AMATEUR historian Prudence Bebb has written before about life in Regency York, Scarborough and Harrogate - now she has given an intriguing insight into early 19th century Whitby in her latest book.

Prudence, from Poppleton, near York, writes of a fishing and whaling community where danger and death were a constant risk.

"At night a woman, tending fretful children and hearing the wind strengthen, would feel stabs of fear as she thought of the tossing coble where her man was earning a living for them," she writes.

Another danger for Whitby men was of being press-ganged into the Royal Navy, and they would try all kinds of tricks to escape the attentions of the Press Gang. "Some young men hid in the woods outside Whitby; devoted mothers and girlfriends slipped surreptitiously out of the town with baskets of food."

Smuggling was rife, and Prudence describes how the Ship Launch Inn in Baxtergate, now the Old Smugglers Cafe, was a sanctuary for smugglers with an underground passage linking it to another inn.

In a fight between men from a revenue cutter and a smuggling vessel in 1817, seven smugglers were killed and four from the revenue. "Ten smugglers escaped and managed to get away on a coach. It rattled away from Whitby and passed through York without anyone in that city being aware of the 'profession' of its occupants. They reached London in safety."

Whitby did not forget its poor, particularly in the wake of war, when gentlemen gathered in the Angel Inn to launch a fund from which money was paid out to enable poverty-stricken families to buy food and coal.

Life in Regency Whitby is published by Sessions of York, priced £6, and is available from local bookstores.