A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee Page 6

  However they are depicted on the television, murders are sordid affairs with nothing of romance or excitement about them. There is usually a lot of sympathy for the victim and occasionally a twinge for the perpetrator, but there was one case in Dundee where the murderer was viewed with pity by just about everybody. Even stranger, this was a domestic murder, where a husband killed his wife, but the murder of Margaret Balfour was unusual right from the start.

  On the morning of 22nd December 1825 David Balfour, a seaman, and Thomas Houston, who worked for the Dundee & Perth Shipping Company, walked into Mr Dalgairny’s spirit shop at the Shore. After he had knocked back half a gill of whisky, Balfour told Houston he was determined to end things; he said he would put his wife away because he could not take any more, and he did not care if he hanged for it. With that the men parted and Balfour headed to the Fleshmarket. He may have intended to buy meat, but instead he borrowed a knife from one of the butchers, ‘to kill a lamb’. When the butcher asked him where the lamb was, Balfour told him it was in the Murraygate.

  With the knife in his jacket, Balfour walked to his father-in-law’s house in the Murraygate. According to his own account, his wife, Margaret, was standing alone beside the kitchen fireside.

  ‘Margaret,’ Balfour said, ‘will you give me the shirt?’

  ‘Yes, yes you blackguard,’ Margaret replied.‘Do you want anything else?’ As she fetched a shirt from another room, she asked again, ‘Do you want anything else, you blackguard?’

  ‘Oh Margaret,’ Balfour said. ‘Margaret …’

  Grabbing him by the shoulders, Margaret tried to push him out of the door, but Balfour drew the knife from within his jacket and stabbed her, there and then. Even as Margaret crumpled to the ground, Balfour left the house, but rather than try to escape from justice, he ran straight toward it. He walked the few dozen yards from his father-in-law’s house to the Town House, knocked politely at the door and when Charles Watson, the turnkey, answered, Balfour confessed he should be locked up; he had murdered his wife.

  Even faced with such a confession, Charles Watson did not welcome Balfour into jail with open arms. Instead he said that the jailer was not there, but if Balfour could wait outside? Balfour did, kicking his heels around the Pillars and walking away the last hour of freedom he would ever know. Eventually John Watson the jailer appeared and ushered David Balfour safely into a cell.

  That same morning Balfour wrote a confession that told his whole sad, sordid story. Like so many before him, Balfour had gone to sea as a young boy, and after four years, the Royal Navy pressed him. It was then 1801, the French Revolutionary War was at its height and Britain was struggling for her existence against a continent in arms. A few years later and still in the Navy, Balfour met Margaret. She was a Dundee girl, and her father worked in the Dundee Sugar House. She was very attractive, and he was a fit, virile young seaman. It is possible that Margaret was pregnant when they married in July 1805, and Balfour was very much in love, despite his more worldly-wise shipmates warning against her. Knowing women from a score of ports, they would recognise her type immediately.

  However, Balfour was as brash and confident as any other seventeen-year-old boy and set up home with his new wife in the Seagate, no distance at all from the harbour of Dundee. Perhaps it was because of her that he deserted the Navy, but there is ambiguity over that period of his life. He certainly served in the Navy until 1813 when he was discharged with a pension, which for some unknown reason he claimed under the name of Mitchell. During that period Margaret picked up half his pay, as was customary with nearly every seaman’s wife – the Custom Records in Dundee are littered with such instances.

  By that time the Balfours were considered an old married couple by nineteenth-century standards, but in David Balfour’s case, at least, the love survived. He seems to have been a decent, good-natured, hard-working man who did his best for his wife despite growing doubts about her fidelity. It was this good nature, combined with the wayward streak in Margaret, which was to begin the slide to murder. Perhaps David remembered the warnings of his shipmates before they married, but if so he tried to ignore them and remain faithful as they produced three children. Unfortunately only one boy survived.

  Notwithstanding his troubles at home, it was not hard for a seaman in Dundee to find a berth, and once Balfour was back at sea Margaret took in a lodger, Alexander Hogg, to help with the bills.

