A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee Read online

  Sink of Atrocity

  Crime in 19th Century Dundee

  Malcolm Archibald

  BLACK & WHITE PUBLISHING

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1 The Body Snatchers: ‘Bury Them Alive!’

  2 Nautical Crime

  3 Crimes of Passion

  4 A Decade with Patrick Mackay

  5 The Watchmen

  6 The Unsolved and the Strange

  7 Gangs of Young Thugs

  8 Not Quite a Murder

  9 ‘Kill the Buggers!’: Early Police 1824–1860

  10 Thieves of the 1860s

  11 Crimes Against Children

  12 Did the Punishment Fit the Crime?

  13 Dangerous Women

  14 Mag Gow, Drink and Dundee

  15 The Bonnet Came First: Family Disputes and Other Acts of Violence

  16 The Later Years

  Epilogue

  Select Bibliography

  Dedication

  FOR CATHY

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following people for their help and guidance while I was researching and writing this manuscript: The staff of Local History Department, Central Library, Dundee; Iain Flett, Richard Cullen and Angela Lockie of Dundee City Archives; Rhona Rodgers, Ruth Neave and Christina Donald of Barrack Street Collection Unit, McManus Galleries, Dundee; Kristen Susienka of Black & White Publishing, for her patience and skill during the editing process and, most important of all, my wife Cathy.

  Epigraph

  ‘Dundee, the palace of Scotch blackguardism, unless perhaps Paisley be

  entitled to contest this honour with it.’

  ‘Dundee, certainly now, and for many years past, the most blackguard place

  in Scotland.’

  ‘Dundee, a sink of atrocity, which no moral flushing seems capable of cleansing.

  A Dundee criminal, especially if a lady, may be known, without any

  evidence of character, by the intensity of the crime, the audacious bar air,

  and the parting curses. What a set of she-devils were before us!’

  Henry, Lord Cockburn, Circuit Journeys

  Foreword

  A Sink of Atrocity

  When Circuit Journeys was first published in 1888, the reading public was able to see the thoughts and experiences of Henry, Lord Cockburn during the seventeen years he worked as a Circuit judge. In this impressively readable tome, Lord Cockburn both praised and condemned the people he met and the places to which he travelled. While some towns earned plaudits, Dundee was treated with nothing but condemnation. Cockburn’s comments bear some repetition: ‘Dundee, the palace of Scotch blackguardism,’ he wrote, ‘unless perhaps Paisley be entitled to contest this honour with it.’ And again, ‘Dundee, certainly now, and for many years past, the most blackguard place in Scotland.’

  After a brief verbal tour of the Fife and Angus district, Cockburn returned to vilify Dundee a third time: ‘Dundee a sink of atrocity, which no moral flushing seems capable of cleansing. A Dundee criminal, especially if a lady, may be known, without any evidence of character, by the intensity of the crime, the audacious bar air, and the parting curses. What a set of she-devils were before us!’

  Lord Cockburn’s statements influenced the writing of this book. If a judge, with all his experience of crime in its worst, most sordid, saddest and most wicked forms, thought so harshly about Dundee, the town must indeed have been a grim place. I decided to investigate further. It took only a brief glance at contemporary and near-contemporary accounts to realise that others also painted Dundee in negative colours, and sometimes they were disappointingly close to Cockburn’s opinion. For instance, there was ‘Philetus’, writing in the Dundee Magazine in 1799, who stated that ‘Vice, manufactures and population … kept a steady jog trot together’. By making this statement, Philetus seems to blame the rise in manufacturing concurrent with urban industrialisation for a growing crime rate; but Dundee had experienced the occasional bout of law-breaking before manufacturing dominated the town. For example, according to Christopher Whatley et al. in The Life and Times of Dundee, in 1720, John Brunton, deacon of the Weavers’ Incorporation, led a mob to sack a merchants’ house and loot food from a vessel in harbour. In the absence of a police force, the authorities sent a body of military from Perth to quell the troubles and one man died and others were arrested before peace was restored.

  However, mob rule was rare, and was perhaps an indication of hunger-politics more than criminal intent. By the nineteenth century and the time of Henry Cockburn, Dundee was a rapidly-industrialising town, fast becoming a city, with all the vices and horrors that were attached. In its own way Dundee was a microcosm of the period, and as such is worth investigating.

  When I first envisaged this book I had a notion of an academic work with every fact referenced and tables of statistics to guide the reader. But the more I researched the more I realised that, while such an approach might appeal to a limited number of intellectuals, it would more likely repel the majority of readers. It would also litter each page with little numbers that would make reading difficult. Accordingly, I altered the approach to make the contents more accessible. This book was not written to prove an argument but to paint a picture, to try and explain not why Dundee was what it was, but how it felt to be there in the nineteenth century.

  Although this book is about crime in nineteenth-century Dundee, it is equally about the people: how they coped with their environment and how they acted and reacted to the trials and stresses of life. It is about the pickpockets and footpads, the husband-beaters and vitriol-throwers, the murderers and thieves, the rioters and rapists, the mill girls and seamen, merchants and prostitutes, fish sellers and masons; it is about the people who occupied the tenements and villas and whose often-raucous voices filled the streets. Some of the incidents are tragic, others are sordid, some show elements of chilling brutality, others a sense of social justice that is humbling in these more selfish times. Often one can feel sympathy with those forced into desperate acts, but sometimes there is a sensation of creeping horror that such people exist in the same sphere as the rest of us.

