Chapter l6. On the Scrapheap.
After the dust had settled, so to speak, my reactions to retirement were depressingly commonplace. I felt a sense of being dumped before I was really worn out and a 1oss of status. I don’t think that had anything to do with what that status
had been and I am sure retired Prime Ministers and labourers must feel the same. One day you have a niche and a function to perform in it and the next day you haven't.
After eight years of retirement I still find myself thinking I’ll do that over the weekend', forgetting that my weekends are now seven days long. Not that time hangs heavy on my hands. Any lack of purpose is more than counterpointed by the way time starts galloping ahead as you gat older. It’s almost weird the way a weekly programme seems to come round every other day.
Men who retire at 60 do not get the state pension until they are 70 at which age they also get such perks as bus-passes and cheaper haircuts. My Civil service pension is not quite the index-linked fortune that the Daily Express thinks it is, but it is quite adequate. Nevertheless the first five years were the least affluent and it was partly to bridge this gap, and partly to ease me into complete idleness, that I did a couple of spells with the monopolies commission in 1983 and 1984.
I was involved in two takeover cases and the work bore some resemblance to my old job. Whereas in VAT we had to take a quick look at the affairs of many traders, the commission probed more deeply into a couple at a time.
The Civil Service has some advantages over the private sector and vice versa and I had always suspected that quangos had the best of both worlds. This was certainly true of the Commission. My immediate boss was an Assistant Secretary of 65, who had
no plans to retire and no one was pressing him to do so. The Principal who signed me on worked three days a week and was pushing 70.
When we were out of town on official business, first class travel and four-star hotels were booked for us and other expenses were promptly refunded without question. The Accountant and Control1er-General of the Customs and excise would have
had a fit.
My group in 1983 was headed by the Chairman of the Commission himself, who was a Q.C. and one of the nicest men I ever met, and I enjoyed every minute of that spell. Despite my distrust of lawyers as a class, I always seen to get on well with any
individua1 ones that I meet. It’s very confusing.
In 1984, it was a less interesting case and the group was Chaired by a retired under Secretary who reminded me of Frankie Frost. He seemed to concentrate on hacking drafts and had a thing about commas. I thought at first that this was just the amiable eccentricity of a top man but later concluded that he homed in on trivia because that was what he was good at. He was, I think, a typical Civil Servant, and though he might have taken that as a compliment, a Customs officer so described would thinkit a deadly insult.
Since 1984, we have continued to live in Glasgow and contemplate a move into England, with our son established in Derby and daughter in Bristol, each with two children, we clearly ought to move south, but where to? It could be invidious to plump for either Derby or Bristol, which might be resented by the more distant family, or worse still, by the one we were closer to.
A strategic halfway house would mean a fresh start in a new place where we had no contacts and not much scope for making any at our time of life. English house prices are horrendous and we both dread the upheaval of the actual move, but these
factors are mere excuses. We "just can't make up our minds.
Meanwhile I have leisure to look back and ruminate about the great might have-been.
Up to 1933 when I went to Holbrook everything was decided for me and any childish ideas I might have had did not matter. I had gone to Swanley quite happily, but I soon realised how much it had cost Mum to agree to it. As Dad was a sailor until
l926 and died in l929 she had had little enough time with him and her financial situation must have been desperate indeed when she let me go. I can still remember times when she was humiliated for the lack of a shilling or two.
After we moved to London, she tried to visit Dad's grave at Wickham each year and, although she was a martyr to travel-sickness on the road, she always went by coach, because the train was dearer. God knows what agonies of shame and embarrassment it cost her. It is no wonder that the need for financial security was burned into my consciousness fromchildhood.
This was what induced me to opt out of the navy and into the Civil Service. I had to leave school at the end of 1937 before the examination in 1938, my boats were burnt and if I failed I was someone's office boy. When I passed, others were green with envy. It was not that 32/6 a week; as a clerical officer was that much more than 25/- as a junior costing clerk. It was because, short of something downright criminal, I was sure of 32/6 or more until I was 60, whereas they could he sacked at a week's notice. It must be hard for the children of the Welfare State to understand how much difference that made. Neither I nor anyone dependent on me would ever suffer as my mother had done.
From 1938 until I was demobbed at the end of 1945 my fate was again in the hands of others, but then I had a choice to make, though I didn't realise it at the time. The country did not do much for its returning heroes, but together with campaign
medals, demob suits and gratuities of a few pounds, it did give them the right to re-claim their pre-war jobs. It never occurred to me not to take this up.
Ex-service men had certain special opportunities to go to universities and if I had been less security-minded I could have checked on my own position, if I had, I might have got a fair degree and even aspired to re-enter the Civil Service in the Administrative Grade. I might have been a Principal at about 30, instead or 48, and risen higher thereafter, but I doubt if I would have enjoyed it as much as I did my career in the Customs. In retrospect, I would dearly like to have had a crack at a degree and more especially to have experienced several years of university life, and found out whether I really could hold my own at that intellectual, level. I believe Holbrook boys now regularly stay there till they are l8 and go on to university but in my day I think it would have been a first, even if the degree wasn’t.
If I had foreseen the timing of the war, I should probably have gone into the Navy in 1937, but I don't now think that I should have been right to do so. A few of my contemporaries at Holbrook actually reached commissioned rank, no doubt helped by wartime expansion and casualties, but there is no reason to think that I should have done so. Quite a few of them; were killed too. Had I survived, I should still have faced the bleak prospect of discharge at 40. So I think that at 14 years of age, I was right. I am not so sure about opting for my old job back in 1946. I was only 24 and single so perhaps I should have taken a more adventurous line. I'm sorry I didn't.
From then on my objective was never in doubt. Once launched in the customs I felt bound to seek to advance as far as I could, The only occasion when I failed to give it my best shot was at the interview for promotion to Assistant Collector in 1967 but I have already agonised enough about that.
I have now largely lost touch with the Customs and Excise but I am sure that they easily filled my place and my departure never left a ripple. This does not bother me as I never thought I, or anyone else, was irreplaceable let alone immortal. The fact that many duties, to which I and thousands like me, devoted years of our lives, are now not being done at all, is a more sobering thought. I do not refer to taxes such as Entertainment duty, for example, which have long since been abolished. Spirit
duty pours in as before without any of the incessant checking of casks which we all thought so important, we were really like the bookie that lost thousands of pounds every week but couldn't give it up because it was his living. Revenue controls, useful or not were our 1iving.
Taking a last look back, I am amazed how often things turned out quite differently from my hopes and expectations. Not necessarily worse, but different. At school I naturally hoped to become a PO boy. When I had given up hope I became one in my last term and was put in charge of a ‘half', but never rated chief, probably because I wasn’t much good at it.
Having always accepted that the Navy was my destiny, I opted out of it. Then the war shoved me back towards it but even then I missed the Navy proper and finished up serving briefly in dozens of merchant ships and seldom seeing a real fighting warship
In the Customs I held my pre-determined course pretty well until I decided to take a chance on Glasgow, calculating that I should be able to get back to Newcastle in a year or two, and possibly even make collector there. In fact, I remained in Glasgow for the last eight years of my service. I have now been retired for eight years, I am still in Glasgow and I never made collector in Newcastle or anywhere else. If I had got through the first interview and failed to make Collector, I could have considered myself unlucky. Having taken three bites at it I was lucky to make deputy. Deputies get only slightly less money than Collectors and have much less responsibility so they are arguably better off, but this kind of rationalising can never alter the fact that there is all the difference in the world between being No.1 and settling for No.2. There may perhaps have been worse men than me who became Collectors; it is certain that many better men didn't get as Far as deputy.
If my whole career was regarded as one long promotion interview, I don't think I passed, but I think perhaps I was a near-miss.
That’s better than nothing and it’s too late to appeal.
Thursday, 10 September 2009
J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY c15
Chapter 15. The Great Big World.-
Looking back over this screed, I see that I have made so little reference to the world at large that it might create the impression that the Customs and Excise is like some enclosed religious order. This is only so in the very limited sense that officers, in common with other civil servants, were not expected to be active in politics, which I never felt to be a hardship.
Given my background, I suppose I should have been strong for Labour, but in fact, I have never had any leaning at all towards the Left. I think this started from my revulsion at the indecent glee with which they ousted Churchill in 1945. Over the years I have realised that political differences are much more between government and opposition than between Tory and Labour. It seems that most government measures are dictated by outside pressures either at home or abroad, and are only marginally affected by the colour of the party in power.
If the Welfare State had been in place in the 1920’s and 1030’s the Booths would have been better off than they were, but I doubt if Labour would have brought it in then had they been in power. I am sure it would have come in about the same time as it did had the Tories been in charge after the war. I expect the Germans would have been governing us all in the 40’s and that really would have been different.
A major feature of the post-war scene was unrestricted immigration, which started under Labour and went on after the Tories took over. In the climate of the time, a lone Tory who only wanted to exclude known criminals and those suffering
from certain diseases, coupled with power to deport those who committed serious crimes over here, was howled down as though he had been n modern cross between Himmler and King Herod.
Since then both sides have had a few goes at the practical problems caused and the need for controls is generally accepted. The point is neatly encapsulated in the present furore about the Hong Kong Chinese, both Tories and Labour agree that we can't take them all, because one or other of them would have to cope with it in 1997 The only one who says, “Let them all come” is Paddy Ashdown, secure in the knowledge that whoever is in power when it comes to the push, it won't he him.
At the risk of being dismissed as yet another old fool grumbling that “Things aren't what they was, and what's more they never were” I must say that post-war changes have generally been made on the principle that all chance is progress. The evident results of this have undermined my faith in many of the things which I was brought up to respect.
Pre-war criminal law may not have been perfect, but at least it was clearly designed to prevent crime or, failing that, to punish it severely. The death penalty was prescribed for murder the definition of which included killings incidental to any
other felony, such as armed robbery or arson. Robbery with violence could be punished with the cat. Thus professional thieves avoided firearms like the plague and bag-snatchers avoided the old and feeble, in case they should unintentionally
ki11 someone and find themselves on the gallows.
Now that we have abolished both corporal and capital punishment and put nothing in their place, the only physical risk to the thug is that his victim may hit back, so the more helpless the latter is, the better. As our First Lieutenant at Southend once
said, 'If you do away with the death penalty the only life that is really sacred is the murderer's'. The measure also leads automatically to the a more widespread arming of the police and despite any thing Ludovic Kennedy may say, the hangman was much less likely to get the wrong man than the armed policeman is.
Despite all the safeguards, we now seem to get more complaints of miscarriages of justice than we did in the past. Perhaps so many guilty parties are acquitted, that equally guilty persons who are convicted regard that as an injustice in itself.
Complainants always demand a full and independent inquiry, regardless of how many have already been held. They have no intention of accepting any report which differs from what they want to hear, even if it was made by the Archangel Gabriel, but the request sounds reasonable if you say it solem1y enough.
Most of these causes are such that it is hard to find any impartial arbiter anyway. It’s about as easy as organising a football match between Jews and Gentiles, where both sides insist on a neutral, referee and reserve the right to question his decisions.
Civil law seems to be even more of a mess but the effects are generally hilarious rather than tragic. Parliament, heavily salted with lawyers, has passed Legal Aid Acts, ostensibly to “Make justice available to all”, but more likely to enable their
brethren, who have priced themselves out of the market, to draw on the public purse. To mount a civil action these days you have to either rich enough to use your own money or poor enough to use the taxpayers. Most of us are neither and are forced to avoid going to law at all cost.
The award of a particularly large sum to one who has been libeled often causes public outrage, while the fact that agang of lawyers have received ten times as much for arguing about it among themselves passes unnoticed. I am convinced that if the Good Samaritan had turned out to be a lawyer, the victim would have done better to stick with the thieves.
Largely as a result of the weakening of the criminal law, and the courts’ obsession with the civil rights of the accused to the exclusion of those of the victim, the effectiveness of the police has been drastically reduced. Attempts to solve the problem by throwing money at it have had little effect. We are continually told that salaries must be raised to attract better recruits. As this argument is applied to every job under the sun, it is difficult to see where all these superior beings
are to come from. In the extreme case of MP's, who had a pre-war salary of £400 a year, a hundred-fold increase in pay and emoluments has patently failed to find them.
I still try to maintain some respect for doctors and priests, but when I see highly—paid specialists rushing to make their fortunes out of abortion clinics and bishops questioning the truth of the gospels while condoning sodomy among the clergy, its not easy.
News coverage has been a growth industry throughout my life, but I doubt if the public is better informed as a result. I realised when I was quite young that the art of journalism lay more in writing convincingly than in really knowing the facts
and giving them. In reports of court action affecting the Customs and excise, for example, they usually got the names wrong, garbled the facts of the case and attributed the whole thing to the Inland revenue, This naturally weakened my faith in their views on all the many subjects which I knew nothing about, and the frequent appearance of discreet little paragraphs on page 17 admitting that last week's scoop was totally false,did nothing to restore my confidence.
On T.V. and radio it is normal to deal with each item by bringing in one or more experts, if the interviewer acted as the uninformed man in the street and sought to bring out the truth it would be most helpful, but he more often acts as some divine arbiter who knows more about the matter than all the experts put together, and winds up with a kind of ruling of his own. I should say his or her own, of course.
This used to irritate me to death, but since I saw Sue Lawley arguing the toss with a naval officer about a wartime incident off Norway, I have treated it as a joke. I doubt if she has ever heard a shot fired in anger either at home or afloat, and
she probably hardly knows one end of a warship from the other but that did not prevent her from pressing, with an air of authority, a point of view that was absurd on the face of it.
BBC radio, in particular, is often accused of being leftist because their interviewers are harder on Government than on opposition speakers. I think it is simply that it is far easier to challenge a minister's account of what he is doing, than his shadow's account of what he would do if only he could get in.
On any controversial issue, those who understand the matter are usually involved on one side or the other and don't even attempt to give a balanced view of it. Other people, always the vast majority, are totally baffled and the endless repetition of conflicting extremist views does nothing to help.
The authorities recently offered a pay rise of 6.5% for on a year to ambulance crews, which they rejected. Their unions as asked for a much higher figure and a new pay mechanism. They gave the impression that their members were not so much drivers as mobile 'paramedics', whatever that means, and said their pay should be fixed like that of firemen, a parallel which I don't profess to understand. They commenced industrial action, refusing routine duties but providing emergency cover and stopping short of an all-out strike.
The employers then offered 9k over 18 months, but the unions said this was no better than 6.5% over 12. Arithmetically, it
seems to be slightly worse. After about six months, during which I suppose most ambulance men did about 10% of their normal duties on full pay, the dispute was settled for some 17.5% over 2 years. The authorities said that this did not breach official guidelines on pay, the unions said it did, and individual members said it was no better than 6.5% over 12 months. How the heck any outsider can make sense of that, I do not know.
Personally, I have no idea who was right, who was wrong or who won.
When it comes to foreign affairs, the media seem to vie witheach other to send squads of reporters to give saturation coverage, even where there is no real British interest in the matter. Am I the only man who doesn’t care a hoot what happens
to the Germans, East or West, as long as the whole boiling lot of then stay in Germany? I don't really need a news flash every time Nelson Mandela blows his nose either. When Mrs. Thatcher presumed to disagree with Mr. Mandela over sanctions, Mr. Kinnoch accused her of arrogance. I wonder he didn't say blasphemy.
As a boy singing the hymn 'So be it, Lord, thy throne shall never, like earth's proud empires, pass away', I always thought of the Roman Empire and mentally exempted the British, but during my lifetime practically all our dependencies have packed us off hone and gone their own way. I can live with that, but I wish they didn't tell us it’s our bounden duty to dig them out each time they run into trouble. And if British rule is so terrible, why have so many of our erstwhile victims come over here?
Looking back over this screed, I see that I have made so little reference to the world at large that it might create the impression that the Customs and Excise is like some enclosed religious order. This is only so in the very limited sense that officers, in common with other civil servants, were not expected to be active in politics, which I never felt to be a hardship.
Given my background, I suppose I should have been strong for Labour, but in fact, I have never had any leaning at all towards the Left. I think this started from my revulsion at the indecent glee with which they ousted Churchill in 1945. Over the years I have realised that political differences are much more between government and opposition than between Tory and Labour. It seems that most government measures are dictated by outside pressures either at home or abroad, and are only marginally affected by the colour of the party in power.
If the Welfare State had been in place in the 1920’s and 1030’s the Booths would have been better off than they were, but I doubt if Labour would have brought it in then had they been in power. I am sure it would have come in about the same time as it did had the Tories been in charge after the war. I expect the Germans would have been governing us all in the 40’s and that really would have been different.
