Frances Wilkins

According to the Board of Customs in Edinburgh, 'very considerable' quantities of contraband goods were landed in Wigtownshire during the eighteenth century. Only 1.3% of Scotland's population lived here at the time so that the region could not provide cu

Summary of a lecture delivered to the Society on 21st November 2003 regarding life and times of Robert Douglas 'Collector' of Customs and Master Smuggler. Douglas married Margaret Corbet, daughter of a Glasgow merchant. He obtained credit on the Isle of m

For a period of nearly one hundred years the senior customs officers at the port of Dumfries believed that the establishment of a king’s boat at Carsethorn was the best means of stopping smuggling up the Solway Firth. These king’s boats were comparatively small when compared with the revenue cutters stationed round the Scottish coasts – the nearest of these was at Whithorn. They were essentially open boats with four, six or eight sets of oars and a sail. They were manned by a commander with a crew of men, who had been bred to the sea. The main source of information about the king’s boats is the copy books of letters from the Board of Customs in Edinburgh to the collector and comptroller at Dumfries and the local officers’ letters to the Board and to their own staff. This paper describes the relationship between the collectors and the commanders of the king’s boat, during the period 1759 to 1799, for which there is the most detailed information.

The history of smuggling in Annandale covers the complete story of that trade in Dumfries and Galloway during the period between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. It includes all aspects of the trade from the merchant based in Annan who engaged in tobacco, brandy and wine smuggling, to the tenant farmer living on the Solway shore who smuggled smaller cargoes of contraband from the Isle of Man and beyond. In addition, there was a brief period when Scottish salt and whisky were smuggled across the Border into England. During the 1720s, the collectors of customs at Dumfries became obsessed with stopping the smuggling trade in Annandale — they were unsuccessful. Smuggling only ended over a century later, when it became uneconomical.