked too much, I thought I had arrived. When I was invited to speak at a Burns supper, of all things, I knew I had.
There were three aspects to staff relations, dealings with subordinates as individuals, mainly through staff reports and supervisory visits; personal contacts with the Collector and working with the staff as a body through the trade unions and the Local Whitley Council.
During my time at Midd1esbrough, the Surveyors' examination had been abolished and all promotion from the basic grade of executive officer was thereafter by selection. Each officer had a Reporting Officer (RO) usually one grade above him, and a Courtersigning Officer (CO) one further grade up. An annual report was made describing the work of the officer, and assessing his performance both on the various aspects of his job and overall, it also covered his promotabi1ity as a separate matter.
The report was signed by the RO and the CO and passed to the Head of Office, i.e. the Collector or his Deputy, who signed it and submitted it to the Board. The system also provided for a Job Appraisal Interview to be given by the CO at which he discussed strengths and weaknesses with the reportee and recorded the fact on the report. While I was one of two Deputies in Glasgow, I dealt with half the reports, being RO for Assistant Collectors and C0 for Surveyors and Head of Office for the remainder. During my last couple of years, I was the only deputy and handled all reports, about 700.
The appraisa1 interview was an important part of the system and was a kind of halfway house between total reporting secrecy favoured by the board and open reporting demanded by the unions. As an Assistant Collector, I attended a two-day course on how to do it conducted by three instructors, one of who in was a lady. We carefully avoided all the obvious double meanings that the subject offered, until she herself, summing up on the question of a relaxed or more 'official' attitude by the interviewer, said, 'Now we have discussed whether to sit him in an armchair or have him across the desk. . . . ' .
Later we did a report on a hypothetical officer whom we were obviously expected to approve of and I took a delight in coming down heavily against him and finding arguments to justify my opinion. I never did anything like that on real people, of course, but all these courses where experienced managers were taught management skills by young whiz-kids who had never managed anyone, struck me as highly artificial.
On another course the class was deliberately left in doubt and uncertainty to see if a natural leader emerged, and he didn't. When the instructor afterwards remarked that it was like having a lot of sheep and no sheepdog, I suggested that a lot of sheepdogs with no sheep might act much the same way. I don't think he got the point.
It was a shrewd move by the Board to lay the appraisal interview to the C.O. rather than to the RO. To tell a man to his face that you had described him as 'unduly aggressive', for example, might have induced him to prove it there and then. I used to say, 'The reporting officer suggests that you are unduly aggressive'. If he denied it, I would urge him not to waste time protesting but to ask himself how he had given such a wrong impression and seek to correct it. If he had then grabbed me by the throat, which no one ever did, should at least have known the truth of the matter.
In endorsing reports, one had to avoid the sin of some dramatic critics who are willing to damn a play just to use a good line which has occurred to them, but we did get a few light-hearted cracks. One RO said, 'he is very fond of talking about the promotion bandwagon, but my impression is that, if it stopped at his door, he would require assistance to climb on it'.
At regular intervals, there were promotion exercises based on these annual reports, each Collector thrashed out a short-list of front runners and a panel set up in London made the final selection. Candidates for promotion to Assistant Collector were interviewed, but 'paper boards' dealt with Surveyors and below.
Outfield and HQ representatives made up these boards and I sat on one myself. Faced with a mountain of annual reports, the last three on each runner, we spent a week cutting them down to about 70 passes and 20 near-misses. The latter were not informed of the fact.
Very few were clear winners and many more were no-hopers, but when it came to the inevitable borderline cases, it could hinge on a word. As the system was designed to base promotion on three years work rather than two days examination, it was unfortunate if someone missed out by a whisker, so to speak, but this was not as bad as it sounds. To have got that far meant that he was a first-class performer likely to be picked up next time around. The experience taught me to avoid casual comments that were even faintly derogatory. If the RO praised a reportee highly and the Collector said, 'While Mr. X is an excellent officer, I do not think him quite as outstanding as the report suggests' he might just as well have said the poor man was mentally retarded if it came to a close finish.
Each promotion board was followed by an appeals board and I sat on one of those too. Fifty officers had appealed. Only one had been a near-miss and many were regulars who had no real hope. We rejected all the appeals on that occasion.
My experience stood me in good stead back in Glasgow when I was faced with a very good H.E.O. who had been turned down for surveyor and wanted to appeal, his CO Had let slip the fact that an Assistant Collector had described him as a 'plodder' about, eight years before and he was convinced that this had told against him. I pointed out that when the Board received his appeal, no doubt they would look up the old report and see the remark for the first time. His appeal was certain to be turned down; it might damage his position in the future and would certainly land his CO on the mat for indiscretion. Agreeing to let it drop, he said, 'What do I have to do to get promoted'. I said, 'You have to go on getting reports like your last three and when it’s your turn to be lucky, you will be in'. I honestly don't know if I put a bit more weight behind his next report, but he was promoted the following year.
I used to go out with officers who were in the running to see them at work. I tried to avoid giving the impression that I was there to check up on the officer, which I was, without scaring the trader, who was apt to fear the worst, at the very sight of two officials where he had only expected one. On the whole, I got on very well with Glasgow officers and, at the end of the day, I was, I think, better liked than I night have been.
