A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee (21 page)

While it is possible to feel sympathy for criminals whose circumstances have left them with little choice but to steal to survive, others deliberately choose theft and violence as a way of life. David Crockatt was one of the latter. He was a career thief who led others astray and did not hesitate to use violence when it suited him. Probably worse, by Victorian standards, he also denied his own mother. Crockatt was not one of the shifting unemployed who lived by their wits; he seems to have avoided crime, or at least avoided being caught in criminal activity until a relatively late age. He had a respectable job in a mill and lived in Temple Lane, which was a decent address in a hard-working quarter of the town. It seems his lifestyle was of his own choosing. In his own way he was an example of the pointless, profitless, utterly shiftless criminal class which infested Victorian cities and which still exists in the sordid underbelly of society.

It was in February of 1868 that the then sixteen-year-old Crockatt first came to the attention of the police. Along with fifteen-year-old John Hutcheson, he appeared at the Dundee Sheriff Criminal Court on a charge of housebreaking. On 28th January the two youths had climbed onto the roof of Mr Anthony Carrick’s farrier business in Gellatly Street, removed a few slates and lowered themselves inside to see what they could steal. Both pleaded guilty but Crockatt claimed that they had not originally planned to steal anything. He said they had been chasing a pigeon and when the bird fluttered inside the building they had taken off the tiles to follow it. According to Mr Douglas, who defended them, they were good boys really; he apologised profusely for their poor behaviour.

Not quite so sure about their innocence but obviously willing to afford them the benefit of the doubt, the sheriff gave them a further fortnight in jail to augment the two weeks they had already spent waiting for trial. Crockatt was hardly released when he was back in trouble, and again pigeons figured.

On 17th March a millworker named Alexander Bennet appeared before Provost Hay at the Police Court. Bennet claimed to be twelve-and-a-half, although his father said he was fourteen. He was charged with stealing five pigeons from Mr C. Kerr’s dovecot in Broughty Ferry Road two days previously. Co-accused was David Crockatt, who Bennett’s father said was the instigator who had led his son astray. Unfortunately, Crockatt failed to appear, so the police searched him out and dragged him to court. When he pleaded guilty the judge ordered him fifteen stripes of the birch.

The weals must have still been throbbing when Crockatt next appeared before Provost Hay, this time charged with stealing a fourteen-pound tin of strawberry jam from the confectionery workshop of John Low and Sons in New Inn Entry. Once more it was a low-level crime and once again he had acted with another boy. This time Neil Stevenson of Blackness Road was his companion, but like Crockatt, Stevenson had already been twice convicted of theft. Provost Hay remitted both to the Procurator Fiscal, and Crockatt was sent to prison.

Perhaps the experience sobered him, but Crockatt was quiet for a while. Then, in August 1868 he was suspected of being involved in a break-in at David Colville’s grocer shop in South Union Street. Rather than a few pigeons or a jar of jam, this time there were eleven shillings in cash and a dozen postage stamps. It was still small-scale stuff, but these persistent robberies were what spoiled a decent community. The police knew there were at least three young men involved; they caught William Mackay and John Lindsay and after a jury found them guilty they were sentenced to eighteen months in jail.

Whether Crockatt was guilty or not, he slipped out of Dundee to live in Edinburgh for a few months, and when he came back in November he probably thought the dust had settled. Nearly as soon as he set foot back in his native streets he was arrested again. However when they began to question him, the police found themselves in difficulties. The youth they had arrested claimed he was not David Crockatt, but somebody called Miller. There was a cure for that, though, and the police knocked on the door of Crockatt’s mother, dragged the poor woman to the police office and presented her with their suspect.

But there was still confusion. Although Mrs Crockatt agreed that she was looking at her son David, the young man refused to acknowledge her, and continued to say he was Miller. Even when Mrs Crockatt collapsed into tears and embraced him, the man denied her. It was only when he realised that the police would not believe him that he also began to cry and admitted he was indeed her son.

