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

  Vitriol-throwing seems very Victorian, but sometimes a crime of passion was so horrible that it still manages to chill the blood. The actual assault in the next case only lasted for seconds, but still raises a curl of disgust.

  Knifed in the Groin

  ‘Jessie Dand!’

  The young voice, laced with pain and fear, would have echoed up the close that late night of 7th May 1867. ‘Jessie Dand!’

  The girl staggered up the stone stairs, her skirt sodden with blood and leaving a red trail behind her. She stopped at one of the doors. She was pretty but she was crying hard; realising her exertion had caused the blood to flow faster from her wound. She felt her petticoats soaked and heavy against her belly and legs.

  ‘Jessie Dand!’

  The door opened at last and she nearly fell in, throwing herself on the bed that stood only a foot or so inside the room. Jessie Dand knew Elizabeth Laing, who lived below her in the same close. She knelt at the girl’s side and asked what had happened.

  ‘See what the villain has done,’ Elizabeth said. ‘He’s stabbed me!’

  By the light of the low gas, Jessie looked at the girl’s hands pressing against the lower part of her belly. They were also cut and bleeding. She asked, ‘Who? Fred?’

  Before Elizabeth told her story, Jessie sent her husband for a doctor. It was obvious that the girl was in increasing pain and losing a lot of blood.

  Jessie already knew much of what had happened, but she listened to Elizabeth’s version of what she knew was not all a one-sided story. Elizabeth lived with her father at 24 Dudhope Crescent, right at the corner of the street and with an entrance that penetrated the building from the front to the court and Number 25 at the back. Her attacker was Frederick Robertson, a mechanic from Princes Street in Dundee and she had known him for quite some time. In fact, the two had been sweethearts, a courting couple, and some people had thought they were destined to be married. Frederick had believed that, but Elizabeth had other ideas. In her own words, she ‘did not care if he stayed away or came’.

  It was about August 1865 when the then eighteen-year-old Elizabeth who worked at Fergusson’s steam loom first met Frederick Robertson. Frederick was a mechanic at Baxter’s Foundry in Dens Works and the two got along very well. They met each other about two or three times a week, and Frederick planned marriage, but Elizabeth was not sure. As the weeks and months passed she began to see flaws in Frederick’s character. It was not drink. Although he took a drink now and then, he was not a habitual drunkard, but he could be a very excitable man. All the same, she met him frequently and wrote to him when they were not together, so Frederick could have no doubt about their mutual attraction.

  Elizabeth’s father, Thomas Laing, had a great influence over her and shared her mixed opinion of Frederick. More than once he asked young Frederick to leave his house, but despite these setbacks, Frederick continued to court Elizabeth and believed she shared his intentions. Nevertheless, when he asked her to marry her, she turned him down – more than once. Some people thought it strange that Elizabeth should continue to walk out with a man she had no intention of marrying. It appeared that she was just stringing him along, offering him false hope while she toyed with him and possibly searched for somebody she considered more suitable.

  Matters began to come to a head on Monday 6th May 1867. Elizabeth spent the afternoon with her sister and two young men, but when the men took the train to Arbroath she returned home, arriving there about nine in the evening. Not long afterward, Frederick came to the door. He had been drinking but was far from drunk and he said it was not right that she spend time with another man. Trying to calm him down, Elizabeth said she had spent the afternoon with her sister, but when Frederick became agitated Thomas Laing ordered him out of the house.

  Frederick left, but returned later. Not surprisingly, Laing did not allow him back inside. There was a nasty moment when Elizabeth believed Frederick would hit her, but perhaps because Laing was there, Frederick left again. Next day, Frederick sent Elizabeth a note asking to meet him in nearby Parker Street. Although it was obvious she had no intention of marrying him, she still agreed. After asking her if she would forgive him, he suggested they meet again, but Elizabeth refused, saying her parents were against the relationship continuing. This time Elizabeth made her position clear and said she wanted nothing more to do with him. When he pressed, she said that no, she would not meet him again that night.

