A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee (17 page)

So the dispute lay squarely around drink. Mrs McKenzie and Agnes Martin thought Mary Leaden had been drinking and had stepped in front of the cart, while others claimed Calder had been driving furiously and Constable McCleary swore Calder was drunk. Wherever the blame lay, there was no doubt about the result. Mary Leaden had been hit by Calder’s cart; she fell and cracked her head. Dr McCosh, the medical superintendent of the Dundee Royal Infirmary, confirmed that Mary had concussion of the brain and a fractured skull. She died without regaining consciousness.

Lord Craighall, the judge, gave the jury both sides of the case, and they found Calder guilty of culpable and reckless driving, but recommended leniency. The courtroom applauded when Lord Craighall sentenced Calder to four months in jail. Although drunkenness was not in itself a major crime, it is obvious there could be serious consequences. The next case was far more premeditated.

For anybody leaving Dundee by the Coupar Angus Road, the gloomy fastnesses of Templeton Woods loom on the right-hand side. On the opposite side spreads Camperdown Park, now open to the public but in the nineteenth century the private policies of the Duncan family, descendants of the Admiral Duncan who defeated the Dutch in one of the most savage naval battles of the eighteenth century. As an area of parkland close by a large urban centre, Camperdown was prone to poaching, but in the autumn of 1842 it sprang to public attention in a case of attempted murder as cold blooded as any in the area.

Despite the advent of industrialisation, in the early 1840s agriculture was of vital importance to Scotland. Of the dozens of agricultural fairs, many were of local importance, such as the Keith Fair, the Timmer market in Aberdeen and the Aikey Brae, while the Falkirk Tryst was of national importance. Drovers would herd their cattle from the most remote Highland glens to Falkirk to sell to buyers who came from as far away as the deep south of England, but there were also many local agreements. In the summer of 1842, James Duff of Whitefield, near Kirkmichael in Strathardle, Perthshire, sold a large number of cattle and sheep to Alexander Mackenzie, a cattle dealer from Drumhead in Glenisla, in the Angus Glens. The price came to something over a thousand pounds, which was an enormous amount of money at the time, and when Mackenzie re-sold the animals at the Falkirk Tryst, Duff followed, expecting to be paid his money.

He was disappointed. Mackenzie was charming and evasive, giving Duff excuse after excuse, eventually stating he was due to be in Glasgow in a short time. Duff listened, but he knew that Mackenzie had sold his animals at a suspiciously low price, so it was unlikely he would raise the thousand pounds he owed. He also doubted that Mackenzie was going to Glasgow so second-guessed him by taking the Edinburgh train. Farmers would rendezvous in well-known spots and sure enough Duff bumped into Mackenzie in the capital.

No doubt Mackenzie was surprised to see Duff again, but he pretended friendship and when Duff demanded he pay his debts, Mackenzie made a firm promise to settle at Blairgowrie. Duff agreed, and ensured there was not another attempt to abscond by sticking with Mackenzie every yard of the way. On the Thursday morning, both men caught the ten o’clock train from Edinburgh, crossed Fife and boarded the ferry across the Tay. At four that afternoon they arrived in Dundee and ate at Mrs Wallace’s Inn at Barrack Street, where Mackenzie once again began his delaying tactics. While Duff urged him to catch the five o’clock train to Newtyle, Mackenzie claimed urgent business that took him on various errands throughout the town. Not surprisingly they missed the train and Mackenzie said they could spend the night at a small property called the Meadows of Auchterhouse, which he owned. It was only about a six-mile walk, so Duff agreed.

It was still light when they left Mrs Wallace’s at about six that evening. They walked up Barrack Street and Constitution Brae, passed over the Law and from there through Dryburgh Farm and onto the Coupar Angus turnpike near the gate to Camperdown. It would probably have been better to follow the turnpike up to Auchterhouse, but Mackenzie chose a shortcut through a field of potatoes and followed a drystane dyke until they came to a break that allowed access to Camperdown Wood.

Until that moment, Duff had followed blindly, trusting to Mackenzie’s knowledge of the area, but he pulled back as they entered the wood. Handing his hat to Duff, Mackenzie said he would check the route and plunged alone into the gloomy trees. He returned after a few moments, told Duff he knew where they were and invited him to follow.