While it was desirable for a Deputy to be on good terms with the public and the troops, it was essential for him to be acceptable to the Collector. Glasgow had three while I was there and, on the whole, my luck in such matters held.
The first was a quiet self-contained man named Bill whom I had never met elsewhere and although I respected him from the start, and grew to like him, I was never sure what he thought of me. Because Vat had come so late in his career, he knew little of it and despised what he did know. As I was regarded as a Vat-man by that time, I think Bill assumed that I knew precious little about anything else. I don't think he regarded my overall performance very highly. Whether or not he liked me personally, I never found out.
Bill was succeeded by Roy, who came on a sideways move from Manchester, which was a bigger and more important Collection than Glasgow, because he was a keen yachtsman and wanted to see his time out on the Clyde. We had met briefly in Edinburgh and hit it off from the start. His Customs and Excise background went back further than mine. He was the son of a Yorkshire Excise officer stationed in Huddersfield, and Roy had actually succeeded his father in that station, he was only a couple of years older than me but I remember him almost as a father-figure. As he was quiet, calm and highly experienced, and, even at 54 I was still noisy and inclined to fly off the handle, we were a well-balanced pair.
When Roy was approaching retirement on his fifteenth birthday on the 29th February, I960 and he told me that he was to be succeeded by one Danny, I viewed the prospect with some misgivings. Not that I nurtured any hope of making Collector myself. I had been forced to accept that that was not going to happen, several years before. For centuries, most promotions in the Customs had been on the basis of 'Buggin's turn', in the sense that no degree of brilliance made much difference to one's rate of progress. Only a minority ever got promoted at all, but once launched on the ladder, it was largely a matter of seniority.
This had been modified in the seventies and a number of 'whiz-kids had received accelerated promotion on a 'horses for courses’ basis. By the time that this happened, I had to admit that I was no longer a kid and that I hadn't whizzed all that much when I was. Danny was seven years younger than me and had done a 'double jump' from Assistant Collector, Newcastle to Collector, Belfast. He was a hard, self-reliant character and that appointment to the hottest seat in the outfield was fully justified.
I had known him for 30 years or more, he was an officer when I became a Surveyor and had taken over the Refinery district in Middlesbrough when I was the senior of the three Surveyors there. Thus I had worked with him but not under him, and I didn't think I would like it much. It is a tribute to him, not me, that my fears were never realised.
It was a time of rapid change in official control procedures under heavy pressure to cut staff, and Danny fully lived up to his hard-nosed image. So much so that my fellow Deputy transferred to another Collection and was not replaced and there was a good dea1 of muttering among the Assistant Collectors. The mere fact of being the only Deputy gave me a status boost and Danny reinforced this by insisting on a clear distinction between me and the Assistants. Mind, I could afford to be pretty haughty with them myself, being their reporting officer.
There was much industrial unrest in the Civil Service in general, and the Customs and Excise in particular, in the early eighties and we were under orders to play it cool. When some upstart in London, who outranked me, disagreed with some move I had made and complained to Danny about it, he got very short shrift. On the 'phone, he apparently said something about 'Jack Booth's action' and Danny cut in, 'Anything done by the Deputy in my absence is the action of the Collector, Glasgow. I am the Collector, Glasgow and I will only discuss it on that basis’. With that kind of loyalty and support I could work with anyone.
With a bit of luck, and a certain amount of wheeling and dealing, we kept the lid on the local situation pretty well and, for the first time, I realised that the Board were right not to let me go back to Newcastle in 1975. I later learned that there had been great, acrimony there between strikers and local management, many of whom belonged to the same union. In Newcastle I was regarded as one of the boys and standing with the management, as I would have done, would have cost me many old friends. In Glasgow I had made new ones who had never known me as anything but Deputy and expected me to act as such in a strike situation, so no damage was done.
The retirement age for Deputies was lowered to 60 from 61 with effect from the 1st April, 1982. Being already 60, I had to retire on the 31st March of that year. I had the usual send-off, at which many people, of all grades, said nice things about me. I don't know if the deceased can hear what is said of him at his funeral. If he can, it must feel very like a second retirement.
The following June, I was awarded the OBE. Don’t ask me why, because you don't get a detailed citation, but it must have been for services to the Customs and Excise as I had not rendered any service to anyone else. I suppose it was mainly my efforts to help launch Vat on a reluctant public, but I don't labour the point. Some people might think that I ought rather to have been hanged for that but luckily that was not the official view.
I was awestruck by the prospect of receiving the medal at Buckingham Palace. When Abraham Lincoln was asked what it was like to be President of the United States he quoted the words of a man who had been tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, 'If it wasn't for the honour and glory of the thing, I'd just as soon walk'. I felt like that, but in the event, I really enjoyed it. I don't know how her majesty puts you at your ease in a few seconds contact but she does.
I am not sure what the privileges, 'all and singular' are, but there were two pleasant side-effects as far as I was concerned, one trivial and the other very important. Recipients were allowed to park their cars inside the palace courtyard, not everyone can boast of that and I have already told my grandchildren. At the next meeting of the Glasgow Local Whitley Council, the Chairman of the Trade Union Side moved to place on record the satisfaction with which they had heard of the award. Danny sent me a copy of the minutes which, I still have, somewhere.