A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee (18 page)

Despite these blips, the police force became established. By the middle of May 1825 there were six sergeants, four night patrols, six day patrols, thirty-six watchmen and a man who was paid the princely sum of five shillings a week to trim the watchman’s lanterns. Even more significantly, the presence of uniformed police in Dundee seemed to have pushed at least some of the criminal element out of the town. In April the people of Lochee met to discuss forming their own police force as the number of undesirables coming to the village had increased. The people decided to create twenty-four constables from local men, with a six-month term of office.

Thomas Abbott, who had been dismissed from the police for falling asleep, became a weaver but was soon accused of stealing twenty spindles of yarn. He claimed he bought it from Mr Peat, the foreman of the bleach field of Turnbull and Company. Peat had conveniently disappeared but Messenger-at-Arms Patrick Mackay arrested William Stewart for buying the yarn.

In the meantime, the new force and its associates tried to prove their worth. On 12th June 1825 the Scouringburn watchman, helped by the day patrol, put out a lodging house fire. When they forced their way into the two-roomed house they found forty people inside, with piles of straw the only beds on the earth floors. It was a reminder of the conditions in which some people in Dundee had to live. In September that same year Constable John Chaplain chased and arrested a notorious bad character named Scott, who had returned to Dundee after being banished. The uniformed men were beginning to show their teeth.

The police were not well paid. In June Superintendent Home had suggested that the most efficient of the day patrol had earned a pay rise from 11/1d to 14/- a week. That was still not great money for men who were in the firing line the moment they stepped out the door and whose every move was watched by a critical and suspicious public. Even so, they were still allowed their idiosyncrasies. As late as August 1828, four years after the establishment of a professional, uniformed force, the Castle Street watchman took his collie dog with him as he walked his beat. It was still the watchman’s job to shout the hour, and the dog helped, barking along with his master. The people of Castle Street must have wondered if it was worth the money to have a dog yapping every hour from ten at night until four in the morning.

However, the Dundee sheriff officers were equally fallible. In August, Thomas Anderson and Thomas Marshall were sent to bring in a woman who had illegally left her position in service. It was a routine task, but they took a pair of handcuffs, and fortified themselves with a few refreshments before rapping at the woman’s door. Quicker witted than both the Sheriff ’s men, she dodged Anderson, grabbed the handcuffs and locked them around Marshall’s wrists before running way, holding the keys in triumph. Two policemen carried the discomfited Marshall to the cells and left him there, still handcuffed. Presumably he was released when he sobered up.

Even so, by 1828 the Dundee police were more professional. At the beginning of December three furtive-looking men were drifting around the shops in the town centre, probing and looking but not actually buying. When they walked into Provost Brown’s shop in Castle Street, he sent a message to Superintendent Home. The superintendent ordered Sergeants Hardy and Strachan to bring them in. The provost’s instincts were correct, for when the sergeants dragged the men to the police office they found nine India silk handkerchiefs and a fur cap hidden in their clothes, all stolen from shops in Castle Street. As the men were searched, one, an Edinburgh cabinetmaker named John Smith, stuffed something in his mouth and tried to swallow it. Seizing Smith by the throat, Sergeant Hardy recovered a half-chewed letter.

The letter was from Smith’s father, and spoke of the ‘infernal police’, but the name may have been an alias, as the man who chewed letters also called himself John Brown. One of his companions, known as Charles MacDonald, had an alias of Peter Jack. MacDonald was a notorious man. His father was long dead but his mother had moved in with one of the more unsavoury characters who wandered the northern counties of Scotland, living by his wits, his fists and his light fingers. Termed the ‘Cock of the North’, this man was well known to the authorities. The relationship between MacDonald’s mother and the Cock of the North ended when he murdered her, and the Glasgow Circuit Court sentenced the Cock to be hanged. Their son continued the family tradition of lawlessness. The third man was William Cammuince and he seemed to be out of his depth among such characters.