  ‘If you come tonight it will be the last night I will seek to see you,’ Frederick promised, but Elizabeth was adamant.

  As she walked away, Frederick shouted out, ‘Will you not come?’

  Elizabeth replied simply, ‘No.’

  Frederick followed her down Parker Street, insisting, asking if she would declare to God that she would come. After so many refusals, now Elizabeth promised that she would, but as she later declared, she had no intention of keeping her word but only wanted rid of him. After work she walked home and remained behind her own front door, but about half past nine Frederick asked Jessie to arrange a meeting. This time he wanted to see Elizabeth at the foot of the Lochee Road. Instead Elizabeth walked upstairs to Jessie’s house.

  Perhaps she suspected that Frederick was already there; she certainly mentioned he was pleased to see her. They remained in Jessie’s house for about ten minutes, perhaps longer, and left together, with Jessie thinking they appeared quite happy, as she said later at Frederick’s trial, ‘with no coldness on Elizabeth’s part’. They spent some time at Mrs McMath’s which was, according to Elizabeth, a respectable public house at 13 Dudhope Crescent. They were not alone there, for they met a woman named Margaret Macrae at the foot of the stair.

  Having had supper and a glass of beer, the three of them left together. After Frederick and Elizabeth escorted Margaret home to West Port, things got a little fraught. Frederick wanted to go back by Brown Street, a route made forbidding by tall mills on either side. Elizabeth was not keen to enter such a dark and, with no houses, lonely place. They seem to have got over that disagreement, for they were still together when they reached Dudhope Crescent, and Frederick continued to ask Elizabeth to marry him. And still she said no.

  Once again Elizabeth seems to have been playing with Frederick’s emotions, for after spending the evening with him, she said she would not see him again. Perhaps she enjoyed the power she obviously had over the man, or maybe she really was naive enough to believe she could handle him.

  ‘If you do not take me,’ Frederick said ominously, ‘you will not get another, for this is the last night I will see you.’

  Elizabeth thought Frederick was ‘quite cool’ as he said these words.

  As he finished speaking, Frederick ducked and produced a knife. In nearly the same instant he shoved his hand under her skirt, under her petticoat and thrust the knife into her groin, slashing upward toward her belly. Frederick did not normally carry a knife. As a non-smoker he did not use one to cut tobacco and there was no other reason for a man in his position to be armed. He could only have brought it to use on Elizabeth.

  Doubling up in agony and shock, Elizabeth grabbed for the knife and attempted to wrest it free. Frederick pulled the blade out of her grasp, cutting her hand. Still holding the knife, he shoved at her, perhaps trying to knock her down and then fled out of the back court, shouting he was going to drown himself. With the blood pouring from the savage slash in her groin, Elizabeth screamed to Jessie Dand for help.

  As Elizabeth writhed in pain, Jessie held the edges of the wound together for the full hour it took until Doctor Pirie arrived. The wound was about nine inches long and an inch deep at the bottom where the knife had initially penetrated, but shallower further up. Frederick had obviously thrust the knife into her left groin and slashed upward. For some distance it ran parallel with, and dangerously close to, her private parts. After his examination, Doctor Pirie carefully stitched Elizabeth together.

  After Elizabeth spent a night in Jessie’s house, her father carried her home
, promising to have Frederick arrested. There was a touch of naivety in Elizabeth’s reply that there was no need as he was ‘away to drown himself ’. There was no real need for Laing to tell the police what had happened, for the trail of blood from the spot where Elizabeth was stabbed to Jessie’s door spoke for itself. It was the end of May before the doctor considered Elizabeth was no longer in danger. She lay in bed for weeks as the wound slowly healed and her parents fretted.

  When the case came to the Circuit Court Frederick tried to deny the stabbing, but Jessie, Margaret MacRae and a woman named Elizabeth Miller had all seen them together. Miller had heard Elizabeth cry for Jessie Dand and saw Frederick run into the court at the back. As these facts were incontestable, the defence concentrated on Elizabeth’s previous treatment of Frederick. He was known to be a man of intense passions and his brother, James Robertson, explained why. ‘He burst a blood vessel about four years ago,’ James said, ‘and has not been so strong since. He is easily excited. If he gets into an argument he gets very excited. The least quantity of drink affects him.’