A major feature of the post-war scene was unrestricted immigration, which started under Labour and went on after the Tories took over. In the climate of the time, a lone Tory who only wanted to exclude known criminals and those suffering
from certain diseases, coupled with power to deport those who committed serious crimes over here, was howled down as though he had been n modern cross between Himmler and King Herod.
Since then both sides have had a few goes at the practical problems caused and the need for controls is generally accepted. The point is neatly encapsulated in the present furore about the Hong Kong Chinese, both Tories and Labour agree that we can't take them all, because one or other of them would have to cope with it in 1997 The only one who says, “Let them all come” is Paddy Ashdown, secure in the knowledge that whoever is in power when it comes to the push, it won't he him.
At the risk of being dismissed as yet another old fool grumbling that “Things aren't what they was, and what's more they never were” I must say that post-war changes have generally been made on the principle that all chance is progress. The evident results of this have undermined my faith in many of the things which I was brought up to respect.
Pre-war criminal law may not have been perfect, but at least it was clearly designed to prevent crime or, failing that, to punish it severely. The death penalty was prescribed for murder the definition of which included killings incidental to any
other felony, such as armed robbery or arson. Robbery with violence could be punished with the cat. Thus professional thieves avoided firearms like the plague and bag-snatchers avoided the old and feeble, in case they should unintentionally
ki11 someone and find themselves on the gallows.
Now that we have abolished both corporal and capital punishment and put nothing in their place, the only physical risk to the thug is that his victim may hit back, so the more helpless the latter is, the better. As our First Lieutenant at Southend once
said, 'If you do away with the death penalty the only life that is really sacred is the murderer's'. The measure also leads automatically to the a more widespread arming of the police and despite any thing Ludovic Kennedy may say, the hangman was much less likely to get the wrong man than the armed policeman is.
Despite all the safeguards, we now seem to get more complaints of miscarriages of justice than we did in the past. Perhaps so many guilty parties are acquitted, that equally guilty persons who are convicted regard that as an injustice in itself.
Complainants always demand a full and independent inquiry, regardless of how many have already been held. They have no intention of accepting any report which differs from what they want to hear, even if it was made by the Archangel Gabriel, but the request sounds reasonable if you say it solem1y enough.
Most of these causes are such that it is hard to find any impartial arbiter anyway. It’s about as easy as organising a football match between Jews and Gentiles, where both sides insist on a neutral, referee and reserve the right to question his decisions.
Civil law seems to be even more of a mess but the effects are generally hilarious rather than tragic. Parliament, heavily salted with lawyers, has passed Legal Aid Acts, ostensibly to “Make justice available to all”, but more likely to enable their
brethren, who have priced themselves out of the market, to draw on the public purse. To mount a civil action these days you have to either rich enough to use your own money or poor enough to use the taxpayers. Most of us are neither and are forced to avoid going to law at all cost.
The award of a particularly large sum to one who has been libeled often causes public outrage, while the fact that agang of lawyers have received ten times as much for arguing about it among themselves passes unnoticed. I am convinced that if the Good Samaritan had turned out to be a lawyer, the victim would have done better to stick with the thieves.
Largely as a result of the weakening of the criminal law, and the courts’ obsession with the civil rights of the accused to the exclusion of those of the victim, the effectiveness of the police has been drastically reduced. Attempts to solve the problem by throwing money at it have had little effect. We are continually told that salaries must be raised to attract better recruits. As this argument is applied to every job under the sun, it is difficult to see where all these superior beings
are to come from. In the extreme case of MP's, who had a pre-war salary of £400 a year, a hundred-fold increase in pay and emoluments has patently failed to find them.
I still try to maintain some respect for doctors and priests, but when I see highly—paid specialists rushing to make their fortunes out of abortion clinics and bishops questioning the truth of the gospels while condoning sodomy among the clergy, its not easy.
News coverage has been a growth industry throughout my life, but I doubt if the public is better informed as a result. I realised when I was quite young that the art of journalism lay more in writing convincingly than in really knowing the facts
and giving them. In reports of court action affecting the Customs and excise, for example, they usually got the names wrong, garbled the facts of the case and attributed the whole thing to the Inland revenue, This naturally weakened my faith in their views on all the many subjects which I knew nothing about, and the frequent appearance of discreet little paragraphs on page 17 admitting that last week's scoop was totally false,did nothing to restore my confidence.
On T.V. and radio it is normal to deal with each item by bringing in one or more experts, if the interviewer acted as the uninformed man in the street and sought to bring out the truth it would be most helpful, but he more often acts as some divine arbiter who knows more about the matter than all the experts put together, and winds up with a kind of ruling of his own. I should say his or her own, of course.
This used to irritate me to death, but since I saw Sue Lawley arguing the toss with a naval officer about a wartime incident off Norway, I have treated it as a joke. I doubt if she has ever heard a shot fired in anger either at home or afloat, and
she probably hardly knows one end of a warship from the other but that did not prevent her from pressing, with an air of authority, a point of view that was absurd on the face of it.
BBC radio, in particular, is often accused of being leftist because their interviewers are harder on Government than on opposition speakers. I think it is simply that it is far easier to challenge a minister's account of what he is doing, than his shadow's account of what he would do if only he could get in.
On any controversial issue, those who understand the matter are usually involved on one side or the other and don't even attempt to give a balanced view of it. Other people, always the vast majority, are totally baffled and the endless repetition of conflicting extremist views does nothing to help.
The authorities recently offered a pay rise of 6.5% for on a year to ambulance crews, which they rejected. Their unions as asked for a much higher figure and a new pay mechanism. They gave the impression that their members were not so much drivers as mobile 'paramedics', whatever that means, and said their pay should be fixed like that of firemen, a parallel which I don't profess to understand. They commenced industrial action, refusing routine duties but providing emergency cover and stopping short of an all-out strike.
The employers then offered 9k over 18 months, but the unions said this was no better than 6.5% over 12. Arithmetically, it
seems to be slightly worse. After about six months, during which I suppose most ambulance men did about 10% of their normal duties on full pay, the dispute was settled for some 17.5% over 2 years. The authorities said that this did not breach official guidelines on pay, the unions said it did, and individual members said it was no better than 6.5% over 12 months. How the heck any outsider can make sense of that, I do not know.
Personally, I have no idea who was right, who was wrong or who won.
When it comes to foreign affairs, the media seem to vie witheach other to send squads of reporters to give saturation coverage, even where there is no real British interest in the matter. Am I the only man who doesn’t care a hoot what happens
to the Germans, East or West, as long as the whole boiling lot of then stay in Germany? I don't really need a news flash every time Nelson Mandela blows his nose either. When Mrs. Thatcher presumed to disagree with Mr. Mandela over sanctions, Mr. Kinnoch accused her of arrogance. I wonder he didn't say blasphemy.
As a boy singing the hymn 'So be it, Lord, thy throne shall never, like earth's proud empires, pass away', I always thought of the Roman Empire and mentally exempted the British, but during my lifetime practically all our dependencies have packed us off hone and gone their own way. I can live with that, but I wish they didn't tell us it’s our bounden duty to dig them out each time they run into trouble. And if British rule is so terrible, why have so many of our erstwhile victims come over here?
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.
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.
J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY c13
Chapter 13 Value Added Tax in Theory.
Democratic governments have always had to walk a tightrope between political expediency and case of collection when selecting items for indirect taxation, or so I have always been led to believe. Now I am not so sure that there is any real conflict in this. C1ear1y it is easier to collect a tax from a few large outlets than from many small ones, but such a tax must still be paid by a wide spread of the population at large. However, it is politically desirable to avoid stressing this latter aspect. Nothing is certain except death and taxes, but people do not like being reminded of the second any more than the first.
I doubt if anyone has ever devised a worthwhile tax on the few, although I am sure it would be popular with the many. Income tax and surtax on the very rich rose to about 96% in the immediate postwar period but never yielded any significant revenue. People who were that rich either emigrated or used their surplus money to avoid the tax rather than to pay it.
If any political party found a means of financing a country by taxing only a third of the voters they could remain in power for ever. Any opponent, who proposed to cut the rate and spread it fairly by taxing everyone, would be defeated by a margin of two to one. The present uproar over the Community Charge- in 1990 - has much less to do with fairness and the plight of the poor, than with the fact that many of those quite comfortably off have long avoided rates by living in other peoples houses and will now have to pay. For them it is not a question of whether the charge is greater or less than the rates were. Their rates were nil.
Traditionally Customs and Excise duties have been pitched at high rates for economic reasons and successive Chancellors have sugared the pill by concentrating on items which can be shown to be harmful if consumed to excess. Thus the two old faithfuls, Tobacco and alcohol are taxed at swingeing rates, justified by a pretence of price-rationing, but actually dictated by purely revenue considerations. This is one of the innumerable cases where public statements conceal real motives.
I remember one budget which raised the duty on spirits but lowered it on beer. The government proudly claimed that it had cheapened the working man's pint while soaking the bloated rich who drank spirits. In fact, beer consumption had fallen in the previous year while spirit sales were going up. In the following year, the reduction in beer duty was more than offset by a rise in consumption and the upward trend on spirits was maintained. Thus the tax yield for the year was up on both commodities.
On tobacco in particular, governments have always been in the cleft stick of revenue versus public health, Even if tobacco causes lung cancer, the duty on it used to be enough to fund the entire national health Service, whatever the ministry of health might say, the Customs and Excise didn't care how many people smoked and drank themselves to death as long as they did it duty-paid. But there was a limit to the amount one could charge as both tobacco and alcohol are non essentials which people may take or leave alone, as they choose.
The duty on road fuel, which started as a means of funding road building and maintenance, has long been an important source of general revenue and remains so. Commerce cannot do without it and a private motorist is hardly likely to cut down on the use of a car costing thousands of pounds, because petrol duty has gone up a few pence a gallon, hydrocarbon oils now yield more than spirits or tobacco, but all three, plus odds and ends like entertainment and betting duties, are not enough. A broader basis had to be found.
Purchase Tax, which had started as a wartime measure to price-ration very limited supplies of luxury goods, was first adapted to assist the Government to cope with postwar shortages. When these shortages had been overcome it became a pure revenue-earner. Rates varied between 125% and 33% ad valorem and it was no longer restricted to luxuries, most furniture was taxed at 33%, clothing at 66% and, for a time, ordinary electric fires at l00%. This latter measure was designed to cut down demand, not so much for the fires, as for electricity itself, as generating capacity was overloaded.
Manufacturers and wholesalers were registered with the Customs and Excise and could sell to each other free of tax. Purchase Tax became chargeable on sale to an unregistered person, such as a retailer, and had to be collected by the seller and paid to the revenue quarterly, all the returns being checked by visiting officers. The value for tax was the wholesale/retail price, which was all very well where a wholesaler actually sold to a retailer. Then manufacturer sold direct to a retailer, or even to the consumer, we ran into endless problems of 'uplift' or other adjustment of the price charged.
There was also great scope for argument about liability in borderline cases, compounded by some of the most bizarre official rulings that ever came out of King's Beam House. The wretched officer had to try to justify such rulings to the uncomprehending trader even when he was equally baffled himself.
Furniture was chargeable but builders fittings were not, which led to the invention of two-legged tables and backless wardrobes designed to be fixed to the wall. Floor coverings generally were chargeable: but if linoleum was cut into squares below a specified size, it was deemed to be free as tiles. I never discovered the reason for this odd arrangement, but the effect was that shops, hote1s and other large buildings all took to using lino tax-free in this form. Only hospital authorities, who could not accept the risks to hygiene posed by tiles, used it in the roll and paid tax on it.
Candles used for 'personal or domestic purposes' were charged, and the Board mysteriously ruled that this included those used by the Church of England but not by the Jews or Roman Catholics. I put it to them that, while not wishing to favour the established church, it seemed wrong to discriminate against it. I further pointed out that some of the candles in question were; made by disabled persons in Middlesbrough and were actually about four feet long. I could think of no domestic purpose to which they could be put and refused to even speculate about personal use.
After a hilarious correspondence they gave in and said any candles deemed unsuitable for such uses, in the opinion of the Surveyor would be free of tax. I freed the lot and that was that.
I recall that in the early days of P.T., retailers used to quote prices and tax separately, £50 plus £10 Purchase Tax, for example. The idea was to say in effect, 'I'm only charging £50, its not my fault if the greedy Government takes £10 on top of that'. The practice was quickly dropped, partly because it enabled anyone who knew the tax rate to work out the retailer's profit margin, but chiefly because the customer just did not like having the tax stuffed down his throat, he preferred to pay a tax-inclusive price and forget it.
Value Added Tax was, I believe, a French invention, 1ike the guillotine. The Board never really liked it and in the late sixties, a report was issued indicating that an extended form of Purchase Tax was to be preferred! A couple of years later, when the political pressure to line up with Europe on the point had become irresistible, there was a further report, based on much the same premises as the first, but reaching the opposite conclusion. VAT had arrived, and I was one of the fortunate few who were able to see a brand-new tax come out of the egg, so to speak. The effect on the Customs and Excise was rather like a cuckoo chick taking over the nest of its smaller foster-parents.
The first move was to set up courses for a number of 'corps instructors' who would spread the gospel through the staff generally and then become founder-members of a country-wide network of Local Vat Offices (L.V.O.'s.). Concurrently, Assistant Collectors destined to command these offices were given three-week courses in London. Each L.V.O. was, of course, to form part of the Collection in which it was located, but some Collectors feared that the Assistant Collectors would become too independent. A proposal to call t h e latter Vat Controllers was abandoned, partly for this reason, but chiefly because someone pointed out that they would inevitably be confused with the Fat-Controller so well-known to the readers of Thomas the Tank Engine. Most of the Department's top brass seemed to have known him from their cradles.
Vat differed from P.T. in that it covered a much wider field including both goods and services and was charged piecemeal on each transaction, instead of in one sum at a specified stage.
Take a simple case of a wooden table manufactured from £10 worth
of materials. P.T. rate 25% on the finished article; Vat rate 10% on both the materials and the completed table.
PURCHASE TAX.
Registered manufacturer sells the table to a registered wholesaler free of P.T. for £50. Wholesaler sells to an unregistered retailer for £80 plus £20 P.T. Retailer sells to customer for £130 made up of £80 cost to him plus £20 P.T. plus £30 profit.
The wholesaler includes the £20 in his quarterly return to C.and E.
VALUE ADDED TAX.
Registered manufacturer buys materials for £10 plus £1 Vat. Registered manufacturer sells table to registered wholesaler for £50 plus £5 Vat. Registered wholesaler sells to registered retailer for £80 plus £8 Vat.
Registered retailer sells to customer for £110 plus £11 Vat.
All three registered traders make quarterly returns to C.and E,
balancing the Vat they have paid to their suppliers (Input Tax) against the Vat collected from their customers Output Tax, and paying only the balance. Thus only the final £11 paid by the customer 'sticks' and remains "in the revenue, being l0% of the final tax-exclusive price.
The fact that I give this as the simplest case, without any sarcastic intent, shows just how simple this new tax was not.
Since most goods and services became Vatable, it follows that hundreds of thousands of traders had to be registered and the
Departments workload was vastly increased. It was claimed that there would be savings on valuation, which did materialise, and on liability problems, which didn't.
For a start we were given an insight into the mechanics of setting up a legal basis for the now tax. Devising the necessary Act of Parliament was the function of a senior lawyer called the Parliamentary Draughtsman. The Customs and Excise specialists explained what they wanted and the draughtsman produced a form of words which he considered met their requirements.
Because it was intended to spread the net as widely as possible, no attempt was made to list the goods and services to be charged at the standard rate of Vat. Instead, only the exceptions to the ru1e were defined, and listed either as zero-rated, a new concept, or exempt. Zero-rated items were regarded as chargeab1e so those dealing in them were to be registered and thus able to reclaim any input tax paid by them. Anyone dealing only in exempt goods or services was not registered and could not recover such tax. Those handling partly exempt items and partly chargeable ones were registered, but their entitlement to repayment of input tax was restricted. To enforce such restriction was so patently impossible that concessions were soon made which practically did away with the conception of partia1 exemption.
The Department apparently queried various items on which the proposed clauses might not meet their intentions. Marine salvage services, for example, were to be zero-rated, but salvage work on land, recovery of wrecked vehicles on the motorways and the like, standard rated. As drafted the clause simply said “Salvage” but the draughtsman explained that this word, used in an Act of Parliament without qualification, meant marine salvage only. He was right, of course, and the point has never been challenged.
