Before I begin, I should mention that Far from the Spaceports is on special Kindle offer for the week starting June 29th. Prices start at £0.99 UK, or $0.99 US, and increase over the course of the week – get in early for the best deal.

OK… now for smuggling.

Smuggling is one of those human activities which spring up with great regularity. The high profile cases are usually those with the most reprehensible of moral dimensions, such as drugs, weapons, or people. But all kinds of very ordinary commodities get smuggled wherever the potential reward outweighs the risk. I recently visited Robin Hood’s Bay, in North Yorkshire, which was a major centre of smuggling during the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Smuggling arises when rulers and governments artificially inflate the price of a good by means of tariffs. Sometimes this is done for reasons of security or national health, where the people at large may well have some level of acceptance of the tax. Alcohol or cigarettes are today’s health examples, and taxes on petrol can be justified by environmental protection. But historically, tariffs have also been applied to quite ordinary products, as a way to boost government revenues.

Popular sympathy soon drains away when the motives appear to be purely acquisitive. People begin to find creative ways to avoid the tax, and smuggling begins. At its simplest, smuggling is just an equation – getting some item into the country, past the revenue officers, and into the hands of a customer has a certain level of cost. If the customer is willing to pay enough to meet that cost, with a dollop extra to cover the risk, it’s worth it. Meanwhile, the customer wants the savings made by avoiding the taxes to be big enough to cover their own anxiety about being found out. If the equation works, everybody’s happy. Except for the revenue officers. It all depends on the relative costs, compared with the likelihood of detection. It has often been big business. In the late 18th century, one moralising pamphlet lamented about the thousands of men turning from respectable trades to smuggling, presumably finding it more lucrative.

Now I had known from years ago about smuggling which went on through the counties along the south coast, from Cornwall to Kent, taking advantage of the short Channel crossing. Kipling’s poem “brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk” comes from there – Kipling had strong associations with Sussex. The poem highlights not only the trade itself but also the way people from all levels of society took part in it. But I had never heard that there was a thriving trade going through Yorkshire!

But yes, it seems that Robin Hood’s Bay was a real centre for smuggling, across the North Sea, especially from Holland. It was sufficiently serious that the government stationed a unit of dragoons there up until the 1830s, in a largely unsuccessful attempt to control it. My guess is that judicious backhanders helped the soldiers to look the other way sometimes.

The trade through Robin Hood’s Bay consisted of silk, tobacco, various strong drinks, and above all tea! Duty on tea was hiked several times during the 18th century, to finance the war effort of the British government. Tea could be bought for about 7d per pound in Holland (that’s 7 old pence, or about £0.03 after the currency change in 1971), but after taxes, and depending on quality, you could easily pay 50 times that. That’s a lot of margin to play with. Revenue efforts to control the trade were definitely an uphill struggle. It has been said that three quarters of all tea drunk in England during those years came into the country via smuggling. So when you drink a cup of Yorkshire Tea, spare a thought about this piece of history.

Why Robin Hood’s Bay? Well, it was useful in several ways. There was good access from the sea, but the nearest major ports were some distance away. Once landed, the goods could be hidden or moved out on any of several routes across the North York Moors, where local knowledge was at a premium. Finally, the village itself is built on a steep bank coming up from the sea, with the houses packed tightly in to narrow twisting streets. It was said that a bolt of silk could be passed from house to house, using windows, tunnels or hidden hatches, without setting foot outdoors, from the shore all the way to the ridge above. All in all, an ideal place to shift contraband!

The heyday of Robin Hood’s Bay smuggling was over by the 1850s. But tea smuggling had declined rather earlier, when the Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger passed a bill slashing the tea tax from 119% to 12.5%. Overnight, the risk-reward equation changed. He recouped his government’s money via a window tax, leading to countless house windows up and down the country being bricked up – unpopular, to be sure, but not likely to lead to smuggling.

So far, I haven’t used smuggling in the plots of either my historical or science fiction. Something to explore in the future, perhaps. Since it happens so very often throughout history, I’m sure a smuggling plot could fit in either place.

To finish with, here’s a bit more of Kipling’s A Smuggler’s Song:

Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark —
Brandy for the Parson,
Baccy for the Clerk;
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
And watch the wall, my darling,
While the Gentlemen go by!