J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY c8

CHAPTER 8, Customs and Excise. -'The Set-up.
Before considering my own career in the Customs and Excise Department, which covered the rest of my working life from 1947to 1982, it is necessary to give some idea of its structure and functions at the start of that period. Major changes which were made in my time will be covered as they arose and affected me.
In 1947 there were a number of points on which the C. and E. differed from the rest of the Civil Service. During the next 35 years changes were made which mostly tended to bring it into line with the rest. Some were natural evolutionary changes, some were applied on the principle that any change must be an improvement and most of them, good or bad, were opposed by the staff.
One of these differences was the examination promotion system which so appealed to me. It has now gone but it lasted long enough for me to get the benefit of it. I was not sure that the C. and E. was the best department to work for but I was sure that it was better than most and I preferred not to chance appointment to something really obnoxious. In the event, fate decided the point and I have never regretted it. Having said that, I must admit that I went in to it with only the haziest notion of the nature of its work.
Most people think of the Department as being staffed by men and women in uniform who rummage around among traveler’s dirty washing. This is actually only a part of the Preventive service which is a relatively small policing operation which never recovers nearly enough to meet its costs but is essential on the basis that an unplugged leak always grows into a flood. Even so it has far more important duties than the control of duty-free allowances, especially the detection of drug smuggling, which is not really a revenue function at all.
In order to administer and collect the duties of Customs on imported goods and of Excise on home-produced commodities, the Department has a substantial headquarters staff in London and a much larger force dispersed over the whole of the United Kingdom, which is divided into Collections for this purpose. The C. and E. had two grading structures, one for the uniformed Waterguard and another for the civilian Outdoor Service. Its permanent headquarters staff, which was separate from both, was graded within the rest of the Civil Service.
These gradings can be confusing to outsiders and it might be worth running through them. The largest starting grade in the C.S. was Junior Executive Officer, with promotion by selection at each level to Higher Executive Officer, Senior Executive Officer, Principal and Senior Principal, all of which are self-explanatory and sound rather grand. Above this was, and is, Assistant Secretary, which sounds like a sort of junior typist, but is actually the limit of most normal entrant's ambition and derives from Secretary of State. I believe M.P.'s recently awarded themselves parity with Assistant Secretaries; whereas-war M.P.'s were on £400 per annum, about the same as J.E.O.'s. This is justified by arguing that to get the best men one must pay the rate for the job. If this is true, the present crop must be better than their predecessors and U.S. Senators must be twice as good as either. I hadn't noticed.
The basic Outdoor Service grade was Officer of Customs and Excise on a salary scale running from the J.E.O. minimum to the H.E.O. maximum. Then by written professional examination to Surveyor which was S.E.O. level. On further promotion by selection one became Assistant Collector, which suggests carrying a collection box under supervision, then Deputy Collector and Collector. This was the top outdoor grade, the name dating back to the days when the official rode round his area on horseback collecting duties in cash. The modern Collector is actually an Area Manager. The term Surveyor did not imply any professional qualifications, except in C. and E. work, of course. A great deal of Excise work is described as surveying which merely means inspecting in this context.
A Waterguard entrant started as Assistant Preventive Officer, rose to Preventive Officer and thence to Chief Preventive Officer by written professional examination at each level. Then, for the few, there was Assistant Waterguard Superintendent and Waterguard Superintendent by selection.
The only snag here was that the term 'Chief' suggested the man in charge of the whole outfit, whereas there were usually several C.P.O.'s in each station. I remember talking to the Collector London Airports who was in general charge of all C. and E. matters at Heathrow and Gatwick at a time when one of his numerous C.P.O.'s was on trial for a serious criminal offence. The case was reported under such headlines as ' Heathrow Customs Chief Charged' and reports commenced 'The Chief Customs officer..........' The Collectors friends and neighbours outside the service either thought that he was the accused living under an assumed name, or that he had been bragging when he told them what his job was.
The Customs side of the Outdoor Service was employed in the docks, where they controlled cargo while the Waterguard did passengers' baggage, ships' stores, etc., and also in bonded warehouses, tobacco factories and oil installations.
The system of control was based on declaration of liability and self-assessment, subject to official checking on a scale proportional to the revenue at stake. Thus each ship arriving from foreign was required to report to the Custom House and lodge various documents, the most important of which was the Ship’s Report listing her cargo by consignments. A copy of this report was passed to the Landing Station and importers or their agents had to lodge an entry for each item and pay any duty due at the Custom House. The entry was passed to the Landing staff who ticked it off against the report, examined a proportion of the goods and ultimately balanced the entries against the report and closed the Ship's File.
A similar system applied in bonded warehouses, where receipts were entered in ledgers and registers, and written off against delivery warrants on which duty was paid. The basic principle was that no goods were released until duty was paid or otherwise secured.
The Excise handled breweries, distilleries, places of entertainment, some bonded warehouses, beet sugar factories and a miscellaneous assortment of public houses, clubs, ethylated spirit users and tobacco dealers. They were also responsible for the checking of Purchase Tax returns. Purchase Tax was a wartime invention which survived the war by nearly30 years, to be superseded by the dreaded V.A.T. in 1973.