On a number of other points he was less positive, saying that, in his opinion, the effect of the words used was that intended, but, if he was wrong, the matter could be clarified in the Courts. He was right about that too, and we finished up with a great deal of expensively acquired case law from both the said Courts and special Vat Tribunals. When it came to reading obscure and convoluted meanings into what looked like a simple form of words, the latter frequently began where the hair-splitters of the Board left off.
It occurs to me that if anyone ever succeeded in drafting unambiguous laws, he would be the ruin of the legal profession, but while the drafting is done by lawyers, I’m sure they have nothing to fear.
Since it is politically impossible to tax everything, most food and other basic necessities were zero rated and we soon realised that borderline cases on liability were likely to be at least as numerous as they had been on P.T. Many of them were old favourites including the builders’ fixtures.
The Department resisted zero rating children's clothing, which had given us so much trouble on P.T., but were overruled in the House. Not that, the Customs and Excise really cared whether or not such clothing bore tax. They were concerned about the weakening of the control of the clothing trade as a whole. Liability of most items depended on size limits for children. This was difficult enough to establish by measuring the garment, when little girls' knickers were bigger than their mothers' except when being worn, and officers had to measure them in stock, not in use. But we could live with this, and take the rough with the smooth when small women wore childrens' sizes and big girls wore adult ones. The real problem was that most
official checks were made on paper records after the goods were
long gone and the scope for fraud by misdescription was unlimited. The one Purchase Tax problem that Vat did solve was valuation. By it’s nature Vat could only be charged on the basis of the actual
price at each stage. If A sold cheaper than B, B's customers paid less tax and that was that. When you got into the realms of part exchange, of course, it could still get a bit hairy, but you can’t win them all.
Having grasped the rudiments of Vat, in so far as it had been defined, we were scattered all over the country to set up the machinery to register and control tens of thousands of traders in each area. We also had to sell the whole idea to the community at large. They greeted it with a mixture of horror and incredulity.
Chapter 13(b. Value Added Tax - Setting it up.
When the late George Formby sang the line, 'For a Nosey Parker, it’s an interesting job' he was referring to window cleaning, but it is equally applicable to Customs and Excise work. This was varied and interesting in itself, but I always felt that the scope it provided for shoving your oar into other people's trades was its real charm. Purchase Tax had added many new activities to breweries, distilleries, oil refineries, sugar factories and the rest, but Vat brought in nearly everything. Before we got to that stage, however, I had to cope with two problems. Setting up and staffing a new office and lecturing trade bodies about the new tax. As a by-product of Vat there was a large increase in C. and E. staff, I a1so found myself sitting on a selection board for recruits in the Newcastle area.
This board was chaired by a retired Assistant Secretary, backed by three other members, a retired Principal, one of my Surveyors and me. The Principal bad a tendency to act the Devil's advocate and urge the merits of any candidate I didn't fancy, but after the Chairman had mentioned that he was only empowered to pass such as were acceptable to the C. and E. representatives, we got on fine. ;
The applicants were mostly of mature years already in employment, many getting higher salaries than we were offering, but attracted by security or tenure and the hope of promotion. Shades of 1938! Some were quite lyrical about their present jobs and qualifications but few had any idea of the nature of the work they were seeking, most of them had a vague idea that they would be working in Vat, but even this was not true, as they were being recruited into the Department in general, not Vat in particular. We rejected one who sold himself to us so well that we thought he should remain in the sales job he already had, the principal dissenting to no avail. On the other hand, a colliery shot-firer who had never done a clerical job in his life struck us all as the best man we had seen, and we accepted him with alacrity
Women were not excluded but I do not remember any. I do remember one who appeared before a board for promotion from Clerical officer to Executive Officer in the Civil Service generally on which I sat in Edinburgh. It was the end of a very wet week in November and she was our last victim on Friday afternoon. She was a very ordinary looking girl from Cowdenbeath, of all places. We were in two minds until the Chairman asked her the mandatory question about recreations. She hesitated and then said, 'I do a bit of shooting'. Startled, the Chairman asked, “How did that come about” With unanswerable logic, the candidate replied, 'Well we got this puppy one Christmas, and when it grew up, someone said it was a gun-dog, so I bought gun and learned to shoot'. 'What do you shoot we asked. 'Oh, rabbits, hares, birds, anything that comes near enough'. She got in by a landslide.
Concurrently, we found a vacant Government office in Newcastle and set up shop. I also had to face the dread prospect of public speaking.
Although I have always had a tendency to talk too much, as my few friends will testify with tears in their eyes, I had never spoken in public, except to make feeble contributions at Federation councils. I didn't much like the prospect of making my debut on an unpopular subject before a hostile audience. As so often in life, the most daunting prospect turned out to be much less formidable in practice. Nobody was an expert on Vat at first, but I could be confident that my audience knew even less about it than I did. We always pointed out that it was the Government, not the Customs and Excise, who had imposed it, and that we were only required to launch it and make it work. If they didn't like the baby, it was unfair to blame the midwife rather than the father.
We always stressed the point that Vat, like all indirect taxes, was paid by the consumer and registered traders were required to collect it on our behalf. When I told Mike Neville, a freelance broadcaster in Newcastle, that this made him a tax collector rather than a tax-payer, he said that was the nastiest thing anyone had ever called him. Mr. Neville, who was as charming in the flesh as on the screen, was only joking, but many other traders took this point quite seriously and even demanded payment for their services.
At a large meeting of the Chamber of Commerce in a cinema one man said, 'This makes me a part-time tax-collector, and I want to know what I shall get out of it'. In rising to reply, I said in an audible aside, “Well I've been a full time tax collector for more years than I care to remember, and I don't get all that much out of it myself'. This crack was well received, and I went on to point out that there was nothing new in the collection of taxes by traders. We didn't collect beer duty in the pubs. Brewers had always collected it and they had to hand it over on the due date, even if they hadn't sold all the beer concerned by then.
Quarterly Vat returns were timed to allow an interval for bills
to have been paid and in practice most traders got a short period of interest-free use of the money, moreover, there was limited provision for waiving Vat on bad debts. Regular repayment traders made monthly returns to minimise the time for which the money was laid out, so for the first three months we achieved the near impossible feat of running a tax at a loss. Luckily this didn’t last long.
The commonest trade complaint was that, although official checks were to be based on their existing records, they would be forced to incur expense in bringing these up to standard, buying accounting machines and paying accountants. The latter, who stood to make a killing out of Vat anyway, built up these fears for their own ends and one accountant actually complained to me that my officers were taking the bread out of his mouth by explaining the tax to traders for nothing. I said that, as the Board had provided these officers at heavy expense, they wore unlikely to call them off at his behest, and I wouldn't either.
During this period Vat was prominent in the newspapers and on the who1e we got a very good Press. About the only time we ever did. The very first lady Commissioner of Customs and Excise paid us an official visit and was photographed in my office. Mindful of protocol, I carefully explained to the reporter that I was only the Vatman and that the Collector was my boss, having control of all C. and E. matters locally, including Vat. For the photograph the Collector was on one side of the Commissioner and I was on the other. To my horror they printed it showing only the lady and I. If the Collector suspected me of complicity in that he never said so.
A press report of one public meeting referred to me as 'an amiable civil servant'. I gleefully circulated the cutting for the benefit of any of my staff who had mistakenly supposed that I was a miserable sod.
Soon after Newcastle LVO was set up, chances of promotion to Deputy Collector arose at four different places and I applied for all four in order of preference. My fourth choice was Glasgow, so naturally that was the one I got. In a farewell speech, I said that, having launched Vat on Tyneside and seen it on its way, labouring heavily and taking in water at every seam, I was now departing hastily before it sank. Like the man who sold a horse which dropped dead soon after, I could then say, 'How was I to know. It never did that when I had it'.
Democratic governments have always had to walk a tightrope between political expediency and case of collection when selecting items for indirect taxation, or so I have always been led to believe. Now I am not so sure that there is any real conflict in this. C1ear1y it is easier to collect a tax from a few large outlets than from many small ones, but such a tax must still be paid by a wide spread of the population at large. However, it is politically desirable to avoid stressing this latter aspect. Nothing is certain except death and taxes, but people do not like being reminded of the second any more than the first.
I doubt if anyone has ever devised a worthwhile tax on the few, although I am sure it would be popular with the many. Income tax and surtax on the very rich rose to about 96% in the immediate postwar period but never yielded any significant revenue. People who were that rich either emigrated or used their surplus money to avoid the tax rather than to pay it.
If any political party found a means of financing a country by taxing only a third of the voters they could remain in power for ever. Any opponent, who proposed to cut the rate and spread it fairly by taxing everyone, would be defeated by a margin of two to one. The present uproar over the Community Charge- in 1990 - has much less to do with fairness and the plight of the poor, than with the fact that many of those quite comfortably off have long avoided rates by living in other peoples houses and will now have to pay. For them it is not a question of whether the charge is greater or less than the rates were. Their rates were nil.
Traditionally Customs and Excise duties have been pitched at high rates for economic reasons and successive Chancellors have sugared the pill by concentrating on items which can be shown to be harmful if consumed to excess. Thus the two old faithfuls, Tobacco and alcohol are taxed at swingeing rates, justified by a pretence of price-rationing, but actually dictated by purely revenue considerations. This is one of the innumerable cases where public statements conceal real motives.
I remember one budget which raised the duty on spirits but lowered it on beer. The government proudly claimed that it had cheapened the working man's pint while soaking the bloated rich who drank spirits. In fact, beer consumption had fallen in the previous year while spirit sales were going up. In the following year, the reduction in beer duty was more than offset by a rise in consumption and the upward trend on spirits was maintained. Thus the tax yield for the year was up on both commodities.
On tobacco in particular, governments have always been in the cleft stick of revenue versus public health, Even if tobacco causes lung cancer, the duty on it used to be enough to fund the entire national health Service, whatever the ministry of health might say, the Customs and Excise didn't care how many people smoked and drank themselves to death as long as they did it duty-paid. But there was a limit to the amount one could charge as both tobacco and alcohol are non essentials which people may take or leave alone, as they choose.
The duty on road fuel, which started as a means of funding road building and maintenance, has long been an important source of general revenue and remains so. Commerce cannot do without it and a private motorist is hardly likely to cut down on the use of a car costing thousands of pounds, because petrol duty has gone up a few pence a gallon, hydrocarbon oils now yield more than spirits or tobacco, but all three, plus odds and ends like entertainment and betting duties, are not enough. A broader basis had to be found.
Purchase Tax, which had started as a wartime measure to price-ration very limited supplies of luxury goods, was first adapted to assist the Government to cope with postwar shortages. When these shortages had been overcome it became a pure revenue-earner. Rates varied between 125% and 33% ad valorem and it was no longer restricted to luxuries, most furniture was taxed at 33%, clothing at 66% and, for a time, ordinary electric fires at l00%. This latter measure was designed to cut down demand, not so much for the fires, as for electricity itself, as generating capacity was overloaded.
Manufacturers and wholesalers were registered with the Customs and Excise and could sell to each other free of tax. Purchase Tax became chargeable on sale to an unregistered person, such as a retailer, and had to be collected by the seller and paid to the revenue quarterly, all the returns being checked by visiting officers. The value for tax was the wholesale/retail price, which was all very well where a wholesaler actually sold to a retailer. Then manufacturer sold direct to a retailer, or even to the consumer, we ran into endless problems of 'uplift' or other adjustment of the price charged.
There was also great scope for argument about liability in borderline cases, compounded by some of the most bizarre official rulings that ever came out of King's Beam House. The wretched officer had to try to justify such rulings to the uncomprehending trader even when he was equally baffled himself.
Furniture was chargeable but builders fittings were not, which led to the invention of two-legged tables and backless wardrobes designed to be fixed to the wall. Floor coverings generally were chargeable: but if linoleum was cut into squares below a specified size, it was deemed to be free as tiles. I never discovered the reason for this odd arrangement, but the effect was that shops, hote1s and other large buildings all took to using lino tax-free in this form. Only hospital authorities, who could not accept the risks to hygiene posed by tiles, used it in the roll and paid tax on it.
Candles used for 'personal or domestic purposes' were charged, and the Board mysteriously ruled that this included those used by the Church of England but not by the Jews or Roman Catholics. I put it to them that, while not wishing to favour the established church, it seemed wrong to discriminate against it. I further pointed out that some of the candles in question were; made by disabled persons in Middlesbrough and were actually about four feet long. I could think of no domestic purpose to which they could be put and refused to even speculate about personal use.
After a hilarious correspondence they gave in and said any candles deemed unsuitable for such uses, in the opinion of the Surveyor would be free of tax. I freed the lot and that was that.
I recall that in the early days of P.T., retailers used to quote prices and tax separately, £50 plus £10 Purchase Tax, for example. The idea was to say in effect, 'I'm only charging £50, its not my fault if the greedy Government takes £10 on top of that'. The practice was quickly dropped, partly because it enabled anyone who knew the tax rate to work out the retailer's profit margin, but chiefly because the customer just did not like having the tax stuffed down his throat, he preferred to pay a tax-inclusive price and forget it.
Value Added Tax was, I believe, a French invention, 1ike the guillotine. The Board never really liked it and in the late sixties, a report was issued indicating that an extended form of Purchase Tax was to be preferred! A couple of years later, when the political pressure to line up with Europe on the point had become irresistible, there was a further report, based on much the same premises as the first, but reaching the opposite conclusion. VAT had arrived, and I was one of the fortunate few who were able to see a brand-new tax come out of the egg, so to speak. The effect on the Customs and Excise was rather like a cuckoo chick taking over the nest of its smaller foster-parents.
The first move was to set up courses for a number of 'corps instructors' who would spread the gospel through the staff generally and then become founder-members of a country-wide network of Local Vat Offices (L.V.O.'s.). Concurrently, Assistant Collectors destined to command these offices were given three-week courses in London. Each L.V.O. was, of course, to form part of the Collection in which it was located, but some Collectors feared that the Assistant Collectors would become too independent. A proposal to call t h e latter Vat Controllers was abandoned, partly for this reason, but chiefly because someone pointed out that they would inevitably be confused with the Fat-Controller so well-known to the readers of Thomas the Tank Engine. Most of the Department's top brass seemed to have known him from their cradles.
Vat differed from P.T. in that it covered a much wider field including both goods and services and was charged piecemeal on each transaction, instead of in one sum at a specified stage.
Take a simple case of a wooden table manufactured from £10 worth
of materials. P.T. rate 25% on the finished article; Vat rate 10% on both the materials and the completed table.
PURCHASE TAX.
Registered manufacturer sells the table to a registered wholesaler free of P.T. for £50. Wholesaler sells to an unregistered retailer for £80 plus £20 P.T. Retailer sells to customer for £130 made up of £80 cost to him plus £20 P.T. plus £30 profit.
The wholesaler includes the £20 in his quarterly return to C.and E.
VALUE ADDED TAX.
Registered manufacturer buys materials for £10 plus £1 Vat. Registered manufacturer sells table to registered wholesaler for £50 plus £5 Vat. Registered wholesaler sells to registered retailer for £80 plus £8 Vat.
Registered retailer sells to customer for £110 plus £11 Vat.
All three registered traders make quarterly returns to C.and E,
balancing the Vat they have paid to their suppliers (Input Tax) against the Vat collected from their customers Output Tax, and paying only the balance. Thus only the final £11 paid by the customer 'sticks' and remains "in the revenue, being l0% of the final tax-exclusive price.
The fact that I give this as the simplest case, without any sarcastic intent, shows just how simple this new tax was not.
Since most goods and services became Vatable, it follows that hundreds of thousands of traders had to be registered and the
Departments workload was vastly increased. It was claimed that there would be savings on valuation, which did materialise, and on liability problems, which didn't.
For a start we were given an insight into the mechanics of setting up a legal basis for the now tax. Devising the necessary Act of Parliament was the function of a senior lawyer called the Parliamentary Draughtsman. The Customs and Excise specialists explained what they wanted and the draughtsman produced a form of words which he considered met their requirements.
Because it was intended to spread the net as widely as possible, no attempt was made to list the goods and services to be charged at the standard rate of Vat. Instead, only the exceptions to the ru1e were defined, and listed either as zero-rated, a new concept, or exempt. Zero-rated items were regarded as chargeab1e so those dealing in them were to be registered and thus able to reclaim any input tax paid by them. Anyone dealing only in exempt goods or services was not registered and could not recover such tax. Those handling partly exempt items and partly chargeable ones were registered, but their entitlement to repayment of input tax was restricted. To enforce such restriction was so patently impossible that concessions were soon made which practically did away with the conception of partia1 exemption.