  Then Margaret’s brother, Robert Clark, needed money. He asked his father and Balfour to act as security, and in time the repayment was due. But as neither Robert nor his father had the wherewithal, Balfour became liable for the full amount. He did not have the money, but Margaret Balfour asked the lodger to help, and the difficulty eased. Nevertheless, there was a cloud to the silver lining, and Margaret and Hogg became more than friends.

  With Balfour at sea much of the time, the relationship between Hogg and Margaret had taken root and Balfour found himself a stranger in his own house. He suggested that Margaret and he leave Dundee together, but when Margaret’s mother applied pressure for her to stay, Balfour moved out alone. For the next three years he lived in Aberdeen, where Margaret occasionally visited him, while Hogg moved in with Margaret’s parents. Eventually David and Margaret moved to Greenock together, with their surviving son and Margaret’s brother.

  In Greenock the Balfours rented a house from a local inn-keeper, Torquil Macleod, who was a widower with a small boy. Margaret soon transferred her infidelity from Hogg to Macleod, and Balfour had renewed cause for jealousy. When he came home early from a voyage from Belfast, he found his house empty and it took little deduction to guess where Margaret was. Balfour waited outside Macleod’s house until two in the morning when he saw Margaret emerge. Naturally he confronted her, heard her admission of guilt and promptly forgave her, but it was obvious they could not stay in Greenock.

  The game of musical chairs began again. Margaret crossed the country to Dundee and moved in with her recently widowed father. She took Macleod’s son with her, and Macleod followed like a hungry dog with Balfour close behind, determined to keep his wife.

  Once again Balfour had to intervene to salvage his marriage. He chased Macleod back to Greenock and ordered him to take his son with him. Macleod left, his retreat possibly sweetened by his consolation prize, for he had transferred his affections from Margaret to her younger sister, a girl of sixteen. Satisfied he had regained his wife, Balfour returned to sea.

  In late 1825 Balfour was shipwrecked off the west coast of England. Such occurrences were part and parcel of a seaman’s life, and he returned to Dundee as a passenger on a packet ship. When he arrived home his wife refused to let him in, saying, ‘You have got Macleod’s boy away, but it will cost you dear.’ She spoke the truth, and Balfour had only his own thoughts and the wet December streets for company. He returned home at night and despite opposition from his wife’s brothers, stayed until morning, but Margaret was anything but friendly and her brothers gave Balfour unpleasant advice to leave Dundee. When he tried to win Margaret back the next day she swore at him and said ‘she loved Torquil Macleod’s finger better than his whole body’.

  At least that statement, unless shouted in thoughtless anger, would have removed any lingering ambiguity about where Margaret’s affections lay, but the sentiment would sink deep and fester. Balfour and Margaret argued again that evening and Margaret stormed into the bedroom, dragged a chest of drawers across the door and kept Balfour out. He asked her to pass him out a clean shirt but Margaret refused. All night Balfour remained in the kitchen, fully dressed and probably fuming.

  Sometime during the night Margaret must have removed the barricade, for at the back of seven the next morning Balfour came to her bed and tried once more to patch the relationship.

  ‘Oh Margaret, why will ye no’ mak’ peace atween us?’

  But Margaret was having nothing of it. ‘Be gone, you vagabond,’ she said. ‘I’ll have nothing to do with you, and some misty morning you will find me away f
rom Dundee. As for you, I will have you fixed before twelve o’clock this day.’

  It was then that Balfour left the house, to return with the knife and murder his wife.

  On 20th April 1826 Balfour was tried at Perth. On the advice of his advocates he pleaded not guilty and Alexander Macneil, speaking for him, argued he had suffered mental derangement brought about by jealousy. The judge, Lord Pitmilly, had little sympathy. After advising the jury against feelings of compassion for the prisoner, he said, ‘Jealousy, revenge, anger from insult or other provocation and every other passion to which human nature is subject, are aberrations of the mind, but not such as to justify the commission of so heinous a crime as that with which the panel is charged.’

  The jury was out for an hour, but when they announced that Balfour was guilty, they also asked for mercy. Once again the judge disagreed and sentenced Balfour to be hanged on the afternoon of 2nd June.

  Balfour remained composed between the sentence and his death. He read the Bible, spoke of death as a happy event and seemed not to let a petition for mercy affect his equanimity. Even after all the provocation he had endured he spoke of ‘his dear little wife, his poor little woman, whom he loved as he loved himself’.

