A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee (26 page)

Other children were not so truculent. In September 1830 two boys, Dugald Wright and William Croll went on a crime spree. First they broke into the garret owned by Alexander Guid and removed a handkerchief. Then they took a variety of articles including two silk gowns from the attic of James Ogilvy. Still not satisfied, they broke into John Scott’s shop on the Shore and removed what they fancied. The pair were caught, held in jail and appeared before the Circuit Court in April 1831. As William Croll was a known thief, the judge sentenced him to fourteen years’ transportation, but he showed mercy to first offender Wright and awarded him only seven years. Perhaps it is not surprising that Wright cried as he stood at the bar; both he and Croll were under ten years old.

An equally sad case occurred at the Perth Circuit Court of April 1842 when William Cuthbert and Isobel Cuthbert, father and daughter, stood accused of incest. William Cuthbert failed to appear and initially Isobel denied the charge, but when it was proven she had given birth to two children by her own father she pleaded guilty. The older child was nearly three, the younger just eighteen months, and the judge sentenced Isobel to transportation for life. One wonders if she could have denied her father’s attentions, and if she was perhaps better off in Australia than living in obviously sordid conditions in Scotland. Was she a three-times victim, twice by her father and once by the court?

To give the courts their due, most of the people transported were thieves ‘by habit and repute’ and so were not people who would be pleasant neighbours. Sometimes the people of Dundee would be heartily pleased to see the back of those sent to Australia. In the autumn Circuit Court of September 1856, the judges, Lords Cowan and Ardmillan, presided over eighteen cases, one of which was that of Frederick McDiarmaid. He was a ticket-of-leave convict, which meant he had been released from jail early, but he stood accused of housebreaking. The evidence was against him and he was found guilty of breaking into the draper’s shop of James Spence in Reform Street and stealing various items including thirteen pairs of gloves, four shirts, three parasols, five pairs of stockings and £3 in copper coins. Because of McDiarmid’s previous convictions the judge was not inclined to mercy and sent him to Australia for fifteen years.

In some ways McDiarmaid was unlucky in his timing. In 1846 transportation was suspended for two years, with those convicted instead being confined in solitary confinement for eighteen months. Possibly disorientated by that experience, they were then used as forced labourers either in Britain or abroad in Gibraltar or Bermuda before being released on licence, ticket-of-leave to any British colony. In 1852 Tasmania, the muchfeared Van Diemen’s Land stopped accepting transportees and Western Australia, where Sir Edward du Cane ruled with an iron fist, became the destination of transport ships. In 1867 transportation ended for good.

More simple banishment was quite common, usually accompanied with the threat of imprisonment if the culprit was caught returning to the town. For example, when the Sheriff Court found William Higgins guilty of theft they sentenced him to the severe punishment of three months in solitary confinement, including thirty days on a diet of bread and water, and then banishment from the county for seven years. In October 1825 when the troublemaker James Reid was found drunk in a stable near the harbour when he was already banished, he was taken to the even less comfortable jail. The convict David Scott, banished from Forfarshire in 1825, was caught in Dundee in October 1825 and again at the beginning of February 1826 and both times thrown into the Town House jail.

Despite the threat of jail, many of those banished returned to Dundee, either because they wanted to come home, or because there were more lucrative opportunities in the town. When William Higgins was banished in early 1825, he moved south but was caught disembarking from the Fife ferry in July. The police court had no sympathy with his story that items in Dundee were cheaper than in Fife, and ordered him to jail. It may just have been coincidence that he had returned at the same time as the Stobs Fair, that happy hunting ground for pickpockets and thieves.

During the 1820s, many unsavoury people infested Dundee, but few were worse than Janet Cassels. She was a thief, a troublemaker and a known prostitute who haunted the low lodging houses of Couttie’s Wynd, but on 12th September 1827 she excelled herself. Cassels was working in Elizabeth Muat’s brothel run when she took a dislike to a prostitute named Jean Adam. When she saw Adam at the other side of a glass door Cassels lifted a table knife and thrust it right through the glass, stabbing Adam in the arm and the face just below the eye.

