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

  Alex Buchan heaved his foreganger over the boat and took the line a turn around the billet head, securing the whale to the boat. He hoisted a jack, a distinctive flag that announced he had harpooned a whale and the animal was now Traveller’s lawful property. They were the ‘fast boat’, the boat held fast to a whale. All they had to do now was kill the animal and they were guaranteed oil money to supplement their wages.

  As was expected, the whale fled, pulling the boat behind it. The whaleboat held a number of lines but one by one they were used up, so although the whale and boat were still attached, the whaling seamen were in danger of losing their capture. Providentially, a boat from Princess of Wales thrust in one of her own harpoons, known in the trade as a ‘friendly harpoon’ to help tire the whale. However, the whale was still full of fight and struggled, dragging lines and boats behind it, until the lines of Princess of Wales were also finished. The whale remained alive, panting on the surface of the sea. Exhausted but triumphant, Alexander Buchan’s crew crept closer, readying their lances for the killing blow, but before they could strike, a boat from Thomas raced past and Alexander Kilgour, a Dundee harpooner, thrust his harpoon deep into the whale.

  Giving a jerk that unbalanced one of the men in Traveller’s boat, the whale raced away, hauling Thomas’s boat behind it. It is easy to imagine the scene, with the waves heaving around, possibly dappled with icebergs and speckled with the Arctic birds that knew a kill meant free food. Eventually, and inevitably, the whale tired and lay on the surface, sobbing its exhaustion as the whaleboats circled around like the predators they were. A seaman from Traveller thrust in another harpoon. The whale barely stirred and the killing lances came out, thrusting for the lungs, the heart and the brain. The hunters of Traveller, the Peterhead Greenlandmen, congratulated themselves on a job well done.

  But the Dundee men had other ideas. Ignoring the imprecations and complaints from Traveller’s boat, Thomas’s men surged forward to claim the whale as their own. Tying lines to the whale’s tail, they prepared to tow it back to their ship but the Peterhead men objected. Harsh words were exchanged, and no doubt so too were threats, but there were more men from Thomas than from Traveller and weight of numbers told who’d be the victors. The whale was towed to Thomas. It was blatant theft, carried out in the full light of the north in view of a dozen men from Peterhead – or so Traveller’s crew claimed. The men from Dundee had another version of events.

  Alexander Kilgour did not deny that Buchan had thrust the first harpoon. On the contrary, he mentioned that he saw Traveller’s harpoon sticking out of the whale. However, he also said that there was no line attaching the whale to the boat; it was a ‘loose whale’ and therefore fair game. The whale was free to whosoever could harpoon it next.

  At the time, the men from Traveller could do nothing but protest. They were outnumbered and far from any law save that of tradition and that imposed by a master on his ship. Captain George Simpson of Traveller complained to Captain Thoms of Thomas, but to no avail. When Captain Simpson brought his complaint to the Dundee Union Whale Fishing Company who owned Thomas, the trustees of the company backed their captain’s actions. Eventually, the owners of Traveller took their case to law, and the High Court in Edinburgh had the unusual experience of deciding who owned a captured whale.

  The case was heard in Edinburgh on 8th March 1830, with traffic rattling past and the formal, learned judges a world away from the savagery of the Arctic seas. By that time, of course, the whale no longer existed in body. The whole idea of whale hunting was to secure the blubber and the whale-bone or baleen. The blubber would be melted down to oil, which was used for lighting, heating and, increasingly, for softening textiles. The baleen was cut up and used for a hundred different household purposes, from hairbrushes to netting to stays for women’s fashion. So the case was now over the value of the whale, and both parties agreed that £600 was about the correct figure.