Excise controls were adapted to the circumstances of each trade and the degree of revenue risk. Distillery officers were in permanent residence at the plant and all the principal vessels and pipes were secured by Crown padlocks. The officer held the keys and had to be present at all operations, such as the measurement of spirits produced and its transfer from the plant vessels into oak casks. The casks were secured in warehouses under both Crown and trader's locks and matured for at least three years. This was the only case where the account of goods produced was taken by the officer himself.
In all other exciseable activities, including Purchase Tax, there was an obligation on the trader to keep prescribed records and give notice of operations where appropriate. Checks were made by officers to set scales which involved visiting brewers, for example, almost every day, and public houses once a year.
There were also a variety of minor activities on both the Customs and Excise sides which will be mentioned only as and when I came across them.
In theory, all Officers of Customs and Excise were fully trained in all these activities. In their early days they were’ unattached' and used as reliefs and assistants by the Collector over the whole field of his Collection both geographically and functionally. Once they were 'fixed' they frequently stuck to either Customs or Excise for many years, sometimes in one station.
In addition to true C. and E. work the department had accumulated many 'agency' functions for other Government Departments. Some of these were akin to their proper role but others were wished on them because they had a nationwide organization.
Thus the Waterguard applied Immigration controls in small ports and searched for drugs and, with even more enthusiasm, pornography, everywhere, on behalf of the Home Office. Landing Officers of the Outdoor Service checked imported food and detained suspected items for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. Less logically Excise officers checked Probate applications in small towns which had no Probate Registry, and, almost incredibly, pursued unlicensed dogs in Scotland only. I don't think this duty was laid to anyone in England; it just wasn’t done.

Customs and Excise - Unattachment.
Soon after the results of the Reconstruction Exams, were published I was called up, so to speak, and spent four weeks on St. Katharine's Dock by Tower Bridge in the 'waiting room’, while a quorum was assembled for formal training in the Minories. This was a useful idea which gave a first glimpse of the Department at work and helped to make more sense of the verbal instruction which followed. The dock handled small ships bringing general cargoes from Holland, which as I soon realised, made more work for the Landing Officers than enormous bulk cargoes from the uttermost parts of the earth would have done. The upper floor of the shed was bonded to store imported wine in cask.
The Customs Acts gave all officers very wide powers but their status and influence depended, as always, on individual personality. The most senior officer on the dock did exports, the easiest job, and one day we had a furious agent protesting at a second-hand car being held back for some technical reason. He stormed out on to the quay vowing to have it shipped regardless, but when he approached the ganger concerned the latter merely glanced enquiringly at the officer, who shook his head. The offending vehicle was pushed aside out of the way and may well be there still for all I know.
The officer on the wine floor, however, was a weak character given, I fear, to sampling the goods rather more frequently than the law required, and as a consequence, the cooper, a sort of warehouse foreman once described to me as 'the arch-conspirator in any wet bond' actually ran the place. One Monday I arrived to find that all this was changed. The cooper knocked before entering the office, removed his bowler hat and awaited the officer’s instructions, very respectful. The office clerk informed me that the regular officer was off sick and Mr. X, a much younger officer from downstairs was acting as relief and 'He don't put up with none of that.' I resolved there and then that when I got a patch of my own that I wouldn't put up with any of that either and I never did.
Brief glimpses like this of the way the job was done in practice were invaluable when it came to reading the library of instruction books which each officer received.
The C.and E. was ahead of other Depts. in training facilities. It was all very well to pick it up as you went along in a large headquarters office with plenty of others to keep you right, but once you started work in the outfield you were apt to be on your own. Desk training doesn't work too well if yours is the only desk and much of your work is done elsewhere anyway.
Because of the heavy influx of new entrants in 1947 we did the course in two parts with an interval of about a year, but it is convenient to consider it as a whole. There were an opening couple of weeks of classroom instruction on Excise followed by six weeks practical instruction with a suitable' officer, a similar arrangement for Customs, and in between a shorter spell on warehousing and distillery.
There were a number of resident instructors at the training centre, assisted by visiting volunteers, and the practical training was, of course, given by normal working officers in their stations. None of these were professional trainers but were generally none the worse for that. The Excise ones were generally less interesting than the Customs and a born raconteur who gave us a couple of days on wet warehousing was the best of the lot. They generally started on the basis of the appropriate instruction book and drove home the salient points by quoting actual cases from experience, mostly humorously. Years later I found that the same approach worked very well when we were selling Value Added Tax to a reluctant trading public.
With my usual luck, I got my practical excise training from an officer in Newcastle who must have been one of the best in the country at the time. Customs practical was usually given to groups of four or so, attached to a station with several officers who had been saturated with pupils since the war, and it tended to be routine and adequate rather that really good.
Particularly on the excise side, I was amazed at the way the officer was accepted by the vast majority of traders - publicans, cinema managers, brewers and the like - not so much as a necessary evil but as a familiar part of the scene. I used to announce my identity half-expecting trouble but it seldom or never came. There used to be a saying that a Cambridge man walked into a place as though he owned it and an Oxford man as though he didn't care a hoot who owned it. Few Excise officers were university men but they soon acquired an air of being there as of right. Customs men, being fixed in one place, were secure anyway.
