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

  The nineteenth century was a time of change and movement like no other. Scotland altered from a country whose inhabitants were largely based in rural areas to one in which the majority of the population lived in urban centres. As a growing population was unable to find full employment in the countryside, they moved to the towns, a continual shuffle of people that was seldom met by adequate house building. The result was an ever-worsening congestion in a finite number of houses, with inevitable tension. Many of these new Dundonians originated from Ireland, bringing with them a strong religious attachment that was not always present in Scotland. The Irish influence altered the character of Dundee, and the clash between Scots and Irish, Orange and Green, added to the confusion of rapid urban expansion.

  Between 1788 and 1801 Dundee’s population rose from just over 19,000 to 26,000. In the next twenty years it rose by nearly fifty per cent to 34,000 and in the next twenty to over 59,000. The depressed decade of the hungry forties saw up to 20,000 more souls arrive, a nearly twenty-five per cent increase in a mere ten years. It was no wonder that many of the people cramming into the already overcrowded town turned to crime. For some it might well have been a lifestyle choice, for others there was simply no other option.

  Yet while the city expanded and altered, its main reason for being remained constant: it was a town of trade. In 1818 there were 150 vessels registered in Dundee, from the sixteen-ton coaster Elizabeth to the 364-ton Tay that braved the Arctic seas in search of whale. As the century progressed, steam gradually ousted sail and the larger and more numerous vessels necessitated constant improvement and enlargement of Dundee’s docks. More shipbuilding yards brought skilled and relatively well-paid jobs as Dundee looked beyond Europe to an increasingly global market.

  As in every major trading port, where there were docks there were prostitutes and pubs. Dundee had its share of both. Public houses from unlicensed shebeens to extremely ornate drinking palaces were scattered thickly around the town. There were also a number of streets and alleys with a reputation for houses of ill repute or brothels. The narrow Couttie’s Wynd that cut like the slash of a seaman’s knife from Nethergate to Yeaman’s Shore was notorious for brothels and low lodging houses, while the Broad Close in the Overgate was another area best avoided by those of more refined susceptibilities, but such streets were part of the price Dundee had to pay for its international trade.

  Finishing the transport trilogy was the railway, which came to Dundee in the early 1830s, altering the geography of the town as it rattled northward toward the new village of Newtyle and the fertile fields of Strathmore. Much more disruptive than the steam ship, in many ways the railway was the epitome of the century just as much as was industrialisation. By bringing inexpensive transport to the people it shrank the country, but the sidings and embankments were a divisive influence, and the gangs of labourers, the railway navvies, who built the initial lines, could bring mayhem in their wake. Dundee was fortunate to avoid that particular form of crime, but criminals certainly did use Dundee’s railways and one of the most mysterious of Dundee’s robberies took place on a steam train.

  Industrialisation brought many changes. It brought factories and pollution, fixed and long working hours and streets of bleak basic tenements, but it also supplied regular work so that when the Industrial Revolution matured, the people of Dundee no longer had the great periods of dearth that marred their rural ancestors. With factory-based employment backed by the Christian charities of the mid- and latter-century, and with the parish workhouse, the dreadful Union, as a last resort, it is unlikely that people actually starved to death by the 1880s and 1890s. That, however, was not the case earlier in the century.

  In the depression years of the 1820s, and especially in the terrible hungry 1840s, death by starvation was not unknown even in the most densely populated areas of Dundee. For example, there was the case of Ann Wilson, a single woman who lived in Jessman’s Court, Seagate. One evening in February 1829, she begged for a potato to eat, and spent the entire night at her spinning wheel, desperate to earn some money. In the morning a neighbour found her dead with her work unfinished and no food in the house. There was a similar case in the middle of January 1844 when a widow named Mrs Cameron was found dead in her garret. Mrs Cameron had lived in Argyll Close in the Overgate, but ended her life lying on the pile of rags that was the only furniture in her house. She had died of starvation, still holding her seven-year-old son in her arms.

