HM Customs & Excise History - Publications

The Call to Duty 1683-1983

Edited by Stanley Prestidge

Bristol 1983

HMC&E - Bristol Collection

Reading Revived

by 'A Small Committee'

Curiosities of the Customs in South West England

by Mark Bullen

To view as a PDF  please click here.

To view as a PDF  please click here.

To view as a PDF  please click here.

To view as a PDF  please click here.

As a Department we have much to be proud of in our long history. This year we mark the tercentenary of the first Board of Excise. Twelve years ago we celebrated the tercentenary of the Board of Customs. And those were simply the more modern incarnations of the organisations for collecting indirect taxes.

Customs duties have been levied in Britain from at least the 8th century, very probably as far back as Roman times. Excise duties, though much younger, have been collected in England since the 17th century. It was in 1683 that Charles 11 finally took the English Excise out of 'farm' an old-fashioned type of privatisation, and placed it firmly under the control of his own Commissioners. It needed an Act of Union to produce, a quarter of a century later, the service further north which would eventually recruit the most illustrious Exciseman of them all.

When the new-style Excise was created all those years ago, it quickly developed into the country's first really large professional government department, relatively free from influence and patronage, and one where the continuity of efficient service was positively encouraged. That is not an insider's boast; it is the dispassionate assessment of a recent historian of Augustan England.

The collection of Customs duties is, in all probability, as old as civilisation itself, although the emergence of a nationally organised Customs service may only be traced from the beginning of the thirteenth century. It is not surprising that a port as ancient and important as Bristol should have a 'Customs presence' from about that time.

The story of the Customs (and more latterly the Customs and Excise) involvement in the affairs of Bristol and the surrounding area can be traced over some 700 years, revealing a rich pattern of events as befits a port which for many years was second only to London in the whole of the Kingdom. It is perhaps appropriate at this time, when a new Custom House is being opened in the port, to look back over the centuries and recall some of the more important and interesting episodes of this long and fascinating chronicle.

Unfortunately the early Customs records were destroyed in the fire at the Custom House in 1831, thus leaving a sad gap in the Customs history of the port at a time when it was at the height of its prosperity. The story that is unfolded here is therefore not as comprehensive as one would have wished, having been compiled from a variety of other sources for this important period.

The inspiration for this little book came from Mary Emeny, formerly Secretary of the Reading Branch of the Civil & Public Services Association, whose idea it was that something should be put on paper to commemorate Reading Collection's 25th anniversary. lt was not long before it was found that the history of the Reading Collection could be traced back very much further than 25 years.

In its final form, the booklet was the work of a small committee helped by the Departmental Librarian who, apart from providing much valuable advice, led the authors to the memoirs of John Cannon, an Officer in Reading from 1707-1714.

We hope that the result will provide some interest, and perhaps a little amusement, to members of the Collection, and to anyone else who may happen to read these pages.

This book was conceived some months after Mark's arrival in Bristol in 1991. Part of his job was to oversee the accurate recording and reporting of Collection artifacts to HQ, and whist browsing through the catalogue on a dreary February day, he realised that South West England, incorporating as it did the former Collections of Bristol and Plymouth, was immensely rich in Customs and Excise History.

With its 600 mile coastline and great variety of old, and in some cases, quaint Custom Houses the Collection had a large number of interesting objects, from clocks to coats of arms, paintings to pistols, branding irons to books. Mark believed that some of the information relating to these diverse aspects of our Collection would interest the general reader, both for its own sake and as a means of putting people in touch with the history of the organisation for which they work, perhaps particularly relevant in those days of such rapid change.

This book was not intended to be a 'history' in the normal sense of the word, instead, Mark has chosen five distinct and sometimes bizarre aspects of South West England and explored them with varying degrees of thoroughness.