The Department apparently queried various items on which the proposed clauses might not meet their intentions. Marine salvage services, for example, were to be zero-rated, but salvage work on land, recovery of wrecked vehicles on the motorways and the like, standard rated. As drafted the clause simply said “Salvage” but the draughtsman explained that this word, used in an Act of Parliament without qualification, meant marine salvage only. He was right, of course, and the point has never been challenged.
On a number of other points he was less positive, saying that, in his opinion, the effect of the words used was that intended, but, if he was wrong, the matter could be clarified in the Courts. He was right about that too, and we finished up with a great deal of expensively acquired case law from both the said Courts and special Vat Tribunals. When it came to reading obscure and convoluted meanings into what looked like a simple form of words, the latter frequently began where the hair-splitters of the Board left off.
It occurs to me that if anyone ever succeeded in drafting unambiguous laws, he would be the ruin of the legal profession, but while the drafting is done by lawyers, I’m sure they have nothing to fear.
Since it is politically impossible to tax everything, most food and other basic necessities were zero rated and we soon realised that borderline cases on liability were likely to be at least as numerous as they had been on P.T. Many of them were old favourites including the builders’ fixtures.
The Department resisted zero rating children's clothing, which had given us so much trouble on P.T., but were overruled in the House. Not that, the Customs and Excise really cared whether or not such clothing bore tax. They were concerned about the weakening of the control of the clothing trade as a whole. Liability of most items depended on size limits for children. This was difficult enough to establish by measuring the garment, when little girls' knickers were bigger than their mothers' except when being worn, and officers had to measure them in stock, not in use. But we could live with this, and take the rough with the smooth when small women wore childrens' sizes and big girls wore adult ones. The real problem was that most
official checks were made on paper records after the goods were
long gone and the scope for fraud by misdescription was unlimited. The one Purchase Tax problem that Vat did solve was valuation. By it’s nature Vat could only be charged on the basis of the actual
price at each stage. If A sold cheaper than B, B's customers paid less tax and that was that. When you got into the realms of part exchange, of course, it could still get a bit hairy, but you can’t win them all.
Having grasped the rudiments of Vat, in so far as it had been defined, we were scattered all over the country to set up the machinery to register and control tens of thousands of traders in each area. We also had to sell the whole idea to the community at large. They greeted it with a mixture of horror and incredulity.
Chapter 13(b. Value Added Tax - Setting it up.
When the late George Formby sang the line, 'For a Nosey Parker, it’s an interesting job' he was referring to window cleaning, but it is equally applicable to Customs and Excise work. This was varied and interesting in itself, but I always felt that the scope it provided for shoving your oar into other people's trades was its real charm. Purchase Tax had added many new activities to breweries, distilleries, oil refineries, sugar factories and the rest, but Vat brought in nearly everything. Before we got to that stage, however, I had to cope with two problems. Setting up and staffing a new office and lecturing trade bodies about the new tax. As a by-product of Vat there was a large increase in C. and E. staff, I a1so found myself sitting on a selection board for recruits in the Newcastle area.
This board was chaired by a retired Assistant Secretary, backed by three other members, a retired Principal, one of my Surveyors and me. The Principal bad a tendency to act the Devil's advocate and urge the merits of any candidate I didn't fancy, but after the Chairman had mentioned that he was only empowered to pass such as were acceptable to the C. and E. representatives, we got on fine. ;
The applicants were mostly of mature years already in employment, many getting higher salaries than we were offering, but attracted by security or tenure and the hope of promotion. Shades of 1938! Some were quite lyrical about their present jobs and qualifications but few had any idea of the nature of the work they were seeking, most of them had a vague idea that they would be working in Vat, but even this was not true, as they were being recruited into the Department in general, not Vat in particular. We rejected one who sold himself to us so well that we thought he should remain in the sales job he already had, the principal dissenting to no avail. On the other hand, a colliery shot-firer who had never done a clerical job in his life struck us all as the best man we had seen, and we accepted him with alacrity
Women were not excluded but I do not remember any. I do remember one who appeared before a board for promotion from Clerical officer to Executive Officer in the Civil Service generally on which I sat in Edinburgh. It was the end of a very wet week in November and she was our last victim on Friday afternoon. She was a very ordinary looking girl from Cowdenbeath, of all places. We were in two minds until the Chairman asked her the mandatory question about recreations. She hesitated and then said, 'I do a bit of shooting'. Startled, the Chairman asked, “How did that come about” With unanswerable logic, the candidate replied, 'Well we got this puppy one Christmas, and when it grew up, someone said it was a gun-dog, so I bought gun and learned to shoot'. 'What do you shoot we asked. 'Oh, rabbits, hares, birds, anything that comes near enough'. She got in by a landslide.
Concurrently, we found a vacant Government office in Newcastle and set up shop. I also had to face the dread prospect of public speaking.
Although I have always had a tendency to talk too much, as my few friends will testify with tears in their eyes, I had never spoken in public, except to make feeble contributions at Federation councils. I didn't much like the prospect of making my debut on an unpopular subject before a hostile audience. As so often in life, the most daunting prospect turned out to be much less formidable in practice. Nobody was an expert on Vat at first, but I could be confident that my audience knew even less about it than I did. We always pointed out that it was the Government, not the Customs and Excise, who had imposed it, and that we were only required to launch it and make it work. If they didn't like the baby, it was unfair to blame the midwife rather than the father.
We always stressed the point that Vat, like all indirect taxes, was paid by the consumer and registered traders were required to collect it on our behalf. When I told Mike Neville, a freelance broadcaster in Newcastle, that this made him a tax collector rather than a tax-payer, he said that was the nastiest thing anyone had ever called him. Mr. Neville, who was as charming in the flesh as on the screen, was only joking, but many other traders took this point quite seriously and even demanded payment for their services.
At a large meeting of the Chamber of Commerce in a cinema one man said, 'This makes me a part-time tax-collector, and I want to know what I shall get out of it'. In rising to reply, I said in an audible aside, “Well I've been a full time tax collector for more years than I care to remember, and I don't get all that much out of it myself'. This crack was well received, and I went on to point out that there was nothing new in the collection of taxes by traders. We didn't collect beer duty in the pubs. Brewers had always collected it and they had to hand it over on the due date, even if they hadn't sold all the beer concerned by then.
Quarterly Vat returns were timed to allow an interval for bills
to have been paid and in practice most traders got a short period of interest-free use of the money, moreover, there was limited provision for waiving Vat on bad debts. Regular repayment traders made monthly returns to minimise the time for which the money was laid out, so for the first three months we achieved the near impossible feat of running a tax at a loss. Luckily this didn’t last long.
The commonest trade complaint was that, although official checks were to be based on their existing records, they would be forced to incur expense in bringing these up to standard, buying accounting machines and paying accountants. The latter, who stood to make a killing out of Vat anyway, built up these fears for their own ends and one accountant actually complained to me that my officers were taking the bread out of his mouth by explaining the tax to traders for nothing. I said that, as the Board had provided these officers at heavy expense, they wore unlikely to call them off at his behest, and I wouldn't either.
During this period Vat was prominent in the newspapers and on the who1e we got a very good Press. About the only time we ever did. The very first lady Commissioner of Customs and Excise paid us an official visit and was photographed in my office. Mindful of protocol, I carefully explained to the reporter that I was only the Vatman and that the Collector was my boss, having control of all C. and E. matters locally, including Vat. For the photograph the Collector was on one side of the Commissioner and I was on the other. To my horror they printed it showing only the lady and I. If the Collector suspected me of complicity in that he never said so.
A press report of one public meeting referred to me as 'an amiable civil servant'. I gleefully circulated the cutting for the benefit of any of my staff who had mistakenly supposed that I was a miserable sod.
Soon after Newcastle LVO was set up, chances of promotion to Deputy Collector arose at four different places and I applied for all four in order of preference. My fourth choice was Glasgow, so naturally that was the one I got. In a farewell speech, I said that, having launched Vat on Tyneside and seen it on its way, labouring heavily and taking in water at every seam, I was now departing hastily before it sank. Like the man who sold a horse which dropped dead soon after, I could then say, 'How was I to know. It never did that when I had it'.
J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY c12
Chapter 12 Changes and Chances.
I should have been quite contented with my lot in Middleborough if it had remained the cosy little empire that I took over in 1962, but the Department had changed more in ten years than in the previous hundred and the process was still gaining momentum. Locally, the abolition of the Surveyor post in West Hartlepool and a growing workload had increased the Middleborough establishment to three districts. As the senior of the three Surveyors, and the man in possession, I took the Customs, leaving the excise and the refineries to the other two. Thus I had limited myself to the type of work I liked best, but my old status of a single command had gone for ever.
Happily about this time, the Board decided to strengthen outdoor management by increasing the number of Assistant Collectors in the run-up to the introduction of Value Added Tax. Against all the probabilities I was offered a third promotion interview in 1970 and this time I made it. The interview was totally different from the 1967 disaster but identical to the one in 1968. The panel included the H.Q. heads of establishment and senior outdoor men, and the former were prone to put
'hypothetical' questions to candidates about matters which the board actually had in hand. This was one of several factors which favoured London-based Surveyors who were likely to havegot wind of the matter and the fashionable view on it.
One member asked me my opinion of a proposal to do away with signing-on in time-attendance stations, when I warily suggested that it ought to be retained for overtime purposes at least he clearly disagreed with me, but I heard distinct murmurs of approval from the top of the table where the Collector, London
Port was sitting. You can't lose them all. Perhaps in 1970 I had that little bit of luck that everyone needs in either written examinations or interviews. Perhaps they had lowered their sights.
There were two vacancies in Edinburgh and I took one of them, partly because I had lost too much time already and wanted quick promotion, but mainly because it involved a preliminary period of six months in London, where my sister was gravely ill. She died in May, a few days short of her 50th birthday, on the day before I was due to report to the Chief Inspector's Office. I telephoned an acquaintance in that office, and shortly afterwards the Chief himself came on to offer his sympathy and
agree to delay my reporting as necessary. This was happily typica1 of the Customs and Excise. In examining, Ada's papers, I found that the Home Office had been far less accommodating in dealing with her much greater problems, and positively mean
on her terms for part-time attendance, which was all she could manage in her last couple of years.
It had always been accepted that no-one could aspire to the dizzy heights of the Controlling Grade, Assistant Collectors and upwards, without first spending a period in the C.I.'s office to learn the mysteries of H.Q. Some, like missionaries to West
Africa, went in and never came out again, by 1970, this indoor period had been cut to a token six months and shortly afterwards it was abolished altogether.
The office was divided into Divisions, each dealing with a section of the department's work, such as Customs, Spirit Duties, Hydrocarbon Oils, etc. It was staffed by Principal Inspectors, Senior Inspectors and just plain Inspectors like me, the most junior of the lot, and they all wrote the rules and advised the hoard on their various specialities. There was no clerical back-up staff in these divisions so junior Inspectors were downright dogs bodies. It was such a come down for a Surveyor that several had been known to revert rather than endure it indefinitely I was prepared to live with it for six months, which was more than enough time to spend in this Chatham Barracks of the Customs
I was allocated to Customs 1 Division, presided over by a P.I. aptly named Frankie Frost, who later became a Commissioner an almost unheard of feat at the time. One typed reports on subjects or case papers on which the P.I. had written one's
name, with an indication that the report could be typed or should be submitted in manuscript for vetting by him before it was typed. With Frankie it was always the latter. It was 32 years since this rule had been applied to me as a junior clerical officer and I got a bit neurotic about it. I re-wrote everything several times and then it would come back hacked to bits, usually with phases from my own first draft unconsciously reinstated. The most maddening thing was that Frankie always did correct something, no matter how small, which was patently wrong, so it was difficult to write him off as a nitpicker, even behind his back.
On the other hand there was one occasion when we had issued specia1 directions for dealing with a national dock strike and, after it was over, I had to ring up selected Collectors to see how it had worked out. I scribbled notes of their replies during and after each call and passed these rough notes into Frankie
for his comments. He had them printed and circulated without altering a word. If I cou1d bring myself to write this the same way, I might even get it published.
My overall, impression was that if all the staff in the Division had been withdrawn, Mr. Frost could have coped with the work on his own, probably in half the time. The office of Chief Inspector has since been renamed Controller, Outfield and his
staff merged with the rest of H.Q. without any adverse effect on the work of the whole.
In November I finally reached Edinburgh, but the general expansion of Outfield management had produced vacancies at Middleborough and Newcastle. I applied for both and got the latter in January, 1971. The transfer rules were relaxed for I had avoided moving house to Scotland, which would have disrupted my daughter's education, and was able to learn the role of Assistant Collector in familiar surroundings among peop1e I knew and respected. I had on1y a 1imited time to do this, because by 1972 the Government had taken a firm decision to introduce Va1ue Added Tax, and as this involved a large expansion of the Department it was seen as the highroad to success. There was a general rush to get in on it and I became Assistant Collector, V.A.T. to the Newcastle area.
I should have been quite contented with my lot in Middleborough if it had remained the cosy little empire that I took over in 1962, but the Department had changed more in ten years than in the previous hundred and the process was still gaining momentum. Locally, the abolition of the Surveyor post in West Hartlepool and a growing workload had increased the Middleborough establishment to three districts. As the senior of the three Surveyors, and the man in possession, I took the Customs, leaving the excise and the refineries to the other two. Thus I had limited myself to the type of work I liked best, but my old status of a single command had gone for ever.
Happily about this time, the Board decided to strengthen outdoor management by increasing the number of Assistant Collectors in the run-up to the introduction of Value Added Tax. Against all the probabilities I was offered a third promotion interview in 1970 and this time I made it. The interview was totally different from the 1967 disaster but identical to the one in 1968. The panel included the H.Q. heads of establishment and senior outdoor men, and the former were prone to put
'hypothetical' questions to candidates about matters which the board actually had in hand. This was one of several factors which favoured London-based Surveyors who were likely to havegot wind of the matter and the fashionable view on it.
One member asked me my opinion of a proposal to do away with signing-on in time-attendance stations, when I warily suggested that it ought to be retained for overtime purposes at least he clearly disagreed with me, but I heard distinct murmurs of approval from the top of the table where the Collector, London
Port was sitting. You can't lose them all. Perhaps in 1970 I had that little bit of luck that everyone needs in either written examinations or interviews. Perhaps they had lowered their sights.
There were two vacancies in Edinburgh and I took one of them, partly because I had lost too much time already and wanted quick promotion, but mainly because it involved a preliminary period of six months in London, where my sister was gravely ill. She died in May, a few days short of her 50th birthday, on the day before I was due to report to the Chief Inspector's Office. I telephoned an acquaintance in that office, and shortly afterwards the Chief himself came on to offer his sympathy and
agree to delay my reporting as necessary. This was happily typica1 of the Customs and Excise. In examining, Ada's papers, I found that the Home Office had been far less accommodating in dealing with her much greater problems, and positively mean
on her terms for part-time attendance, which was all she could manage in her last couple of years.
It had always been accepted that no-one could aspire to the dizzy heights of the Controlling Grade, Assistant Collectors and upwards, without first spending a period in the C.I.'s office to learn the mysteries of H.Q. Some, like missionaries to West
Africa, went in and never came out again, by 1970, this indoor period had been cut to a token six months and shortly afterwards it was abolished altogether.
The office was divided into Divisions, each dealing with a section of the department's work, such as Customs, Spirit Duties, Hydrocarbon Oils, etc. It was staffed by Principal Inspectors, Senior Inspectors and just plain Inspectors like me, the most junior of the lot, and they all wrote the rules and advised the hoard on their various specialities. There was no clerical back-up staff in these divisions so junior Inspectors were downright dogs bodies. It was such a come down for a Surveyor that several had been known to revert rather than endure it indefinitely I was prepared to live with it for six months, which was more than enough time to spend in this Chatham Barracks of the Customs
I was allocated to Customs 1 Division, presided over by a P.I. aptly named Frankie Frost, who later became a Commissioner an almost unheard of feat at the time. One typed reports on subjects or case papers on which the P.I. had written one's
name, with an indication that the report could be typed or should be submitted in manuscript for vetting by him before it was typed. With Frankie it was always the latter. It was 32 years since this rule had been applied to me as a junior clerical officer and I got a bit neurotic about it. I re-wrote everything several times and then it would come back hacked to bits, usually with phases from my own first draft unconsciously reinstated. The most maddening thing was that Frankie always did correct something, no matter how small, which was patently wrong, so it was difficult to write him off as a nitpicker, even behind his back.
