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Foreword
This web site started life as a page on the Tomasin Family History Project web site. It was to be a page that attempted to describe my life and work in HM Customs & Excise.
From 1966 until 1972, I was an Assistant Preventive Officer - a proud member of Her Majesty's Waterguard. On transferring from the Air Ministry, I was at first a supernumerary in London Port - 'Room 11' and the Harpy. After the Waterguard Training Centre, I secured a fixed post at London Heathrow Airport. In 1972 I was promoted to Officer (EO) and continued to work in the newly reorganised Department, first as Officer in Charge at Exeter Airport, then as an Officer - Preventive and EPU - and Senior Officer - Accounts, Administration & EPU - at Avonmouth, before promotion to SEO and a spell in HQ London - RAMCS - as a Senior Consultant. I finally returned to Bristol where I became becalmed in the LVO, and took early retirement as a Surveyor (SEO) in 1995.
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The more I wrote, the more I realized that the Family History page was becoming too large for its original purpose - to record my personal history and written for my children, my grandchildren and their descendents.
Over the 2006 Christmas period, I re-conceived the page as a web site in its own right. In January 2007 I registered the web site as www.hm-waterguard.org.uk and started an associated Rootsweb e-mailing list - HM-WATERGUARD-L-request@rootsweb.com so that ex-colleagues and others interested in the Waterguard could correspond with each other. I also started a sister Rootsweb e-mailing list - HM-CUSTOMS-EXCISE-L-request@rootsweb.com - so that non-Waterguard colleagues and others interested in HM Customs & Excise in general could also correspond with each other.
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A few letters to the editors of The Bond - the newsletter of the Federation of Customs and Excise Retired Members Associations & the Retired Members Society - and Portcullis - the C&E house magazine - announced the new web site, its aims and scope, and soon put me back in touch with ex-colleagues who were more than willing to share their memories, search their lofts and to loan me memorabilia from their own Waterguard days.
From those humble beginnings the word spread and material for the site flooded in . . . . . .
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After the initial success, it became obvious that the site was in need of the services of a 'proof reader/editor' who not only had a better command of English spelling, grammar and punctuation than myself, but who also had a Customs preventive background.
Eric Preedy offered his services. Eric joined HMC&E as a Departmental Clerical Officer in 1968, starting preventive work in 1971 on the Irish Land Boundary at Newry then at Luton Airport until 1972 when promotion beckoned to Excise and VAT. For 20 years prior to his early retirement in 2007 he was an Anti-Smuggling Senior Officer at Heathrow Airport. He is interested in the history of HMC&E and knows his way around HMC&E records at the National Archives at Kew . He is a regular contributor and the site owes much to his hard work.
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Since the 2005 merger of HM Customs & Excise with the Inland Revenue, forming HM Revenue & Customs, and the absorption of all the remaining Customs Preventive work into the Home Office's UK Border Agency, completed in 2008, the United Kingdom has lost the distinctively uniformed Customs Officer at its ports, land boundaries and airports. With them have gone the traditions and the expertise of the Waterguard.
Both these new organizations have sought to impose their own 'look and feel', often aggressively and at the expense of the HMC&E and Waterguard histories and traditions that went before them. This web site seeks to redress some that 'wonton' destruction and the re-writing of history that has gone with it . . . . . .
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Trevor Tomasin
APO -1966 to1972
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