They walked through the wood and onto a grassy path, when Mackenzie politely stepped aside and allowed Duff to walk in front. As Duff did so, Mackenzie pulled a pistol from under his cloak and fired a single shot before ducking away. Duff staggered, with a bullet between his left shoulder and his spine. Terrified that Mackenzie would fire again, he dropped his hat and fled, limping through the estate of Camperdown, past the eastern fields of St Mary’s and came to the cottar town of Baldragon. By now it was full night and he was in pain, bleeding, dripping with sweat and exhausted, but a friendly light beckoned to him and he banged on the door for help.

The cottage belonged to a farm servant called James White and as soon as he saw the state of Duff he told Mr Patullo, the farmer. Within the hour Patullo had informed the police and sent for Doctor Cocks who dressed Duff’s wound. After that, things moved swiftly. Superintendent Mackison came out from Dundee, arriving just after midnight in a flurry of horse-hooves and officialdom. Afraid that Duff might die, for Doctor Cocks had not found the pistol ball, Patullo wrote down Duff’s statement of what had happened as the police began their search for Mackenzie. A quick examination of the potato field found Mackenzie’s footprints heading back toward Dundee, so the police scoured the town. They arrested Mackenzie as he waited for the Arbroath train and brought him to the police office.

Denying everything, Mackenzie claimed he was innocent, until the police told him that Duff was still alive, when the colour drained from his face. When the police searched him they found £257 in bank notes as well as a deposit receipt for another £72. There was little doubt the events had happened just as Duff stated: one of Lord Duncan’s keepers found Duff’s hat just where he said it was, and an Edinburgh pawnbroker described Mackenzie as the man to whom he had sold a pistol.

Even so, Mackenzie said, ‘You know, James, I didna shoot you.’

The jury at Perth Circuit Court, however, took a different view and found Mackenzie guilty.

Although completely different, these two cases do illustrate something of the variety of crime in Dundee. People could die because of a relatively minor misdemeanour, or could be nearly killed by a man who had planned a murder. Either way, death was always a threat.

At first it had appeared an easy enough arrest for the watchmen of the new Dundee Police Force. It was 1825, late at night on the last Saturday before Christmas and a drunken man had been annoying people in the High Street. The watchmen arrested him, discovered he was John Gordon, a plumber’s apprentice, and were escorting him to the police office when he suddenly lay down on the street and refused to move any further. As the watchmen lifted him and began to carry him away, a crowd gathered, shouting and pushing at the officers. Battering through to the police office, the watchmen deposited Gordon in a cell but when they returned to the streets the crowd was waiting, reinforced by others who emerged from the pubs and shebeens.

A shower of stones forced the watchmen back to the police office and some began to grumble that they would be better in a job with more money and less trouble. Mr Hume, the superintendent, gave them a rousing talk and ordered them back out to clear the crowd. Rather than facing them head on, the watchmen slipped out the back door, probably intending to take the rioters by surprise, and moved forward in a compact body. Immediately after the watchmen appeared, the barrage began again, with people hiding in the entrances to closes and leaning out of windows to throw whatever came to hand. This time, however, police watchmen from other parts of the town rallied to aid their comrades and dispelled the crowd.

But not for long. When the police chased the crowd from one street they reassembled in another, so Dundee echoed with the raucous cries of battle, the clatter of stones on cobbles and the crack of police truncheons on the heads of rioters. The trouble continued past twelve o’clock and into the small hours of Sunday morning, with stones weighing as much as three pounds and even a length of iron railing used as weapons. There were casualties on both sides with one police watchman, Daniel Mackay, badly injured by a stone thrown from a window in the Overgate. There were also twenty-six people arrested for rioting or refusing to go home before the police finally restored quiet to the streets.

Although this riot was quite extreme, there was no doubt that a uniformed police force was not universally welcomed in Dundee, or indeed throughout the nation. Many believed that the police had been formed to protect the respectable from the unfortunate, or even to keep the poor under control. Having the police dressed in blue uniforms was a deliberate attempt to avoid any resemblance to the military but they were still a disciplined, uniformed body of men whose duty was to enforce laws that often seemed to victimise the underclass. With their long, tailed greatcoats, top hats and hand-held lanterns, the police were quite distinctive and were soon to be a familiar sight in the streets of Dundee.