For the next year or two, Crockatt was a frequent visitor to the courts and nearly a resident in Dundee jail. Shop breaking was his speciality, and as the records only speak of the crimes for which he was officially accused or tried, it is difficult to judge how successful, or otherwise, he was. He was in the Police Court in August and before the bar of the Sheriff Criminal Court in December, both times on charges of housebreaking or shop breaking. The Sheriff Court found him guilty of the break-in at David Colville’s South Union Street grocer’s shop and awarded him twelve months. For that year Dundee was free of him, but he was released in December 1869. Within the month he was back in trouble again, accused of breaking into O’Farrell’s pawnbroker’s in North Tay Street on the Tuesday night or Wednesday morning and stealing £3 in silver and copper coins. By now Crockatt was living at Dudhope Crescent, a handy hundred yards or so from the prison where Provost Yeaman ordered him detained until the judges of the Spring Circuit Court could decide what best to do with him.

For the best part of four months Crockatt remained confined in Dundee Jail, but at the beginning of May the Circuit judges rolled into town. While the prisoners remained in their bleak cells the Lords Deas and Jerviswoode held a lavish levee in the Royal Hotel before driving to the Sheriff Court Buildings in a horse and four with a military escort and all the pomp and ceremony that the Victorians did so well. To assist the learned judges, Mr H. Moncrieff acted as Advocate Depute, while a Mr Smith would defend Crockatt. It was a splendid array of wigs and gowns that surveyed the ragged accused with their prison pallor and knowledge that these well-fed, well-bred men had the power to imprison them for a terrifyingly long period because of a relatively minor crime.

The charge was simple: theft by housebreaking. The method was also simple: Crockatt was accused of bending the iron stanchions that protected the back window of O’Farrell’s pawnshop, forcing open the inside wooden shutter and entering to steal £2 7/- in silver and fifteen shillings in copper. He pleaded not guilty and probably hoped the jury would ignore his four previous convictions for theft.

George O’Farrell, the pawnbroker, was first to give his evidence. He said he left the shop at about nine o’clock on the night of 18th January and next morning he had been robbed. His money had been removed from the cash drawer and the central bar of the back window had been drawn apart, and with the Victorian love of detailed statistics he added that rather than their normal five and a half inches apart they were seven and a half inches apart. The window had been raised and the front door was locked. So far there was nothing new; all Mr O’Farrell had done was confirm he had been robbed by somebody coming through the back window. Now he gave his only evidence to implicate Crockatt. He said he had seen Crockatt looking in the window on the 17th, just as he was putting money in a box. With the window being four feet tall, Mr O’Farrell claimed that a boy could have got in. At that point at last some of the jury must have looked at Crockatt. He was a short, slight man and after months on prison fare it is unlikely he was carrying any excess fat.

It was perhaps a mistake for Mr O’Farrell to add that a police officer had put his head through the gap, for Mr Smith, defending Crockatt, turned the statement to his advantage, using humour against the pawnbroker.

‘And is an officer’s head as large as a boy’s body?’

If he said it was as large, O’Farrell might have been accused of ridiculing the police. If he said it was not, he would be damaging his case. Instead he tried to bluster by saying:

‘I don’t know but he looked in between the bars.’

As the audience laughed, Mr Smith must have known he was a small step closer toward creating a bond of sympathy between Crockatt and the jury.

The next witness was less easy to manipulate. Peter Duff was a criminal officer, a detective, and his evidence could have been damning. When he searched the pawnshop he had found part of a buckle and when arrested, Crockatt had two half crowns, two shilling pieces and eleven pence halfpenny in copper – nearly eight shillings altogether, which was quite a decent sum for a man not a month out of jail. One of the buckles on Crockatt’s braces was also broken, and although he claimed to have broken it at home, the broken part exactly matched the piece Duff had found. Possibly even more damning for a respectable Victorian jury: Crockatt was known to have the character of a common thief.

A blacksmith agreed that the two broken parts belonged to the same buckle, ‘because no man could make the same buckle joint’. Nevertheless, when pressed by Mr Smith he agreed he had seen that type of buckle before. It therefore was not unique.

The Police Surgeon, Doctor George Pirie, said when he examined Crockatt on 18th January he had an abrasion on his shoulder. The sort of mark somebody might get by scraping against a hard surface. Although Doctor Pirie did not say Crockatt might have scraped himself squeezing between two iron bars, the inference was obvious.

