On British Smuggling, The Hays Code, and Art Under Tariffs

 On British Smuggling, The Hays Code, and Art Under Tariffs

One reason I started this blog was that I occasionally go down random rabbit holes on specific topics for other projects, and there's nothing else to show for the byproduct of my research. One recent topic I dove into was the history of smuggling along the British coast. I didn't think it all that interesting on its own to write about. Then the tariffs came, and my research suddenly felt very relevant.

My deep dive took several turns, and while there are plenty of names and dates I could recite about who was smuggling what, the more interesting parts included poetry by Kippling and a Hitchcock film, but I'm getting ahead of things. For starters, there was a lot of smuggling in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was practically its own industry. Up and down the coast, there were secret bays and hidden cellars where gangs moved contraband. Why? Tariffs. Taxes were paid on imported goods, so if someone could bring in the goods themselves, they could sell them for anything less than the taxed amount, and the rest was profit.

The smugglers fought against the customs patrols and even attacked them openly. No matter how hard the British government tried to crack down on the practice, their own taxes were creating the economic incentive that turned the coastal communities against them.

Smuggling was ingrained enough in British culture that the famed writer Rudyard Kipling even wrote a poem in 1906 titled "A Smuggler's Song." The poem encourages a young woman to "Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!" That way, she would be able to truthfully tell the cops she hadn't seen anything, as "Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie." In today's parlance, clearly, Kipling wasn't no snitch. Respect.

It wasn't until the import duties were cut that the smuggling ended. In 1784, a young Prime Minister named William Pitt dropped tea taxes from 119% to 12.5%. This ended tea smuggling, and tax revenue actually increased from the greater amount of sales. However, Britain soon went to war with France, as usual, and wartime smuggling was profitable once again, which lasted a few more decades.

While the smugglers killed excise-men to protect their operation, there was an even darker side I discovered. Yes, darker than straight-up murder. The darker side was called wrecking. That was the practice of intentionally getting ships to wreck on shore by extinguishing or putting up false guide lights, then looting the salvage. The laws at the time made it illegal to take salvage from a wreck if any of the crew were still alive, so the wreckers killed any survivors.

A wrecking gang served as the plot of Daphne du Maurier's 1936 novel Jamaica Inn, which was later adapted into a film of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock. The story follows a young woman who goes to live with an aunt and uncle in Cornwall who run the very real Jamaica Inn. Cornwall is the southwest peninsula of England. The inn still exists, and room prices looked fairly reasonable on their website. In the story, the protagonist learns her uncle leads a gang of wreckers, and she struggles to get out of the gang life. 

In the novel, there is a villainous vicar, though saying more about the character could be a spoiler for a book published almost 100 years ago. In the film adaptation, the villain's role was changed to that of the local squire and justice of the peace. The film was made in 1939 under the Hays Code, which forbade a member of the clergy from being portrayed unsympathetically. The Hays Code was a series of censorship rules that films had to obey that lasted until 1968. Other rules included things like bad guys must get punished for their crimes by the end of a film, so now you know how Jamaica Inn, a film about wreckers, was required to end. Censorship is bad for art.

I found two versions of Jamaica Inn on YouTube, one in black and white and the other colorized. This being a 1939 Hitchcock film, the black and white one was clearly the original as Hitchcock always used the style to great effect in his films. Some of his films were later colorized, which often cheapened their look. However, the black and white version I found was missing a scene in the middle, so I had to watch the inferior colorized version to complete the film. If you want to watch it yourself, make sure it's a complete version. The film wasn't his best work, but it could be of interest if you want a visual depiction of a gang of wreckers crashing what is clearly a model boat.

Thanks to the Hays Code, in Jamaica Inn, the "police" of 1830 England, or whatever law enforcement they had at the time, were unequivocally depicted as the good guys. It at least allowed for the local justice of the peace to be corrupt in the film. They even had to change it from the evil vicar in the book as that was too far astray from their morality code. While the practice of wrecking ships and murdering their sailors was pretty unequivocally evil, the film depicted their morality in stark black and white, and not with just the type of film used. The villains are depicted as greedy and unsympathetic, just as the Hays Code required. Would the filmmakers have treated those characters with the same lack of nuance without those rules imposed, or was it a sign of the general cultural choices of the 1930s to view good and bad without any shades of gray? My discussions with friends who think in a black and white morality have led me to be staunchly opposed to this mindset as it leads to dark and unforgiving places.

Kipling's poem, on the other hand, takes the side of the smugglers. He warns, "If you meet King George's men, dressed in blue and red,/ You be careful what you say, and mindful what is said." I don't think Kipling, the celebrated writer, was a criminal himself, and his other works depict the British government in a far more heroic light. His novel "Kim" mostly portrays the British colonial rule of India favorably, so he wasn't exactly opposed to the British government and monarchy. However, in "A Smuggler's Song," he taps into something romantic about smuggling against them, including danger and excitement. Perhaps it's unfair to compare smuggling to wrecking. Wrecking had many victims, while the victims of smuggling were unpaid taxes. While taxes on the rich are healthy for an economy, flat taxes are unfair, and going around them may feel justified to those doing it.

Trade tariffs are not likely to lead to ship wrecking today, mostly thanks to GPS. However, there are still interesting trends. In the past few years, trains in the US have been getting robbed by thieves stopping them and then raiding the shipping containers. Some of these events were organized online, where anyone who was in the know would descend on the train, grab any packages that looked expensive, and flee. Perhaps that's the modern-day equivalent of wrecking. At least they don't have to hurt the train operators to take your Amazon shipment. Tough economic times are only going to make this problem worse, as poverty breeds crime.

One thing that tariffs may bring back is smuggling. While drug smuggling is nothing new, the ability to get cheaper goods by skirting customs will mean a lot of people willing to take large risks may think they can make a lot of money, so long as they remember to turn off their cell phone's GPS. While I have no plans to open my own Jamaica Airbnb, if smuggling does become commonplace, all I have to say is watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by.

Links to explore more:

Read Rudyard Kippling's A Smuggler's Song: A Smuggler’s Song – The Kipling Society

See a walking tour of the Cornish coast with Tony Robinson while he discusses the history of British smugglers: The Dark History Of Smuggling In 18th-Century Britain | Walking Through History | Absolute History - YouTube

Also, if you like literary travel elements of this post, my sister has an entire blog about just that: A Suitcase Full of Books — A Literary Travel Blog

Look at that, a post on history not based on an Overly Sarcastic Productions video. Did you learn something new? You can sign up on the sidebar to get an email every time there's a new post to this blog.