The area has a very long history of smuggling. Rustington used to have a pub called “The Smugglers” until it was sympathetically converted into a traditional “ye olde Sussex” Chinese restaurant (now called the Dragon).
In the old days of horse mounted customs and excise men, the jolly smugglers sneaked in brandy and rum. They were regarded as local heroes and only killed people when it was easy or they were going to get caught.
Now-a-days, the jolly old smuggler just deals in the usual mundane stuff like narcotics, immigrants and weapons as everybody can get cheap duty free brandy on the way back from holiday.
Littlehampton makes a wonderful smugglers port - when the fishermen go home or down the pub, the port is empty.
Considered relatively small operations on the national scale, no effort is made to kerb the illegal traffick *. The only officials interested being the council wardens responsible for fining litter droppers. Woe betide any smuggler that drops the packaging off an armalite rifle in front of a litter warden. Eighty quid fine straight away!
* To be fair, detecting smugglers is quite difficult now-a-days, as most of them no longer wear tricorn hats, eye patches, ¾ length coats and cutlasses. This failure to wear the proper uniform is a dirty rotten trick that doesn’t give the authorities a chance and also means that local stockists of such attire are rapidly going into recession.
