This image is the cover for the book King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855, Classics To Go

King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855, Classics To Go

Outside pure Naval history it would be difficult to find any period so full of incident and contest as that which is covered by the exploits of the English Preventive Service in their efforts to deal with the notorious and dangerous bands of smugglers which at one time were a terrible menace to the trade and welfare of our nation. As we shall see from the following pages, their activities covered many decades, and indeed smuggling is not even to-day dead nor ever will be so long as there are regulations which human ingenuity can occasionally outwit. But the grand, adventurous epoch of the smugglers covers little more than a century and a half, beginning about the year 1700 and ending about 1855 or 1860. Nevertheless, within that space of time there are crowded in so much adventure, so many exciting escapes, so many fierce encounters, such clever moves and counter-moves: there are so many thousands of people concerned in the events, so many craft employed, and so much money expended that the story of the smugglers possesses a right to be ranked second only to those larger battles between two or more nations. Everyone has, even nowadays, a sneaking regard for the smugglers of that bygone age, an instinct that is based partly on a curious human failing and partly on a keen admiration for men of dash and daring. There is a sympathy, somehow, with a class of men who succeeded not once but hundreds of times in setting the law at defiance; who, in spite of all the resources of the Government, were not easily beaten. In the novels of James, Marryat, and a host of lesser writers the smuggler and the Preventive man have become familiar and standard types, and there are very few, surely, who in the days of their youth have not enjoyed the breathless excitement of some story depicting the chasing of a contraband lugger or watched vicariously the landing of the tubs of spirits along the pebbly beach on a night when the moon never showed herself. But most of these were fiction and little else. Even Marryat, though he was for some time actually engaged in Revenue duty, is now known to have been inaccurate and loose in some of his stories. Those who have followed afterwards have been scarcely better. (Amazon)

E. Keble Chatterton

Edward Keble Chatterton (10 September 1878 – 31 December 1944) was a prolific writer who published around a hundred books, pamphlets and magazine series, mainly on maritime and naval themes. Edward Keble Chatterton undertook a number of small-boat voyages through the English Channel and the Netherlands; out of these voyages came magazine articles and books describing the passages as well as several books on the maritime art collections of the Low Countries. At the outbreak of the First World War, Chatterton joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (R.N.V.R.), ultimately commanding a Motor Launch flotilla[5] at Queenstown, now Cobh, in Ireland. He describes these years in Q-Ships and their Story (1922), The Auxiliary Patrol (1924) and Danger Zone: The Story of the Queenstown Command (1934). He left the service in 1919 with the rank of Lieutenant Commander. In the inter-war years, his output was continuous, and included a series of monographs on model ships, many narrative histories of naval events, and a number of juvenile novels. Most of his books were republished in the United States and several were translated into French and German editions.

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