Having completed the Excise part of the course, I was at a wet warehouse in London learning the mysteries of 'operations' on spirits in cask when I got my orders attaching me to a collection as an Unattached Officer. Thereafter during unattachment one was moved about the collection at the Collector's behest and occasionally shifted to another collection by the Board. Every order issuing from H.Q. was deemed to come from the Board, although most of them were issued by some junior clerk.
We had been required to nominate three Collections in order of preference for first appointment. I had named Newcastle and Sunderland to be near my fiancée though they were both in demand and I didn't expect to get either. I had opted for London in third place, secure in the knowledge that there were about six large collections there and people were being compulsorily transferred into them in droves. I was directed into Grimsby Collection which I had never heard of. Perhaps someone thought I should like to be midway between London and the north-east, but more likely the appointer ignored the expressed preferences unread.
My first attachment was to Brigg Sugar Factory near Lincoln. Sugar control had never been mentioned on the course, but there was a slim volume about it among the library of instructions which had not yet been issued to me. I got what little advice was available from the Newcastle excise, borrowed the book to read on the train and set out for Brigg.
Apparently the beet sugar industry had been developed by the British Sugar Corporation between the wars. The beet crop was harvested from about October onward and had to be processed at once. The factories worked all round the clock throughout the 'campaign' - October to February - and were comparatively idle for the rest of the year when they refined as much imported raw sugar as they could get. Two U.O.'s were stationed at each factory for the campaign and worked two shifts, 6am to 2pm and2pm to 10pm. One was always present in the factory from about7am to 7pm and control outside these hours was by promiscuous visits. In the Excise, promiscuous did not imply anything immoral. It just meant that you didn't tell anyone when you were coming.
The duty on beet sugar was only about 9p a cwt and control was relatively light. Produce was filled into numbered bags and deposited in a secure part of the premises approved as a warehouse. The delivery doors of these warehouses were unlocked by the U.O. at Sam and relocked with Crown padlocks at about6pm. Internal receipt doors remained unlocked throughout the campaign. It was not thought that the Sugar Corporation would be party to fraud with so little at stake and controls were really designed to limit pilferage. The sugar was worth far more than the duty on it and thus the corporation and the Revenue were really on the same side. On whisky, for example, where duty greatly exceeded duty-free value, the controls were very different, as I soon discovered.
I arrived at Brigg just after lunch and the other U.O. hastily handed over to me, showed me where the warehouse doors and the keys were and left me to it. Apart from protecting the Revenue by my awe-inspiring presence, I was required to lock up at 6pm and, being early officer the next day, to unlock by Sam. At the appointed hour I went round the doors and locked up everyone that had a padlock on its hasp. In the morning I looked long and hard at a unlocked door which I thought I had locked.
It transpired that this section of the warehouse had been approved as an empty bag store and during the night, as the first sugar mountain built up on the floor, the night manager had had the lock sawn off. In the circumstances this was a trivial matter which I should have treated as such later on. At the time I reported the whole thing to the Board, with diagrams, and thought that I had blighted my career before it had fairly begun. The Surveyor laughed like a drain and I didn't even have to pay for the lock.
I soon realised that the department was quite tolerant of clangers of this kind, though they did have a nasty habit of asking for the culprit's reasons in writing. Nobody has a good reason for making a mistake. It is not an intentional act. Years later as a Surveyor I was defending one of my staff who had dropped quite a heavy brick, and I quoted to my Collector the story of the man who was drowning in a river when a passer-by said; ' How did you come to fall in?' The victim replied, 'I didn’t come to fall in. I came to fish.' Luckily the Collector received this very well - he was a very nice man - and it helped to get the offender off the hook.
At the end of the campaign, which passed without further incident as far as I was concerned, I was moved into Grimsby where I performed some menial duties in the King's Warehouse. Warehouses generally belong to traders, but most ports have; King's Warehouse which is the property of the Crown, and is used to store goods which have been seized or detained for security of duty. These goods are either released on payment of charges, sold on behalf of the Revenue or destroyed. Within the King's Warehouse in London was a furnace used to burn seized tobacco designated the King's Pipe. When the sovereign is a lady the King’s Warehouse becomes the Queen's warehouse but the term King’s Pipe falls into disuse.
The C.and E. was not always so wary of ambiguous terms, however, and one of the instruction books was entitled 'Relations with the Navy'. In the Establishment Instructions was a section headed’ Position of Women Civil Servants on Marriage'. In 1938, their position was quite simple; they got the sack, but the war changed that for ever. We once got a hilarious notice which tabulated office accidents by percentages over a year and apparently about 570 were caused by 'Opening doors and falling drawers'. The mind boggles.
In March 1948, I was transferred to Inverness Collection where I was employed on distillery work, first as an assistant and later as an officer. I started at Brackia Distillery near Nairn, being accommodated in digs in the very shadow of Cawdor Castle, with oil-lamps and candle light which took me back to my childhood in rural Hampshire.
