J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY c9

Chapter 9. Fixed Officer. (Warehousing)For many years, efforts to improve the pay and conditions of Officers of Customs and Excise were bedeviled by the wide span of difficulty and responsibility of the work laid to that grade. Being thin on the ground with many single officer units, officers did all their own clerical work and this frequently included typing. Apart from this, proper officer grade work ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous.
The union could point to the conp1exities of oil refineries with the duty on millions of gallons of petrol at stake and the Board could hit back with schoolboy jobs like tobacco licences, not to mention the wretched dogs in Scotland. The position was further complicated by the fact that some of the most responsible jobs, on which the bulk of the revenue then depended, were technically very simple. Weighing newly-filled casks of whisky and imported leaf tobacco were cases in point.
My first and only fixed station could have been quoted as an example of these extremes on the Customs side. Each of the four officers spent six months on each seat and 'rotated' at the end of that period. There were two Ship's Store seats in North Shields and two Landing and Shipping seats at Tyne Commission Quay, a mile or so up the river. T.C. Quay dealt with a regular service of passenger and cargo liners to and from Norway and the work there was good quality Customs Landing and Shipping work. The stores seats dealt with a number of Ship's Store warehouses and other odds and ends and the officers did work better suited to a grocer's assistant - a grossly under-employed one at that. On a scale of 1 to 10 for difficulty and importance, I think T.C. Quay might have ranked 8 or 9 and the warehouse seats about 1 or 2.
Being the most junior of the four officers, I started with a year in the warehouses. The first office, the smallest and dirtiest I ever worked in, was located in Sharpe's warehouse and the officer handled their business and that of another warehouse down by the river, he also did any oddments of landing work at the Fish Quay and Smith's Dock shipyard and ran a small Queen's warehouse in North Shields Custom House. This was the worst seat of the lot. The officer was idle for most of his time, but could nevertheless be required in two or more places at the same time every once in a whi1e. Ship's store merchants acted as assemblers of all the goods required by a ship for its next voyage. Their representatives descended on arriving vessels like vultures and, having secured their order, bought in whatever they hadn't got in stock and delivered the whole lot in one or more loads.
The officer was only concerned with the 'bonded' part of the consignment, that is, the items which were liable to duty but exempted from the charge because they were for use outside the fiscal area of Great Britain on the ship at sea. The high duty items were spirits and tobacco goods which had to be delivered to the ship in officially sealed parcels, examined by the Waterguard officer and certified 'Shipped'. Low duty items such as sugar, jams, beer and the like were less closely controlled.
The warehouse officer's basic responsibility was to ensure that all goods received duty-free into the warehouse were properly entered in the official registers and ledgers and duly accounted for when delivered. Goods not so accounted for fell to be charged with duty.
Entries in the books were made by one officer and all figures were checked by another. Moreover, a proportion of them were rechecked by the Surveyor. I thought at first that this elaborate system was designed to eliminate errors, but, as each three-yearly stocktaking revealed numerous discrepancies between registers and ledgers on the one hand and the physical stock on the other, this cannot have been the case. Perhaps it was designed to ensure that so many people were to blame for each error that got through that none of them could be 'visited by some mark of the Board's displeasure' as I once saw it quaintly put. The tracing and correction of these errors every three years went on for months and eased the boredom of the idle hours between orders. The office window, when it was clean enough to see through, looked out on a large bill hoarding and nothing else and it always created a flurry of interest when the bill-poster arrived to change the posters. I remember being distinctly disappointed when he only renewed existing ones which had become defaced and didn't give us any fresh pictures to look at.
The other warehouse seat was in Frazer's bond, located by the riverside, which also handled the business of Morrisons, who rented space in the warehouse. It was less boring than Sharpe's because it was busier and the office overlooked the river instead of the hoarding. Ship's store merchants always exaggerated the urgency of orders, assuring the officer that the ship was about to sail and conjuring up pictures of fuming captains pacing the bridge, but it was usually only the convenience of the chief steward that was at stake. Officers who frequently looked out to see ships sailing two weeks after their stores had been rushed aboard, became a little cynical, and the dealer who was stuck with a genuine last-minute order was in a spot. As one officer put it 'I never yet heard of a ship sailing so fast that she went without her bond'.
One of the few complications of ship's store work was rum in bulk. This was kept in a huge stock cask and measured out in casks and demi-johns with plenty of scope for natural, and unnatural, losses of both bulk and strength. Unlike the distillery officer, who had hundreds of casks to play with so to speak, the ship's store man had only one, and balancing losses on it was about the only difficult job he ever had to do.
