A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee (16 page)

A reward was set for Ferguson, who was required for his promise to turn King’s Evidence in another high-profile case involving a major robbery at Colonel Chalmers’ house, but Patrick Mackay saved the town’s finances by capturing him in Glasgow. Mackay next proved his high reputation by also putting Shaw and Rose Bruce in his bag, and while Shaw was outlawed from Dundee, the others were conveyed back to gaol. There Gardiner, Ferguson and Gray waited for the spring circuit and the decision of a higher judge; the rest just waited for the drear days to drag past.

It was always a scene of high drama when the Dundee prisoners were sent off to Perth for trial, and April of 1824 was no exception. Half the town seemed to turn out to watch the fun, support their friends or weep for loved ones who might be destined for the gallows or Van Diemen’s Land. If anything there was more excitement than usual, for Ferguson had again attempted to escape, attacking the turnkey with more aggression than forethought and had been once more subdued and despatched in irons two days early. From before first light to high noon, any Dundonians not busy at work packed the High Street to witness the convicts depart, while the escorting Scots Greys sat on their tall horses, watching for any attempt at rescue.

The judges at Perth seemed to be arbitrary in their decisions. While John Gray was released with his case found not proven, Alexander Gardiner was tried for theft and housebreaking, found guilty and sentenced to seven years’ transportation. There was no chance of reprieve and Gardiner would know his next seven years would be spent under a harsh regime in a land nine months’ travel away. On 4th November 1824 he was one of 210 convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land. But Gardiner’s fate only seemed to make the remaining members of Wallace’s gang more contemptuous of law and order.

Within a few days of his returning to Dundee from his trial, Gray was suspected of stealing clothes from the bleaching green at Upper Chapelshade. As he was under sentence of banishment from an earlier case, he was taking the risk of an uncomfortable time on bread and water under the care of Charles Watson, but he was not alone. Scott was back in Dundee, and Peter Wallace had also completed his term of confinement and was roaming the streets that had given him a living but not much else. Once again, however, the authorities acted and Gray and Scott were thrown into the upper storey of the Town House. Mr Mackay was also busy, for he collared John Shaw and sent him to join his friends for a few weeks.

The next months were like a merry-go-round, with Wallace’s gang returning to their old haunts, being picked up and thrown into jail. Scott was again in the cells at the end of June; Rose Bruce, likewise banished but caught robbing a house in the Overgate a few days later, also returned to the cells. No sooner was she out than in August she was back inside, having been caught in the Murraygate. Scott was next, with Patrick Mackay picking him up in early September and escorting him back to the cells. By now the authorities were tiring of Rose Bruce and banned her from the county for life, but she returned to Dundee, was spotted by Mackay and speedily locked up in a gaol which by now must have seemed like her second home. She was followed by Scott a few days later and Shaw the following week, but then Gray and Bruce came under the influence of a far more predatory personality. Peter Wallace was after bigger game than the few pennies he might find in the poor houses of the Overgate or the Scouringburn.

By November 1824 Wallace realised that returning to Dundee merely invited arrest. Instead he remained in the countryside where he was not so well known. Basing himself outside Carnoustie, a few miles north of Dundee, he may have visited Montrose on a thieving expedition, but he certainly gathered what was left of his old companions and grabbed the pack from a travelling pedlar. The pedlar, however, was not inclined to see his livelihood disappear and yelled for help. A number of country folk rallied round, helped by the fortuitous appearance of Mr James Hunter, a local solicitor. Rose Bruce and Gray were both caught, but Wallace, who had been carrying the pack, dropped it as a decoy and ran. Mr Hunter trussed Bruce and Gray to a cart and trundled them south to the gaol they knew so well.

