Embedded Files
By 1823 Lazarus Roberts was living at Melcombe Regis (Weymouth) on the Dorset coast. I don’t know precisely the reason for his move to Dorset, but it would have been an obvious place for a naval man to find work.
The sea here was often treacherous, in particular the stretch by Chesil Beach, and Lazarus would have witnessed the ‘Great Gale’ of November 1824 which caused extensive flooding and damage to the coastal villages, especially Melcombe, killing several people including two revenue men. ‘The whole of the roads and streets were covered with the rolling billows, driving impetuously masses of sand and stone, boats were observed floating in close approximation with vehicles of various descriptions, such a scene of devastation and ruin were never remembered to have been observed before … Melcombe was nearly swept from the face of the earth,’ was how one contemporary observer put it.
Lazarus may have already known Thomas Lipson RN (c.1784–1863), a naval contemporary, who was married to Elizabeth Emma Fooks of Melcombe Regis. Lazarus possibly became friendly with Elizabeth’s young sister Mary through an acquaintance with Lipson. On 6 March 1823, aged thirty-two, he and the twenty-one-year-old Mary Fooks married at the parish mother-church of St Mary’s.
Within a year, Lazarus and Mary’s first child was born. He was my great-great grandfather and was named James Mackenzie Roberts after his uncle, James Mackenzie Fooks, a noted surveyor of Melcombe Regis. He was baptised at the church of St Laurence, Upwey, near Weymouth on 2 March 1824. The baptism record lists his abode as Upwey, however the transcript of another baptism record (also dated 2 March) seems to list his place of abode as Tyneham, some twenty miles east of Weymouth, near Lulworth (and now more famous as a World War II ‘ghost village’). I have been unable to trace the original record this was transcribed from, however, and this feels like an error. Lazarus’s occupation is given as ‘Lieut RN’ though and there was a coastguard station at Tyneham (Worbarrow, seemingly an outpost of the Lulworth station), so it is just possible he was already serving as a coastguard officer at this time. However the earliest date I can find for his nomination to the service is twenty months later, on 2 November 1825, from Upwey.
The Coastguard – Dorset And Hampshire
In the century since the early 1700s smuggling had become rife along the Dorset and Hampshire coasts, where the numerous hidden coves and quiet beaches could be used to land contraband goods well out of sight of the combined forces of the Water Guard, Revenue cruisers and land-based Riding Officers.
At Weymouth the frequent visits by George III and his entourage ensured a seasonal demand for luxury items such as silk and lace, as well as the traditional commodities of tobacco, tea and brandy. This lasted well into the reign of George IV and by the 1820s the ‘Free Traders’ – often themselves discharged servicemen – had developed sophisticated tactics that required a more organised combative approach. This came in 1822 when the three preventive services were amalgamated under the new name of the ‘Coast Guard’, which was comprised almost entirely of demobilised naval officers such as Lieutenant Roberts.
The stretch of coast under patrol by a Coastguard station was officially six miles, but in reality was often nearer sixteen. Officers such as Lazarus who married locally were posted not less than twenty miles from their home to avoid possible collusion with locals.
A Lieut L. Roberts was appointed to the Coastguard at Cadgewith, near the Lizard in Cornwall, according to newspapers of November 1825. This must be him although he was subsequently Chief Officer at Bourne Bottom station, Poole port, Dorset (this is where Bournemouth pier now stands).
A second son, William Pollard, was born at Bourne Bottom early in 1826 so they must have been there then. Terraces of cottages were built to house Coastguard officers at strategic points, including Bourne Bottom, so it is likely this is where Lazarus and Mary lived. William was baptised at St James’s, Poole, on 10 February 1826 – Lazarus and Mary’s address is given just as ‘in the preventive service, Bournemouth’.
As at Weymouth, there was a long tradition of smuggling here and, surrounded by wild heathland, it was Bourne Bottom which saw most of the landings along this part of the coast. Lazarus’s time here coincided with the last years of the local squire, Captain Lewis Tregonwell, the man to whom the founding of modern Bournemouth is attributed but who, evidence suggests, may also have been an agent for smuggling enterprises.
A few months after William was born, Lazarus moved east to Hampshire and a posting at Barton Cliff station, Southampton port, arriving on 10 June 1826. A third son, Henry Came, was born at the nearby village of Milton in 1828.
This was another stretch of coast favoured by smugglers. Captain Frederick Marryat, author of many sea-yarns, assisted the local Revenue cruiser Rosario here in the winter of 1821 and subsequently appealed to the First Lord of the Admiralty for improvements in the government’s methods of dealing with smuggling. But at the end of the decade Barton and its neighbouring towns of Christchurch and Milford on Sea were still popular landing-places, although the stations along this coast, such as the one at Mudeford (Christchurch Harbour) staffed by ‘ten men armed with musket, cutlass and a brace of pistols for each, and constantly vigilant’, ultimately gave the smugglers little chance.
The conditions under which a Coastguard officer had to do his job were hard, as summed up by a contemporary of Lazarus’s:
The work was terrible. In the winter months we had to be on our guards by dusk, which meant leaving home by four or half-past, and we never got back until eight the next morning. ... I’ve often been that done up that I could scarcely walk home and many is the time I’ve gone down to the water and washed my face to keep my eyes open. It was enough to kill a horse and only a strong man could stand it.