  The defence tried to blame Elizabeth for her cruelty to a man with such a temperament. They brought up her earlier behaviour when she raised and dashed his hopes and kept him dangling like a puppet on a string, but nothing they said altered the horror of the stabbing. Margaret MacRae and Jessie both mentioned that Frederick and Elizabeth were ‘sweethearting’ but neither was sure whether or not they intended to marry. Elizabeth’s father claimed he ‘did not understand they were to be married … I would have advised her against him – he would have been a bad husband’.

  During the trial Sergeant Dow said he had arrested Frederick for assault in July 1866. He was not quite the slighted and bewildered innocent the defence claimed.

  Strangely, at least some of the people of Dundee sympathised with Frederick and booed Elizabeth when she appeared outside the court. The judge, Lord Deas, had none of it. When the jury, after an absence of just eleven minutes, found him guilty of the attack, Lord Deas sentenced Frederick to twenty years’ penal servitude, which sounds a savage punishment for a crime committed in a fit of passion.

  But was it so savage? There is no doubt that Elizabeth had an unpleasant side to her nature and her treatment of a genuine suitor was unkind, but as Frederick did not normally carry a knife he must have had some intention of stabbing this girl when he arranged the meeting, and the manner of the stabbing was undoubtedly brutal. Elizabeth was scarred for life and might well have been killed, while Frederick had a history of violence. Was the attack something that occurred in a fit of passion, or was it a planned revenge for a year of frustrated hopes? Only Frederick Robertson knew all the facts. As he left the courtroom to begin his two decades in jail, he looked pale and calm. He glanced toward Elizabeth, but she appeared as unconcerned about his sentence as she had been about his feelings when she had pretended to court him.

  These cases show only a few examples of the passion that was never far from the surface in Dundee, where men and women held strong feelings for one another. Those feelings were often displayed in marriages that endured periods of unemployment and depression, but when they were roused by injustice – particularly in personal relationships – they could be perverted into acts of extreme violence.

  4

  A Decade with Patrick Mackay

  Films, books and folklore have maintained the fame of many nineteenth-century lawmen. The names of Pinkerton and Wyatt Earp are well known; in the 1860s Edinburgh had detective James McLevy, while the fictional Sherlock Holmes spawned a huge genre of stories based on brainpower and detection. Dundee, however, also had a man who stood out against the underworld and although he has now disappeared from public memory, his name can still be found in the records of faded court cases and in many newspaper columns. His name was Patrick Mackay.

  Before the 1824 Dundee Police Act introduced professional policemen to the streets of Dundee, the streets were guarded by night watchmen, the much-derided ‘Charlies’ who were often recruited from the aging ranks of paid-off soldiers. These men were backed by the elected constables and the far more professional servants of the courts. There were two levels of the latter: Sheriff Officers and Messengers-at-Arms. While Sheriff Officers had local responsibility and could pursue warrants within the burgh of Dundee, Messengers-at-Arms were officers of the Court of Session, with the responsibility of serving legal documents and enforcing court orders across the entire country. Patrick Mackay was one of the latter. He had a commission as a sheriff officer, but with his wider remit, was also able to pursue and arrest criminals all across Scotland.

  The position is ancient; officially Mackay was an Officer of the King, but since at least 1510 the Lord Lyon King of Arms has been their ultimate controller, and he had a fixed scale of fees set by an Act of Sedurant passed by the Court of Session, Scotland’s supreme Civil Court. Patrick Mackay, then, was a powerful official, and as an energetic man, he was arguably a dangerous enemy of Dundee’s criminal population.