Although bottled rum in cases was readily available most ships insisted on taking it in bulk. The innocent reason given was that crews preferred it, but less innocent people, like me, thought that it was marginally cheaper, which endeared it to the owners, and there was certainly scope for manipulation in issuing bulk rum-which endeared it a great deal more to pursers and chief stewards. Suffice it to mention that, when a ship was laid up, any bulk rum among her stores brought into warehouse for safe custody was usually more than half water.
Mind you, if naval tradition is to be believed, worse things than water might get into it. I had always imagined that the torso 'Nelson's blood' was intended to imply that ruin helped to keep the spirit of Nelson alive, until someone, I forget who, told me differently. Apparently Nelson's body was brought home from Trafalgar preserved in a cask of navy rum, and when it had been taken out for burial, someone asked the Admiralty how the rum was to be disposed of. Their thrifty Lordships ordered it to be issued.
But all good, and bad, things come to an end, and after a year had passed I got my first taste of Tyne Commission Quay.
(b) Landing and Shipping.
I had done a little Landing and Shipping work in Newcastle as a U.0.but having a fixed post in that discipline was a vastly different proposition. The whole subject requires a general explanation before we consider my own experience of it.
The basis of Customs control of imports, which formed the bulk of the work, was simple declaration and self-assessment. Each ship had to make a report to the Custom House, including a complete list of her cargo. The Landing Officer received a copy of this report and checked the clearance of cargo against it item by item.
The importer, normally through an agent, had to submit an entry form for each item declaring the nature and quantity of the goods and how much duty was due upon them. He paid the money into the Custom House after the document had been checked and before it was passed to the Landing Officer. The latter not only checked the paperwork yet again, but also examined the goods physically in the shed to a scale proportioned to the degree of revenue risk involved.
It was a cardinal rule that goods should not be released until the revenue had been paid or secured, but inevitably this rule was breached from time to time. The officer concerned was usually able to restore the position by getting a deposit of duty or having the goods returned to his control. Relations between officers and agents were normally excellent, although one had to deal with disgruntled importers direct on occasion. Agents were not above excusing their own shortcomings by blaming officers to the importers, regardless of the facts, but where an officer had landed himself in a spot the agent concerned usually co-operated in getting him out of it.
Technically, goods were not supposed to be taken off the ship until they had been cleared by the landing officer, but for this purpose the approved Transit Shed was deemed to be part of the ship. Before the Import Duties Act of 1932, most goods were free of duty and could be removed direct from the ship, 1eaving only a limited range of dutiable items to await clearance in dock sheds. These sheds were hopelessly inadequate when practically everything became dutiable in 1932, and importers continued to remove low duty goods to their own stores and enter and clear them afterwards, until more transit sheds could be provided. The Board was naturally worried about this and sent a high-powered team of inspectors to a selected port to investigate the position. This team reported that, although the whole thing was wide open to abuse in theory, in practice the agents and importers were so much in awe of the Landing Officers that there was little actual risk.
Shipping work consisted of applying much more relaxed control to goods for export, on broadly similar lines to imports. No payments of duty were involved but on some items repayment of duty were at stake and officers had to satisfy themselves as to the fact of export and certify accordingly.
In complete contrast to the Excise, w h e r e one went around doing bits and pieces of jobs on the premises of the traders concerned, t h e Customs officer's work was concentrated on a dock, where he was a known, and usually highly respected, part of the set-up. Nobody ever preferred the warehousing side of the station, not from any desire to work harder on the dock, but because of the total absence of job-satisfaction, and overtime, in the warehouses.
Starting with a tendency to work to the book and make my presence felt, I soon found that there was a large element of 'local practice' and a good deal of give and take between officers on the one hand and agents on the other. It was fatally easy for an officer to get a reputation as pleasant and co-operative simply by not doing his job, but this had its pitfalls. If agents were thinking 'Mr. Booth won't mind if I cut this corner, he's a nice chap' they would eventually do something that landed them, and Mr. Booth, in deep trouble. It was safer all round if they thought 'We'd better ask Mr. Booth before we do that. He can be a bit awkward if we don't'. The line between over-popularity and arch-bastard status was finely drawn but it paid the officer to keep it in mind.
Apart from a few odds and ends, Tyne Commission Quay was wholly devoted to the Norwegian trade. The Bergen Line ran ships to Bergen and Stavanger and the Fred Olsen Line to Oslo. The ships were passenger and cargo liners, with the emphasis on passengers in the summer and cargo in the winter. Apart from tourists, passengers were business travelers and Norwegian merchant seaman, whose ships operated all over the world and rarely returned to Norway between trips. All the ships carried a few passenger-accompanied cars in each direction.