It struck me at the time that a single-officer distillery was the best job in the Dept., if not the world, and though I have since modified this view because of the monotony of the work, I still think it was a very cushy number. To have served as a U.O. in the Highlands under pre-war conditions must have been a delightful experience. Even as I had it for some 18 months from early 1948 to the autumn of 1949 it was pleasant enough and I was 26 years old, married in mid-1948 with a wife and home in Newcastle upon Tyne. The same job at about 20 with no ties was just another thing that I missed, like a university education.
Distilleries worked batch wise on a weekly basis. They usually brewed and collected 'wash' - a kind of crude beer - from Sunday to Tuesday, by mashing a kind of malt porridge, draining off the liquor and fermenting it in 'wash-backs'. They had to declare the quantity and strength of the wash collected and the officer checked it both initially and in the course of fermentation. The fermented wash was led to the Wash Charger and thence to the Wash Still in which it was distilled to produce Low Wines, a fluid half-way between wash and spirits. Low wines were used to charge the Spirit Still and a second distillation produced whisky at a strength of about 20 degrees over proof and further low wines and feints which were collected separately for re-cycling.
The whole of the plant from the Wash Charger onwards was secured by Crown locks on all hatches, valves etc., the latter being on working fastenings to allow the distiller to control the flow of spirits without having direct access to them. Quality and strength could be checked by instruments in an enclosed locked 'Spirit Safe' which was made of glass in a brass framework, and the flow was directed to the Spirits Receiver or Feints Receiver as appropriate.
Twice a week the officer 'took the charge' in the presence of the manager. This involved unlocking the receiver, having first dipped it with a fixed rod to check the quantity collected, and sampling the contents to determine the strength. The spirits were then reduced to about 11 over proof by the addition of water and pumped to another spirit receiver in the Racking Warehouse.
A suitable batch of casks having been prepared, weighed empty and the results recorded in the official register, the whisky was then racked into the casks which were weighed full. The net weight of spirit in the casks was then converted to gallons by the use of printed tables. The stronger the whisky the lighter it is. The casks were rolled into storage warehouses which were secured with both Crown and trader's locks and the contents matured in cask for a minimum of three years, usually for much longer than that.
The whole produce for the week was totaled and compared with the materials used and, although different distilleries varied in their efficiency, the yield of each plant was usually consistent from one week to another.
Apart from supervising these operations, the officer surveyed the premises twice a day recording the results in a Survey Book, and attended in the warehouses when men were working there to prevent pilferage. He occasionally went round the place during the night when the stills were working. His other main function was to check the contents of casks being removed, normally to other warehouses for bottling. The officers at the latter were advised and had to give a receipt.
The rate of duty was about £10 a proof gallon which was vastly more than the duty-free value of the whisky and duty was normally paid only at the end of the line when cases of bottled whisky were delivered from bonded warehouses for home use. The greater part of the product was exported and never bore duty at all. The purpose of official controls was to secure it against mis-appropriation from production to final delivery. Once it was in the bottle this was easy. The proof quantity per case was known to two places of decimals and any shortages found in warehouse, unless clearly due to accidental breakages, were charged with duty and that was that. Casks in warehouse were a very different matter.
During the period of maturation the whisky acquires distinctive characteristics from the cask and it also loses both bulk and strength. The contents of a cask were recorded in proof gallons, a figure which was the product of bulk gallons and strength. During a period of 5 to 6 years an average cask might lose anything from 5% upwards. The officer was empowered to waive the duty on such losses, subject to a scale of allowances, where he was satisfied that they were wholly due to natural causes. Warehouses and casks varied enormously and this was a matter of experience and judgment. Casks stored in damp warehouses lost strength rather than bulk and in dry premises the reverse was the case. Casks which did not conform to pattern were closely examined for leaks or evidence of pilferage. Where there was such evidence the whole loss would be charged. Thus a warehouse keeper might be charged for a loss of several gallons when only a pint or so had actually been stolen, which gave him a strong incentive to watch his employees as closely as the officer did.
The distillery officer's problems were increased by a widely-held belief that whisky matured best in casks that were soft-bunged. Soft bungs were large corks wrapped in hessian and could be silently removed by pulling on the cloth. Hard bungs were made of oak driven in with a hammer and the bung cloth shaved off flush with the bung stave. They could only be removed with a screw- type bung starter, which was noisy, or by flogging the bung stave, literally, which was deafening. Strong-minded distillery officers who didn't trust the cooper had been known to order all casks to be hard-bunged, deaf to the protests of the manager.
The maturation argument was suspect anyway as, when distillery warehouses were full, new whisky was removed to general bonded warehouses elsewhere for maturation and the casks had to be hard-bunged for the journey. Casks thus removed matured quite happily with the hard bungs still in throughout - because in general bonded warehouses nobody ever trusted anybody else. By and large, I believe there was very little pilferage from distilleries in the sense of the physical removal of any material quantity of whisky. It was not really possible to prevent pilferage by drinking the stuff, but offenders had to have very strong heads to avoid tell-tale signs which usually led to the sack on the spot. I have heard men pretend that they were 'affected by the fumes'. No one ever believed this and even if it had been true it would have made the sufferers totally unsuitable for work in a wet warehouse. I use the term 'wet’ in its Customs sense to denote a spirit warehouse. The officer in charge of Brackia was clearly a top man in everyway and a few weeks there assisting him taught me the rudiments of distillery control and stood me in good stead for some six months in Inverness Collection followed by over a year in Dundee. Most of the work around Inverness was distillery and, although Dundee Collection was more varied, I was soon spotted as a man with some distillery experience and very little else. so they tended to use me on what I knew. The theory was that, new UO should be given a wide range of experience, but in practice some degree of specialisation was more practical and meant that he made fewer mistakes.