  Born in August 1772 to Patrick Mackay and his wife Isabel Meek, Mackay was a native of Dundee and spent his life working for the peace of the burgh. He married comparatively late, on 21st November 1818 when, according to the Old Parish Register, he chose Anne Scott of Auchterhouse as his wife. Their marriage was not to last, though, and Anne died not three years later. Her gravestone in the Howff is still as moving as it must have been to Mackay when he set it up. ‘Erected by Patrick Mackay, Messenger at Arms Dundee,’ it says, ‘and dedicated to the memory of Anne Scott, his spouse, who died the 29th May 1821.’

  After the loss of his wife, Patrick Mackay seems to have redoubled his efforts to quieten the turbulent underworld of Dundee. He lived in Methodist Close in the Overgate, the heart of Dundee, and was also active in the commercial world, holding shares in the shipping that was the lifeblood of Dundee. However it was his crime-fighting skills that made him well known and probably well-hated by the seething Dundee underworld. Despite his position, his pay was not always remitted promptly. For instance, there is an entry in the Collectors Book in Dundee Archives for 19th July 1831 when he still had not been paid the £2 16/6 that was due to him for apprehending two smugglers, David Dick junior and James Paterson senior, in 1823.

  Mackay’s work was surprisingly varied. For instance, in April 1823 he was called to control a prize fight in the west end of Dundee. The combatants were to be a heckler and a baker, and thousands of people gathered in expectation of blood and gore and bravery. Patrick Mackay brought three peace officers with him to control the unruly thousands, but when only one of the fighters turned up the throng dissipated reasonably quietly and his services were not required.

  Thiefy Doig and the Wallace Gang

  A few months later, in August of 1823, Mackay swooped down on one of Dundee’s most notorious characters, a man named Doig, but who was better known by the name of ‘Thiefy’. Doig was a well-known petty thief, in and out of trouble, and when Mackay searched him he found a collection of false keys in his pockets. Thiefy Doig was hustled to jail, where he belonged. In October Mackay was busy again. There had been a robbery at the house of Colonel Chalmers, one of Dundee’s elite, and the forces of authority were under pressure to catch the burglars. One man named James Ferguson was caught and thrown into Dundee’s jail, but when he turned King’s Evidence and named his accomplices, the others were hunted down.

  Three of the thieves were speedily caught and lodged in various jails, but one must have had a loose tongue, for two women, Mrs Cook and Mrs Wallace, were implicated for receiving the stolen property. Cook was quickly captured, but Wallace fled to Edinburgh. Patrick Mackay caught the packet boat and traced her. When he reached her and declared her under arrest, Wallace had a petticoat, some shifts and a shawl that belonged to Mrs Chalmers, so Mackay escorted her back to Dundee. The whole operation had been neat and effective; it proved how efficient Dundee’s crime detection service could be, but it did little for crime prevention.

  Only two day
s after Wallace had been deposited in jail, Mackay caught two other women named Robertson and Mary Thomson strolling the streets. Both had been outlawed for creating counterfeit coins, so Mackay quietly locked them up.

  He had barely settled their paperwork when there was further trouble as five of Dundee’s most notorious criminals escaped from the Town House jail. During this incident, Mackay was in Forfar, but a rider notified him what had happened and he began to hunt for the absconders. Eventually, he found them, but more on this particular story later.

  A Trip to Leith

  Save for the constant but necessary routine paperwork of his office and recapturing and incarcerating the banished Thiefy Doig, Mackay seems to have enjoyed a fairly quiet period over the next few months, but in June 1824 he was off on his travels again. A female pickpocket had charmed her way into the company of two visiting farmers, smiled sweetly, patted them fondly and relieved them of their pocket books and all their money.

  When one of the farmers ran to the authorities for help, Patrick Mackay asked around his informants. Contacts on the fringe of the Dundee underworld were a vital component of the King’s Messenger’s armoury; Mackay discovered the pickpocket and her friend had boarded Quentin Durward, one of the steam packet boats that sailed between Dundee and Leith. Catching the next boat, Mackay apprehended both women and kept them secure in the police office in Edinburgh, from where they were brought back to Dundee and jailed.