  After the advocates listened to the evidence they realised the whole case hinged on one fact: Was the whale ‘fast’ or ‘loose’? If it was ‘fast’, or attached, to Alexander Kilgour’s boat by a line, then Traveller had the right to compensation, but if it was what the whaling men termed a ‘loose fish’, a whale with no lines, then the Dundee boats had every right to harpoon and claim it for themselves. The judge made the problem as clear as he could:

  A ‘fast fish’ which is entangled by any means, such as the entanglement by the line round it or the like, to the boat of the first striker … any harpoon struck by another person into the fish while so entangled is said to be a ‘friendly harpoon’ and that the fish belongs to the first striker … on the other hand, the instant a fish … gets free … it becomes a ‘loose fish’ and belongs to the person who next succeeds in making it fast.

  With this advice as a background, the legal experts listened to the evidence, with Greenlandmen from opposing vessels giving vastly different versions of the events, each of which proved conclusively that their vessel owned the whale, until Henry Cockburn, later to become Lord Cockburn, gave his exasperated opinion: ‘I would confess that in all my experience,’ he said, ‘I never saw any class of men on whose evidence I had less reliance than on the depositions of Sailors. At all times, under all circumstances, they are ever ready to depone that their own ship was indisputably in the right.’

  Despite the tangled evidence, the court gave its judgement. It was decided the evidence from Traveller’s crew was more reliable than that of the crew of Thomas. In essence, the judge said Thomas had stolen the whale and he ordered the Dundee Union Whale Fishing Company to pay £600 to the owners of Traveller.

  In this incident, only Dundee’s pride and the Whale Fishing Company’s bank balance were injured but there were other occasions when whaling voyages created more tragic results.

  Every year whaling ships sailed to brave the ice and vicious storms of the Arctic. They were hunting for whales, seals and anything else they could bring back to make money for the ship owners and shareholders. Whaling was not an easy job. It was hard, dirty, often bloody and frequently dangerous. Many Dundee ships ended their careers crushed by the ice of the Davis Strait. Every voyage could end in injury or death for the Greenlandmen, so it was no wonder that the families crowded to the dockside when the ships sailed, and the farewells were always emotional as wives said goodbye to the men they would not see for many months.

  By the same token, the homecoming was joyful as the Greenlandmen erupted into the bars of Dock Street and the Overgate. The men picked up their wages from the whaling company offices in Whale Lane or Seagate, and alone, in groups or with their wives, they relaxed after the tensions of the voyage. In most cases the whaling men were good husbands and fathers, for the museums and archives of Dundee contain many documents showing wages being paid to their wives, or photographs where husband and wife stand united. However, there was always an exception to the rule.

  The Terra Nova Murderer

  Sometimes an area of a city will attract a bad element, and for a period of time will suffer from a notoriety that is unfair to the majority of the inhabitants. The Whitechapel area of London was such an area during the murders of Jack the Ripper and the Grassmarket of Edinburgh when Burke and Hare went on their rampage in the 1820s. Dundee did not quite have such a district, but in the late 1880s and early 1890s the streets around Dudhope Crescent became known for casual acts of violence. Dudhope Crescent no longer exists; a dual carriageway has obliterated the entire area, but in the later years of the nineteenth century it was the scene of possibly the only Dundee murder by a whaling man.

  Richard Leggat was a Greenlandman on board the famous Terra Nova, the last whaling ship built in Dundee, but when he returned from the Davis Strait in 1896 he was not a happy man. At thirty years old he was an experienced seaman; he knew the Arctic seas well, and was used to bringing back a fat pay packet after his exploits in the north. The wage system for whaling men was fairly complex: There was a low basic pay augmented by oil money, striking
money, fast money and bone money. Oil money was based on the amount of blubber the ship brought home, paid in proportion to the rank of the seaman. Bone money depended on the weight of baleen, or whalebone, brought back, while striking money was paid to the harpooner who actually fixed his harpoon into the whale, and fast money to men who were in the boat, or boats, that got ‘fast’ to a whale. In a good year, the whaling man could at least double his basic wage; in a poor year he would get only the basic, which was perhaps the equivalent of a minimum wage – a poor return for months of stress and effort.