From Brackia I went to Balmenach, a larger still near Grantown-on-Spey, to assist the officer, but as he promptly seized the chance to take three weeks leave, I found myself in at the deep end, drunk with power in charge on my own. Only the excellence of the instruction I had received at Brackia saved me from what Dickens called 'various high crimes and misdemeanours'. The officer at Balmenach was an elderly Orcadian who was very much the Highland gentleman and resented the fact that his immediate superior, the Surveyor, Kothes, was, I fear, rather a common little man. The way they sparred with each other each time the Surveyor visited Balmenach was a constant source of amusement to everyone, including me.
This officer was a mine of information on Departmental folk-lore and I still remember two. examples of this. If one wrote up a survey in a book without having done it physically this was known as 'stamping', a term which I thought meant rubber-stamping. He informed me that it actually dated back to the time when there was a duty on malt and officers were required to 'dip’ it to check the quantity when it was laid out on large malt barn floors to dry. If an officer had simply copied the maltster's declared figures into his book without checking them physically, and he saw the Surveyor approaching, he had to dash madly around on the malt to produce footmarks, the absence of which would have given the game away, hence’ stamping'
The same officer also maintained the term 'Bob's your uncle’ had originated in the Customs, and gave me the only explanation I have ever heard for this extraordinary expression. Apparently when Lord Salisbury, whose nickname was 'Bobs', was Prime Minster, there was, Surveyor of Customs who bore a striking resemblance to him ""and was said to be his nephew. Feeling that he was due for promotion, this Surveyor approached Salisbury, who suggested to the Board of Customs that they might be moved to promote him to Collector. The Board were reluctant to do so and reminded Salisbury that the appointment of Collectors was solely their prerogative. He conceded this but pointed out that the appointment of Commissioners of Customs was his responsibility as First Lord of the Treasury and implied that if the Board did not want Mr. X as a Collector, they might prefer to have him on the Board itself. The Surveyor was duly promoted Collector and thereafter anyone in the Department who got an unexpected promotion was apt to be asked 'Is Bobs your Uncle?'.
Although pot stills all had much in common, each one had its peculiarities which I remember with affection. Balmenach was a mile or so from the village of Cromdale and had a shunting engine to haul casks etc. to and from Cromdale Station. Th^..puggy also made a morning trip to pick up the post, the clerkes and the U.O. from the digs in Cromdale. Subsistence allowances had fallen well behind the cost of living in 1948 but luckily, so had highland rents.
Ualwhinnie, now very much on the map because of developments at Aviemore, was then the most isolated still in the area, set on a moor which stretched for miles in all directions broken only by the featureless A.9 and the railway lines. Trains usually had about four coaches and three engines, two at the front and one at the back, and you could hear southbound trains struggling over the Pass of Drumochter long after they had passed through Dalwhinnie.
The village of Rothes was the exception to the rule that all distilleries were in pleasant surroundings. It was a kind of rural slum with four distilleries actually in it and a dozen or more within a ten-mile radius.
One of those in Rothes itself had no electricity laid on and still used oil lamps in the Still House. This could be dangerous as the night stillman frequently held the lamp close to the Spirit Safe to read the instruments, and this had been known to ignite any escape of spirit vapour and blow the top off the Spirit Receiver. We once opened the hatch of the receiver to check the measurements and found it full of vapour. Nevertheless, the stillman was in favour of putting the lamp in to show us a light. He thought that, at worst, the vapour would merely put it out as the carbon dioxide left in emptied wash backs was apt to do.
I heard of a distillery where the management warned employees to lower a light into a wash back after emptying and only to go in to clean it if the light did not go out. Shortly afterwards an elderly worker was overcome by C.0.2 and nearly killed. It transpired that he had been working with wash backs all his life and would never have gone in too soon normally, but he was deceived by the light remaining on. He had used an electric bulb on a long lead.
From Rothes I went on leave and was married in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in July, 1948, honeymooned in Nairn and returned to Montrosein Dundee Collection. Distilleries around there were much less remote that the Inverness lot, but otherwise very similar. Dundee differed from Inverness in having a more varied range of activities including Customs shipping work, breweries, general Excise with pubs etc. and Purchase Tax with quite a lot of it in Dundee itself. My home was in Newcastle, but Dundee was my headquarters so I got no allowances when in the seat of the Collection. Luckily a sympathetic Assistant Collector, bless him, was well aware of this, and of the fact that I had little experience other than in distilleries so most of my 15 months in the Collection were spent in stills outside the town of Dundee.