For all the hostility of many of the population, Dundee’s early police establishment was not large. In November 1824 there was one superintendant, one lieutenant, six sergeants, six men for the day patrol, six men for the night patrol, thirty-six watchmen, one turnkey to look after those arrested and one office keeper. That was a total of fifty-eight men to look after an expanding industrial city with a population exceeding 34,000. There were also the scavengers who cleared the dung piles and the lamplighters who fought the encroaching dark and who were on the official police establishment, but not involved in upholding the law. At that time the police office was in St Clements Lane and, without a dedicated jail, prisoners were held in the top floors of the Town House.

In those early months attacks on the police seemed to be a hobby amongst certain sections of the community. For example, on Tuesday 16th November 1824 a carter named David Morrison was fined five shillings for insulting the new police. The following week two drunken gentlemen strutted through Dundee bullying everybody in the belief that their genteel birth would protect them from justice. The Dundee police thought differently, despite being threatened with dire vengeance when they arrested the more violent of the two. The Police Court agreed with the officers and fined the drunks two guineas. That same week a man set his mastiff on a policeman walking his beat in the Seagate. In January a policeman was escorting a prisoner to the police office when a youth attacked him hoping to rescue his friend. He ended the night in a cell. Later that week the police had to tie up a man named James Wilson who had attacked them, and a carter was fined five shillings for swearing at Sergeant Thomas Hardy. The following week another gentleman was taken to court and fined for what the
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called ‘abusing the watchmen’ while on Thursday 20th January in Baltic Street a man threw a stone at a watchman named David Leslie, who had to be carried to a surgeon. Also on the 20th a seaman in Seagate attacked the watchman on duty there, breaking some of their lanterns. The following week the police court seemed filled with seamen attacking the police.

And so it continued. Every time the police walked their beats they were liable to receive abuse, insult and assault and when the great Reform Riot of 1831 took place, the police office at St Clements was ransacked by an angry mob. It took a lot of courage to be a policeman on the streets of Dundee in the 1820s and 1830s.

With few men to guard the streets and no military garrison nearer than Perth to call upon, the police were very vulnerable. At the Police Court on 24th March 1825, a number of men were fined for assaulting the police watchmen, including a Chapelshade manufacturer who bit a watchman’s hand. A typical case occurred in December 1829 when Alexander Gall, a man with a long record of violence, was in the company of a prostitute at the back of the Wards at about midnight on a Saturday. When James Matthews, the watchman, shone his lantern on them, Gall immediately swore and threatened to knock out his brains. Naturally Matthews answered back, but Gall grabbed his truncheon and battered him to the ground; when Matthews called for help Gall and his woman fled. Gall was later fined £2 at the Police Court.

In April of that year a man named Alexander Meldrum was accused of assaulting Sergeant Alexander Taws, who was so injured he could not work. Taws was one of the best-known of the early police, whom J.M. Beatts, in his book
Reminiscences of an Old Dundonian
, described as being ‘portly’. In 1827, while still a constable, Taws was involved in an incident in Union Street when rival gangs of boys from the Grammar School and the English School were throwing stones at each other. Alexander Taws led a body of police straight into the heart of the scramash, arrested the ringleaders and marched them to the St Clements Lane Police Office.

Despite the high hopes of the magistrates, not all the early police proved up to the job. At the beginning of March 1825 a watchman named William Stephen was fined 1/4d and dismissed the service for banging at the door of a pub in his Seagate beat and demanding drink for himself and his two companions. The following month in the Witchknowe a watchman named Raffins helped put down a disturbance by a group of weavers, but in doing so he beat one of the men so severely that Mr Dick, the police surgeon, had to dress the wound. The weaver was still bloody and bruised when he stood in front of the Police Court. In May the superintendent dismissed Raffin but took no further action. Including Raffin, ten policemen were dismissed in the four weeks between 11th April and 11th May 1825. These were David Taylor, Alexander Lesslie and James Shearer for being drunk while on their beat, William Gordon and William Middleton for being drunk and asleep on their beat, Alexander Robertson, Thomas McEvoy and Thomas Abbott for falling asleep on their beat, David Sharp for being in a pub while on duty and finally Alexander Raffin for improper conduct. In August a policeman was jailed for the terrible crime of picking berries from somebody’s garden when he was on duty. In November 1826 there was another case of police brutality when John Sharp, a Nethergate night watchman, used his staff to attack a young man, without apparent reason. With the other police as witnesses, the superintendent warned him that any further examples of violence would mean instant dismissal. The rules for police were plain: abide by every letter of the law or lose the position.