Smuggling craft were brought into Harwich, sometimes in return for a reward, at a rate of one a week by the Scout and its sister vessel Desmond, as well as the Flying Fish, another smaller vessel attached to Harwich Coastguard Station that Lazarus may have commanded. There are several reports of the Scout’s accomplishments around this time. Between 1823 and 1825, as Hervey Benham notes in Once Upon a Tide, she took the 13-ton lugger William of Flushing; the lugger Maria of Folkestone, from Ostend, with six foreigners who were discharged and four English who were impressed; and the 57-ton lugger Le Chasseur of Boulogne. Lazarus had inherited a vessel of some note: six years previously it had the distinction of winning a race for Revenue cruisers to test their sailing abilities. 

Frederick Marryat describes the uniforms of the Revenue men in 1836: they were ‘all dressed in red flannel shirts, and blue trousers; some of them have not taken off their canvass or tarpauling petticoats, which are very useful to them, as they are in the boats night and day in all weathers.’ The boats themselves were painted red and black, with the ‘many gigs and galleys’ hoisted up around the sides painted white. ‘Revenue cruisers are not yachts,’ Marryat observes. ‘You will find no turtle or champagne; but, nevertheless, you will perhaps find a joint to carve at, a good glass of grog, and a hearty welcome.’

As in Dorset and Hampshire, smuggling (mostly of spirits and tobacco) was a frequent occurrence along the Essex coast in the 1830s and this, together with vessels caught on the dangerous estuary sands, kept the Revenue cruisers and salvagers busy. The era of the armed and violent smuggler was drawing to a close but there were still many prepared to risk the statutory six months imprisonment or drafting to the Navy (although often these were foreigners exempt from such penalties). This was the height of smuggling’s ‘scientific age’. The trend was for smugglers to leave some of their contraband sunk at sea for future recovery, which involved the Revenue cruisers in long hours ‘creeping’ with grapnels to discover it. 

The Roberts family settled in this part of Essex for eleven years. At Harwich, Lazarus may have lived in one of the bow-front houses on St Helen’s Green, home to the captains of the Harwich Revenue cruisers and Post Office packets in the early nineteenth century. Some photographs of the Harwich Lazarus would have known can be seen here. 

Sadly, in 1832, Lazarus and Mary’s youngest son, Felix, died at Harwich. He was barely a year old. Mary was already pregnant with their next child though, and another son was born at Harwich in November of that year. His baptism took six months to arrange, during which his parents perhaps considered whether to name him Felix, in memory of his deceased brother. But the pain was too recent and too deep: eventually he was named Arthur.

Two years later yet another son was born. Perhaps the death of Felix had weighed heavy on their mind as Lazarus and Mary decided this one should also be baptised Felix Delaney, at Harwich in August 1834. However their worst fears were realised when he too died at birth or shortly afterwards.

By 1836 the family were living at Brightlingsea and Lazarus was a lieutenant on half pay. With the deaths of two baby sons, both named Felix, and in a family full of boys, amazingly Lazarus and Mary then had three daughters in quick succession: Mary Mackenzie (in 1836), Ellen Fanny (1838) and Catherine Anne (1839). All three girls were baptised at Brightlingsea. 

Lazarus had rejoined the Coastguard, initially in a detachment of three men on the watch vessel Emerald. He would have carried out his duties as a Coastguard officer in the waters around the Essex coast and perhaps into the Thames estuary. He was stationed at Stone Point, but it is not clear where he lived. There were no purpose-built Coastguard cottages here and no specific address for the family is given in the 1841 census, just Brightlingsea Street, although in an 1846 directory their address is given as the Preventive Station. Coastguards were at the old Martello tower at St Osyth though (see here page 38), so he could have lived there, or possibly at Mersea Hall across the channel on Mersea Island (according to Dorothy Roberts). 

The eldest sons, James, William and Henry (aged seventeen, fifteen and thirteen respectively), were not with the family at Brightlingsea when the census was carried out in June of 1841, as they were in London. Meanwhile the family continued to expand. In October 1841 another son was born at Brightlingsea. Assuming Felix to be a jinxed name, he was named Alfred George. Then, in early 1843, their twelfth and last child, Edward Parry, was born and baptised at Brightlingsea. Lazarus was fifty-three years old and Mary forty-one.

In 1844 William Fooks, Mary’s father, died at Weymouth. He left a will (written in 1840, proved in 1849) in which he mentions ‘my daughter Mary Roberts the wife of Lieutenant Lazarus Roberts of the Royal Navy’. She inherited little from her father though, it would seem.