Customs work was divided between the two L. and S. officers who dealt with cargo, one the Bergen and the other the Oslo, and the uniformed Waterguard who handled passengers' baggage and controlled the shipment of stores. For some reason, which I never discovered, passengers' cars counted as cargo for Customs purposes. Apart from occasional borderline cases, the two sides worked harmoniously. Cars were identified and documented both inwards and outwards at the time and gave landing officers their only direct contact with the traveling public, which was an education in itself.
The passenger's annoyance at any snag was usually in direct proportion to his own responsibility for it. The more he was to blame, the more he ranted about red tape. Conversely, when he really was the injured party, he was normally very reasonable about it. After a rough crossing from Oslo, the Olsen boat landed about a dozen cars, all damaged to a greater or lesser extent by a fish container which had broken loose on the car deck. The crew said it had broken loose but it probably wasn't secured in the first place. The car owners snowed a restraint which really amazed me.
Foreign tourists could buy British-made cars free of Purchase Tax subject to their being checked out by the shipping officer when they left the country. The supplier was required to forward documents to the dock, but frequently didn't because the tourist had neglected to let the supplier know when and where he was leaving the country. I remember explaining this to an irate American and telling him 'I can let the car go and sort this out later, but don't go away with the idea that the snag was anybody’s fault but your own'. To do him justice, he took this in very good part.
On another occasion, an American in the same situation showed me a letter from Jaguar Cars which showed that he, the passenger had carried out his part to the letter and the company was at fault. When I let the car go he overwhelmed me with gratitude. He went aboard the ship and I went into the office to write a curt note to Jaguars. I was interrupted by the American’s wife, who had come ashore to thank me for being so nice to her husband. The American Customs must be a rough lot.
I soon discovered that there was a great deal to learn that was not in the Customs Codes. The term 'code' was not intended to imply that they were written in some kind of secret cypher, but it sometimes looked that way on first reading. The rules applied equally to all men, of course, but even before the days of V.I.P. lounges and treating the arrival of pop stars like visitations of God, some people were more equal than others. V.I.P's traveling incognito were not always very pleased to be treated as ordinary mortals, especially if they happened to be selected for a close check. Luckily their correct names were used on their car documents and this once enabled me to head off a keen young Preventive Officer who was advancing on Crown Prince Axel of Denmark with a gleam in his eye.
Early one morning I challenged a truck-driver who was proposing to remove a small yacht direct from the Oslo boat, but backed off hastily when informed that the Duke of Edinburgh, required it to be in Torbay the following morning. It is fair to add that the Duke's agent had lodged the necessary documents in good time, so there was no reason to hold the thing up anyway.
Things were done rather informally compared to modern roll-on roll-off ferries, and last-minute arrivals with cars could usually be rushed aboard with the co-operation of the Shipping officer. One officer lifted the bonnet of a late-comer's sports car and a gust of wind tore it right off. The owner was very reasonable about it at the time and caught the boat after first-aid repairs to the car. Weeks later the officer received a substantial bill for the damage, backed by a solicitor's
letter, and had to report himself to the Board. Their Honours paid the bill from public funds and rebuked the officer for 'handling the goods', contrary to para. X of Customs Code Y, but took no further action against him.
This was a classic case of incorrect action with tine best of motives and I never heard of an officer being penalised for such a breach of regulations, unless the course taken was plainly silly in itself. On the contrary, it was widely recognized that there would always be cases where rigid adherence to the rules would cause more trouble than enough and the few hidebound 'bookmen' were the curse of the service.
What was true of cars applied equally to cargo in general and, as we soon became experts on the normal range of goods passing inwards and outwards, there were few problems. Host of the real snags arose on odd items to which application of the rules would produce absurd results and discretion was the better part of red tape. A senior officer named Bert used to report such problems to the Board, after he had solved them, using the phrase' It was deemed inappropriate to apply Customs Code Z in this case'. They always agreed.
Before Christmas each year, thousands of children always wrote to Santa Claus addressing the letters to Bergen, and the postal authorities there actually sent cards and other knick-knacks in reply. One such letter from a child in a Manchester orphanage produced a large crate full of expensive toys. The Olsen Line carried it free of charge and it arrived totally undocumented. Faced with this, Bert released it 'without formality'. Days later we had the Collector on the phone in a panic lest we had detained it. The Norwegian Ambassador was due to present the toys that day in Manchester, and one could just see the headlines if the wicked Customs had still been sitting on them in North Shields. Vastly relieved that they were not, the Board spent about six months agonising about how best to legalise Bert's action. They finally deemed the goods to have been consigned to the Norwegian Embassy and released under diplomatic privilege. Nobody cared.
