Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain (16 page)

An even more decisive step against smuggling had been taken forty years earlier, in 1784, when the East India Company persuaded the government to reduce the duties on tea to a point where the smugglers had little to gain. In two years the legitimate imports of tea grew from 5.8 million to 16.3 million pounds weight, which gives some idea of the quantity that was previously being smuggled. In the following century other tariffs were reduced or abolished as Britain entered its era of Free Trade. In 1815 the government passed the Corn Laws. This was a form of excise tax on wheat, the purpose of which was to protect British farmers against cheaper imported produce rather than to raise money for the government. Since wheat was a bulky product it was much more difficult to smuggle than tea, tobacco and alcohol. The Corn Laws were unpopular because they forced up the price of bread and made only a very small contribution to the exchequer. They were abolished by Robert Peel’s government in 1846.

W
indow tax was first introduced in 1696. Each dwelling with any windows had to pay a tax of two shillings (10p); those with ten to twenty windows paid four shillings; those with more than twenty windows paid eight shillings. Certain poor families were exempted and the tax may be compared with the later rates and council tax. It was easy to assess but, like all taxes, it was unpopular and regarded by some as ‘a tax on light and air’. It may also be the origin of the expression ‘daylight robbery’ and some householders managed to reduce their payments by bricking up their windows, a feature of some of the buildings in the fashionable financial district of Charlotte Square in Edinburgh. These became known as ‘Pitt’s Pictures’ when the Window Tax was increased by William Pitt the Younger in the 1780s. Some wealthy families, however, decided that the construction of houses with many windows was a way of drawing attention to their affluence. By 1815 the tax was raising the very substantial sum of £2 million a year to pay for the Napoleonic Wars. The tax was finally abolished in 1851, coincidentally the year of the Great Exhibition staged in Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, an incredible erection of cast iron and acres of glass which was followed by the construction of many similar buildings.

I
ncome tax had long been resisted on the grounds that the disclosure of income that it required was a gross intrusion on personal liberty (besides the less noble reason that people just didn’t want to pay it). It was introduced as a ‘temporary’ measure in 1799 by William Pitt the Younger to finance the wars against France and in 1816, as the wars ended, the tax was abolished. However the gradual expansion of government activities in the 19th century into fields like education, sanitation, the Poor Law and local government required its ‘temporary’ reintroduction in 1842. Thereafter numerous governments, including those of both Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), tried to abolish it again but without success. As late as the 1870s Gladstone tried to lay his hands on some land which had been reclaimed from the Thames by the Metropolitan Board of Works. The Board used the land to create the Victoria Embankment but Gladstone tried to claim some surplus plots to build offices whose rents, he hoped, would generate enough revenue to do away with income tax. A petition to the Queen organized by the MP and newspaper seller W H Smith frustrated this noble plan so, as well as income tax, we now also have Victoria Embankment Gardens free of Gladstone’s proposed offices. The highest rate of income tax was reached in World War II when surtax, on incomes above £2,000, amounted to nineteen shillings and sixpence (97.5p) in the pound!

The Thames Embankment

I
n 1696 the ‘Company of Scotland’ appealed to the citizens of Edinburgh for the huge sum of £400,000 to finance its plans to exploit the untold riches of the Darien isthmus of Panama with its gold deposits and limitless forests of valuable timber. They had been encouraged in this by an English ship’s surgeon called Lionel Wafer who had returned from the area and supposedly seen these treasures. Wafer’s cause had been taken up by William Paterson, a Scotsman who had helped to form the Bank of England two years earlier. Paterson first tried to interest London financiers who were sceptical of Wafer’s claims. The ‘Company of Scotland’ was more successful. In the words of one director the Scottish investors ‘came in shoals from every corner of the kingdom, rich, poor, blind, lame, to lodge their subscriptions in the company’s house’. In a few days most of Scotland’s savings were invested in the scheme. In 1698 the fleet of six ships set out, laden with serge cloth, wigs, shoes and 380 Bibles to trade with the Cuna Indians who inhabited the Darien isthmus.

Precious little gold: Darien scheme collapses

Upon arrival it very quickly became apparent that the area, while well supplied with poisonous snakes and biting insects, had little useable timber and no gold. Moreover the Cuna Indians, though friendly, had no interest in serge cloth in the tropical heat. The most telling indication of the hopelessness of the venture lies in the reaction of the Spanish authorities who governed the lands on either side of Panama.

They had omitted to colonize the area themselves because they knew it to be an inhospitable, disease-ridden swamp. In 1534 the Spaniards had considered the possibility of cutting a canal through Panama but abandoned it as a hopeless venture and even in the 20th century the eventual cutting of the canal cost almost 30,000 lives. The Spaniards were content to leave the intruding Scots alone to die of tropical diseases. The colonists, however, were undeterred. They wrote to their compatriots back in Edinburgh that ‘the wealth, fruitfulness, health and good situation of the country proves much above our greatest expectation’, naming the colony New Caledonia and the first settlement New Edinburgh. Moreover, in an attempt to raise more capital and recruit more colonists, they produced maps which showed such features as ‘Place where, upon digging for stones to make an oven, a considerable mixture of gold was found in them’. The second fleet of colonists was no more fortunate than the first and in the meantime the Spaniards, under orders from Madrid, had stirred themselves to take action against the by-now thoroughly demoralized intruders. In March 1700 the Scots agreed to evacuate the colony. The Spaniards took pity on the survivors and obligingly towed their ships out to sea. Most of them died on the return to Scotland from sickness or shipwreck. The Darien scheme effectively wrecked the finances of Scotland and was widely derided in the English press. The virtual bankruptcy of the nation helped to drive the Scots into the Act of Union with England which marked the end of the Scottish Parliament for almost 300 years. The English government paid the Scots £400,000 to restore the financial health of the nation, some of which went to the shareholders of the ‘Company of Scotland’. It was poor compensation for what was, in effect, the loss of financial and political independence. One person who emerged unscathed from the scheme was Lionel Wafer, who started it all. The Scots had promised him a share in the scheme in return for his information about the gold and timber of Darien but they reneged on the agreement and excluded him from it as an untrustworthy ‘Sassenach’. A piece of luck for him!