Yarmouth, Norfolk

In 1845, Lazarus was discharged to another Revenue cruiser, the Royal Charlotte, operating out of the Norfolk port of Yarmouth, with a crew of twenty-nine. His appointment was announced in The Times on 3 February 1845: ‘Lieutenant L. Roberts from St Osyth, Stone Point, to the Royal Charlotte cutter, vice Miller, removed to Adelaide.’ Lazarus’s patrol was not confined to the Norfolk coast however: one incident this cruiser was engaged in (probably under his command) occurred as far south as Felixstowe in Suffolk where, on 21 November 1845, it assisted the schooner Sally and Susannah, presumably caught on the sands.

The following year Lazarus was living at Gaol Street, Yarmouth, where, it is noted in the Royal Charlotte’s muster book, he was on shore with a fever for a week in November 1846. A number of the crew were also ill at this time with bronchitis. He was on shore again the following 14–27 January, ‘cause unknown’. In fact he attended his eldest son’s wedding in Essex during this month.

The same year the Admiralty attempted to repair the deficiencies of its personnel records by sending circular letters to officers requesting them to supply details of their services. These then appeared in O’Brien’s naval biographies. Looking back almost forty years, Lazarus provided a summary of his early life at sea:

Ten years and eight months services as Midshipman and Masters Mate, served on the Home Station, West Indies, Coast of Africa, Mediterranean, and Baltic. Commanded in 1808 one of the Montague’s boats at evacuation of the Castle of Scylla on the Coast of Calabria, the last post we held in Italy and saw much Boat service along that Coast. Commanded an armed Flat bottomed boat at the Walcheren expedition and assisted in all the operations of South Beveland and Fort Bathz, was in the Revenge in the attack of the French Squadron in Aix Roads in 1809 when that Ship was particularly distinguished, and was engaged in numerous affairs with Gun Boats in the Baltic in 1812, 1813 and 1814.

He states he served ‘sixteen years as a Lieutenant in the Coast Guard and Four Years commanding Revenue Cruisers, during which period he has been twice wounded in personal conflict with smugglers’.

Lazarus remained with the Royal Charlotte for two years, until 5 July 1847, whereupon he was again discharged to the Coastguard, at North Yarmouth station, Yarmouth port. Six months later, on 10 January 1848, he was promoted to the rank of Commander Retired, on half pay. He moved house to 23 Regent Road, close to the Yarmouth Admiralty, where he was still in 1850, according to Hunt & Co’s Directory of East Norfolk. Lieutenant Roberts was now Captain Roberts.

In the census taken in April 1851 Lazarus and his family were at 3 Harrison’s Buildings, a row of lodging houses on the north side of Yarmouth’s St George’s Road. With them lived a twenty-seven-year-old servant, a maid of all work no doubt, named Mary Ann Lucia. She left the following year to marry John Carver James Woolsey, a ‘beachman’ who lived at Bland’s Buildings. A beachman was part lifeboat man, part salvager. When Charles Dickens (1812–70) visited Yarmouth on 8–10 January 1849 and apparently saw an upturned boat used as a beachman’s hut out on the lonely sands, it provided him with the inspiration for Peggotty’s house in David Copperfield – a ‘ship-looking thing’ on the beach. 

[U]pon removing the tiles from some quaint old buildings the boat roof was discovered as perfect as when described by the author. A tenant of the house nearly forty years ago describes it as then standing out on the open ‘Denes’ with an uninterrupted view of the German Ocean, and far removed from other dwellings, to be approached only by crossing the soft sand, but that it was always visited by strangers, no doubt attracted by its picturesque appearance. It is now in the midst of the populous part of the town, and is about to be demolished for the erection of more modern houses. The window in which a light was placed for Little Emily’s return is still seen upon the removal of the plaster, and many regrets are here heard that some measures have not been taken to preserve the old building in remembrance of the celebrated author.—Our engraving is from a sketch by Mr. H. F.  Neave, of Great Yarmouth. (The Graphic, 1 November 1879)

Perhaps Lazarus knew the boathouse marooned out on the Denes? Perhaps his maid’s fiancé John Woolsey even lived there? He must have taken walks there, especially as its location was probably not far from the Nelson monument. He may well have known that Dickens visited Yarmouth – ‘[s]ome of our readers may be aware, that at the latter end of last year [sic], our town was honoured a visit from the popular novelist, Charles Dickens’ (Norfolk News, May 1849) – although there is no evidence that their paths crossed. It’s worth noting the following somewhat gothic passage in David Copperfield though:

One Sunday night my mother reads to Peggotty and me in there, how Lazarus was raised up from the dead. And I am so frightened that they are afterwards obliged to take me out of bed, and show me the quiet churchyard out of the bedroom window, with the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon. 