This incident, perhaps minor in itself, demonstrates not only the sort of people the Dundee police had to deal with, but their efficiency in arresting them, and some of their methods. Perhaps they were crude by twenty-first century standards, but they were also relatively efficient. As they notched up successes, the police might have become more acceptable to the Dundee public.

The
Dundee Directory
of 1829 records the names of some of these early police. It states that John Home was Superintendent of Police and the Procurator Fiscal of Court; William Dick was Surgeon and the sergeants included Alexander Dow, Thomas Hardy, John Low and William McRoberts; Alexander Donaldson was the Harbour Sergeant and James McDougal was the keeper of the magazine. Sometimes a name reaches through the murk of time to afford brief illumination to a period. One such name was Sergeant Jack, who looms out of obscurity in a few cases in the late 1820s and early 1830s, only to fade back into the murk of history.

In January 1829 Sergeant Jack arrested a man named Alexander MacDonald, a flax dresser in Monifieth, who had stolen a silver watch. Jack also retrieved the watch. Nearly exactly a year later he arrested an Aberdeen man who had come to try his luck in Dundee, and in February 1830 he searched through the Overgate for a well-known law breaker called George Keith who had already been banished from Forfarshire. Although no details have survived, Sergeant Jack found Keith hidden in a house in Rodger’s Close, Overgate, so there was either a tip-off or a thorough house-to-house search of that warren of narrow lanes and crowded houses. Either way, Sergeant Jack was doing his job in preserving the respectable of Dundee from the underworld.

Only a few months later Jack was again making the news when on one Friday in May he arrested three people under sentence of banishment. Jean Mitchell and Francis Wright were well-known as petty thieves, but Christina Scott had made her name as a hen stealer, a crime that would perhaps go unnoticed today. With nineteenth-century Dundonians far closer to their rural ancestors and rural roots than is often credited, hen keeping was quite common, both as a source of income and a dietary supplement, so hen stealing was a fairly widespread crime.

Even with such men, the early Dundee police could occasionally slip back to their old wayward ways. In early January 1830 an unnamed young flesher was working in Greenmarket Square when two sheriff officers and a posse of police officers grabbed him. Considering he was innocent of any crime, the flesher made a determined resistance, and the arrival of some burly shore porters to assist the forces of law and order did not make things any better. The flesher punched and wrestled and raked his boots down the shins of the porters, but eventually they dragged him to St Clements Lane and shoved him in a cell.

It was not until later that the prisoner was informed he had been arrested for being the father of an illegitimate child, a charge he denied. When the flesher’s father arrived and gave his name, the police realised they had the wrong man and released him, but it was a reminder that the police were still not perfect.

Sometimes it was either inexperience or naivety that let the police down. About two o’clock on a Sunday morning in February 1831, the constable on the West Port beat came across a makeshift ladder leaning against a wall in Young’s Close. The wall was one side of a small cul-de-sac with a single-storey house at the other side and no exit at the top, while the ladder consisted of a six-foot-long plank of wood with a rope attached in place of rungs. There was nothing in the close but a single water cask that stood in a corner. Realising that there was something wrong, the policeman returned to the West Port and summoned help, but re-entered Young’s Close before anybody arrived. Climbing the ladder, he saw a man in the close below and called out to him.

‘I’m coming up,’ the man said at once, but as the policeman waited, the man jumped onto the water cask, scrambled onto the roof of the house on the opposite side of the close and vanished. Rather than arrest a burglar, the policeman found only a set of housebreaking tools, but within a day or so he had been sacked for inefficiency.

At other times, the police were very successful. In the beginning of December 1830 the watchman at the Wards found a cattle drover sleeping in an outhouse and took him to the police office. When he was questioned, the drover claimed he had spent the night with a girl who had subsequently robbed him. Drovers were good targets for thieves, for they would take a drove of cattle to market, sell them and carry the money back to their employer. They were a hardy bunch, sleeping outside beside their cattle whatever the weather, but in common with many people from the country, they were not always wise to the tricks of the town.