  For many people, even late in the century, poverty and hunger were dark shadows waiting. The middle-aged would remember the pangs of childhood; the elderly would recall the daily struggle to survive, so for them the rattling din of a mill would signify the sound of wages, however poor. Yet although the nineteenth century lacked the famines that had created meal riots in the 1770s, the alternative also had dangers. Scarcely a week passed when there was not a death or injury at work.

  Accidents could happen in a hundred different ways. Seamen could fall from a ship in Dundee harbour nearly as easily as they could in a Baltic squall or in the blinding ice of the Arctic; carriers and coachmen risked death on winter roads, quarrymen worked with gunpowder and terrible weights, but the workplaces in the city were equally deadly. Sometimes accidents resulted in horrific injuries, such as the case in April 1836 when an unnamed boy lost his arm in a carding machine at Balfour and Meldrum’s mill in Chapelshade. He survived to be taken to hospital, but others were not so fortunate. The following year an eight-year-old boy named James Templeman was also victim of a carding machine into which he fell backward. He sustained appalling injuries, so it was probably merciful that he died before he reached the infirmary. Another man who died was Archibald Menzies. In 1844 he was working at the Dron distillery when he fell into boiling copper. He was hauled out but died of his burns.

  Sometimes people were so terribly injured they might have wished they were dead, such as the fourteen-year-old Robert Thoms who worked at Midmills Bleachfield on the Dichty Burn. He got himself trapped between two of the great wheels and his left leg was literally rolled together to form a single mass of bone, muscle and sinew, while according to the Dundee Advertiser, ‘the integuments of the lower part of the belly and fork were torn off.’ The surgeons at the infirmary immediately amputated the mess that had been his leg, but could do little about his other injuries. On 19th June 1828 another unfortunate fell into a tub of not-quite-boiling lees at Taylor’s Soapworks. He dragged himself out and lingered for two agonising days before he died.

  Even home life had its dangers. With houses heated by open fires and children often unsupervised while their parents were at work, death by burning was common. To give one example of many, on 27th December 1826 a three-year-old girl living in the Long Wynd died when her dress caught fire. The ballooning clothes worn by women were terribly susceptible to catching fire, and every so often some unfortunate creature would run screaming into the street enveloped in flames.

  Augmenting the dreadful poverty and frequent accidents was the constant worry of childbirth and disease. Childbirth was a major killer of women well into the century, but unless there was something unusual in the circumstances, it hardly merited a comment. In July 1824 there was a double tragedy when two women died in childbirth the same day. The incident was worse because both women were married to whaling seamen. In common with every other urban centre, Dundee had areas where disease was rarely absent, and such horrors as smallpox, typhus and cholera made periodical ravages. The cholera year of 1832 alone claimed 511 lives in the town, but it was the slow dribble of childhood deaths that would suck joy from people’s lives. Infant mortality was as bad in Dundee as anywhere else, as a single visit to the Howff graveyard can prove. It is sobering to read the names and ages on many of the gravestones, and one can only bless the medical pioneers who have alleviated much of that monstrosity.

  A final, and sad, cause of death was suicide. Every week seemed to bring another instance of man or woman who terminated their own life by hanging, drowning,
jumping or wrist slashing. Each death was a family tragedy and a failure by the community to recognise that one of their own was in trouble. Suicide seems to have been prolific in the nineteenth century, and Dundee was no exception.

  Yet the Dundonians struggled on. Seamen mutinied against inefficient ship masters, workers fought for something approaching a liveable wage and working hours that would give them some life with their families, and charities, usually Christian, combated the worst effects of poverty. Sometimes, perhaps more often than was recorded, quick anger banded people together to combat crime. The sudden cry of ‘Murder!’ or ‘Stop, thief!’ invariably invoked a response in old Dundee as people co-operated in chasing a housebreaker, wife beater or pickpocket.