The men were forbidden to leave their posts on the shore even when wet through; in such conditions it is not surprising that there was a high level of sickness, which resulted in loss of pay.
There was much traffic between the coast here and the Isle of Wight, and on 20 December 1828 Lazarus was briefly posted to East Cowes station, Cowes port, on the island for a few weeks until 3 March the following year. After this he returned to Dorset and a posting at West Lulworth.
Lulworth is perhaps the most renowned of smuggling locations, and the Coastguard built a station here very early in its history. Lazarus was Chief Officer in charge of five officers, with a personal allowance of £10 per annum (plus an entitlement to a share of any seizure-rewards). Ships from Cherbourg were regularly using Dorset beaches, with the most daring landing at Weymouth itself. Thomas Hardy, an authority on Dorset smuggling, romantically describes the exploits of the Free Traders and ‘Preventive-guard’ in 1830s Lulworth in his short story ‘The Distracted Preacher’. Here the poor customs man, Will Latimer, is tied to a tree at Lulworth Cove by local smugglers, ‘rascals’ who cheerfully proclaim ‘We don’t do murder here!’.
But in reality these were violent times: vicious attacks on Coastguard officers were not uncommon and several stories have passed down of men beaten and left to die, tied down and even, on one occasion at least, hung over the precipitous Lulworth cliff at the end of a rope while the smugglers carried on their business. None of these published accounts mentions Lazarus by name, but his activities in the Coastguard during this period are summarised in his claim for the Greenwich out-pension of 1860:
After the peace in 1815, not from choice but from necessity after waiting years endeavouring to obtain employment in his own profession but without success, he joined the Coast Guard service where he used every effort in putting down smuggling and succeeded in capturing a greater number of goods than any officer then employed and he begs to observe that this was not done by one fortunate seizure, but was the result of constant exertion and perseverance running great risk both at sea and on shore, having been twice seriously injured in normal conflicts with smugglers. On the first occasion being forced over a cliff at Lulworth in Dorset and seriously injured and on the second being opposed by a group of smugglers armed with flails, himself and chief boatman (the only two present) were left senseless on the ground, the latter dying from the injuries he received and so seriously was this considered that the board of Customs offered a reward of £500 for the apprehension of the offenders, a larger sum than was ever offered on any other occasion.
This latter assault, or one very similar, was referred to by the Collector of Customs in his reports to head office on 17 July 1829 and confirms the figure of £500 (by 1831 the universal government reward for information leading to the apprehension and conviction of smugglers). But no names are given in the report and the only officer to be recorded as ‘discharged dead’ during Lazarus’s time at Lulworth was a boatman, John Gosnell, who died on 9 December 1829.
Other attacks on Lazarus’s fellow officers include that on Thomas Jago, a commissioned boatman at West Lulworth, who was reportedly tied down on Weymouth beach and left to drown (he was rescued and left the station a month before Lazarus arrived). The death of Lieutenant Thomas Knight, who joined West Lulworth three days before Lazarus moved on in June 1831, was widely reported. He died in June of the following year from injuries received in a struggle with smugglers at Lulworth not dissimilar to that in Lazarus’s account. Knight’s boatman, John Duke, another contemporary of Lazarus’s, also received a severe beating.
Whether Lazarus really did succeeded in capturing a greater number of goods ‘than any officer then employed’ is difficult to prove; nor are his alleged attacks confirmed. It is of course possible, writing thirty years later, that he saw fit to embellish his own Coastguard career a little to add weight to his application for the out-pension, in which he claims he captured 2682 tubs of spirits, 208 bales of tobacco, 9 bales of snuff, 37 chests of tea, 16 cases of plate glass, 18 vessels and boats and 51 men. He was also a strong swimmer and thrice saved the lives of sailors who had fallen overboard.
A fourth son, Charles Dunrich, was born at West Lulworth and baptised there on 3 September 1829. The middle names of Mary and Lazarus’s eldest children – Mackenzie, Pollard, Dunrich – are all family names. Another son, Felix Delaney, was baptised at West Lulworth in April 1831, although if Delaney was also a family name I have been unable to locate it.
It is perhaps illustrative of the relationship between Lazarus and his father that Lazarus named none of his nine sons either Abraham or Lazarus. (Abraham died when Lazarus was about fourteen and may have had little contact with his son after Lazarus’s mother had died in 1801.)
Harwich and Brightlingsea
After two and a half years at Lulworth, Lazarus, Mary and their young sons James (aged seven), William (five), Henry (three), Charles (two) and the baby Felix left Dorset for the East Coast in the summer of 1831. In this year naval appointments became universal in the Coastguard service, at first for a compulsory three-year posting (this did not count for seniority and so was highly unpopular, although remained until 1841).
In June 1831, Lazarus was posted to the Revenue cruiser Hornet and then the Scout, based at Harwich in Essex. His command was to be for three years beginning on 8 July. The Revenue cruiser, or cutter, was a sloop-rigged single-master with a running bowsprit which appeared to ‘cut’ through the water, hence its name. Handy and fast, they were extensively used by the Revenue and smugglers alike. Once the Royal Navy had taken over the Revenue cruisers though, the smugglers found themselves in deep trouble. The ships (thirty-five patrolled the coast of England) were better sailed and surveillance both at sea and on land became far more efficient.
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.
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