Making a few enquiries, the police superintendent learned that three suspicious-looking people had caught the mail coach for Aberdeen. They had given false names and sat on the roof, the cheapest, most exposed and coldest seats. The superintendent knew the mother of one of the suspects lived in Arbroath, twenty miles up the coast. Accordingly he sent the redoubtable Sergeant Dow along with the drover on the next coach. Arbroath was a small place and strangers were easily seen, so it did not take Dow long to track down the three people who had recently arrived in the town. Arresting Gersham Elder, Barbara Elder and the local bad character Alison Watt, Sergeant Dow found £2 9/- in a drawer in the Elders’ house and another 20/- in Watt’s. Only ten shillings had been spent, and that on women’s clothing. What Watt learned next makes one wish for a time machine, or a nineteenth-century tape recorder as Gersham Elder said he had been the woman with whom the drover spent the evening. He had a very feminine voice and looks, dressed in women’s clothing and confessed he was in the habit of prowling Dundee in women’s clothing and performing acts that were well beyond decency. We will never know the full story.

Even with the police on the streets, there were times when the Dundee public took the law into their own hands, often in indignation at some act of cruelty to a vulnerable person. As in every period, crowds of idle youths tended to congregate at certain places, and in Dundee during the early 1830s they chose the piazzas of the Town House. As this building was where much of the official business of the town was conducted, many people would feel uncomfortable passing so many youths. In February 1832 the jailer, Colin MacEwan, took matters upon himself and whipped a fourteen-year-old boy who refused to leave. Not surprisingly, people objected to a child being attacked and gathered against the jailer. For a while the situation looked ugly for MacEwan, but some police commissioners rescued him, although he was taken to court and fined £2 2/-.

While older youths congregated at street corners and outside the Town House, gangs of younger children tended to annoy the street porters. They liked to jump on the handcarts the porters trundled around the streets and get a free lift, depending on the porter’s good nature and mighty muscles. However, not every porter was inclined to act as a free taxi service and in August Duncan Barland lost his temper with a girl who had jumped on his cart when he pushed it along the Murraygate. Grabbing the girl, he pulled her over his knee, lifted her skirt and spanked her soundly. When he released her, the girl ran away, howling. An indignant crowd complained and the case reached the court, where witnesses spoke of Barland’s quiet character and said the girl got no more than she deserved, but the porter was fined 5/- nonetheless.

In January 1835, eleven years after they were formed, the Dundee police were given better uniforms and equipment. A lot of thought had gone into the improvements, and the experiences of the watchmen were taken into account. Off came the long tails of the night watchmen’s greatcoat, to be replaced by a shorter coat that was less cumbersome when they had to chase a law breaker. The hand-held lantern was also discarded in favour of one that was strapped to the body and equipped with a shutter, so enabling the watchman to approach a culprit without announcing his presence in a blaze of light.

The watchmen’s hat was also improved, so it was stronger and more waterproof, with a strap that fastened under the chin. Until these alterations there had been a set pattern to attacking the watchmen. First the attacker would break his lantern or knock it out of his hand, and when the watchmen tried to pick it up, the attacker would throw the long tails of his coat over his head and thump him on the back of the head or any other vulnerable part. Now, with more efficient lanterns and stouter hats, the watchmen were slightly better protected. It was a start.

Although the population of Dundee grew year on year, the numbers of the police establishment were remarkably constant. The 1837
Dundee Directory
states there were eleven day patrols, six night patrols and just thirty-six watchmen that year; while the 1841 issue of the same publication says that with the population around 62,000 there was one lieutenant, one sergeant major, four sergeants, one turnkey for the cells, twelve day patrols, four night patrols and thirty watchmen. According to the record of 1850, there were 70,000 people in Dundee in that year, and the police establishment had altered into something more recognisable. Under the superintendence of Donald Mackay, there was John Cameron, the lieutenant of police, two criminal officers, six police sergeants, two street sergeants, forty-three constables and one female turnkey to care for those women who were under arrest.