In Dundee Collection I had my only taste of dog licence work. How the C. and E. got lumbered with this thankless task I never found out, and they only did it in Scotland. Each officer kept a register and was advised of all dog licenses issued, and he followed up non-renewals. In cases of failure to renew, the officer had to establish that a dog was still being kept and, in the last resort to report the offender to the Board, who caused the Surveyor to prosecute him. Fines of 5 / - (25p) were normal, and the felon was ordered to take out a licence at 7/6 (72 p). This absurd ritual cost the Department a fortune; Surveyors sometimes flew out to the Orkneys to do it, and some dog-owners were prosecuted every year.
Practically all dog work was pushed on to U.O.'s but I only ever heard of one U.O. who got the better of a persistent offender. An officer in Dundee had a certain Mr. Mac in his station who had been prosecuted each year for as long as he could remember, and, going on leave, he asked the U.O. to visit Mr. Mac's house to see if he still had a dog and set the wheels in motion once again. When the officer returned he was astounded to see that Mr. Mac had renewed his licence without recourse to the court. The U.O. had duly called and been confronted and abused by Mr. Mac, backed up by the dog which appeared to be a close relative of the Hound of the Baskervilles.
The U.O.'s brand new Commission empowered him to call on the police, or indeed the Armed Forces, to assist him in case of need, and seeing an enormous cop on the corner, he thought 'Why not’? He returned to the house and Mr.Mac, seeing him back, was more abusive than before and attempted to slam the door, whereupon the policeman leaned on it and strode ponderously into the hall. The dog unwisely went for his legs and he booted it the length of the passage. Mr. Mac swore he would not take out a licence but would go to court as usual, but the policeman cut him short. 'It's no' so much a question of your dog, Mr.Mac. There is such a thing as obstructing an officer and using foul and abusive language. Get your cap, I'm taking you in’. This had a wonderfully calming effect and all three of them finished up at the Post Office licence counter.
Apart from the size of the policeman, the mere fact that Mr. Mac was confronted by two officials made all the difference. In Scotland, one uncorroborated witness is useless even if he were an Archbishop. In fact, if he were an English Archbishop, a Scottish Sheriff would probably regard him with grave suspicion anyway. The winter of 1948/49 was my first as a married man and my last in Scotland for some 36 years. It was more than averagely severe. The distilleries in which I worked were a very mixed bag, some quite unlike anything around Inverness. Hillside Distillery near Montrose was a small patent still which had opened experimentally at the beginning of the war. Windygates, near Methil - of happy memory - was a big patent still with about half-a-dozen resident officers and their wives living in a row of provided houses and bickering with each other. Fettercairn was a pot still of conventional design, but oil-fired and reputed to produce the worst dram for miles around. Brechin boasted two distilleries. North Port in the centre of the town and Glencadam a mile or two away, both standard models, and near Pitlochry lay Edradour, the smallest working distillery in Scotland.
I spent Christmas and the New Year at Pitlochry. There was a still there called Blair Atholl, which was silent and in process of complete reconstruction, and the officer divided his time between warehouse work at Blair Atholl and distillery work at Edradour. As the latter was working he was allowed to take a taxi to get there the three days a week that the Blair Athol warehouses were opened, but had to walk it for the rest of the week. Edradour was about four miles off by road but less if one walked through the woods.
The officer was a long-serving Customs man with his roots in Liverpool, who had only moved to Pitlochry in 1948 and was one of the nicest men I have ever met. He was going to Liverpool over the holiday and actually offered to lend me his house if I wanted to have my wife up over Christmas. I couldn't do this because her mother was gravely ill in Newcastle, but I never forgot the generosity of the gesture. After all, the officer had never laid eyes on me before, but I was a fellow officer, even if only just, and that was enough.
I always felt like Gulliver at Edradour where everything was in miniature. The place only produced about five casks of whisky a week, a fraction of the produce of an average still. When it was wet the walk through the woods was less than pleasant, but more often it froze hard through the night and then, with the sun coming up over the surrounding hills, it was magic. I had always thought that highland scenes on calendars with pink snow were exaggerated, but they are not. The real thing is not less vivid but more so.
I disliked Fettercairn in the winter, not because of the inferiority of its produce, which I was not qualified to judge, but because it had the only cold and uncomfortable office I ever found in a distillery. As the stills were oil-fired it lacked the usual mountain of coal in the yard and the huge open fire in the office. My favourite was North Port, which went to the opposite extreme. The office there had the standard old-fashioned stand-up desk, a couple of armchairs and a sofa. Most distillery offices had sofas, a relic of the days when officers, or more often U.O.'s, had to be on call through the night during the brewing of wash. Laying this duty to U.O.'s seems to have had disastrous results for managers' daughters if there is any truth in folklore. It’s a fact that quite a few U.O.'s married managers' daughters and most managers possessed shotguns, so there may have been something in it.