  The season of 1896 was not good for Terra Nova or Richard Leggat. The ship captured around 5000 seals but only one whale, so the wages were as low as the spirits of the men. Not that Leggat was a stranger to hard times; in 1888, while he was sailing on Nova Zembla, he took ill with what the doctors called ‘inflammation of the lungs and dropsy’ and had to leave the ship at Holsteinborg in Greenland. Although a Danish ship brought him back to Scotland, his wages would be drastically cut, for a seaman’s wages stopped the moment he left his ship. Perhaps that was one reason for the constant arguing that marked Leggat’s marriage.

  At that period many Dundee whaling ships worked out of St John’s in Newfoundland, with the hands spending time and money in the local taverns. However, amongst a breed of men renowned for their heavy drinking, Leggat was noted for his quiet sobriety. In appearance he was thin-featured, almost gaunt, with a straight, prominent nose and a red, drooping moustache. As a line manager he had a position of some responsibility, rowing out in the small whaleboat from which the whale was harpooned and ensuring the line connecting the harpoon to the boat did not kink around the leg or head of any of the seamen. Their lives depended on his skill and concentration.

  In her mid-twenties, Elizabeth had been married to Leggat for three years. She worked as a weaver in Mid Wynd Works at the Hawkhill, and that autumn moved from her home at Lawrence Street to a two-roomed attic in a John Street tenement, four floors above the flickering gas of a streetlamp. There was also a fourteen-month-old daughter to care for. John Street was a short street between Dudhope Crescent and Dudhope Crescent Road. Because Leggat’s wages were poor that season, Elizabeth had to work longer hours at the mill to make ends meet. ‘What will become of us? There’s only my wages to keep my man and myself and the bairn,’ she said once, and that single remark reveals so much about the constant work of ordinary people in Victorian Dundee. Neither Richard nor Elizabeth were great conversationalists, so save for the occasional brief greeting, their neighbours did not know much about them, but they did hear their frequent arguments and knew that all was not well in the Leggat household.

  It is obvious that such a marriage was subject to stress: A man away for months at a time and a family dependent on wages that could fluctuate wildly from season to season. There was one other factor that was probably hidden from the outside world: Richard Leggat was racked with jealousy.

  There is no knowing how Elizabeth Leggat acted when her husband was at sea, but when he was home she seemed hardly to have a life. Leggat controlled everything she did, and beat her if she did not obey. On one occasion she told her sister, Jessie Crichton, that Leggat had beaten her so badly she could barely walk. At times he had threatened to murder her, but nobody believed he would. The neighbours knew the marriage was not perfect – the internal walls of a Dundee tenement were too thin for secrecy – but there were many quarrelling couples in the city and few thought twice about it. Marriage, like life, was never easy in an industrial city and people preferred to close their ears, mind their own business and hope other people minded theirs.

  Late on the morning of 7th December the couple fell out, and their raised voices echoed around the close. Mrs Kendall, in the house immediately below, had heard such things before, but at one in the afternoon there was something that momentarily startled her. It was a sound, she thought, ‘like the breaking of a bed’, but save for a brief, semi-humorous comment to a friend, ‘Is that somebody being killed?’, she pushed the incident to the back of her mind.

  When Mrs Kendall heard somebody running down the common staircase she peeped outside her door and saw Leggat hurrying past. On a lower floor, Mrs Smith greeted Leggat with a cheery ‘Hello,’ but met with no response as he rushed outside into the dark winter street. Presumably both women gave a metaphorical shrug of their shoulders and returned to their homes. The police arrived a couple of hours later.

  Until then only Richard Leggat knew what had happened. During the long months he was at sea, he was intensely aware that his young, attractive wife was alone. Leggat was a quiet man who did not join in the revelries of his comrades, and perhaps this solitariness enhanced his jealousy until it became an obsession. By the time he returned from the Arctic he was convinced that Elizabeth had been cheating on him, and he gave her dog’s abuse. Combined with the lack of money, Leggat’s suspicions must have unhinged his mind. Up in the ice, the Greenlandmen would hunt anything, from birds to polar bears to whales, so perhaps that is why Leggat owned a large, central fire revolver. He produced it as Elizabeth stood in front of him, taking a pinch of snuff. He shot five times, hitting her twice, with one shot going into her thigh and another straight through her heart.