  It was a short walk from the condemned cell through the Guild Hall of the Town House to the gibbet that had been erected outside the window. Probably the calmest person in Dundee, Balfour stepped outside, sang a hymn and spoke to the estimated 18,000-strong crowd. He was hanged at ten to three and less than an hour later his body was taken into the Guild Hall preparatory to be sent to Edinburgh for dissection.

  There was still one final act, however. After Balfour’s execution a cast was made of his head, for at that time the supposed science of phrenology, when so-called experts attempted to explain the character of a person by the shape of his or her head, was popular. The idea was to examine Balfour’s head and see if there was a typical criminal or even murderer’s head. The cast still exists, sitting on a shelf within the Barrack Street storage facilities of Dundee’s McManus Museum.

  A Face Full of Vitriol

  Of course not all crimes of passion resulted in murder, and sometimes it was the male partner who was the victim. As Lord Cockburn pointed out, Dundee women could be passionate in their actions, so a Dundee woman scorned was best avoided.

  At midday on 28th December 1864 Princes Street was busy. Carriages and carts clattered over the cobbles, merchants marched purposefully from their places of business, chimney sweeps carried their long brushes, shop keepers watched out of crowded windows, hoping for trade in the post-Christmas lull, blacksmiths and boilermakers, carpenters and cowfeeders, mechanics and millworkers, the myriad workers of Dundee all hustled along, lost in their own lives.

  Young David Nicoll probably should have been at work. Not yet a teenager, he was growing out of boyhood and enjoying the bustle of the expanding city. It was a boom time for Dundee, with the docks packed with ships, the mills and factories buzzing nonstop and jobs for anybody who wanted one, but David was more interested in the drama that played itself out only a few yards from where he stood.

  The woman was a looker, a respectable millworker standing with a handkerchief in her hand. She was at the bottom of Crescent Street, just where it met Princes Street, and had been there for some time, obviously waiting for somebody. Eventually she saw a man and shouted over to him. The man replied, but David did not hear what was said through the growl of traffic. He watched the woman hurry over to the man and they spoke together for some time, but it seemed the man was less enthusiastic about continuing their conversation than the woman was. As David watched, the woman produced a small tin canister and threw the liquid contents in the man’s face, before turning and running away. The man collapsed to the ground, screaming and clutching his face.

  Although David Nicoll did not know it, he had just witnessed a jilted lover’s classic act of revenge.

  It had all started in July 1862, about a month after James Killeen had left Ireland to seek work in Dundee. He had an aunt in Todburn Lane, and while visiting her he had got to know a young woman named Elizabeth Hay, a quiet, decent millworker. Unmarried and in her mid-twenties, Elizabeth lived in Horsewater Wynd while Killeen stayed in his own house in Princes Street. As a cooper he was a skilled man and made a respectable wage, although he would certainly never be rich. The two got on so well that Elizabeth believed Killeen was courting her for marriage, although in his own words he believed ‘it would not answer’.

  After more than two years with Elizabeth, Killeen met and married another woman. It is not difficult to imagine how Elizabeth felt about that, in an age when women married fairly young. Her own words, spoken at her trial, ‘This injured my feelings very much,’ were probably a great understatement. She would undoubtedly be devastated.

  There are two versions of what happened next: James Killeen’s and Elizabeth Hay’s. According to Elizabeth, Killeen and his wife began to spend more than they earned, and he was desperate for money. He came to her door, apologised for the way he had treated her and asked her for a loan of some money. She loaned him £2.

  Killeen had a radically different story. He claimed that he had been married for just over a year when Elizabeth came into his King Street shop. At first Killeen believed she had come to buy one of the tubs he made, but instead she showed him a portrait and asked if he knew who owned it. He did not know and handed it back, and she pressed two shillings and eleven pence halfpenny, (about fifteen pence) onto him. Killeen tried to hand it back, saying he had enough money, but Elizabeth was insistent. At the beginning of September she met him again, handed over £1 16/- and suggested that he leave his wife, go down to Newcastle and find work there. When he was settled she would come and join him. Naturally, Killeen refused. He refuted any suggestion that he had ever asked for money from Elizabeth.