  If there was often a deep sense of justice in the hard-used Dundonians, there was also a fierce independence that resented any authority considered overbearing. The old nightwatchmen – the Charlies – and the early police force were often given a rough time by the people they set out to protect. Sometimes a whole street would rise against the peacekeepers, and on a Saturday night when the drink flowed free the police seem to have been regarded as legitimate targets by many of the less respectable inhabitants of the burgh.

  To live in nineteenth-century Dundee would be to live in a constant barrage of noise and smells. The noise would be from the wheels of carts and coaches across granite cobbles, the clump of horses’ hooves, the shouting of street traders trying to sell their wares and the pleas of a dozen different types of beggars. In the background, and dominating the narrow streets, was the hum and clatter of machinery from the scores of mills and factories. The smells were, if anything, more offensive. Hundreds of horses meant the roads would be covered in horse dung. Houses with no interior plumbing led to cesspits for household waste. These household middens were meant to be emptied every night, but reality did not always match the theory. And there was the smell of rotten fruit and vegetables and at times the sickening stench of boiling whale blubber. In common with every urban centre, Dundee employed scavengers, men whose job it was to remove the ‘nuisances’ (as the piles of human excreta were known), but their numbers were small and the city constantly growing. Over everything, sometimes choking, sometimes drifting, was the all-pervading smell of smoke from scores of factory chimneys and hundreds of household fires. Edinburgh may be known as Auld Reekie, but smoke dominated Dundee as well. To live in industrial Dundee was to wade through smoke, avoid assorted unpleasantness and grow used to the varieties of smells that assailed the nostrils and noise that battered the ears.

  So that was Dundee in the opening decades of the nineteenth century: a hard-working, hard-living town rapidly changing into an industrial city. It was a town at the heart of an international trading network. It was a place of startling contrasts, of sickening deprivation close to some of the most luxurious trade-created mansions in Britain, a place of cramped tenement living and of mobs that could attack the police at the skiff of a broken bottle, a place of rattling mills and men often numbed by unemployment. Perhaps it was this terrible contrast that created the criminal element, for Dundee was also home to just about every kind of crime known to the nineteenth-century man and woman. Murder and petty theft, smuggling and Resurrection, child stripping and thimble rigging, rape and prostitution, housebreaking and hen stealing, riot and child exposure – Dundee knew them all.

  As the century rolled on, some of the types of crimes became less familiar, while others were as well known to the Bobbies of the late 1890s as they had been to the Charlies of the 1820s. It has often been said that people do not change, only circumstances and technology. That is certainly true of Dundee’s nineteenth-century crime, and the blackguards and footpads of Peter Wallace’s gang in the 1820s would have fit easily into the garrotters of the 1860s or even the teenage thugs of the present age.

  This book does not pretend to cover the entire story of Dundee’s nineteenth-century crime. It has been selective, leaving out far more than was included, but it aims to give a flavour of life in Dundee at a time when Scotland was in the forefront of the world of industry and trade. It shows Dundee through a period of major change, when shipping advanced from sail power to steam, when the iron juggernaut of the railway cleaved through the centre of town and life moved at an ever faster pace. It brings the reader to the claustrophobic closes and unhygienic tenements of the city and eases through the smoke-swirled streets. Was Dundee such a sink of atrocity? Enter the gas-lit confusion of the nineteenth century and make a judgement, but be aware: the pitiless eyes of the criminals are watching.

  1

  The Body Snatchers: ‘Bury Them Alive!’

  Body on the Coach

  On 9th of February 1825 the Commercial Traveller coach rumbled on its usual route through the small towns of Fife. Crammed together, with their feet shuffling in the straw, the passengers would normally have stared at the dismal winter weather outside or spoken to the people within, but not this time. Instead they sat in some discomfort, very aware of the man in their midst. He was young, well-mannered and respectably dressed, but they were still wary of him; he had boarded the coach in Dundee and had behaved perfectly politely, but they were highly suspicious of his luggage.