(c) Union Work.
During the time I was a fixed officer I engaged in the affairs of the Customs and Excise Federation, which was the officers' trade union. I attended four annual conferences as a delegate between 1954 and 1957, but never took any very active part. I was on the union executive for one year only and never really got into the swim of that either.
It was a difficult time for the Federation. They spent most of their time and energy fighting to gain a pay differential over the Higher Executive Officer Grade of the Civil Service. Given the problems of work evaluation already mentioned, and the clear determination of the powers-that-be to bring the Officer grade into line with the rest of the service, this was always a lost cause.
With hindsight, I now clearly see that we should have accepted the inevitable on pay, and pursued fringe benefits in areas where the grade was worse off than many others. Officers' subsistence allowances were well below Treasury rates, but because they always had been, the Federation thought that to ask for parity was crying for the moon. The five-day week was then on offer and the Federation opposed it on the grounds that only Excise officers could enjoy it because many Customs officers would still have to work on Saturdays, and it would thus be divisive .
In the event both were imposed administratively, all officers especially U.0.'s benefited from the higher rates of allowances, and Customs officers profited by working all Saturday duties on overtime.
The truth was that by perpetuating the disadvantages of the officer grade, the Federation hoped to strengthen their hopeless claim for more pay. They should have accepted equal pay and insisted on equally favourable conditions. I only wish I had seen that as clearly then as I do now and I might have made a name for myself. In fact, I was as thick as the rest and never made any real impact on union affairs.
(d) Studying.
Although the Customs and Excise has long since fallen into line with the service generally and all promotions are by selection, up to the mid-sixties the need for an examination for promotion
from Officer to Surveyor was generally accepted. Over the years there had been much heart-searching about the proper form of this exam.
It started as a straightforward written exercise lasting two days, the first on the letter of the instructions, and the second on wider issues of taxation theory and policy. There was a sufficient choice of first-day questions to enable the candidates to stick to either the Customs or the Excise side, and second-day questions often covered both. There was, in theory, a pass standard of 55%, but by a recurring miracle, the number successful always approximated to the foreseeable vacancies over the two years until the next exam.
Among many excellent Surveyors, this system naturally threw up a number of 'bookmen' who passed the exam but were not really suitable for a supervisory role or to represent the Department at Surveyor level. To weed out these misfits, a formal interview, open only to those who had qualified in the written part, was added. No marks were awarded; the panel simply passed or failed a candidate.
However, the rejects included some who had not only qualified well on the written, but were patently not the kind of misfits that the interview was designed to exclude. Under pressure, the Board amended the rules to award marks for both the written papers and the interview, and the result then depended on the aggregate. Unfortunately this change completely defeated the object of having an interview. There were 1000 marks at stake on the first day, 1050 on the second and 700 on the interview. In practice, no-one ever got more than about 520 or less than 280 for the interview, so the margin was obviously insufficient to exclude the unsuitable bookworm. In 1956, for example, one candidate came out top by a clear 250 marks over the second man. He actually got about 500 on the interview, but he could have got a record low and still been top. He could have skipped the interview altogether and still passed comfortably.
Officers were eligible to sit twice, usually between 36 and40 years of age. As all further promotion was by selection from Surveyors, failure meant a further 20/25 years as officer with no chance of advancement in the Department. Occasionally such 'failures' succeeded in escaping to other Departments, where they almost invariably did well, which speaks for itself. Escapes from the C. and E. at that time were about as common as break-outs from Dartmoor.
My first turn came in 1956 and I undertook the usual cram course for 18 months before. In theory, a 'wide general experience' should have been enough, but once cramming became general very few ever tested the theory. I sat on the Customs side and had to be careful to avoid mentioning local Newcastle practice, which would have been Greek to the London-based markers.
The syllabus was so wide that everybody looked up recent papers, worked out which questions were due to come up again, and swotted them up. I had my usual luck with written exams. All my bankers came up on the first day, so, although there was nothing I really fancied on the second, I got a good result. With an average interview I passed comfortably and was duly called up as an Unattached Surveyor in a batch of ten in February, 1959. As seniority was fixed by examination position and I was tenth in the batch, I went from being a well-established Landing officer to the most junior Surveyor in the service. My salary went up, but my overtime disappeared, and with a real loss of status in the short term, it really felt like an “Irishman’s rise”.