On the other hand there was one occasion when we had issued specia1 directions for dealing with a national dock strike and, after it was over, I had to ring up selected Collectors to see how it had worked out. I scribbled notes of their replies during and after each call and passed these rough notes into Frankie
for his comments. He had them printed and circulated without altering a word. If I cou1d bring myself to write this the same way, I might even get it published.
My overall, impression was that if all the staff in the Division had been withdrawn, Mr. Frost could have coped with the work on his own, probably in half the time. The office of Chief Inspector has since been renamed Controller, Outfield and his
staff merged with the rest of H.Q. without any adverse effect on the work of the whole.
In November I finally reached Edinburgh, but the general expansion of Outfield management had produced vacancies at Middleborough and Newcastle. I applied for both and got the latter in January, 1971. The transfer rules were relaxed for I had avoided moving house to Scotland, which would have disrupted my daughter's education, and was able to learn the role of Assistant Collector in familiar surroundings among peop1e I knew and respected. I had on1y a 1imited time to do this, because by 1972 the Government had taken a firm decision to introduce Va1ue Added Tax, and as this involved a large expansion of the Department it was seen as the highroad to success. There was a general rush to get in on it and I became Assistant Collector, V.A.T. to the Newcastle area.
J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY c11
Chapter 11 – Trials and Tribulations.
My son was ten and my daughter five when we moved to Middleborough, so both of them had a large slice of their education in that area. Both proved to be reasonably intelligent and Christopher showed a fair amount of athletic ability, the last thing I should have expected from any son of mine. Ann had a good deal of artistic skill from quite an early age, which was not quite so unexpected, but very pleasing just the same.
My wife Margaret enjoyed pretty good health and, once she had recovered from the shock of her first visit, when she came by train via such beauty spots as Cargo Fleet, settled into Teesside and made friends with her usual ease.
When I, was at Swanley, the nurse had terrified my mother by repeatedly describing me as a very delicate boy. I wasn't really delicate, I could have been better described as weedy. I never looked very robust, but, on the other hand, I was rarely even slightly ill. No medical examination had ever found anything wrong with me and up to the mid-sixties I had served nearly 30 years in the Civil Service and never taken a day's sick leave.
About 1964, a friend and colleague of my age collapsed and died of a coronary and this got to me much more than it ought to have done. I had a morbid fear of sudden death. After medical advice and sympathy, I gradually snapped out of it, and symptoms
1ike dizzy spells disappeared.
In 1966, they recurred and became worse, but having made a fool of myself before I tried to ignore them. Finally, in January, 1967, which was to prove a traumatic year for me, I was smitten with severe stomach pains and removed to hospital. The fact
that I had just passed the age at which my father had died of Stomach Trouble was not lost on me. I was scared stiff, but it was not 1929, and a very capable consultant surgeon named Mr Fordyce soon diagnosed diverticulitis, which is apparently due to a weakness in the wall of an internal vessel, leading to
inflammation and pain. It is usually curable without surgery and was in my case. However I remained patently unwell, my temperature was up and they didn't 1ike the look of my blood.
Finally Mr. Fordyce decided that I had a pelvic abscess, a theory which he verified by opening me up and 'draining it off'.
I was in hospital, for the first time in my life, for four weeks and was amazed how quickly I became institutionalised. I must have a flair for it. Middleborough General had started life as a workhouse and still looked like one. There was a sort of pecking order in the men's surgical ward based on the nature of one's operation, Men who had been practically disemboweled were top of the heap, while an unfortunate Scottish steel erector in the next bed to me, who on1y had piles, was more a figure of fun. I ranked somewhere between these two extremes.
I expected the nurses, who were mostly teenagers, to think me as o1d as the hills, but I was actually 20 years or more younger than most surgical patients and we got on fine. The bed was made up by two nurses each morning, with me still in it, and they usually discussed last night's adventures across me. If I ventured to join in the conversation they didn't mind, but they looked startled, as if the bed itself had spoken. My schooldays had left me in awe of nursing sisters and schoolmasters but the ward-sister was quite young and not very intimidating. As I now have a niece who is a nursing sister and my son is a schoolmaster, the phobia has 1arge1y worn off.
My maiden aunt, in her middle 70's, was visibly failing, and my sister was admitted to hospita1 in London in June with a lump in her breast. She had a mastectomy from which she never fully recovered. Auntie Ada died in 1968 and my sister in 1970.
Thus my maternal grandmother, my mother and my sister had fallen victims to cancer and I was left with no blood relations in the world except my own two chi1dren.
In October 1967, I had my first interview for promotion to Assistant Collector and failed the greatest single disappointment of my life. It was not the end of the line, as each Surveyor normally had two interviews and I actually had my second in 1968, and was rejected again. In all probability this second failure meant that I would see out my service as a Surveyor, but it didn't depress me nearly so much as the first one had. This was partly because I knew I had blown it in 1967and not done myself justice, whereas in 1968 I gave it my best shot and if that wasn't good enough there was no help for it. But mainly, I knew that whatever happened to then subsequently,Surveyors rejected on the first interview were not regarded as in the front rank. We all kid ourselves that we are.
In November 1967, I found myself back in Middleborough GeneralHospital. One Thursday I got stomach pains much worse than ever before. No doubt thinking it was a recurrence of diverticulitis my doctor left me overnight. I awoke about midnight in agony which soon afterwards seemed to ease and I slept till 6am. I woke to pain just as intense as before but,ominously as I realised later, less concentrated in the one place. I was taken in and Mr. Fordyce decided to make an exploratory operation, which disclosed a burst and gangrenous appendix.
My recollection of the next few days is hazy. Mr Fordyce had a way of looking into the ward at odd times, which re-assured the patients as much as it panicked the nurses, and I think it must have been on Saturday evening that he was checking me over. From behind the curtain a local church choir struck up a lively hymn and he offered to send them away if I found it disturbing. I said I didn't really feel well enough to quarrel with the church, implying that if he failed they were my only hope. He chuckled re-assuringly and actually I recovered very quickly.
It is interesting to compare my approach to my first operation and this second one. In January I was terrified by the prospect of the operation itself. In November I thought I was dying andknew I cou1dn't last long as I was so I cou1dn't get to the
theatre quickly enough. I don't remember being frightened at all; the pain left no room for that. I didn't realise how close a shave I had had until more than a week later. When I was admitted I recognised one of the nurses, but didn't see her again until the following Monday week when she returned from leave. About Wednesday she turned to me and said, 'I've justrecognised you. You were brought in last Friday week. You were bad'. When I had digested this, I said, 'Until you recognised
me, what did you think had become of that chap?’ She shrugged.
The hospital was in process of modernisation and half the surgical ward had already been completely refurbished. Needless to say, I was in the other half. That is the kind of luck I have with things that don't really matter.
There was an older and more traditional-type sister in charge, waging a running battle with both the staff nurses and practically everybody else. A young and rather slap-happy student nurse was her favourite target. One morning, the latter did not turn up, having overslept in the Nurses Home which was on the premises. Duly roused out, she arrived ten minutes later, very flustered. Sister said, 'Have you had any breakfast?. Oh, no, Sister, I came straight over. Well get some tea in the
kitchen and make yourself some toast'. Then, catching my eye, Sister said, 'Can't have these silly girls fainting all over the place'. I was not deceived; she was about as tough as amother hen. Months later I saw her in the street and she looked
just the same, only smaller.
Apart from curing my physical ailments, two spells in hospital did a lot to give me a better-balanced mental outlook. Each time there were a number of old men there who were not really surgical cases any more, but had nowhere else to go until they
died. I wondered why I had ever been afraid of sudden death; gradual death is far worse.
Another patient in for a prostate operation, had only one 1eg, having lost the other in 1916 in the trenches. He was one of a machinegun detachment hit by a shell between the lines and had lived about a week, drinking the water out of the cooling
jackets of the guns, until he was found and brought in. When someone said, 'How awful', he replied, 'I was the lucky one. The others were all killed'. He discouraged his wife from making too many visits because their son had died in the hospital the year before and 'it upset her', he didn't say how much it upset
him. I never met a more contented man.
Never having done much more than pay lip-service to the northern custom of seeing the New Year in, I sat up on the 31st December to see the old one out, feeling that it was the worst year I had ever lived through. In retrospect the only real tragedy
was the start of Ada's fatal illness. As far as I was concerned, my Guardian Ange1 had never done better. But for the diverticulitis which put me in hospital, I suppose the pelvic abscess would have remained undetected until it burst. If Mr.
Fordyce had decided to wait another day or so, the appendicitis might well have been fatal. As to my career, that seemed quite a small matter by comparison. Discussing the period with my son Christopher years later I said, 'In the space of about 12
months, I had two promotion interviews and failed both. I also had two serious operations and survived them both' Chris, who plays a lot of tennis.rep1ied, 'As they say, Dad, you have to win the big points’.
Throughout 1968 and 1969, I applied myself to running my district and coping with changes and challenges as they arose. Convinced that I should get no further, I was determined not to lose the pleasure of what I had by brooding on what might have been. If the Board thought I was only fitted to be a Surveyor, I would be the best one they ever passed over. They would never notice, of course, but I would, and you have to live with yourself. I had seen people who, denied promotion, p1ayed out time with minimal effort, which I regarded as downright dishonest. It also made them thorough1y miserab1e.
My son was ten and my daughter five when we moved to Middleborough, so both of them had a large slice of their education in that area. Both proved to be reasonably intelligent and Christopher showed a fair amount of athletic ability, the last thing I should have expected from any son of mine. Ann had a good deal of artistic skill from quite an early age, which was not quite so unexpected, but very pleasing just the same.
My wife Margaret enjoyed pretty good health and, once she had recovered from the shock of her first visit, when she came by train via such beauty spots as Cargo Fleet, settled into Teesside and made friends with her usual ease.
When I, was at Swanley, the nurse had terrified my mother by repeatedly describing me as a very delicate boy. I wasn't really delicate, I could have been better described as weedy. I never looked very robust, but, on the other hand, I was rarely even slightly ill. No medical examination had ever found anything wrong with me and up to the mid-sixties I had served nearly 30 years in the Civil Service and never taken a day's sick leave.
About 1964, a friend and colleague of my age collapsed and died of a coronary and this got to me much more than it ought to have done. I had a morbid fear of sudden death. After medical advice and sympathy, I gradually snapped out of it, and symptoms
1ike dizzy spells disappeared.
In 1966, they recurred and became worse, but having made a fool of myself before I tried to ignore them. Finally, in January, 1967, which was to prove a traumatic year for me, I was smitten with severe stomach pains and removed to hospital. The fact
that I had just passed the age at which my father had died of Stomach Trouble was not lost on me. I was scared stiff, but it was not 1929, and a very capable consultant surgeon named Mr Fordyce soon diagnosed diverticulitis, which is apparently due to a weakness in the wall of an internal vessel, leading to
inflammation and pain. It is usually curable without surgery and was in my case. However I remained patently unwell, my temperature was up and they didn't 1ike the look of my blood.
Finally Mr. Fordyce decided that I had a pelvic abscess, a theory which he verified by opening me up and 'draining it off'.
I was in hospital, for the first time in my life, for four weeks and was amazed how quickly I became institutionalised. I must have a flair for it. Middleborough General had started life as a workhouse and still looked like one. There was a sort of pecking order in the men's surgical ward based on the nature of one's operation, Men who had been practically disemboweled were top of the heap, while an unfortunate Scottish steel erector in the next bed to me, who on1y had piles, was more a figure of fun. I ranked somewhere between these two extremes.
I expected the nurses, who were mostly teenagers, to think me as o1d as the hills, but I was actually 20 years or more younger than most surgical patients and we got on fine. The bed was made up by two nurses each morning, with me still in it, and they usually discussed last night's adventures across me. If I ventured to join in the conversation they didn't mind, but they looked startled, as if the bed itself had spoken. My schooldays had left me in awe of nursing sisters and schoolmasters but the ward-sister was quite young and not very intimidating. As I now have a niece who is a nursing sister and my son is a schoolmaster, the phobia has 1arge1y worn off.
My maiden aunt, in her middle 70's, was visibly failing, and my sister was admitted to hospita1 in London in June with a lump in her breast. She had a mastectomy from which she never fully recovered. Auntie Ada died in 1968 and my sister in 1970.
Thus my maternal grandmother, my mother and my sister had fallen victims to cancer and I was left with no blood relations in the world except my own two chi1dren.
In October 1967, I had my first interview for promotion to Assistant Collector and failed the greatest single disappointment of my life. It was not the end of the line, as each Surveyor normally had two interviews and I actually had my second in 1968, and was rejected again. In all probability this second failure meant that I would see out my service as a Surveyor, but it didn't depress me nearly so much as the first one had. This was partly because I knew I had blown it in 1967and not done myself justice, whereas in 1968 I gave it my best shot and if that wasn't good enough there was no help for it. But mainly, I knew that whatever happened to then subsequently,Surveyors rejected on the first interview were not regarded as in the front rank. We all kid ourselves that we are.
In November 1967, I found myself back in Middleborough GeneralHospital. One Thursday I got stomach pains much worse than ever before. No doubt thinking it was a recurrence of diverticulitis my doctor left me overnight. I awoke about midnight in agony which soon afterwards seemed to ease and I slept till 6am. I woke to pain just as intense as before but,ominously as I realised later, less concentrated in the one place. I was taken in and Mr. Fordyce decided to make an exploratory operation, which disclosed a burst and gangrenous appendix.
My recollection of the next few days is hazy. Mr Fordyce had a way of looking into the ward at odd times, which re-assured the patients as much as it panicked the nurses, and I think it must have been on Saturday evening that he was checking me over. From behind the curtain a local church choir struck up a lively hymn and he offered to send them away if I found it disturbing. I said I didn't really feel well enough to quarrel with the church, implying that if he failed they were my only hope. He chuckled re-assuringly and actually I recovered very quickly.
It is interesting to compare my approach to my first operation and this second one. In January I was terrified by the prospect of the operation itself. In November I thought I was dying andknew I cou1dn't last long as I was so I cou1dn't get to the
theatre quickly enough. I don't remember being frightened at all; the pain left no room for that. I didn't realise how close a shave I had had until more than a week later. When I was admitted I recognised one of the nurses, but didn't see her again until the following Monday week when she returned from leave. About Wednesday she turned to me and said, 'I've justrecognised you. You were brought in last Friday week. You were bad'. When I had digested this, I said, 'Until you recognised
me, what did you think had become of that chap?’ She shrugged.
The hospital was in process of modernisation and half the surgical ward had already been completely refurbished. Needless to say, I was in the other half. That is the kind of luck I have with things that don't really matter.
There was an older and more traditional-type sister in charge, waging a running battle with both the staff nurses and practically everybody else. A young and rather slap-happy student nurse was her favourite target. One morning, the latter did not turn up, having overslept in the Nurses Home which was on the premises. Duly roused out, she arrived ten minutes later, very flustered. Sister said, 'Have you had any breakfast?. Oh, no, Sister, I came straight over. Well get some tea in the
kitchen and make yourself some toast'. Then, catching my eye, Sister said, 'Can't have these silly girls fainting all over the place'. I was not deceived; she was about as tough as amother hen. Months later I saw her in the street and she looked
just the same, only smaller.
Apart from curing my physical ailments, two spells in hospital did a lot to give me a better-balanced mental outlook. Each time there were a number of old men there who were not really surgical cases any more, but had nowhere else to go until they
died. I wondered why I had ever been afraid of sudden death; gradual death is far worse.
Another patient in for a prostate operation, had only one 1eg, having lost the other in 1916 in the trenches. He was one of a machinegun detachment hit by a shell between the lines and had lived about a week, drinking the water out of the cooling
jackets of the guns, until he was found and brought in. When someone said, 'How awful', he replied, 'I was the lucky one. The others were all killed'. He discouraged his wife from making too many visits because their son had died in the hospital the year before and 'it upset her', he didn't say how much it upset
him. I never met a more contented man.
Never having done much more than pay lip-service to the northern custom of seeing the New Year in, I sat up on the 31st December to see the old one out, feeling that it was the worst year I had ever lived through. In retrospect the only real tragedy
was the start of Ada's fatal illness. As far as I was concerned, my Guardian Ange1 had never done better. But for the diverticulitis which put me in hospital, I suppose the pelvic abscess would have remained undetected until it burst. If Mr.