  Rather than the usual selection of bundles and bags, the young man carried a single but extremely large box, which aroused great curiosity in the rocking coach. Naturally, if not exactly politely, the other passengers had asked him what it contained, but the man had been evasive with his replies. By the time the coach stopped at Kinghorn for the ferry across the Forth, the other passengers were restless on their leather seats. Without a word, the young man left the coach, hefted the huge box on his back and fled, but by then the curiosity of the passengers was too strong.

  Bundling out of the coach, they followed. When the young man tried to run, the weight of the box slowed him down and the other passengers caught him, held him secure and wrenched open the huge box. They peered inside, with some recoiling in horror and others nodding as their suspicions were confirmed. The dead eyes of an old woman stared sightlessly up at them. There was only one reason for anyone to carry a dead body across the country in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and the passengers looked at their captive with mixed horror and disgust: he must be a Resurrectionist.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century Edinburgh was one of the leading medical centres of the world. The University’s medical school was famous for teaching and innovation, but human bodies were essential to teach anatomy and the legal supply had just about dried up. In an era when religion was still important, people believed that the dead should be left undefiled so when God called them on Judgement Day they were whole. That notion, however, only applied to God-fearing folk; those who broke God’s word were unimportant, so there was some leeway for doctors of dissection. The law stated that babies who died before they were christened and orphans who died before they signed articles for an apprenticeship could be dissected, although the parents of the former probably raised some objections. In other parts of Europe deceased prostitutes could be legally dissected, and the Terror in France produced a crop of fresh corpses. Sometimes the dead were shipped from Europe and Ireland to Britain for dissection. Nevertheless, throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth the most common corpses in anatomy labs had been those of hanged criminals.

  Such a situation was fine and dandy as long as there was a healthy crop of condemned men, but the swinging old days of full gallows were past. By the 1820s there were few crimes for which hanging was prescribed, and unless Scotland was flooded with murderers and rapists, the noose would wait in vain for its victim and the anatomy table for its cadaver.

  To rectify this situation, medical students and strong-stomached entrepreneurs became Resurrectionists, scouring the graveyards of the countryside, watching for funerals so they could unearth the grave, remove the recently interred body and carry it to an anatomist. Stealing a body was reprehensible, but carried only a fine. Stealing the c
lothes in which the body was clad was worse, for clothing was valuable, so the Resurrection men would strip the corpse and run with a naked body. The most unscrupulous would even murder to obtain fresh meat: Burke and Hare were not the first in this trade. That dubious honour goes to a pair of women, Helen Torrence and Jean Waldie, who murdered a young boy as early as 1751 and were duly hanged for their pains. However, the rewards for body snatching, with or without the accompanying murder, were good. A prime body could fetch as much as £10, which was a small fortune at a time when a working man was lucky to earn £1 a week.

  The town authorities took what precautions they could to deter the Resurrectionists. Many graveyards had a watchtower in which men stood watch over their silent charges, shivering as cold moonlight cast long shadows on the ranked memorials of the town. Others had a mort house or dead house in which the dead were securely placed until they decayed to a condition unlikely to interest even the most avid of anatomists. Even after burial there were mort safes, heavy cages that could be hired to protect the coffin, but for those without funds, the best defence was to stand guard night after long eerie night, so dim lanterns often lit Dundee’s graveyards as the bereaved huddled over the graves of their departed. The young man who had carried the box on the Fife Commercial Traveller had obviously succeeded in circumventing any defences, but until he was questioned, nobody knew who he was or whose grave he had desecrated.

  Dragged back to Cupar, the county town of Fife, the Resurrectionist was closely interrogated until he admitted everything. He was a medical student and he had dug up the body from the burial yard of Dundee. There were two graveyards in Dundee: Logie on the Lochee Road, and the Howff beside Barrack Street and the Meadows. When the student finally confessed he had dug up a grave in the Howff, word was sent to the Dundee Procurator Fiscal, who sent men to search the fresh graves.