  Researching this book was an interesting procedure in itself and involved many hours in the libraries and archives of Dundee and Edinburgh. Dundee is fortunate that the archives hold the Police Board Minutes, while the local press filled in many details that were missing elsewhere. It was sometimes frustrating that many perpetrators were mentioned only by their surname, but that seemed to be the style of the period. However, that anomaly was counterbalanced by the double naming of married women. In Scotland, women could keep their maiden names even after marriage, which is why they were frequently referred to as, for example, Mary Brown or Smith. For the sake of clarity, this book will refer to married women solely by their married name.

  The book has a simple format: sixteen chapters dealing with various forms of crime or crime prevention. Some chapters deal with a type of crime or a historical period, others are more specific. What will become apparent is that while some crimes are very much fixed in the past, others are recognisable today. In Scotland, grave-robbing and infanticide are hopefully confined to history, but theft and drunken behaviour are probably as common in the twenty-first century as they were in the early nineteenth. It is perhaps encouraging to learn that crimes we consider as products of modern life were known 150 or 200 years ago; child abuse, assault and brawls are not creations of the media, but were part and parcel of life for our ancestors as much
as for ourselves. The nature of people does not change despite advances in technology.

  Throughout the book I have not attempted to either prove or disprove the words of Lord Cockburn. That I will leave to the reader, basing his or her answer on the evidence presented in the following pages.

  There is only one piece of advice: Keep your doors and windows locked.

  Malcolm Archibald

  Dundee and Moray, 2012

  Introduction

  Nineteenth-Century Dundee

  Trade was vital to Dundee: trade with the landward farmers who grew the produce that fed the population, coast-wise trade with the other towns and cities of the British Isles and overseas trade that imported raw produce which Dundee converted to sellable goods. At no time was the importance of trade more apparent than in the nineteenth century, when Dundee expanded from a small town into an industrial powerhouse that was the world capital of jute, a major linen manufacturer, the largest whaling port in Europe and a shipbuilding centre of note. However, the ordinary Dundonians paid the price for prominence with poor housing and poverty wages. Not surprisingly, such conditions helped create a criminal underclass. Given the hell’s kitchen in which so many lived, it is more surprising that most people remained honest.

  Perhaps it was their environment that made the Dundonians such a unique people. While industrialisation and the associated factor of overcrowding scarred their city, the people evolved a toleration that is hard to match. Beneath faces often aged by poverty and deprivation, the vast majority of the population exudes a comfortable warmth that extends a welcome to visitors and incomers alike. It may have been Dundee’s nineteenth-century ordeal by industrial fire that created this character, and if so, then something good was hammered from the horrendously long working hours, the starvation poverty and the constant battle to survive.

  For those unfortunate enough never to have visited, Dundee sits on the north bank of the Firth of Tay, sheltered from the worst of the weather by the Sidlaw Hills and from the grind of the North Sea by eight miles of river. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Dundee had a population of around 30,000, and she was centred on just a handful of principal thoroughfares. Nearest to the coast was the Shore, with the docks, dockyards and fish market, from where the rapidly deteriorating Fish Street slanted down towards the docks. Slightly to the north and east, past a maze of closes and buildings bisected by the broad new Castle Street was the Seagate. This long, narrow street ran past a score of timber yards and whale yards that emitted a noxious stench when they boiled blubber into oil. Continuous with Seagate and curving eastward to Peep o’ Day and the rural hamlets of Lilybank and Craigie was The Croft, not yet darkened by industry to its Victorian name of Blackscroft.

  North of and parallel to the Shore was the High Street, the centre of religion, administration and justice. Here were the City Churches, the Mercat Cross from where official proclamations were announced and the William Adam Town House. This iconic building was arguably the most important single structure in the town, housing the council officials, the archives and the jail in one impressive building. Nearly closing the east of the High Street was the Trades Hall, meeting place of the town’s businessmen. Beyond that stretched the Murraygate, at first narrow, congested between overbearing buildings, and then broadening out as it poked a long finger toward the Cowgate and the meandering Dens Road. Slicing northward from the junction of Murraygate and Cowgate was the Wellgate, leading to the steep slope of Bonnethill, later to be known as Hilltown as it gradually industrialised and the land between there and Dens filled with tenements, mills and factories. A few miles to the east lay the fishing village of Broughty from where many of Dundee’s seamen came. Not yet part of the town, the countryside between Broughty and Dundee was pleasantly rural, speckled with farms and the houses of gentlemen.

  The High Street split just west of the Town House. The northern branch eased through the bustling, congested and lively Overgate, heading toward the ancient gateway of West Port. Here the road split again, one branch heading north-west along the evocatively named Witchknowe to merge with the road to Coupar Angus and the not-yet-significant village of Lochee. The other branch was named the Hawkhill and included the densely and largely unregulated industrial suburbs of the Scouringburn. The working people who lived there shared their world with the reeking smoke and clattering machinery of the mills and factories that dominated their lives.

