Daniel Pomeroy

A London customs clerk whose name matters wherever inspection turns exacting. Carriers with fragile or awkward cargo soon learn whether he is in a searching mood or merely a procedural one.

Daniel Pomeroy is a customs clerk within London’s dense regime of manifests, seals, cargo checks and overlapping authority — the stretch of procedure where a consignment stops being a commercial matter and becomes a documentary one. In the city’s practical hierarchy of movement, the port-reeve and the harbourmaster matter at the basin; Pomeroy matters where customs turns exacting.

His reputation rests on unpredictability rather than cruelty. A nervous clerk with fragile cargo learns quickly to judge whether Pomeroy is in a searching mood or a procedural one, and the difference is measured in days. Along the quays he is said to read a seal more closely than the man who pressed it, and to remember a consignor’s earlier irregularities long after the consignor has forgotten them. He is not thought open to persuasion, which makes him unpopular and, in the view of a certain class of merchant, valuable: a cargo Pomeroy has passed is assumed to have been properly looked at.

Companies meet him when they carry goods into London on another’s behalf, when a commission turns on what a manifest does or does not say, or when an employer wants to know why a crate has sat under customs seal for a week. He answers questions about procedure readily and questions about particular cargoes hardly at all.

In person

In person, Daniel Pomeroy is a narrow, slight and rather underfed man of thirty-four, a little below middle height and mildly stooped, with fine, short straw-blond hair already thinning at the crown. His thin, triangular face is clean-shaven, with a pointed chin, prominent cheekbones and a pale, sallow complexion, and his extremely dark-brown eyes look out through small round steel spectacles with thick lenses. The tip of his left index finger is missing. He wears a rust-brown frock coat over a faded dark-red waistcoat, a cream high-collared shirt and dark neckcloth, dark trousers and practical shoes, with a dark inspection apron when he is at work on a cargo. He carries no weapon: his tools are a loupe, a folding balance, a brass rule, customs seal and stamp, wax, probes, an inspection knife, sample bottles, numbered tags, manifests and a notebook filled in a tiny hand, supplemented by the restrained cargo-verification and seal-reading apparatus of the customs house.