  There does not seem to have been any build-up to the murder, no more arguments than usual, but the neighbours beneath did hear loud noises. Afterwards Leggat placed the revolver on the dresser in the kitchen and left the house. His daughter lay in her bed, half naked and apparently undisturbed by the violence and the death of her mother.

  Running down the stairs, Leggat walked straight to the harbour, climbed onto the West Protection Wall and jumped into the Tidal Basin in an attempt to commit suicide, but his instincts for life were stronger than either guilt or grief and he remained afloat. Some time before three in the afternoon he swam back ashore, walked to the Central Police Station in Bell Street and gave himself up. At first the police did not believe him. It was not common for a soaking wet man to arrive and confess to a murder, but they searched him, found a handful of revolver cartridges, and decided to act.

  The arrival of Deputy Chief Constable Carmichael and Inspector Davidson with a gaggle of uniformed police alerted half the neighbourhood that something was amiss. People emerged from their homes and bustled to John Street, some hoping for scandal, others perhaps genuinely shocked. Searching the house, the police found the corpse of Elizabeth Leggat and her still unaware daughter. The police doctor, Charles Templeman, announced that Mrs Leggat was dead and her body was quickly taken to the Constitution Road Mortuary.

  Leggat was as quiet and unassuming in custody as he had been on board a ship, but when he appeared at the Police Court he denied murder, claiming he remembered nothing until he came to his senses in the Tay. As he waited for his trial, his daughter was taken to the Children’s Shelter in Constitution Road. Possibly because of his plea of temporary insanity, Leggat was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude.

  Murder, however, was uncommon among Dundee seamen. Assault, drunkenness and theft were much more likely. In one case in February 1824 three sailors arrived at an Overgate lodging house. They paid for a night’s board but when the owner slipped out for a few moments, one of the seamen began to search through all the drawers. The owner returned before anything was stolen but the man ran too quickly to be caught. The police found him later and dragged him to the police office, where he was strip-searched. Only then did they realise that he was actually a woman. When dealing with Dundee mariners, anything was possible!

  3

  Crimes of Passion

  Burning Passion

  At first sight, there seemed nothing out of the ordinary about Mary Sullivan. In common with many thousands of other Dundee women, she was over forty years old and worked in a textile mill. Although she was sometimes known as Mary Killen and lived in fair harmony with a man of that name, the two had never been married. Nevertheless they had acted as man and wife for years, so whe
n Killen left her for another millworker named Margaret Page, it is not surprising that Sullivan was a little upset.

  In such a case it would be expected for Sullivan to confront her man and tell him exactly what she thought of him. She might also have tried to win him back or challenged her rival for his affections, but instead she took more direct and more drastic action. Gathering a bundle of waste paper and a piece of a discarded willow basket, Mary Sullivan soaked them in paraffin. Sometime after dark on the night of Wednesday 29th July, she placed her bundle against the door of Page’s house in Lilybank Road, scratched a Lucifer match and set it alight. Within a few minutes the flames had spread to the door, burning through the wood and spiralling blue smoke inside the house. Fortunately for the occupants, and probably for Mary Sullivan, the flames spread only as far as the surrounding woodwork and nobody was hurt.

  Sullivan never denied the act and within days she was in the Police Court, charged with wilful fire-raising. Bailie Doig thought a higher court would be more appropriate for such a serious accusation and in mid-September Sullivan appeared before Lord Craighall at the Circuit Court. Once again she pleaded guilty, so there was no need for a trial. Lord Craighall listened to the reasons for Sullivan’s actions and pointed out that the fire might have spread from Page’s house to others around, so putting others in great danger. He reminded her that the law considered fire-raising as a serious crime and sentenced her to twelve months’ imprisonment. He also said that Sullivan had ‘done it under the influence of passion’. That same passion was evident in some of the worst crimes in nineteenth-century Dundee.

  Lock Me Up