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1. In the beginning


October 2016

Damn. The publication and launch of the long awaited Collier Letters edited by Dr Richard Saville is scheduled for the middle of October when I’ll be in France.  I’ve been waiting for the publication of this volume from the Sussex Record Society for almost two years – ever since I first started thinking about writing a biography of Collier.
I first came across ‘Mister Hastings’ while researching my book ‘The Smuggling Life of Gabriel Tomkins’.  Collier was Surveyor of the Kent Customs Service from the 1730’s and thus actually employed Tomkins – a former smuggler – as Keeper of the Dartford Customs House.
The thing about Collier is that he was a voluminous correspondent, leaving behind some 3000 letters written between around 1714 and his death in 1760.  I’d spent several hours in the Hastings Library looking through the letters for mentions of Tomkins or the Hawkhurst Gang of smugglers with whom Tomkins rode after he was kicked out of the customs service.
Fortunately I hadn’t had to read the Collier letters in their original spidery long-hand.  A descendant. Charles Lane Sayer had collected a large number into two volumes which he’d published in 1906.  But Sayer left a lot out, and Dr Saville would be annotating the comprehensive selection written between 1731 and 1746 when Collier was, in Saville’s words “at the height of his powers.”
But I was going to miss the launch of Saville’s book – and the chance to meet this eminent historian and, hopefully, start a dialogue which would help me with my research.

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