It has emerged that Dutch border police found a map of Sea Palling, a small Norfolk beach, when they seized two suspected traffickers and 24 Albanian and Vietnamese migrants after being alerted to a yacht sitting unusually low in the water at the Netherlands port of IJmuiden.
The revelation of the discovery last August has come as something of a shock to the residents of Britain’s smaller coastal towns a week after a boat was stopped with 20 people on board near Dymchurch in Kent and a yacht with 17 Albanians was spotted sailing into a marina in Chichester, West Sussex.
In Norfolk, in particular, residents understand the local coastline has sections remote enough for boats to possibly land undetected.
“I’ve always thought it’s an ideal place for smuggling because there’s lots of uninhabited coastline,” said Tony Roff, who works at the Muckleburgh Military Collection, a former anti-aircraft training base overlooking Weybourne, where the water is sufficiently deep off shore there were worries during the second world war that the area might be a target for invasion.
The fortifications are now a museum and many coastal residents express a sense of vulnerability, given that Britain’s coastline is longer than India’s and is covered by the three vessels of the UK Border Force. Norfolk is just 102 nautical miles from the Dutch port of IJmuiden.
“We can’t afford to defend the coast properly,” said Barry Tomlinson, walking his dog. “The coastguard here is based in Hull; they haven’t got local knowledge. Migrant boats could come in under the cliffs all along here and nobody would notice.”
On the hill above Sheringham, with fine views across Weybourne, someone is noticing – Sarah Fendley, a volunteer for the National Coastwatch Institution. Over the past 20 years, dozens of derelict coastguard lookout huts have been reopened and 50 are now staffed by the charity. They have telescopes, radar and a mission to contact the professional coastguard if they spot anything dangerous or suspicious.
“People are quite alert now to [people smuggling] being a potential threat,” said Fendley. Smaller crab boats are not identified on the Coastwatch radar but the watchers have an A4 binder with photographs of all the local boats. “We have to record how many people are on boats because somebody could pick someone up out there and come back,” said Fendley.
Long stretches of the Norfolk coast are surveyed by the telescopes of the volunteers, but at Cart Gap, the closest lookout to Sea Palling, one of them points out that they only work from 10am to 6pm.
“People smuggling is always going to be possible,” he said, pointing at a hazy horizon of choppy, flecked, sea. “There’s the view. At 10pm tonight, it’s still there. It’s just not possible to constantly look across the whole country. Think of the amount of people who were in Calais; if you’re desperate, you’re going to try anything.”
The East Anglian coastline may have a rich smuggling history but things have been decidedly peaceful in recent years. None of three Coastwatch volunteers at different lookout stations along the Norfolk coast, with more than five years’ service between them, has ever spotted anything suspicious.
The only widely known incident of a migrant boat arriving on the East Anglian coast in recent history was in August 1994 when four men from Turkey capsized in a dingy off Mundesley. There was a lifeboat gala on the beach that day and the lifeboat and coastguards were mobilised. The migrants were arrested – one unsuccessfully hid in the village telephone box – and three Dutch sailors were charged with assisting illegal entry into Britain.