When the case appeared before the sheriff later in the year, Cassels was as respectable looking as possible and declared, ‘I am not guilty, please, your lordship.’

Although the sheriff took the unusual course of being judge and defender, he still found Cassel guilty and told her she was lucky she was not at a higher court on a much more serious charge. Immediately Cassel’s politeness ended and she reverted to type, ‘Go to hell, you bugger. I hope to God I’ll be tried before the Lords next time and not before yon old damned sheriff.’

Those words were only the beginning of a tirade that continued as the sheriff sentenced her to two years’ banishment from Forfarshire, with the warning that if she returned she would be put in prison and sustained only on bread and water for two months. Patrick Mackay, the Messenger-at-Arms, was given the unenviable task of taking her by post chaise out of the county and into Perthshire.

The very next day at twelve o’clock the watchman at the Witchknowe hauled her into custody again. Rather than show remorse, she declared she preferred to be in prison in Dundee than exist outside the county. She was released in January 1828 but a week later was once more arrested and returned to her former lodging. The same thing happened again, and again, she held true to her promise not to leave the town.

The policy of near starvation, when a convicted offender would be sentenced to a period on bread and water, was sometimes imposed as an extra punishment or for a repeated offence. For example in July 1825 a rootless, shiftless man by the name of David Wilson stood before the Police Court. As it was his ninth appearance he was given thirty days on bread and water. Cassels, on the other hand, was given a longer period for her more serious crime.

Penal servitude took the place of transportation. Perhaps the prospect of remaining within the British Isles was preferable to being sent thousands of miles away, but the new punishment was no sinecure. The initial 1853 Penal Servitude Act was for a four-year period only, but with no colonies willing or able to take convicted, ticket-of-leave criminals, a second Act in 1857 ordered that the period of servitude should be exactly the same as it had been for transportation: seven years or more. Penal servitude started off with a tough regime, but co-operation by the prisoner could earn better conditions in what was termed the Progressive Stage System. There were four stages of servitude and once sentenced the prisoner was thrown straight into a nightmare of work and hardship from which he or she had to labour to crawl up the ladder. The first stage was a daily regime of ten hours of muscle-tearing, back-breaking, and mind-numbing class one hard labour. Much of that time was spent at either the crank, shot drill, or the treadmill. The crank entailed turning a handle to rotate a box filled with gravel, hour after agonising hour, 14,400 times a day. The treadmill was an ingeniously revolting contraption where a convict was forced to walk on a never-ending series of steps, rather like a hamster on a wheel. Those who used it knew it as the shin-scraper or cock-chafer, which vividly demonstrated the secondary effects the procedure could have. To engage in shot drill was to stand in a line, endlessly lifting and carrying heavy cannonballs.

Even when the prisoner returned to his cell there was no real rest. Night after night he or she slept on bare wooden planks, alone and silent. No communication with either prisoner or warden was permitted, so there was no means of redress and nobody to whom the prisoner could complain or even vent steam. Protests led to cramped days handcuffed in an unlit punishment cell, frustrated violence could end in a whipping, either by the birch or the cat. The longer the sentence continued the more chance of breaking the spirit of the prisoner. It was not surprising that some descended into insanity.

If the prisoner behaved and attained enough marks, he or she could rise to the second stage, with slightly easier labour and a mattress to sleep on five nights a week. He or she could also earn a few pennies and had the privilege of exercise and education on the Sabbath. The third stage saw the lighter labour continue, while the convict enjoyed a mattress six days a week; wages rose and library books were allowed. The fourth and final stage must have seemed like paradise, with wages of perhaps two shillings a week, a mattress every night, the luxury of letters home and the incredible joy of a twenty-minute visit. To a man or woman living in utter solitary silence, a letter or a visit would be a reminder they were not alone; they were part of the human race, they mattered. But the road to such salvation broke many.

Penal servitude was undoubtedly a savage system, intended to punish and with the consequential effect of destroying people who were often the most vulnerable in society and embittering those who had the mental strength to survive.

