"Great dissatisfaction is felt in the neighbourhood of Hope's Nose in consequence of the Preventive men coming across a store of tubs which had been landed there early in October.
"It is said that one of the parties split, and that his daughter took her station on a rock in front of the cave, and the Preventive men walked right in and took the tubs.
"The honest man had his conscience smitten, and was obliged to split to ease it, he having been engaged in runs for fourteen years and upwards, and now doing the illicit in the matrimonial line at Torquay, the expenses of which caused him to "nose". The men of the "moonshine" are very indignant at being done out of the results of a successful run."
A nose, like a snitch or a snout is, as every schoolboy knows, common as a noun and means a police-informant, or in this case an H.M.Customs informant.
NOSING was The Western Times' (12th November 1842) title to this piece, here used as a verb. To split, meaning more or less the same, is not felt to merit quotation marks. Of course it is the location, Hope's Nose, that inspired the choice of words.
Hope's Nose is said to be a form of Hoop's Nose, so called because of the shape of this headland although it seems more of a hook than a hoop.
The Preventive Men came by sea. (I assume) The informer's daughter stood on a rock to betray the cache of tubs. Her father was doing the illicit in the matrimonial line, (horrible euphemism!) How did the Times' correspondent know all these details? It is pretty clear where his sympathies lay.
Men of the moonshine, I find admirable. It would make a good title for a novel about smugglers.
"Moonshine signifies smuggled spirits, which were placed in holes or pits and removed at night" - Notes and Queries, May 1884.
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