Fordyce had decided to wait another day or so, the appendicitis might well have been fatal. As to my career, that seemed quite a small matter by comparison. Discussing the period with my son Christopher years later I said, 'In the space of about 12
months, I had two promotion interviews and failed both. I also had two serious operations and survived them both' Chris, who plays a lot of tennis.rep1ied, 'As they say, Dad, you have to win the big points’.
Throughout 1968 and 1969, I applied myself to running my district and coping with changes and challenges as they arose. Convinced that I should get no further, I was determined not to lose the pleasure of what I had by brooding on what might have been. If the Board thought I was only fitted to be a Surveyor, I would be the best one they ever passed over. They would never notice, of course, but I would, and you have to live with yourself. I had seen people who, denied promotion, p1ayed out time with minimal effort, which I regarded as downright dishonest. It also made them thorough1y miserab1e.
J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY c10
Chapter 10. Unattached Surveyor.
Before one could be trusted on the road as an Unattached Survey it was necessary to receive a week of theoretical instruction in the Surveyor's Branch in London, followed by three weeks 'assisting' an experienced Excise Surveyor and another three with a Customs man. These six weeks were, of course, practical instruction, which was of more value than any amount of classroom stuff. The only point I remember which we learnt in London was that travelling expenses and subsistence allowances were even more complicated for U/Surveyors than they were for U/0's.
I did my excise stint with a Newcastle Surveyor whom I already knew quite well. Surveyors did not keep books, they mere1y checked those kept by Officers, but they did have a quarterly diary in which they recorded their activities, taking care
to use a time-honoured form of jargon. When I noted an inspection I had made 'Satisfied' the Surveyor mildly corrected me saying ‘Customs officers are 'satisfied'. Excise Surveyors find things regular'.
Just as ratings in the Navy professed to despise their equals in other branches of the service, so the civilian Outdoor Service looked down on the uniformed Waterguard in the Customs and both hated the Indoor Staff and the board, using that term for the entire headquarters set-up. The Customs Surveyor in Hu11 who indoctrinated me suffered from this complaint in its most virulent form. The only people for whom he had any respect were other Landing and Shipping Surveyors. He had little use for the Excise side of the Outdoor, was at loggerheads with the Collector, and especially with the Collector's clerk, and disliked the Waterguard. As my immediate predecessors had all been promoted Excise officers and I had been a Customs Landing officer tending to share his views, he regarded me as almost human and we got on famously.
The only reason he ever gave for his antipathy for the Waterguard was that a new young A.P.0. had once questioned his identity in the docks. If the Surveyor had simply said who he was the thing would have passed off with a laugh, but he made quite a fuss about it. Against that he himself told me that once when he returned from a package ho1iday via a busy airport, the P.O. there, learning that he was a Surveyor, gave VIP treatment not only to him but to the whole coach load he was with, thus making him the hero of the hour. Even so, he continued to sneer at the Waterguard. I think he did it to keep up a long-standing tradition rather than from any real feeling in the matter.
After being gently broken in, so to speak, U/Surveyors moved about the country at the behest of an appointer in the Surveyor’s Branch and were not attached to any one Collection. They usually had a fair spread of work and location relieving for leave and sickness mainly in three-week spells for the first few months.
After that they were kept closer to their homes, subject to the exigencies of the service.
I spent most of my three years of unattachment in or around Newcastle, but one of my contemporaries whose home was in Birmingham was seldom or never there. The appointer always protested that he was keen to keep people in their home areas, which cost less than having them in distant hotels of course, but few believed him. Some thought he deliberately sent them to far-flung places but a story I heard suggested otherwise. A man who specially asked to be in Southampton when his wife was due to give birth, was told that there was nothing going there, but he was being sent to Northampton as the next best thing.
When that appointer retired the U/Surveyors had a whip round and bought him an atlas.
I entered on my travels with some trepidation and visions of whole districts of very senior officers old enough to be my father, resenting having been passed over for promotion and ready to take it out on me. None of them ever did. There were really not many such officers about and most of them were charmingly old-fashioned gentlemen who had never wanted promotion anyway. Even the few who were awkward with their regular Surveyors were rarely so with young upstarts like me. They would have regarded getting the better of an unattached Surveyor as like shooting a sitting bird, I suppose.
My first trip was to Montrose, where much had changed in 11 years since the drowsy days of 1948. Then it was Inverness where my district included both Brackla and Dalwhinnie. After that in Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool, I learned how limited my knowledge of the Department really was. More importantly, I realised how careful one had to be in exercising even limited authority, a far-cry from my power-drunk days as a P.O. boy at Holbrook.
Once I was considered to be sufficiently experienced I became virtually re1ief Surveyor for Newcastle Collection, where I was more at ease with the work, but had to be even more careful in my dealings with erstwhile fellow officers.
Unattached Surveyors relieving for three week leave spells did not really get into the long-term overall responsibilities of the grade and it will be convenient to consider surveyor duties in some detail as they affected me after I was fixed. Meantime, I had a fairly easy ride on the day-to day stuff and was in no hurry to seek fixity. When it was becoming evitable towards the end of 1961, I was resigned to moving home to Scotland when I discovered by chance that Middlesbrough District in Newcastle Collection was falling vacant in 1962. It was not attractive enough to induce any fixed Surveyor to transfer and I was appointed to it in April of that year. Thus the home removal was reduced to about 40 miles and I remained under the familiar, and tolerant, Newcastle management. Oddly enough, Middlesbrough was about the only Newcastle district which I had missed while unattached, so, work wise, it was completely new ground.
b} Surveyor - Fixed.
Having obtained a fixed post as an Officer in my home Collection was an achievement in itself, and to have repeated the trick at Surveyor level was little short of miraculous. The domestic upheaval of moving house was offset by the decided advantage of having a District out of the Collector's residence, which was the nearest I got to an independent command at any level in the Customs and Excise. It follows that I should have jumped at the chance of Middlesbrough District regardless of the nature of its work but, as it happened, there was no cause for complaint on that score either.
In contrast to the 1imited range of my only fixed station as an officer, my only fixed district as a Surveyor covered an unusually wide span of work. Based on a Custom House, I had a sub-office manned by indoor staff; three general Excise
stations covering much of North Yorkshire and a three-officer landing station covering the Tees. There was also one officer stationed in the ICI installation at Wilton. The Waterguard had a separate establishment in Middlesbrough Docks under an
Assistant Waterguard Superintendent, who was roughly equal to me in rank. However, the surveyor was generally regarded as the man in charge of the area and I enjoyed this status immensely. During my eight years there, further variety was provided by continual expansion in the trade of the area and reorganisation in the Department.
Middlesbrough itself was not a very attractive town, but its southern edge where we lived abutted on rural North Yorkshire and was delightful. The Custom House was in the centre of the original planned area, built up around 1840 and thoroughly run down by 1962. The town had developed away from it and it was a s1u m, 1iterally on the wrong side of the tracks. The building had been bought outright by the Crown in 1884 for £4,000 and we must have spent more than that on replacement windows whi1e I was there. The Ministry of Works had a running contract with a local glazier and we simply rang him up most mornings to tell him how many panes of glass to bring. One Monday it was 28 and I don't suppose any of them lasted long enough for the putty to set.
The Custom house yard was often littered with the debris of weekend battles fought by rival gangs of children on the roof. Even so we were luckier than the Church of England church nearby which was vandalised so badly that it had to be demolished. An adjacent Roman Catholic cathedral never got a scratch, but I think this was less due to religious fervour than to the presence of a number of young and muscular priests who lived on the premises.
Soon after my arrival I saw an interview on T.V. in which a local pensioner complained bitterly about being harassed by packs of marauding dogs in North Street where the Custom House stood. Sympathising with him, the interviewer said,’ and think of the danger to children' 'Oh no' said the o1d chap 'The dogs are afraid of the children'. Animals are more intelligent than you might think.
Over the years, the sea-borne trade of the Tees had shifted down river as ships got bigger and land transport more efficient. Sailing ships had worked their way laboriously up the winding river to the ancient towns of Yarm and Stockton, because it was more economical to spend a fortnight doing this, than to discharge cargo nearer the mouth and move it inland piecemeal using horse-drawn wagons. The development of the steel industry in the early 1800's led to the birth of Middlesbrough, and the coming of the railways, pioneered in the north east of England, tipped the balance in favour of landing goods there rather than higher up. When I went there in 1962 virtually all imports and exports centred on Middlesbrough. By the time I left in 1970 much of the trade had moved another 10 miles downstream to Teesport near the mouth of the river.
Incidentally, the use of the Tees by really large vessels, mainly tankers and bulk carriers, was only made possibly by the removal of a rock ledge which had restricted the depth and width of the channel, using powerful screw dredgers which broke up the rock with a huge drill and sucked up the debris. Before these came into use it had been reckoned that the use of explosives might cause Redcar to fall into the sea. Opinion was divided on the desirability of this. Personally, 1 never liked Redcar, a rather seedy seaside resort, known locally as Middlesbrough-on-Sea.
First in 1ine to deal with the Customs aspects of the trade, I had my Sub Office, manned by 4 or 5 clerks under a Departmental Clerical Officer (DHCO). This grade, which has now been phased out, was purely supervisory, and the incumbent, whom I shall call Reggie because that was his name, was a bit of an anachronism himself. The traditional Hostility between outdoor and indoor was well maintained and the landing officers gleefully informed me that Reggie was wont to refer to me as his new outdoor man when talking to outsiders. I laughed this off, pointing out that Reggie and I both know who was in charge of whom and so did they. In the naval tradition of respect for experience and seniority as well as rank, I said that I expected officers young enough to be Reggie's sons to make allowances for him to avoid any further friction. I never heard any more of it.
Officers were not bound to accept the Surveyor's view of things like that, all the while they carried out their duties efficiently and their promotion was by written examination.
When the examination was abolished and promotion was by selection based on annual reports, the Surveyor became Reporting Officer for all members of the Officer Grade, so his position was enormously strengthened. All the officers at Middlesbrough, both Customs and Excise, were good or better and indeed they all became Surveyors by selection in the fullness of time.
Although regarded as a Customs man, I had sufficient experience of the Excise side to cope with that part of the district, and Betting Duty, which became a significant item, was introduced in the mid-sixties so we all started fair on that but I had very little knowledge of oil refineries and the petrol trade generally in 1962, so the single-officer station in the ICI complex at Wilton was my biggest challenge.
ICI had two establishments on Teesside. The one at Billingham was laid to West Hartlepool for Customs purposes, and I had seen it from time to time when I was unattached. It was not one installation but a kind of trading estate on which there
were a number of plants all belonging to the various divisions of ICI. Official interest was largely confined to the use of hydrocarbon oils for the production of chemicals, plastics and man-made fibres. Large quantities of petrol and diesel oil
were produced as by-products and the duty involved ran into millions of pounds. Billingham was festooned with pipelines which ran overhead on gantries, making the whole area permanently wet, gloomy and smelly. All these pipes seemed to drip 1iquids on to the roads beneath and if any fell on you, you could only hope it was something harmless, like sewage, for example.
Wilton was a more recent set-up and its pipelines were laid in open trenches between the roadways. The whole effect was much less depressing but the atmosphere w as probab1y equally obnoxious. I once admired the tulips growing around the officer's office, but he told me that the gardeners had planted them out the day before and they, the tulips not the gardeners, would be dead by the end of the week.
Having had previous experience of both Customs Landing and Shipping and General Excise work, I soon settled into the role of supervisor rather than worker in these fields and had few problems, either below or above, so to speak. Sub Office functions were so closely allied to the outdoor Customs side that, having established a good working relationship with Reggie, I felt reasonably secure on that front too. The deadly ICI hydrocarbon oils sector was another matter altogether, not only because I knew 1ess about it but because it was more complicated and the money at stake was colossal. The risks to the revenue and the Surveyor's career were about equal. He was in the same position as the captain of a ship. If it sank it was his fault, whatever the circumstances. It used to be said that Naval ships' captains, having signed for then, preferred to go down with them rather than pay for them. I was safe from that, at least.
In 1962 the rate of duty on imported hydrocarbon oi1s, petro1, diesel oil etc. was 2/9 a gallon. 0n indigenous oil produced from shale and coal it was 1/6. These duties were generally only charged when the oil was delivered for road fuel, and all oils used in an approved refinery were duty-free. Moreover, as imported oils were thus relieved of the duty of 2/9 indigenous oils so used attracted an allowance of 1/3 a gallon to maintain the advantage of using home-produced oils. Millions of gallons of both kinds of oil were swilling around Billingham and Wilton all the time, so any pilferage or irregular deliveries amounted to smuggling. Natural losses by evaporation from storage tanks and in processing ran into tens of thousands of gallons monthly, so control based on stocks was clearly hopeless.
ICI employees parked their cars inside the premises and were thus able to steal small quantities of petrol by putting it in their tanks and avoiding the risk of taking cans through the gates. Offenders caught were fined by the revenue and sacked or suspended by the company. Moreover, the vehicles concerned were usually seized by the Customs and only returned on payment of a further penalty based on the duty involved in the offence. This action was covered by an ancient law which empowered the department to seize any vehicle used to convey smuggled goods, under which the Customs used to seize and destroy the carts used to convey goods from the beach in the good old days. As these carts had often been forcibly 'borrowed' from local farmers, the practice didn't do much for the Department's image.
Incidentally, cars used to smuggle spirits, tobacco etc. through the docks are still frequently seized outright and sold on behalf of the revenue, even where the smuggler is not the owner. A good example of the Draconian powers of officers which the Board, and Surveyors, were constantly reminding their headstrong juniors to use with restraint, lest they should be lost.
I was aware that a much more serious fraud had been discovered at Billingham in 1960. Road fuel was charged with duty at the point where it left the bonded refinery. ICI did not sell petrol under their own brand at that time. It was sold, mostly to Shell, and at the Road Filling Station there were Shell checkers to see that the full quantities invoiced were loaded and ICI, men to see that they were not exceeded. Duty was charged on the declared loaded gallonage and officers working on the installation made physical spot checks by dipping the tankers. Filling was direct from huge storage tanks subject to natural loss by evaporation, so no accurate check on them was feasib1e, but we felt the system was as safe as we could make it.
Most tankers had five separate compartments and if due to make deliveries to five garages the appropriate quantity was loaded on the basis of one compartment for each. This avoided the need to measure by dipping at the point of delivery. In part-loaded tankers the bow compartment was always left empty to keep the weight on the back wheels of the vehicle. Sometime, probably soon after the war when petrol was rationed, someone hit on the idea of putting 100 gallons in the 'empty' compartment of such tankers in the hope that, even if it were spot checked the officer would accept that it was empty and not dip it. With the connivance of checkers and drivers it worked like a charm for years.
The drivers sold the petrol to any garage to which they were makings legal delivery for £12.10s and gave £5 to the checker at Billingham on their next visit. I believe Shell drivers competed to get put on the Billingham run,which was like being on a permanent bonus.
In 1960, an anonymous letter was received by the Customs from one who complained that a Shell garage near his own was dealing in cheap petrol to the detriment of his own trade. The writer had clearly heeded the old saying 'If you hear of a good racket, get in on it. If you can't get in on it, bust it up' T h e Customs do not despise anonymous letters; they check them out. An Investigation branch officer showed the letter to a Stockton detective who speedily traced the writer and put him to the question. The next illicit delivery was intercepted, the tanker was seized and the driver arrested. Apart from this one case, there was no evidence of theft, as no one could say how much, if any, was missing, but then everyone questioned began to talk.
I myself, officiating for the Surveyor, West Hartlepool, went to Billingham with the police and the I.E. officer. We arrested an ICI checker and I heard him questioned at the Police Station. The police approach was quite fair, with no attempt to intimidate, but very effective. The Inspector said that he knew the thefts had been going on for years, but now it was all over and everything was bound to come out. If the accused understated his part in it, he would face further separate charges later when all was known. The accused said 'I've only been on this job for three months. Before me, X was on it for years', uniformed men who had been called in as the case grew were sent to arrest X, and so it went on.
Eventually three checkers, a dozen or more drivers and as many garage-owners pled guilty to theft and receiving a total of some 10,000 gallons of petrol. The drivers and garage-owners were fined and the checkers imprisoned. On the assumption that
the thefts had extended over at least ten years, the C. and E. calculated a loss to the revenue of some £12,000, on 100,000 gallons, and the Board demanded this sum from ICI. The latter resisted on the grounds that only 10,000 gallons had been
admitted in court, but the Collector, Newcastle pointed out that natural losses of about 50,000 gallons a month over the ten years had been written off only because the officer was 'satisfied that no part of the loss had gone into home use' .
