brought over the hidden tracks that crossed Holmwood Common, and the
town was the scene of a trick that trapped revenue men in a pub yard, allowing
the smugglers and their goods to escape.
Various attempts were made by the government to control the‘free trade’,
including the introduction of more and more severe penalties and some
temporary tax cuts, but with minimal success. In Cornwall, attempts to
prosecute smugglers often failed–no Cornish jury was going to convict
fellow countrymen on behalf of the distant and‘foreign’government in
London! All that happened was that matters grew ever more violent. Millions
of pounds of revenue were being lost. A series of wars reduced the number of
troops available to combat the smugglers, and of course raised demand for
smuggled goods.
The wars against Revolutionary France between 1792 and 1815 provided
even more opportunities for the smuggling community, coupled with the
activities of spies from both sides. Napoleon was desperate for money to pay
his troops, and the transfer of gold across the Channel was assisted by the use
of‘free trade’shipping. Patriotic smugglers used their connections to pass
information to the Royal Navy and helped French aristocrats to escape the
Terror; others assisted French prisoners of war to escape and return home.
New, faster, revenue cutters were commissioned, and began to have an
effect. The victory at Trafalgar in 1805 cleared the seas of much French
shipping, and permitted more resources to be transferred to the Revenue
Service. The Channel Islands closed their free ports, cutting off a major source
of supply for the smugglers of the West Country. Napoleon declared Roscoff
to be a free port in an attempt to encourage the smuggling to continue in
Brittany; for him, this was an important avenue for both profit for French
suppliers, and for his spies to gain information from‘perfidious Albion’.
The construction of defences against a French invasion along the southeast
coast, such as the Martello towers and the Royal Military Canal, made
smuggling more difficult, as did the coordination of the revenue forces and
the increase of officers’pay. At the end of the war, the Martello towers were
used to house squads of preventative men in the Waterguard division.
Blockades of the coast substantially reduced the amount of smuggling, as did
the introduction of a comprehensive coastguard service. The rise of
Methodism in the West Country began to erode public support for illegal trade
too, and with the development of the tin and other mines in that part of the
country, there was more legal work available for local people. Smuggling
became a more clandestine and dangerous business. The introduction of a free
trade system in the 1840s as a result of the burgeoning industrial economy
CRIME IN THE AGE OF INDUSTRY AND EMPIRE