A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee (33 page)

Hustled back to Dundee jail, Bury was placed in the condemned cell, some distance from the main block, and while he waited, various people petitioned for clemency. His solicitor, David Tweedie, wrote to Lord Lothian, Secretary of State for Scotland, arguing that the medical evidence was conflicting, and Bury might have inherited the insanity of his mother. The Reverend Gough of St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Dundee also wanted clemency but on 22nd April the reprieve was rejected and the sentence confirmed. Bury was to be hanged on 24th of the month.

Even with the obviously planned and cold-blooded nature of the murder, many people in Dundee were against the execution, and the
Courier
opposed capital punishment in principle. Although they could not know it, Bury’s hanging was to be Dundee’s last. Perhaps in gratitude for his attempts to save his life, Bury confessed to the Reverend Gough that he had indeed murdered Ellen as they argued drunkenly over money, but even this virtual deathbed confession did not tally with the facts. He said he had tried to cut up Ellen’s body the next morning, while the doctors said the slashes across her abdomen had been made within ten minutes of death.

While he waited for his execution, Bury was reported to be composed, spending his time writing a forty-four-page summary of his life. At no time did he say he was Jack the Ripper. On 24th April he was escorted the forty yards from his cell to the scaffold. It was only after the hanging that rumours began that Bury had been Jack the Ripper. Most are based on circumstantial evidence. For example, Bury had lived near Whitechapel when the murders had taken place; Bury’s wife may have once been a prostitute and Bury had slashed open her abdomen in the same fashion as the Ripper. It was also said that Bury took off his wife’s rings, which is something Jack the Ripper did, and the Whitechapel murders stopped when Bury left London. Lastly there are some remarks that Ellen allegedly made, saying,‘Jack the Ripper is quiet now’ when speaking to her neighbours. Strangely, it was the
New York Times
, a newspaper which had no connection with either Dundee or London, that made a direct connection between Bury and the Ripper, and James Berry, the official hangman, supported the claims.

So what is the evidence?

1. Bury was near the area at the time of the five ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders.

2. The murders stopped at the time Bury left London.

3. Bury ripped open his wife’s abdomen in a similar fashion to the Ripper.

4. There was chalk graffiti near Bury’s flat implicating him.

5. Ellen Bury made some remarks about Jack the Ripper.

On the surface, these are not particularly damning pieces of evidence, but taken together they might be formulated into a case. Euan Macpherson in
The Trial of Jack the Ripper
has painted a full picture of the connection, and it remains an intriguing possibility that one of history’s most elusive murderers met his end at the end of a rope in Dundee. The gallows remains in pieces, as a macabre reminder of Dundee’s last hanging, and the storage facility of Dundee’s museum also holds an inscribed sandstone slab with the initials J. H. B. and the date 1889, which is thought by some to commemorate Bury, but that too is merely conjecture. Of one thing there is no doubt: if anybody deserved hanging for murder, William Henry Bury did.

And that is a picture of Dundee crime in the nineteenth century. Of course it is only fragmentary. For every theft or robbery or drunken brawl mentioned, a hundred have been left out and for every recorded act of kindness or Christian charity, there are a thousand un-noted and long forgotten. But the text is intended to reveal something of the realities of life in Dundee when 200 chimneys pumped out smoke and the jute mills provided hard, hard work for many thousands. For the majority of the population, to live in old Dundee was to live with grinding labour or desperate poverty; drink competed with crime to blight the streets and a petty theft was all that was required to crash a family from marginal security to destitution and hunger.

As the century progressed, so the population increased. From the uncertain justice of the Charlies, Authority tightened its grip. The 1824 Police Act introduced new professionalism to the smoke-swirled streets of the city. Uniformed police paced their portentous beats, public houses faced tightened regulations and new concepts of justice replaced transportation with penal servitude and the lottery of freedom or death with the certainty of terrible silence behind enclosing walls. Some patterns of crime altered; grave robbing stopped; train robbing began. Some remained the same: husbands and wives abused each other behind the paper-thin partitions of tenement walls, men and women over-indulged in alcohol and exchanged insults and blows outside the gaudy glow of public houses, sneak thieves slithered through windows and predatory eyes watched for the unwary in the yawning mouths of closes.

According to figures released by the Scottish Government in 2011, Dundee still has problems with crime. Robbery and indecency are above the national average; drug crime, which the Victorians never knew, and crimes of dishonesty are well above. Petty assault and breach of the peace are as prevalent as ever, and Donald Mackay would not be surprised to learn that drunkenness in Dundee is well above the national average too. However, there is proportionally less crime concerning offensive weapons in Dundee than elsewhere, fewer miscellaneous offences and mercifully fewer serious assaults. The gang problems that so blight some communities are markedly fewer in Dundee and the two local football teams share an intense rivalry without the near hatred that afflicts sporting fixtures in other communities.

And yet in many ways Dundee remains as she was. She is one of Scotland’s major cities, a bustling, very human place spreading along the coastal plain between the Sidlaw Hills and the Firth of Tay. The dynamism of the nineteenth century remains in her constant reinvention of self. Now the city is a centre of education, with two quality universities, Dundee and Abertay, a college of further education and the Islamic Al-Maktoum College of Higher Education. All share the same city and co-exist in harmony. There is talk of Abertay and Dundee Universities merging, talk of Dundee College linking with Angus College. Both may happen, but the underlying dynamism will continue. Dundee is like that.

In other ways Dundee has altered radically. Many of the tenements remain but more have gone, with the once crowded inhabitants moved to local authority housing schemes that encircle the city and provide far superior accommodation but possibly lack the community spirit that saw the Dundee people so often rise against what they perceived as injustice. The whaling ships also have gone, along with the jute mills, and the economic structure of the city has altered. New buildings and new roads have blossomed and two bridges now take the place of the once-busy ferries. Patrick Mackay the messenger is long dead, but his wife’s grave still sits in the Howff graveyard, carefully tended by the hard working men and women of Dundee City Council. Some say the ghosts of the Wallace gang may be sensed on dark nights around Brook Street, and David Crockatt is no longer even a memory, but others of his type still linger. Baffin Street has forgotten its ghost, but the gallows where the Ripper may have bid his last farewell still lie in storage, possibly waiting for a new twist in the justice game.

Overall, Dundonians are proud of their city, and with good reason. It enjoys an enviable position between the Firth of Tay and the Sidlaw Hills, it is a notably accessible shopping centre and is constantly improving itself. And although crime still remains, Dundee can no longer be termed a ‘Sink of Atrocity’, if indeed that accolade was ever deserved. With few exceptions, most crimes in the nineteenth century were crimes of opportunity; murder was rare and organised criminality ever rarer. Dundee may have been a dangerous place, but probably no more so than any other industrial port town.

And through it all one sentiment remains: the warm-heartedness and genuine humanity of the Dundee people, and for that, residents should be proud and visitors thankful.

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First published 2012
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