Most days the officer made his first visit to North Port before breakfast and on snowy mornings one could spot the office by the melting snow pouring off its roof. The night stillman lit the fire at about 4am by taking a shovel of white hot cinders from under one of the stills and piling coal on them in the huge grate. By the time the officer arrived the paint on the walls was blistering and he was apt to be driven back by the heat. In my time, the officer at North Port was a bachelor, who seemed as old as the hills to me but was probably 10 years younger than I am now. He spent most of his evenings in the office which was far more comfortable and warm than the lounge of the guest-house where he lived.
Another pleasant feature or North Port was Beth, the manager's clerkess, so called because the term 'clerk' is exclusively male in Scotland. Women's lib had not been heard of in 1948, certainly not in Brechin where I remember seeing a printed notice in the window of a pub reading 'No seating accommodation and no ladies' lavatory.' By the standards of the time, Beth was a sprightly young woman of forthright speech and manner, who contrived to liven the place up from time to time.
Her best effort was the great scandal of the office cleaner. For about 100 years the post of office cleaner at North Porthad been the perquisite of the cooper's wife, but as the lady in question was an invalid who never set foot in the place, it had become a sinecure, and the offices were comfortably dirty. According to Beth, Willie the cooper occasionally/gave the desks a 'swipe with' his bonnet' in passing and that was that.
I arrived one morning to find the place in an uproar because Beth had signed on a cleaner who was reputed to be a whore, and the men's wives were up in arms about it. The manager was protesting his innocence. 'I didna' ken she was a whore. Beth kent she was a whore and Beth signed her on'. Beth said 'I didna' sign her on to be a whore. I signed her on to clean the offices’. I could not wait to see this woman, but when I did it was a big disappointment. She was plain and about 60, and looking at her and them, I couldn't believe that anyone thought she was a threat to the morals of the men. I suppose there were some doubts about her character, probably about 40 years back, but I don't think for moment that she had ever been a professional prostitute. She would have been hard put to it to make a living that way in Brechin even if she had looked like Helen of Troy. I believe the matter settled down quicker than the dust of ages which she disturbed in the offices. It’s a daunting thought that Beth must be in her sixties by now, I feel she’s as lovely as ever.
Towards the end of I was transferred to Sunderland Collection and had another taste of sugar factory control, this time in York. This was cut short when I got a further move to Newcastle Collection and started nearly three years of unattachment in my home Collection, most of it in Newcastle itself. The Collection covered the whole range of General Excise, Purchase Tax, Warehousing and Customs work, so from doing one kind of work in many scattered stations, I passed to a wide variety in one concentrated area. In the event, I never had a fixed Excise station, so this period provided my only experience of Excise and Purchase Tax work at officer level.
In those days there were an astonishing range of activities for which one required an Excise licence. At the top were things like a licence to brew beer at a price based on the amount brewed each year and usually amounting to some hundreds of pounds. There were four breweries in Newcastle itself and probably about ten in the Collection as a whole. At the bottom was a tobacconists licence at 5/3 a year, and in between there were things like spirit dealers and publicans, and odd items like gun licenses, money-lenders and hawkers licenses.
A licence to kill game cost £5 unless you were a gamekeeper when it was £2.10s. A tabulated list of Excise licenses in the book made it appear that licence to kill game cost more than a licence to kill gamekeepers, but I don't think this was the intention. Publicans licenses were based on the rateable value of the premises, with fascinating’ complications when part of the building was used for some other purpose, as a hotel for example.
The key to all these mysteries was a kind of family Bible called the General Licence Register, but as most officers kept this pretty close to their chests I never got much of an insight into it. U.O.'s were allowed to follow up non-renewals, which was usually less bother than chasing unlicensed dogs. You ‘made a detection’ by visiting the pub concerned and buying half a pint of beer at the Board's expense. You then revealed your identity and told the publican that technically he was trading without a license, and he hastily paid up. Officers were forbidden to order spirits on these occasions, allegedly because in law a conviction for selling spirits without a license disqualified the offender for life from holding any liquor licence. We always thought that the real reason for this rule was that the Board was too mean to pay for spirits.
Tobacco retailers, thus accosted, normally handed over 5/3 from the till, but one unfortunate officer in Stockton had an eccentric old woman who annually responded with abuse and missiles. It would have been ridiculous to have thrown the book at her, even figuratively, and he scorned the soft option of sending a I.J.O. After the first couple of years he simply waited until her name appeared on the Collector's list of non-renewals and then walked down to the Post Office, bought a postal order for 5/3 out of his own pocket, and renewed her license himself. Lest one might think he was a line-of-least-resistance man, I hasten to add that he was quite different where things that mattered were concerned, and made very short work of one of his Purchase Tax traders whom he caught fiddling the books.
LI.U. assistants were not much concerned with license registers but they were well-acquainted with Survey Books and, above all, with the Journal. Excise officers had a great deal of freedom in coming and going as long as they kept their quota of workup-to-date, but they were required to keep a journal. This was the nearest they got to an attendance book. The officer was required to journalise into the office at any time between midnight and noon on each working day by entering a mysterious 27 rnp 8 for example, and initialing the entry. This meant that he had arrived on the 27th of the month at 'morning past 8' which was any time between 8 and 9 am. 27 ep 8 meaning 'evening past 8' would be used in the afternoon. If leaving to visit any out of town
part of his station, the officer would enter '27 mp 9'- Now going to Seaton Burn and Dudley on survey'. When he returned he wrote 'Returned - 27 ep 5' if he had carried out his original intention. If not it might be 'Retd. not having visited Dudley' or 'Retd. having also visited Wideopen'. In an exceptional case where he had had to abandon the excursion completely the traditional phrase was 'Retd. not having been' ,which sounded vaguely constipated.