As it was now clear that some part of it, albeit a very small part, had been so used, he threatened to charge the lot if there was any further argument. There wasn't, and the Board rubbed it in by fining the company £500 'to mark the irregularity'.
As it happened Wilton did not make deliveries of petrol for road fuel. Imported crude oil and indigenous benzene were
processed into non-oils such as ethylene gas and other things
all the way down the line to in man-made fibres. At the point where it ceased to be hydrocarbon oil, the imported material was written off as having been used duty-free in an approved
refinery. The indigenous oils qualified for the allowance of
1/3 a gallon at the same point. The Department actually charged the Excise duty of 1/6 a gallon on benzene received at Wilton and paid 2/9 on each gallon shown to have been converted to non-oil, and I soon learned that this complication had led to disaster some years before.
In one of the processes applied gave a volumetric increase of some 20%, and in error the 1/6 had been paid only on the quantity originally received and the 2/9 on that quantity plus 20%. One of my predecessors had spotted this and had had great difficulty in convincing the Board that it had really happened. When they were convinced they assessed the loss to the revenue at some £400000 and finally recovered about £250000 from ICI.
The Surveyor, who should really have been rewarded, moved south soon after and was never promoted. I suppose the board didn't exactly blame him, but any promotion panel would only have heard of him in connection with this awful clanger, whether he personally dropped it or not. If anything as dire as this occurred during my time at Middlesbrough it remained undiscovered.
Whi1e the Surveyor's duties were mainly supervisory, reporting on app1ications for approvals of plant, storage tanks and the like were laid to him, and he was also heavily involved in revenue concessions. The amount of this work generated by ICI, far exceeded that arising in the rest of the district, so although that firm's affairs occupied only one of the seven officers, they took up a disproportionate amount of my time. ICI, were highly skilled at getting the best out of the law and invariably claimed that their proposals were in the national interest. They frequently were, but at other times they could be positively devious.
Hydrocarbon oil could be used duty-free in approved refineries
to produce heat, light and power but the Wilton complex included both such refineries and other plants and a coal-fired power station supplied the lot. I.C.I, said they proposed to convert part of the power station to oil-firing and an elaborate scheme to segregate energy thus produced and channel it to approved refineries was worked out.
The Board finally agreed to allow the use of duty-free oil, subject to the prior alteration of the plant to achieve this segregation. ICI, did not make the alterations, so the scheme never operated. In reply to official enquiries, the firm said that they h a d negotiated a new contract with the Coal Board and the entire power station would remain coal-fired for the time being. It probably still is. Clearly duty-free oil was cheaper than coal, whereas duty-paid oil was dearer, and ICI had secured the Customs concession only to help them beat down the price of coal. We had been used.
While I was coping as best I might with these known hazards and the fact that Teesside, as a rapidly expanding area, was constantly understaffed, several new problems were invented for my benefit between 1962 and 1967.
On the Customs side, a survey company based itself on
Middlesbrough and began exploring the North Sea for likely spots to drill for oil. This involved the use of much expensive imported equipment which they naturally expected to be duty-free as it was not for use ashore. On the other hand, it was not being exported to any foreign country either and the existing regulations simply did not cover it. The problem was finally solved by the Continental Shelf Act in the late sixties, but until then the Department floundered among all kinds of expedients too humourous to mention.
A small container terminal was opened at Teesport; one example of a general move towards containerisation. During the postwar years there were several dock strikes and, where troops were brought in, they sweated to shift half the tonnage handled by
the regular men. This was no surprise to anyone like me, who had often marvelled at the way a docker of about 70 could balance a half-ton case on a two-wheeled barrow. As dockers were frequently paid by tonnage and containers replaced the barrow with a steel box holding 40 tons, which was swung aboard or ashore by a crane while an 8-man gang watched on, one would have expected dockers to we1come containers as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Actually the welcome was muted, to say the least.
The men had the usual resistance to innovation and their unions realised that, in the 1ong run, redundancies w ere in the wind. The immediate effect was to cut down the casual pilfering which had always been a feature of the docks, and to simplify revenue control of high-risk items such as whisky for export. Steel containers had double doors at one end which could be secured by Crown locks which made undetected theft difficult. Moreover, they could be stacked door-end to door-end in the compound making access impossible without using either the travelling hoist to move them apart, or heavy metal-cutting equipment to cut them open.
Dockers' unions have had a very bad Press over the years and this is not surprising in view of some of their antics. A proposal to remove some 20 dockers from the labour force caused a strike in London, although none of the 20 had done days work for years, all of them were over 70 years of age and some were over 8O. Another strike was in protest at police investigations into wholesale theft of sides of meat. To the public, this looked perilously close to striking for the right to steal.
On Teesside, the dockers were required to work at West Hartlepool when necessary; Men detailed for this usually refused to go and were laid off Monday to Wednesday of the following week. The others came out in sympathy and they all went back on Thursday and worked through Saturday and Sunday. With weekend overtime rates they regularly made more money for the four days than they would have got for the normal Monday to Friday. Incidentally, so did the Landing Officers.
It is fair to add that the local boss of the Transport and General Workers Union was a very reasonable and practical man, named Barney Ward. Faced with a rotting cargo of bones in a damaged ship, which he could justifiably refused to touch with
a bargepole, he had it all cleared one weekend on special 'dirty cargo' rates which a pop star might have envied.
During a national seamen's strike, the dockers agreed to un1oad incoming ships, on condition that they were afterwards laid up, and no seamen’s duties were carried out by officers on board. Whi1e one bulk carrier was being unloaded at Midd1esbrough, the seamen asked the dockers to black her because officers were doing seamen’s work. When it transpired that they were only cooking their own meals on board in the absence of striking stewards, Barney said 'What do you expect them to do - starve?’
When we had a 24-hour strike by Customs Watchers he asked me who was doing their duties, I explained that no-one was; the Department was simply accepting the risk of doing without them. He said 'O.K. But if your officers do any Watchers duties I'll call my lads out'. If the unions had had a few more like Barney it would have done their image, and their members, a power of good.
On the Excise side, a general betting duty was introduced. We had had a duty on betting at dog tracks for some years, but a similar duty on horse-racing had been successfully resisted on the grounds that it would adversely affect exports of
bloodstock. How the heck it could have done anything of the kind is beyond me and I think it was simply that horses had more political clout that greyhounds. There had been a short-lived tax on horseracing in the 1920's. Officers old enough to remember it told awful tales of truculent bookies assaulting officers, and we viewed the new duty with some concern. But this was one case where the Department had learned from past mistakes, so we need not have worried.
Betting, shops had just been legalised and licensed and off-course bookies were enjoying a respectability which they had never previously known. They had no intention of quarreling with the Excise, particularly as a shop licence could be withdrawn for revenue offences. Moreover, most bookies had chains of shops, large or small, and any fraud was usually by local managers of individual shops, who omitted some losing bets from their records. Thus the owner and the revenue were on the same side, and their checks complemented each other. The point was well illustrated when I was discussing the new tax with a Teesside bookmaker who had about 50 shops. He showed me weekly returns from each shop which were collated in his office and studied for trends, up or down. I said, 'I suppose if one shop became a loser you would consider closing it, and using the licence for other premises'. He looked at me rather quizzically and said 'Well, I would try one or two different managers in it first'.
Official control relied on checks of betting slips and sheet both at shops and at Head Offices, supplemented by 'test betting'. Officers placed bets at selected shops, using public money and subsequently paying any winnings to the cashier. All
Excise officers could be required to place test bets in shops where they were not known, except those who pleaded genuine conscientious objections to betting. One of my officers was a Methodist lay-preacher who was confidently expected to object, but he did not do so. He explained to me that, as he would not be using his own money and did not stand to win or lose, he had no objection to playing his part, and did not wish to push the job on to younger and more vulnerable men. 'Lead us not into temptation'. This was typical of this sincere and clear-thinking officer.
Our efforts to avoid the identification of test betters were not very successful. Officers who called later to make routine checks on betting slips generally and to quietly ensure that the test bets were in the records, sometimes found that the
test slips had been separated from the rest by clerks who had spotted the test better and wanted to save the officer the trouble of digging them out.
The Board had craftily drafted the regulations to make racecourse proprietors responsible for seeing that on-course bookies had a card from the revenue confirming that their duty payments were up-to-date. Without tills the bookie was not allowed to stand. Instead of being abused by bookmakers, an officer attending a race meeting was sometimes welcomed with open arms by one who had lost his card and wanted the officer to vouch for him and pass him in. Any general hassle in the ring could lead to a bookie being warned off the course, a sanction so swingeing that it never happened.
One way and another, I enjoyed my position and duties in Middlesbrough as much as any part of my service. Such troubles as I had during the period were outside the day-to-day management of the District.
Before one could be trusted on the road as an Unattached Survey it was necessary to receive a week of theoretical instruction in the Surveyor's Branch in London, followed by three weeks 'assisting' an experienced Excise Surveyor and another three with a Customs man. These six weeks were, of course, practical instruction, which was of more value than any amount of classroom stuff. The only point I remember which we learnt in London was that travelling expenses and subsistence allowances were even more complicated for U/Surveyors than they were for U/0's.
I did my excise stint with a Newcastle Surveyor whom I already knew quite well. Surveyors did not keep books, they mere1y checked those kept by Officers, but they did have a quarterly diary in which they recorded their activities, taking care
to use a time-honoured form of jargon. When I noted an inspection I had made 'Satisfied' the Surveyor mildly corrected me saying ‘Customs officers are 'satisfied'. Excise Surveyors find things regular'.
Just as ratings in the Navy professed to despise their equals in other branches of the service, so the civilian Outdoor Service looked down on the uniformed Waterguard in the Customs and both hated the Indoor Staff and the board, using that term for the entire headquarters set-up. The Customs Surveyor in Hu11 who indoctrinated me suffered from this complaint in its most virulent form. The only people for whom he had any respect were other Landing and Shipping Surveyors. He had little use for the Excise side of the Outdoor, was at loggerheads with the Collector, and especially with the Collector's clerk, and disliked the Waterguard. As my immediate predecessors had all been promoted Excise officers and I had been a Customs Landing officer tending to share his views, he regarded me as almost human and we got on famously.
The only reason he ever gave for his antipathy for the Waterguard was that a new young A.P.0. had once questioned his identity in the docks. If the Surveyor had simply said who he was the thing would have passed off with a laugh, but he made quite a fuss about it. Against that he himself told me that once when he returned from a package ho1iday via a busy airport, the P.O. there, learning that he was a Surveyor, gave VIP treatment not only to him but to the whole coach load he was with, thus making him the hero of the hour. Even so, he continued to sneer at the Waterguard. I think he did it to keep up a long-standing tradition rather than from any real feeling in the matter.
After being gently broken in, so to speak, U/Surveyors moved about the country at the behest of an appointer in the Surveyor’s Branch and were not attached to any one Collection. They usually had a fair spread of work and location relieving for leave and sickness mainly in three-week spells for the first few months.
After that they were kept closer to their homes, subject to the exigencies of the service.
I spent most of my three years of unattachment in or around Newcastle, but one of my contemporaries whose home was in Birmingham was seldom or never there. The appointer always protested that he was keen to keep people in their home areas, which cost less than having them in distant hotels of course, but few believed him. Some thought he deliberately sent them to far-flung places but a story I heard suggested otherwise. A man who specially asked to be in Southampton when his wife was due to give birth, was told that there was nothing going there, but he was being sent to Northampton as the next best thing.
When that appointer retired the U/Surveyors had a whip round and bought him an atlas.
I entered on my travels with some trepidation and visions of whole districts of very senior officers old enough to be my father, resenting having been passed over for promotion and ready to take it out on me. None of them ever did. There were really not many such officers about and most of them were charmingly old-fashioned gentlemen who had never wanted promotion anyway. Even the few who were awkward with their regular Surveyors were rarely so with young upstarts like me. They would have regarded getting the better of an unattached Surveyor as like shooting a sitting bird, I suppose.
My first trip was to Montrose, where much had changed in 11 years since the drowsy days of 1948. Then it was Inverness where my district included both Brackla and Dalwhinnie. After that in Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool, I learned how limited my knowledge of the Department really was. More importantly, I realised how careful one had to be in exercising even limited authority, a far-cry from my power-drunk days as a P.O. boy at Holbrook.
Once I was considered to be sufficiently experienced I became virtually re1ief Surveyor for Newcastle Collection, where I was more at ease with the work, but had to be even more careful in my dealings with erstwhile fellow officers.
Unattached Surveyors relieving for three week leave spells did not really get into the long-term overall responsibilities of the grade and it will be convenient to consider surveyor duties in some detail as they affected me after I was fixed. Meantime, I had a fairly easy ride on the day-to day stuff and was in no hurry to seek fixity. When it was becoming evitable towards the end of 1961, I was resigned to moving home to Scotland when I discovered by chance that Middlesbrough District in Newcastle Collection was falling vacant in 1962. It was not attractive enough to induce any fixed Surveyor to transfer and I was appointed to it in April of that year. Thus the home removal was reduced to about 40 miles and I remained under the familiar, and tolerant, Newcastle management. Oddly enough, Middlesbrough was about the only Newcastle district which I had missed while unattached, so, work wise, it was completely new ground.
b} Surveyor - Fixed.
Having obtained a fixed post as an Officer in my home Collection was an achievement in itself, and to have repeated the trick at Surveyor level was little short of miraculous. The domestic upheaval of moving house was offset by the decided advantage of having a District out of the Collector's residence, which was the nearest I got to an independent command at any level in the Customs and Excise. It follows that I should have jumped at the chance of Middlesbrough District regardless of the nature of its work but, as it happened, there was no cause for complaint on that score either.
In contrast to the 1imited range of my only fixed station as an officer, my only fixed district as a Surveyor covered an unusually wide span of work. Based on a Custom House, I had a sub-office manned by indoor staff; three general Excise
stations covering much of North Yorkshire and a three-officer landing station covering the Tees. There was also one officer stationed in the ICI installation at Wilton. The Waterguard had a separate establishment in Middlesbrough Docks under an
Assistant Waterguard Superintendent, who was roughly equal to me in rank. However, the surveyor was generally regarded as the man in charge of the area and I enjoyed this status immensely. During my eight years there, further variety was provided by continual expansion in the trade of the area and reorganisation in the Department.
Middlesbrough itself was not a very attractive town, but its southern edge where we lived abutted on rural North Yorkshire and was delightful. The Custom House was in the centre of the original planned area, built up around 1840 and thoroughly run down by 1962. The town had developed away from it and it was a s1u m, 1iterally on the wrong side of the tracks. The building had been bought outright by the Crown in 1884 for £4,000 and we must have spent more than that on replacement windows whi1e I was there. The Ministry of Works had a running contract with a local glazier and we simply rang him up most mornings to tell him how many panes of glass to bring. One Monday it was 28 and I don't suppose any of them lasted long enough for the putty to set.
The Custom house yard was often littered with the debris of weekend battles fought by rival gangs of children on the roof. Even so we were luckier than the Church of England church nearby which was vandalised so badly that it had to be demolished. An adjacent Roman Catholic cathedral never got a scratch, but I think this was less due to religious fervour than to the presence of a number of young and muscular priests who lived on the premises.
Soon after my arrival I saw an interview on T.V. in which a local pensioner complained bitterly about being harassed by packs of marauding dogs in North Street where the Custom House stood. Sympathising with him, the interviewer said,’ and think of the danger to children' 'Oh no' said the o1d chap 'The dogs are afraid of the children'. Animals are more intelligent than you might think.
Over the years, the sea-borne trade of the Tees had shifted down river as ships got bigger and land transport more efficient. Sailing ships had worked their way laboriously up the winding river to the ancient towns of Yarm and Stockton, because it was more economical to spend a fortnight doing this, than to discharge cargo nearer the mouth and move it inland piecemeal using horse-drawn wagons. The development of the steel industry in the early 1800's led to the birth of Middlesbrough, and the coming of the railways, pioneered in the north east of England, tipped the balance in favour of landing goods there rather than higher up. When I went there in 1962 virtually all imports and exports centred on Middlesbrough. By the time I left in 1970 much of the trade had moved another 10 miles downstream to Teesport near the mouth of the river.
Incidentally, the use of the Tees by really large vessels, mainly tankers and bulk carriers, was only made possibly by the removal of a rock ledge which had restricted the depth and width of the channel, using powerful screw dredgers which broke up the rock with a huge drill and sucked up the debris. Before these came into use it had been reckoned that the use of explosives might cause Redcar to fall into the sea. Opinion was divided on the desirability of this. Personally, 1 never liked Redcar, a rather seedy seaside resort, known locally as Middlesbrough-on-Sea.