This would have been St Nicholas churchyard, where Dickens had Ham Peggotty buried and where, in 1855, Lazarus’s wife Mary would also be laid to rest, ‘below the solemn moon’.

[Side note: Dickens was quite struck by the town of Yarmouth. An article, ‘The Norfolk Gridiron’, published in his journal Household Words, includes an account of the capsizing of a boat in rough seas near Yarmouth jetty on 4 September 1852. The beachmen impressed with their swift actions to rescue the crew. However if Dickens himself was the author of this uncredited piece, he cannot have witnessed the jetty incident first-hand. According to his correspondence he was on a train from Liverpool to London on 4 September 1852 and was still in the Capital the following day.]

Whether Lazarus read David Copperfield or Household Words is unknown. Neither are among the books and journals mentioned in his will and Dickens was perhaps a little modern for his taste, which was mainly for the classics and eighteenth-century poets. 

I imagine Lazarus settled into retirement at Harrison’s Buildings with his modest library. He immersed himself in a social circle of retired naval officers and civic dignitaries and took up the position of Honorary Secretary of the annual Yarmouth Regatta, or at least he was in July 1852, when announcements of the two-day event were published. The proceedings included a firework display and a ball at the Town Hall. 

A week before the regatta there was a general election. Lazarus had probably been enfranchised by the Reform Act of 1832 and so was on the electoral register and, as the secret ballot was yet to be introduced, we know that he voted for the two candidates standing on the ‘Moderate Conservative’ ticket: Charles Rumbold (actually a Whig Liberal) and Sir Edmund Lacon (Conservative). The Norwich Mercury reported on the hustings:

In the morning of the Nomination the walls were found covered with these placards—‘Rumbold the Champion of the Board of Health,’ ‘Lacon the Patron of Lowestoft.’ The Sailors marched in procession to the ‘Star’ where the Liberal candidates were staying with a band, colours, and chariots borne by the men, on which were ‘Britannia,’ ‘Neptune,’ ‘Triton,’ &c.  Upon the Blue flags appeared ‘M’Cullagh and Freedom of Election,’ ‘True Blue and Victory,’ ‘England expects that every man will do his duty,’ &c.; and on the Red flags ‘Lacon our Townsman,’ ‘Lacon and Rumbold for Ever,’ ‘Church and State,’ and ‘Cheap Bread and no Monopoly.’

As in the previous election of 1847, Lord John Russell’s Whigs won the popular vote, but the Earl of Derby’s Conservatives won a very slight majority of the seats. Lacon and Rumbold were returned to Westminster to represent Great Yarmouth.

There are newspaper reports of Lazarus attending various other balls and dinners around this time, such as one on 16 May 1854 for the East Norfolk Militia, raised that year in response to the Crimean War. Also in attendance on this occasion was Captain Smyth RN, probably the father of Edward Smyth who, in 1865, married Lazarus’s daughter Mary. Britain’s three thousand serving Coastguards were also drafted into service in the Crimea. Had Lazarus’s age allowed, he would certainly have been among them. While the Coastguards were away at war their places were temporarily filled by retired officers. In early November 1854 Lazarus was present at a ‘patriotic fund’ meeting, also held at the Town Hall: a fundraiser for the war effort. Another function Lazarus attended that month was the mayor’s inauguration, on 30 November, which involved much entertainment. The mayor that year was Charles J. Palmer, a local solicitor. Four years earlier the mayor had been Philip Pullyn, one of Lazarus’s neighbours at Harrison’s Buildings. 

Tragedy struck on 23 August 1855, when Lazarus’s wife Mary died, at Harrison’s Buildings. Her funeral took place at St Nicholas church, on 28 August. Ironically, it was reported in the local paper the day before Mary’s death that attempts to recover Racehorse, a lugger that had sunk during the marine regatta that year, were abandoned. Almost ten years later Lazarus and Mary’s youngest son, Edward, died in the wreck of another vessel named Racehorse, although this time in the China seas. Lazarus grieved for Mary, as he would again for Edward. Around him though, life went on at Yarmouth in high summer, as reported in the Bury and Norwich Post issue of the day after the funeral:

This town is now full of visitors, the number being estimated at 10,000. All the inns and lodging-houses are quite full, and of late the cheap excursion trains every Monday and Thursday have brought large numbers of Norwich friends. Every day our beach is covered with people, and every afternoon and evening when the weather is fine the Wellington Pier [opened two years earlier] is quite crowded.

It could have been written almost any summer since.

Before we leave Great Yarmouth, there are some great photos from the 1850s here.