Alone once more, Wallace was suspected of robbing a shop in Forfar after neatly cutting through the window, and was also reported in Dundee; sightings and rumours were numerous, but he proved elusive until in the middle of the month he made a couple of minor mistakes. Roaming in southern Perthshire, he arrived at Dunkeld, saw an Army recruiting party and enlisted under the name of either John or Thomas Barry (his writing was not the most legible). Remembering that Wallace had already made one attempt at holding down a respectable job, and crediting him with more intelligence than his companions, it is worth considering if he was genuinely hoping to make a fresh start. Or was he hoping to grab the enlistment bounty and disappear? With a man as obviously complex and clever as Wallace, either is possible, but the evidence seems to suggest the former, for after receiving the initial advance of the bounty, he returned to Perth to be sworn in.

As he entered the magistrate’s house where the ceremony would take place, two of the day patrol constables were waiting for him. One tends to imagine that the Army lost a first-class recruit, but instead Wallace’s hands were tied, he was bundled into the Perth–Dundee packet boat and unloaded at the pier where he was reported as looking ‘crestfallen’. Once again Wallace, together with Gray and Bruce, faced a sheriff and jury, and once again sentence was pronounced.

While the case of the Carnoustie pedlar seems to have been forgotten, on 17th March the Sheriff Depute tried them for a robbery at the shop of Mary Cowie in the Townhead of Montrose, and of resetting the proceeds, five pieces of checked cloth and a length of corduroy. Of course they pleaded not guilty. It was a nine-hour trial in front of a packed court, but it seems to have been fair, with Mr Duff speaking for the prosecution and the more than capable Mr George Kinloch for the defence, but the jury nevertheless found them guilty of reset.

All three were consigned to the Dundee gaol on a debilitating diet of bread and water until 1st August, and then banished from the county for life. If Rose Bruce returned to Forfarshire she was to be imprisoned on bread and water for ten months; if Wallace or Gray were seen again they were to endure two months in jail followed by a whipping through the Dundee streets. There was a solemn warning that ‘This punishment to be inflicted as often as they are found within the county.’ The sheriff also ordered that their friends could not bring them food.

Not surprisingly, the prisoners reacted with defiance. Throughout the trial they had looked with indifference at the judge, sworn at the witnesses and refreshed themselves with small beer – a mixture of beer and water. When the sentence was read, Gray, mingling insult with foul language, said that he thought some of the court authorities would make good executioners while Wallace bluntly told the sheriff to ‘Go to Hell!’ Battered by life and authority, Bruce told the Sheriff that the next time she stole it would be from him.

It was a Monday morning in August when Wallace, Bruce and Gray were released, and at half past eleven the next evening Wallace was back under arrest. Together with a rogue called Robert McKenzie and the notorious ‘Thiefy Doig’ he was charged with rioting in the Blackness Tollhouse. However, in Wallace’s case the court was kind. As he was arrested at half past eleven, and he was under orders to be out of the county by twelve, the judge merely ordered him to be returned to the tollhouse so he could leave the county; the others were fined five shillings each.

Despite the absence of Peter Wallace, the rump of the gang continued to annoy the respectable people of Dundee for a while. In September Scott gave the policeman John Chaplain a hard chase before he was again arrested for returning from banishment. In March 1827 Rose Bruce’s luck finally ran out and she filed onto the London smack on her way to join Gardiner in Australia, but Peter Wallace seems to have vanished from history. Perhaps he found himself a steady job elsewhere in the county, or maybe he did join the Army, but he does not appear again in Dundee, at least not under his own name.

Murder is a premeditated killing of one human being by another. Murder makes the headlines as arguably the most atrocious of all crimes. But humans can kill humans without any malice and sometimes humans intend to commit murder but fail. These not-quite-murders all have their own morbid fascination.

When the first motorcar grumbled onto the roads of Scotland, the authorities were quick to issue regulations that restricted their speed to the pace of a man walking with a red flag. The horseless carriage with an internal combustion engine was viewed as something terrible, a monster that would devour all pedestrians in its path, scare the milk from cows and no doubt cause serious concern in nervous women. Yet, the horsed carriages were no paragons of innocence, either. The records of the Dundee Police Court are speckled with instances of what was then known as furious or reckless driving. Then as now, there were four main causes for such behaviour: drunkenness, youth, rivalry and pure carelessness.