First in 1ine to deal with the Customs aspects of the trade, I had my Sub Office, manned by 4 or 5 clerks under a Departmental Clerical Officer (DHCO). This grade, which has now been phased out, was purely supervisory, and the incumbent, whom I shall call Reggie because that was his name, was a bit of an anachronism himself. The traditional Hostility between outdoor and indoor was well maintained and the landing officers gleefully informed me that Reggie was wont to refer to me as his new outdoor man when talking to outsiders. I laughed this off, pointing out that Reggie and I both know who was in charge of whom and so did they. In the naval tradition of respect for experience and seniority as well as rank, I said that I expected officers young enough to be Reggie's sons to make allowances for him to avoid any further friction. I never heard any more of it.
Officers were not bound to accept the Surveyor's view of things like that, all the while they carried out their duties efficiently and their promotion was by written examination.
When the examination was abolished and promotion was by selection based on annual reports, the Surveyor became Reporting Officer for all members of the Officer Grade, so his position was enormously strengthened. All the officers at Middlesbrough, both Customs and Excise, were good or better and indeed they all became Surveyors by selection in the fullness of time.
Although regarded as a Customs man, I had sufficient experience of the Excise side to cope with that part of the district, and Betting Duty, which became a significant item, was introduced in the mid-sixties so we all started fair on that but I had very little knowledge of oil refineries and the petrol trade generally in 1962, so the single-officer station in the ICI complex at Wilton was my biggest challenge.
ICI had two establishments on Teesside. The one at Billingham was laid to West Hartlepool for Customs purposes, and I had seen it from time to time when I was unattached. It was not one installation but a kind of trading estate on which there
were a number of plants all belonging to the various divisions of ICI. Official interest was largely confined to the use of hydrocarbon oils for the production of chemicals, plastics and man-made fibres. Large quantities of petrol and diesel oil
were produced as by-products and the duty involved ran into millions of pounds. Billingham was festooned with pipelines which ran overhead on gantries, making the whole area permanently wet, gloomy and smelly. All these pipes seemed to drip 1iquids on to the roads beneath and if any fell on you, you could only hope it was something harmless, like sewage, for example.
Wilton was a more recent set-up and its pipelines were laid in open trenches between the roadways. The whole effect was much less depressing but the atmosphere w as probab1y equally obnoxious. I once admired the tulips growing around the officer's office, but he told me that the gardeners had planted them out the day before and they, the tulips not the gardeners, would be dead by the end of the week.
Having had previous experience of both Customs Landing and Shipping and General Excise work, I soon settled into the role of supervisor rather than worker in these fields and had few problems, either below or above, so to speak. Sub Office functions were so closely allied to the outdoor Customs side that, having established a good working relationship with Reggie, I felt reasonably secure on that front too. The deadly ICI hydrocarbon oils sector was another matter altogether, not only because I knew 1ess about it but because it was more complicated and the money at stake was colossal. The risks to the revenue and the Surveyor's career were about equal. He was in the same position as the captain of a ship. If it sank it was his fault, whatever the circumstances. It used to be said that Naval ships' captains, having signed for then, preferred to go down with them rather than pay for them. I was safe from that, at least.
In 1962 the rate of duty on imported hydrocarbon oi1s, petro1, diesel oil etc. was 2/9 a gallon. 0n indigenous oil produced from shale and coal it was 1/6. These duties were generally only charged when the oil was delivered for road fuel, and all oils used in an approved refinery were duty-free. Moreover, as imported oils were thus relieved of the duty of 2/9 indigenous oils so used attracted an allowance of 1/3 a gallon to maintain the advantage of using home-produced oils. Millions of gallons of both kinds of oil were swilling around Billingham and Wilton all the time, so any pilferage or irregular deliveries amounted to smuggling. Natural losses by evaporation from storage tanks and in processing ran into tens of thousands of gallons monthly, so control based on stocks was clearly hopeless.
ICI employees parked their cars inside the premises and were thus able to steal small quantities of petrol by putting it in their tanks and avoiding the risk of taking cans through the gates. Offenders caught were fined by the revenue and sacked or suspended by the company. Moreover, the vehicles concerned were usually seized by the Customs and only returned on payment of a further penalty based on the duty involved in the offence. This action was covered by an ancient law which empowered the department to seize any vehicle used to convey smuggled goods, under which the Customs used to seize and destroy the carts used to convey goods from the beach in the good old days. As these carts had often been forcibly 'borrowed' from local farmers, the practice didn't do much for the Department's image.
Incidentally, cars used to smuggle spirits, tobacco etc. through the docks are still frequently seized outright and sold on behalf of the revenue, even where the smuggler is not the owner. A good example of the Draconian powers of officers which the Board, and Surveyors, were constantly reminding their headstrong juniors to use with restraint, lest they should be lost.
I was aware that a much more serious fraud had been discovered at Billingham in 1960. Road fuel was charged with duty at the point where it left the bonded refinery. ICI did not sell petrol under their own brand at that time. It was sold, mostly to Shell, and at the Road Filling Station there were Shell checkers to see that the full quantities invoiced were loaded and ICI, men to see that they were not exceeded. Duty was charged on the declared loaded gallonage and officers working on the installation made physical spot checks by dipping the tankers. Filling was direct from huge storage tanks subject to natural loss by evaporation, so no accurate check on them was feasib1e, but we felt the system was as safe as we could make it.
Most tankers had five separate compartments and if due to make deliveries to five garages the appropriate quantity was loaded on the basis of one compartment for each. This avoided the need to measure by dipping at the point of delivery. In part-loaded tankers the bow compartment was always left empty to keep the weight on the back wheels of the vehicle. Sometime, probably soon after the war when petrol was rationed, someone hit on the idea of putting 100 gallons in the 'empty' compartment of such tankers in the hope that, even if it were spot checked the officer would accept that it was empty and not dip it. With the connivance of checkers and drivers it worked like a charm for years.
The drivers sold the petrol to any garage to which they were makings legal delivery for £12.10s and gave £5 to the checker at Billingham on their next visit. I believe Shell drivers competed to get put on the Billingham run,which was like being on a permanent bonus.
In 1960, an anonymous letter was received by the Customs from one who complained that a Shell garage near his own was dealing in cheap petrol to the detriment of his own trade. The writer had clearly heeded the old saying 'If you hear of a good racket, get in on it. If you can't get in on it, bust it up' T h e Customs do not despise anonymous letters; they check them out. An Investigation branch officer showed the letter to a Stockton detective who speedily traced the writer and put him to the question. The next illicit delivery was intercepted, the tanker was seized and the driver arrested. Apart from this one case, there was no evidence of theft, as no one could say how much, if any, was missing, but then everyone questioned began to talk.
I myself, officiating for the Surveyor, West Hartlepool, went to Billingham with the police and the I.E. officer. We arrested an ICI checker and I heard him questioned at the Police Station. The police approach was quite fair, with no attempt to intimidate, but very effective. The Inspector said that he knew the thefts had been going on for years, but now it was all over and everything was bound to come out. If the accused understated his part in it, he would face further separate charges later when all was known. The accused said 'I've only been on this job for three months. Before me, X was on it for years', uniformed men who had been called in as the case grew were sent to arrest X, and so it went on.
Eventually three checkers, a dozen or more drivers and as many garage-owners pled guilty to theft and receiving a total of some 10,000 gallons of petrol. The drivers and garage-owners were fined and the checkers imprisoned. On the assumption that
the thefts had extended over at least ten years, the C. and E. calculated a loss to the revenue of some £12,000, on 100,000 gallons, and the Board demanded this sum from ICI. The latter resisted on the grounds that only 10,000 gallons had been
admitted in court, but the Collector, Newcastle pointed out that natural losses of about 50,000 gallons a month over the ten years had been written off only because the officer was 'satisfied that no part of the loss had gone into home use' .
As it was now clear that some part of it, albeit a very small part, had been so used, he threatened to charge the lot if there was any further argument. There wasn't, and the Board rubbed it in by fining the company £500 'to mark the irregularity'.
As it happened Wilton did not make deliveries of petrol for road fuel. Imported crude oil and indigenous benzene were
processed into non-oils such as ethylene gas and other things
all the way down the line to in man-made fibres. At the point where it ceased to be hydrocarbon oil, the imported material was written off as having been used duty-free in an approved
refinery. The indigenous oils qualified for the allowance of
1/3 a gallon at the same point. The Department actually charged the Excise duty of 1/6 a gallon on benzene received at Wilton and paid 2/9 on each gallon shown to have been converted to non-oil, and I soon learned that this complication had led to disaster some years before.
In one of the processes applied gave a volumetric increase of some 20%, and in error the 1/6 had been paid only on the quantity originally received and the 2/9 on that quantity plus 20%. One of my predecessors had spotted this and had had great difficulty in convincing the Board that it had really happened. When they were convinced they assessed the loss to the revenue at some £400000 and finally recovered about £250000 from ICI.
The Surveyor, who should really have been rewarded, moved south soon after and was never promoted. I suppose the board didn't exactly blame him, but any promotion panel would only have heard of him in connection with this awful clanger, whether he personally dropped it or not. If anything as dire as this occurred during my time at Middlesbrough it remained undiscovered.
Whi1e the Surveyor's duties were mainly supervisory, reporting on app1ications for approvals of plant, storage tanks and the like were laid to him, and he was also heavily involved in revenue concessions. The amount of this work generated by ICI, far exceeded that arising in the rest of the district, so although that firm's affairs occupied only one of the seven officers, they took up a disproportionate amount of my time. ICI, were highly skilled at getting the best out of the law and invariably claimed that their proposals were in the national interest. They frequently were, but at other times they could be positively devious.
Hydrocarbon oil could be used duty-free in approved refineries
to produce heat, light and power but the Wilton complex included both such refineries and other plants and a coal-fired power station supplied the lot. I.C.I, said they proposed to convert part of the power station to oil-firing and an elaborate scheme to segregate energy thus produced and channel it to approved refineries was worked out.
The Board finally agreed to allow the use of duty-free oil, subject to the prior alteration of the plant to achieve this segregation. ICI, did not make the alterations, so the scheme never operated. In reply to official enquiries, the firm said that they h a d negotiated a new contract with the Coal Board and the entire power station would remain coal-fired for the time being. It probably still is. Clearly duty-free oil was cheaper than coal, whereas duty-paid oil was dearer, and ICI had secured the Customs concession only to help them beat down the price of coal. We had been used.
While I was coping as best I might with these known hazards and the fact that Teesside, as a rapidly expanding area, was constantly understaffed, several new problems were invented for my benefit between 1962 and 1967.
On the Customs side, a survey company based itself on
Middlesbrough and began exploring the North Sea for likely spots to drill for oil. This involved the use of much expensive imported equipment which they naturally expected to be duty-free as it was not for use ashore. On the other hand, it was not being exported to any foreign country either and the existing regulations simply did not cover it. The problem was finally solved by the Continental Shelf Act in the late sixties, but until then the Department floundered among all kinds of expedients too humourous to mention.
A small container terminal was opened at Teesport; one example of a general move towards containerisation. During the postwar years there were several dock strikes and, where troops were brought in, they sweated to shift half the tonnage handled by
the regular men. This was no surprise to anyone like me, who had often marvelled at the way a docker of about 70 could balance a half-ton case on a two-wheeled barrow. As dockers were frequently paid by tonnage and containers replaced the barrow with a steel box holding 40 tons, which was swung aboard or ashore by a crane while an 8-man gang watched on, one would have expected dockers to we1come containers as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Actually the welcome was muted, to say the least.
The men had the usual resistance to innovation and their unions realised that, in the 1ong run, redundancies w ere in the wind. The immediate effect was to cut down the casual pilfering which had always been a feature of the docks, and to simplify revenue control of high-risk items such as whisky for export. Steel containers had double doors at one end which could be secured by Crown locks which made undetected theft difficult. Moreover, they could be stacked door-end to door-end in the compound making access impossible without using either the travelling hoist to move them apart, or heavy metal-cutting equipment to cut them open.
Dockers' unions have had a very bad Press over the years and this is not surprising in view of some of their antics. A proposal to remove some 20 dockers from the labour force caused a strike in London, although none of the 20 had done days work for years, all of them were over 70 years of age and some were over 8O. Another strike was in protest at police investigations into wholesale theft of sides of meat. To the public, this looked perilously close to striking for the right to steal.
On Teesside, the dockers were required to work at West Hartlepool when necessary; Men detailed for this usually refused to go and were laid off Monday to Wednesday of the following week. The others came out in sympathy and they all went back on Thursday and worked through Saturday and Sunday. With weekend overtime rates they regularly made more money for the four days than they would have got for the normal Monday to Friday. Incidentally, so did the Landing Officers.
It is fair to add that the local boss of the Transport and General Workers Union was a very reasonable and practical man, named Barney Ward. Faced with a rotting cargo of bones in a damaged ship, which he could justifiably refused to touch with
a bargepole, he had it all cleared one weekend on special 'dirty cargo' rates which a pop star might have envied.
During a national seamen's strike, the dockers agreed to un1oad incoming ships, on condition that they were afterwards laid up, and no seamen’s duties were carried out by officers on board. Whi1e one bulk carrier was being unloaded at Midd1esbrough, the seamen asked the dockers to black her because officers were doing seamen’s work. When it transpired that they were only cooking their own meals on board in the absence of striking stewards, Barney said 'What do you expect them to do - starve?’
When we had a 24-hour strike by Customs Watchers he asked me who was doing their duties, I explained that no-one was; the Department was simply accepting the risk of doing without them. He said 'O.K. But if your officers do any Watchers duties I'll call my lads out'. If the unions had had a few more like Barney it would have done their image, and their members, a power of good.
On the Excise side, a general betting duty was introduced. We had had a duty on betting at dog tracks for some years, but a similar duty on horse-racing had been successfully resisted on the grounds that it would adversely affect exports of
bloodstock. How the heck it could have done anything of the kind is beyond me and I think it was simply that horses had more political clout that greyhounds. There had been a short-lived tax on horseracing in the 1920's. Officers old enough to remember it told awful tales of truculent bookies assaulting officers, and we viewed the new duty with some concern. But this was one case where the Department had learned from past mistakes, so we need not have worried.
Betting, shops had just been legalised and licensed and off-course bookies were enjoying a respectability which they had never previously known. They had no intention of quarreling with the Excise, particularly as a shop licence could be withdrawn for revenue offences. Moreover, most bookies had chains of shops, large or small, and any fraud was usually by local managers of individual shops, who omitted some losing bets from their records. Thus the owner and the revenue were on the same side, and their checks complemented each other. The point was well illustrated when I was discussing the new tax with a Teesside bookmaker who had about 50 shops. He showed me weekly returns from each shop which were collated in his office and studied for trends, up or down. I said, 'I suppose if one shop became a loser you would consider closing it, and using the licence for other premises'. He looked at me rather quizzically and said 'Well, I would try one or two different managers in it first'.
Official control relied on checks of betting slips and sheet both at shops and at Head Offices, supplemented by 'test betting'. Officers placed bets at selected shops, using public money and subsequently paying any winnings to the cashier. All
Excise officers could be required to place test bets in shops where they were not known, except those who pleaded genuine conscientious objections to betting. One of my officers was a Methodist lay-preacher who was confidently expected to object, but he did not do so. He explained to me that, as he would not be using his own money and did not stand to win or lose, he had no objection to playing his part, and did not wish to push the job on to younger and more vulnerable men. 'Lead us not into temptation'. This was typical of this sincere and clear-thinking officer.
Our efforts to avoid the identification of test betters were not very successful. Officers who called later to make routine checks on betting slips generally and to quietly ensure that the test bets were in the records, sometimes found that the
test slips had been separated from the rest by clerks who had spotted the test better and wanted to save the officer the trouble of digging them out.
The Board had craftily drafted the regulations to make racecourse proprietors responsible for seeing that on-course bookies had a card from the revenue confirming that their duty payments were up-to-date. Without tills the bookie was not allowed to stand. Instead of being abused by bookmakers, an officer attending a race meeting was sometimes welcomed with open arms by one who had lost his card and wanted the officer to vouch for him and pass him in. Any general hassle in the ring could lead to a bookie being warned off the course, a sanction so swingeing that it never happened.
One way and another, I enjoyed my position and duties in Middlesbrough as much as any part of my service. Such troubles as I had during the period were outside the day-to-day management of the District.
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