Company & trade
Dover packet service
Also called Packet service · Packet office · the packets · the Dover service · the packet trade · packet owners
The nine to thirteen fast packets working the crossing from Dover to Blanchefleur, carrying mails, passengers and light valuable freight. Each hull is divided into sixty-fourths held by masters, Dover houses, London houses, small holders, a charity and, in three hulls, the pilots' fund; the owners jointly fill the Keeper's office.
The packet service carrying mail, passengers, small valuable freight and official correspondence across the Narrow Sea to a published schedule; it enters sailings in advance and handles relics and bodies as routine. The cross-Channel packets and their owners, who pay a ship's surgeon to attend their crews.
Named with it
- Packet Master Gideon Kingsdown
- Master Elias Whitstable
- Ship's Surgeon Helena Swingfield
- Captain Miriam Holt
- Packet-Master Ruth Sholden
- Packet-Master Owen Lydd
- Packet Master Josiah Kell
Ties
- owners fill the Keeper's office of the Dover Packet Office
- the Dover pilots' roll's fund holds shares in three packets
- insured by the Dover room
- subscribe to the Dover quay mission
- sail on the packet office's calendar
- its timings set by convoy and packet law
At the table
About twenty masters, nearly all Dover men, hold command as long as they wish and alone decide whether a hull sails; three will take a band across outside the calendar for a private fee. Crews keep unwritten refusal lists (never a coffin sealed abroad unseen, nor burial-ground earth). Deck passage 2s 8d; horses need the master's leave. The surgeon judges who is fit to land and has put eleven ashore in nine years. Resented because a packet man is attended within the hour while a quayman is not. Owners sometimes carry a destitute foreigner home at their own cost, subscribe to the quay mission, and hire bands. Rovers do not attack packets, which are protected by an agreement everybody keeps. Masters who will not sail on certain nights are quietly rostered elsewhere as 'convenience of working'. It has weight in the realm out of proportion to its size.