  The southern Nethergate Road slunk from the High Street to the right of the City Churches and onward to the prosperous Perth Road and the open space of Magdalen Green, home of cricketers and swimmers. Here in Dundee’s first suburb substantial stone-built villas smiled over tended gardens, or were sheltered behind the security of isolating surrounding walls.

  To the north of the High Street was the Howff, once the grounds of the Grey Friars, then a combination of a meeting place for the town’s Incorporated Trades and a burial ground, but by the early nineteenth century it was purely a graveyard, enclosed by high walls and holding the remains of the great, the good and everybody else whose time on Earth had passed. Beyond that, spreading in flat green dampness, was the open ground of the Ward and the Meadows, used for public recreation and bleaching linen. From there Barrack Street and Constitution Brae pointed the way to the military barracks around the ancient Dudhope Castle.

  Dundee was not large; an active man could stroll across it in half an hour, but it had considerable civic pride. The Dundee Directory for 1818 states it was a ‘well-built town, consisting of several streets’, while the High Street was a ‘spacious square 360 feet long by 100 feet broad’. In 1847 George McGillivray painted a fine illustration of this High Street, which can be viewed in Dundee’s McManus Gallery. Top-hatted gentlemen and wide-skirted ladies converse in convivial knots while the tight architectural group around the Trades Hall and the bulk of the City Churches speaks of the combination of a continuity of commerce and Christianity that will maintain the status quo and ensure future prosperity. Perhaps it is fitting that the Town House is not included in the picture, for that might tell a different story.

  With its frontage of Ionic pilasters and bustling shops, the 1776 Trades Hall was a meeting place for businessmen and trade, but the Town House was the administrative heart of Dundee. Unique in Britain for having two facades, one facing the Tay, the other the High Street, the Town House was a splendid building, created by William Adam in 1734 and would have graced any street in Europe. In a lecture in 2010, Charles McKean, then Professor of Architectural History at Dundee University, described the Town House of 1776 as ‘the finest new public building north of London’. Beneath the 140-foot-high spire and behind the piazzas were the Guild Hall and the town clerk’s office, the town records and the Court House, and rooms in which the Dundee Banking Company attended to its financial affairs. It was perhaps ironic, yet typical of the nature of Dundee, that the upper storey of this most impressive piece of architecture was the town’s prison, so the blackguards and ne’er-do-wells, the thieves and drunkards and swindlers rested their predatory persons only a few feet above one of the largest stores of money in Dundee.

  The 1818 Directory also lauds both the Old Church, with its 156-foot-high tower, and the nearly-as-lofty spire of St Andrews Church. Naturally for a town bred to the sea, the Sailor’s Hall was also mentioned, and the infirmary, lunatic asylum, the schools and colleges. The ‘neatness and elegance’ of the most recent streets is pointed out, as well as the good supply of ‘excellent water conveyed in leaden pipes’. It would not be for many years that the danger of such pipes was known, and it was not until relatively late in the century that Dundee truly had an adequate supply of clean water.

  On either fringe of Dundee were pockets of luxury where the wealthy merchants built their houses and lived apart from the common mass of humanity. In the west, the area around Magdalen Green and Perth Road saw a gradual build-up of fine houses, either ornate terraces or individual mansions. However, the preferred relocation area for Dundee�
�s elite would be to the east, with the jute barons of the 1860s building mansions in West Ferry and Broughty Ferry, so it earned the sobriquet of the ‘richest square-mile in the world’. Other parts of the city were not so fortunate.

  As a seaport, it would be expected that Dundee had good connections by water, and most Dundonians were familiar with the regular packet boats to Perth and the ferries to Fife. Travel to Edinburgh was more likely to be by sea than by road, although by the 1820s there was a network of stagecoaches. Merchants Hotel in Castle Street saw the Royal Mail coach arrive from Edinburgh at seven every morning, having crossed the Forth at Queensferry and rattled through Perth with its guard clearing the way with a post horn and the horses lathered with sweat and dust. From Dundee it continued up the coast by Arbroath to Aberdeen, and returned with the northern mail to Merchants at about half past four in the evening. There was also a coach for Forfar too, the Thane of Fife, that arrived at Morran’s Hotel in the High Street at nine, and the Coupar Angus Caravan that filled the road at the same time. A Caravan was a slower and less luxurious vehicle, with bench seating and more space for luggage. With the Saxe-Coburg, the Commercial and the Fife Royal Union also searching for business and touting for travellers, Dundee was well connected with the rest of the country.

  In 1800, Dundee was very much a linen town, with ships bringing raw flax from the Baltic and exporting the finished material. Although linen remained extremely important throughout the century, from mid-century on there was a gradual shift to jute and the number of mills and factories multiplied, bringing their own problems. As early as the 1830s there was concern about the volumes of smoke pumped over and through the town from the tall factory chimneys, but while some voiced concern about the possible effect on people’s health, others said that more smoke meant more employment, which could only benefit the town.