For much of the nineteenth century there was no special provision for the young. Children who broke the law were treated much the same as adults. Even when they were not transported, they could be sent to an adult jail, to endure the same conditions. In 1851 a Police Bill gave a different slant to the treatment of young male offenders who appeared before the Police Court. These were children accused of petty crimes, the day-by-day, opportunist crimes that often were more mischievous or plain thoughtless than malicious. For such offences a child could now be flogged rather than sent to jail. The same bill restricted the sentences police courts could inflict on adults from sixty to thirty days, and maximum fines were reduced from £5 to £2.

It was May 1852 before the Dundee Police Court used its new power of corporal punishment when the aptly-named Baillie Spankie ordered a boy to receive twenty strokes and two days in the jail. The boy was a worker in Kinnaird, Hill and Luke’s Mill at Burnside, Lochee and he had vandalised a pump. All work had to stop for hours, so causing the mill to lose production and possibly costing the workers some wages. At this time, and for some years afterward in Dundee, the boys were punished with the tawse, a long leather strap with the striking section divided into two or three tails. The tawse was inflicted across the bare buttocks. Schools and some parents in Scotland used a similar instrument.

From that date on, sentences of whipping became fairly common in the Dundee Police Court. At the end of November 1852 Sheriff Henderson ordered a housebreaker and regular offender named Alexander Robertson to eight months in jail and thirty stripes. A week later Sheriff Henderson awarded George Gray, another boy with a record of housebreaking, six months and thirty stripes. In August 1853 the court awarded ten days and twenty stripes to two very young children named Alexander Piper and James Irwan. They had committed the shocking crime of stealing apples from a garden in Greenfield Place. Strangely, nobody seemed to question why they had been allowed out at two o’clock on a Sunday morning, and how they got their hands on the false key that gave them access to the garden.

A false key got another bunch of boys in trouble in February 1854. Seven youngsters aged from ten to fourteen used a false key to enter the stateroom and cabin of the schooner
Mary and Rose
in Victoria Dock. Once inside they took everything that was not nailed down: a sand glass, kitchen forks, spoons and four-dozen laxatives. When they reached the Sheriff Criminal Court in early March, Sheriff Logan treated them to a long lecture about their youth and probable future and awarded them painful sentences. Twelve-year-old John Connor, who had already been in trouble with the police, was awarded four months in jail, with ten weeks at hard labour as well as one whipping of thirty-six stripes. Frances Gillan, a youth of fourteen, was given four months, with ten weeks at hard labour and the others, Robert Page, aged twelve; Hugh Money, aged thirteen; Owen Gillan aged thirteen; James Stewart, aged ten and eleven-year-old Owen Morgan were given three months, with eight weeks at hard labour, plus twenty-four stripes.

Although the judicial flogging of children was to continue until 1948, the instrument and number of strokes altered. By an Act of Parliament of 1862, the tawse was replaced by the birch rod. The law stipulated that nobody could be birched more than once for the same offence and in Scotland children of fourteen and under could only suffer twelve strokes. Offenders of sixteen and over could not be birched for theft or for a crime against a person or property. In time the Scottish Home Office drew up more precise regulations that commanded a birching was to be severe enough to ensure the recipient dreaded any repetition. The birch rod was a bundle of twigs tied together at the handle. Two policemen would hold the boy down on a wooden bench while a third applied the birch, normally in the police cells or courthouse.

There is no doubt that birching was a savage punishment, but it was seen as advantageous to the reformers of the period. It cost next to nothing, it frequently saved boys from being exposed to the worse abuses of an adult prison and at an age when pubescent boys often turned to crime to gain the reputation of being men, a birching across the bare bottom treated them instead like naughty children; unlike a spell in jail, it was not an experience of which they could boast.

Yet for all the efforts of the authorities, sentencing still remained something of a lottery. In June 1863 Owan Gorman entered a grocer’s shop in the Overgate and stole 1/7 and three farthings – less than eight pence in today’s currency – and was jailed for nine months. In October that same year Thomas Reynolds indecently assaulted a child in the Overgate and was given only fourteen days. Yet when Mark Devlin, a weaver, raped a fourteen-year-old in February 1835 he was hanged. His was the only execution for rape in Dundee that century and one of the few executions in the city, but his case was a reminder that behind all the judges and prisons there waited always the shadow of the noose.