Catherine Crockatt, the already-denied mother, said her son was not at home on the night of the robbery. Crockatt himself claimed to have stayed overnight with a man called Michael Downs, but Downs disagreed. On the surface there seemed to be quite a pile of evidence against Crockatt, but it was all circumstantial. A broken buckle that could have belonged to anybody, a half-seen glance through a window, money in his pocket, a scraped shoulder and a lie as to his whereabouts. The jury were not overly convinced and a majority found the case not proven.

David Crockatt was free to go and steal again, which he did. Either he was a compulsive thief or just a man with an overwhelming confidence in his ability to evade justice, but within a week he was back under arrest. On this occasion he was suspected of having broken into John Milne’s grocer and spirit dealer’s shop in the Lower Pleasance. Once again there was little subtlety in the robbery; the shop had two windows, one larger than the other and both protected by wooden shutters. The thieves had simply torn out one of the planks of the shutter outside the small window, hauled back the restraining bolts and pulled open the window. They had stolen the till, with between fifteen shillings and a pound in change, and escaped out the same window.

A mill watchman saw three men emerge from the window and alerted the police, who arrested two men that same night. One was Neill Stevenson and the other was David Crockatt. When the police searched them they both had money and Mr Milne’s sister, who also worked in the shop, claimed to identify one of the coins. She said a customer had handed it to her only the previous day.

Once again Crockatt’s luck held, for although he was remitted to the Procurator Fiscal, he was not charged for that particular robbery either. Nevertheless, while a more sensible or cautious man would have kept out of trouble for a while, Crockatt seemed hell-bent on thievery. On 13th May another shop was broken into and once again Crockatt was arrested. This time there were four others also accused: Neil Stevenson and Peter McDonald of Scouringburn, Donald Fraser of Ash Lane and John Johnstone of Cherryfield. Again the thieves had escaped with petty quantities: half a pound of tobacco, four pounds of cheese and three shillings in copper coins, but the amount was irrelevant, the repetition was what mattered. Now Crockatt was thrust back into Dundee Jail to await the autumn sitting of the Circuit Court.

The Dundee Circuit Court did not meet until 5th September, with the Lord Justice Clerk and Lord Cowan presiding. The police had been busy, and while some of their original suspects had been released, others had been arrested. Now Crockatt and Stevenson had Peter McFall and John Johnstone as co-accused. They stood charged with breaking into David Munro’s shop in Lochee Road on 13th May and as expected, they pleaded not guilty.

David Munro gave his statement first. He said he left his shop between nine and ten o’clock on the night of Thursday 12th May but about three on Friday morning a policeman woke him with the news he had been robbed. There had been no subtlety in the break in: the door had been forced open by bursting the bolts and the money drawer torn out. Between three and five shillings had been stolen, and a purse that held a halfpenny, which he called a cent. That small coin was important, for Munro had kept it for years, never having seen one quite like it before. Some cheese and tobacco were also missing.

Constable Ward had seen all the prisoners together with young Donald Fraser in the Scouringburn. As soon as they noticed him, one had sworn and said, ‘Here’s that bugger. We’d better shift – he knows us,’ and they disappeared up Milne’s West Wynd. About half-past one Ward saw them again in Douglas Street, and quarter of an hour after that they were in Smellie’s Lane, about 300 yards from Munro’s shop. By that time Constable Ward had joined up with Constable McIsaac, and the sight of two policemen sent the suspects running down Blinshall Street.

As the youths tried to hide in the shadows, the police followed. Constable Ward heard somebody curse and say, ‘It’s no’ fairly divided,’ but then the suspects passed beyond the bounds of his beat and he had to leave them. When he passed Munro’s shop just before one o’clock the premises were secure, but when he returned at three the door had been burst open.

There was a whole raft of police constables involved. Constables Cuthbert and Forbes followed the suspects; Constable McIsaac arrested Johnstone and Fraser and Constable Abbott arrested Crockatt. Constable John Graham arrested McFall in Brown Street and later raided Neil Stevenson’s house, hauled him out of bed by the hair and dragged him to Bell Street. When Crockatt was arrested he wore no stockings, but Abbott found one in his pocket and the second, with a piece of tobacco inside, at the spot where he was arrested. McFall had two shillings and sixpence in his pocket. The police also found a piece of cheese in the Lochee Road.