One or two breweries operated on a basis which required the officer to attend more late evening or through the night than during the day. One such officer was accustomed to journalise '27 pm midnight' or thereabouts and became almost completely nocturnal in his habits, lie was so rarely seen during daylight that many believed him to be a vampire.
There was a General survey book and special ones for Entertainment Duty and Purchase Tax. As hundreds of officers spent their working lives filling these books with words and figures which were incomprehensible to the uninitiated, it is interesting to reflect that practically everything they dealt with has since been abolished without apparent detriment to the Revenue. At the time, they were regarded as the lifeblood of the Excise.
Surveys, the generic term for all visits, might be anything from daily to annually, and the U.O. usually studied the books in the office to see what was due, or overdue, and roughed out an excursion accordingly. E.D. visits were of two kinds. Verifications to check the books usually done by appointment in the mornings, and inspections without prior warning to see what was actually going on, at any time when entertainment was in progress. P.T. visits were always by appointment and others all 'promiscuous'. An average day might involve E.D. verification in the morning, a few pubs or other odds and ends across lunchtime, P.T. verification in the afternoon and then one or more E.D. verifications at small cinemas in the evening.
E.D. verification consisted of comparing the 'certified returns’ on which the trader had paid duty with the company's books, and was not very convincing. The real safeguard lay in the fact that by law all tickets to admit people to entertainments had to bear Government Stamps, but the Board was empowered to accept certified returns instead, subject to conditions. The actual use of stamped tickets was rare, and so cumbersome that the trader had every inducement to submit the returns punctually and accurately, to avoid the withdrawal of the concession.
Publicans were inspected to see that they were not watering the beer, or tampering with it in any way to the detriment of the revenue, and that they were maintaining a Spirit Stock Book. All spirits received by a publican had to be accompanied by a permit which was entered in the book. The officer inspected the book and compared it with spirits in stock and took up the permits. As this annual ritual had been abandoned during the war, one was apt to acquire wads of these documents at each pub and the official case bulged with them.
Publicans always imagined that the officer was concerned with licensed hours, which was actually a police matter. As long as he had a licence he could stay open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all we cared, but they never grasped that. It was hilarious to call about afternoon closing time and see the startled regulars hustled off the premises as soon as you announced your identity. I always ha1f expected to be challenged by some bloody-minded landlord, particularly when I was new and nervous, but they never so much as checked my credentials. I suppose they figured that no one would perform these tricks unless he was getting paid for it and they were right.
I remember a saying that a Cambridge man walks into a place as though he owned it and an Oxford man as though he didn’t give a hoot who owned it. We favoured the latter approach.
Most E.D. inspections were at cinemas, of which every large town had dozens, and even small villages usually had several. Many were only open in the evening, so inspections were at the end of the day’s work. The officer was required to check the numbers of tickets issued against the halves held by the checker at the door, and, in theory at least, against the other halves held by a selection of members of the audience. It took a man of blood and iron to start chivvying the occupants of the back row, for example, so most of us were less conscientious. The officer who instructed me actually went round and checked the tickets of bookies at a race meeting, but he was an exceptional man. When some loudmouth started to shout the odds about 'dead liberties' I feared the worst, but two large policemen cooled him down in very short order. The officer took the opportunity to warn me that, if I was assaulted on duty, I must not compromise the assault by hitting back. I wasn't planning to.
Although the small cinemas were numerous, the big chains running all the best houses paid the bulk of the duty. The system of collection was such that local managers and staff could only defraud the Crown by also robbing their bosses. Thus we and the latter had a common interest in checking local activities which was a great safeguard to the revenue. Most C. and E. duties were arranged like that.
A U.O. friend of mine told me of an occasion when he was inspecting a cinema, and, walking down the centre aisle 'drunk with power' as he put it, he took an awful toss over one of those ropes which marked the line between the 9d seats and the1 / 3's. His official case burst open scattering hundreds of spirit permits all over the auditorium, and they had to stop the film and put the house lights on to gather them up. For all the use they were, they might just as well have left them where they fell.
With an occasional diversion into Customs work, I spent about three years in the happy role of a senior U.O. but after that the dread shadow of fixity reared its ugly head. Apart from the usual let-down from a senior niche among U.O.'s to the least desirable of fixed stations, it commonly involved an enormous domestic upheaval in removing to London or some other hell-hole.
With my usual luck I actually secured a station in Newcastle Collection and remained there for over six years until I was promoted Surveyor. Since the station was the last 'consequential’ after a re-shuffle of some of my more senior colleagues, it-follows that it was not much sought after. It was a Customs station having four officers, two on Ships' Store warehousing and two on Landing and Shipping. These duties were 'rotated’ at six-monthly intervals, and the whole set-up requires a fresh chapter to itself.