In a period when drinking was more of a way of life than a social pastime, it is hardly surprising some cart or coach drivers would hit the road after imbibing too much. To give a couple of typical examples: in April 1829 a well-known character known as Piper Gray appeared in the court charged with drunken driving along the Shore, where he had knocked down the stand of a fishwife. Four years previously two carters were fined ten shillings each for ‘furiously driving their carts along the Shore’. Carters were frequently in trouble, possibly because they were on the road all day, probably because of the competition for trade. Children in particular tended to fall victim to the screeching wheels and iron-shod hooves of carts and carriages, but adults could also be hit and, occasionally, killed. In the autumn of 1877, such a case reached the Circuit Court.

Joseph Calder of Scouringburn was a carter; he spent much of his working life on the driving seat, negotiating the often-crowded streets of Dundee with a laden single-horse van. On Saturday 23rd June 1877 he was driving along Victoria Street when he knocked down Mary Leaden, a millworker of Kemback Street. Leaden fell heavily, fractured her skull and on 7th August she died. Calder pleaded not guilty to the charge of driving ‘in a reckless and furious manner’.

There were many witnesses but as so often their evidence only clouded the issue. The first to be called was David Anderson, a baker of Erskine Street. He stated that at half-past seven that evening he saw Calder driving his van eastward along Victoria Street. Mary Leaden was standing ‘in the water channel’ – the gutter – with her back to the van. She was speaking to her father who stood on the pavement. According to Anderson, the van was very close to the water channel, despite the road being about forty feet across, and he was travelling at nine or ten miles an hour. Calder did not shout a warning and the van hit Leaden ‘about the middle of the body’. As Leaden fell, her head smashed against the kerb of the pavement. Thinking that Calder was drunk, Anderson grabbed hold of him until the police arrived.

James Elder, who was also a baker, agreed with everything Anderson said, but added that Calder was driving recklessly and had no need to be in the water channel when the street was wide and virtually empty of traffic. A selection of other witnesses substantially agreed; Mrs Dick was watching out of her Victoria Street window and thought the wheels of Calder’s van were on the kerbstone of Victoria Bridge. She also said that Calder was driving furiously while Mrs Stark of Lyon Street said it was the shaft of the machine that knocked Leaden down.

Mary’s father Thomas was a hammer-man who lived in Princes Street. He agreed he had been talking to Mary when the cart hit her. Admitting she was standing in the water channel, he saw the van coming and said he tried to pull her clear but the shaft of the van knocked her over. When he visited his daughter in the infirmary she did not recognise him. However, Thomas Leaden also introduced a little doubt when he said that he, his daughter and a fourth person, a woman named Agnes Martin, had been drinking, although Mary was sober. It was the first indication that there might be some fault on the victim’s side.

Mrs McKenzie of Lyon Street added to the confusion. She saw Calder’s van on Victoria Street and saw it approach the father and daughter while they were talking loudly with the second woman, Martin. McKenzie said that Thomas Leaden asked Mary for money and she stepped back into the road just as Calder’s cart roared up. Mrs McKenzie also said that the wheel of the van was not in the water channel when it hit Mary Leaden. Possibly more significantly, she thought the Leadens and Martin were all drunk.

The evidence of John Miller, a confectioner in Victoria Street, also tended to support Calder’s case. He said that Calder was quite sober when he visited his shop, about twenty-five yards from the accident. Miller also said although he did not see the accident, he did not see Calder driving furiously.

The penultimate witness was one of the closest to the accident, and a woman who might be expected to support Mary Leaden. Agnes Martin was actually talking to Mary when the accident occurred. She admitted that they had been drinking in a number of public houses during the day and she was drunk by half past seven. According to Martin, Mary stood at the edge of the pavement and had plenty of time to see the van coming, for it was ‘not driven at a furious pace’. She also said the van had hardly left Mr McKenzie’s shop so there was hardly time for it so build up speed, and she reiterated that Mary Leaden was the worse for drink.

Constable William McCleary had no doubt who had taken drink. He escorted Calder to the Police Station and said he was so drunk he did not realise what had happened until the police told him. Calder claimed he was not drunk.