  During Elizabeth’s trial for assault, Killeen’s legal representative, Mr Campbell, asked him if he had ever asked Elizabeth to forgive him. When Killeen said no, Elizabeth had become agitated, saying, ‘Didn’t you now? Didn’t you?’

  Killeen did sail to Newcastle, but after a few weeks he returned to Dundee. According to Killeen’s account he was barely back when Elizabeth visited him in his aunt’s house. They drank together, but before he could repay the loan Elizabeth left the house.

  Once again, Elizabeth’s version does not agree. She claimed that Killeen was ‘doing well’ in Newcastle and when she heard he was back she called on him to ask for her loan back. She said she had loaned him a full £2 – a lot of money for a millworker in the 1860s – but he refused, instead starting an ugly rumour that she was ‘trying to seduce him from his wife’.

  Once again Elizabeth was emotionally injured. Killeen had hurt her when he had strung her along with hopes of marriage and then rejected her in favour of another woman, and now he had hurt her again when he spread cruel and, according to her, false tales about her. In Elizabeth’s words the rumours ‘affected’ her ‘very much’. Not surprisingly she became ill. One of her friends, Isabella Darling, advised her to take a solution of vitriol (sulphuric acid) for her health. Darling said that a few drops of vitriol in a glass of water helped settle her own stomach and Elizabeth tried the same solution.

  There was more disputing about the meeting between Elizabeth and Killeen on Tuesday 28th December. Both agreed that they met in Princes Street at twelve o’clock, but the accounts of what happened next differ widely. Elizabeth said that she just happened to have her vitriol with her when she met Killeen that day and ‘he spoke cruelly to me’ and gave her a slight push. By the time of her trial she thought the push might have been accidental, but, ‘I took the bottle and threw some drops of the liquid over him,’ she said.

  Killeen said Elizabeth had called over to him, but he told her he wanted ‘nothing to do with her as I was a married man’. At that point Elizabeth put her hands beneath the handkerchief she was carrying and threw a red liquid over his face and his clothes.

  ‘T
ake that!’ Elizabeth said, and ran away along Princes Street.

  The vitriol landed on Killeen’s face, mouth and neck. He said he felt a ‘burning sensation’ so painful he would ‘as soon have had a pistol bullet through my head’. With the corrosive vitriol burning his eyes and inside his mouth, he yelled for the police and chased after Elizabeth. He caught her outside James Milne’s grocer shop, and they both went inside to try and ease the pain.

  As soon as Milne learned what had happened he cut away the damaged part of Killeen’s clothes and dabbed olive oil on his burned face.‘She must have been an awful woman that would do the like of that,’ he said, but Elizabeth denied everything and blamed Killeen for throwing the vitriol. Milne did mention that her dress was also damaged. Elizabeth also advised that Killeen put water on his burns.

  When they were in the shop somebody handed the near-empty canister of vitriol to David Ogilvy, a police lamplighter. He kept it as evidence, followed Elizabeth into Milne’s and held her until she could be properly arrested, but once again Elizabeth denied that she had thrown vitriol into Killeen’s face.

  After Milne’s first aid, Killeen sought more professional medical help, but the pain continued to gnaw at his face. He was in bed for over a month, for the first two weeks of which he was unable to eat. Even during Elizabeth’s trial at the Perth Circuit Court in April, his eye and cheek still bore the marks of the burns, and Lord Cowan, the presiding judge, said that some of the injuries could be permanent.

  The jury listened to all the evidence, and although they thought it obvious that Elizabeth Hay had thrown the vitriol, there was also a measure of sympathy for her. Perhaps they thought that Killeen had reneged on a previous agreement, stated or unstated, by marrying another woman after having courted her for so long; and possibly they believed at least part of her story. Whatever their reasoning, they found her guilty of assault, but under common law. Lord Cowan gave his final comments on his jury’s decision: ‘The crime of which you have been convicted is divested of much of its aggravated character. There are certainly circumstances connected with the crime that weigh with the court.’ In other words, he said that Elizabeth had certainly thrown the vitriol, but the jury thought she had some justification or excuse for her actions. Lord Cowan sentenced her to eighteen months’ imprisonment.