Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (7 page)

Notable success had been achieved in the case of the three young men who were hanged after the 1812 riots. All had admitted their previous ignorance of, or indifference to, religion. All had been converted and had died with Bibles in their hands, proclaiming their faith that they were going to meet their God. Clearly, at the very least, the ministers’ intervention performed a useful service. It gave the condemned men the courage to die with dignity, and that suited the authorities, for it awed the crowd and convinced them of the terrible majesty of the law. The Rev Mr Porteous, who spent many hours with them after their sentence, published a little book recounting their conversion. He expressed the hope that it would be an inspiration to others; that they would learn from it to lead a godly life and eschew temptation; but the others had not been sentenced to death, and so, for the most part, ignored the lesson, and went their way, like David Haggart, unrepenting.

Now it was his turn however. Three ministers, the Rev Henry Grey, the Rev Dr Anderson and Mr Porteous, the Chaplain of the jail, attended on him. Their purpose was to bring him to a proper understanding of his spiritual condition. It is hard to determine their success. On the one hand he observed the formalities of repentance. He read the Bible with which they provided him, admitted the errors of his ways, prayed dutifully, and, in his speech from the gallows eventually, `conjured the multitude’, as The Scotsman reported, `to avoid the heinous crimes of disobedience to parents, inattention to the Holy Scriptures, of being idle and disorderly, and especially of Sabbath-breaking, which, he said, had led him to that shameful end’; and immediately before the hanging, after the singing of part of the twenty-third psalm, he `knelt down and prayed fervently for a few minutes’. All that was satisfactory. On the other hand, much of his time in the condemned cell was passed in the writing of his autobiography, in which the expressions of regret are perfunctory and conventional, and the delight in his exploits real and unabated; and in the conversations with George Combe, in which he continued to promote the image of himself as a fine fellow, the very Dandy of the Sporting Life.

One attitude does not necessarily exclude the other. We have passed beyond the crude psychology that insists on absolute consistency as a test of sincerity. Instead we can recognise that contradictory emotions do not necessarily drive each other out, but can exist simultaneously in the same being, man’s elasticity of temperament being such that he can accommodate such contradictions. As a lively and impressionable boy, who was, moreover, in an emotional condition heightened to an exceptional degree, David took on the colour of the moment. He did what seemed immediately appropriate; played, that is to say, the part that circumstances asked him to play.

The Scotsman reported that his conduct from the time of the trial was `devout and penitent’. That was the proper attitude for the condemned; a certain co-operation from them being desirable if executions are to be conducted with due dignity. His father paid him a visit. The interview was `most affecting’. David expressed satisfaction to an attendant that `his mother was dead, as, if she had been living, his ignominious fate would have broken her heart’. That was exactly the right sentiment. The following day, a Tuesday, he was taken in a chaise to the lock-up house, and, during the journey, `he kept his eyes intently fixed on his Bible’. On the Wednesday morning, two bailies and the three ministers accompanied him in procession to the scaffold. `His appearance was firm and unshaken, and his countenance exhibited a degree of mildness astonishing to those acquainted with the daring hardiness of his characters and exploits. The calm serenity was changed to an expression of grief, and he even shed a few tears on hearing an expression of sorrow involuntarily burst from a few women assembled in Liberton’s Wynd to catch a glimpse of his tall slender person.’

That may have been a nervous moment for the authorities who were properly anxious that all should go off smoothly, especially that there should be no repetition of the disgraceful scenes that had attended Johnston’s execution. However, David quickly recovered. His behaviour on the scaffold was henceforth all that they could wish. After singing part of Psalm 130 -‘More than they that for morning watch my soul waits for the Lord’ - and listening to Mr Grey’s `fervent impressive prayer, he shook hands with ministers and magistrates, bidding them farewell in a most affectionate manner’. He then mounted two or three steps of the platform but descended again to deliver his admonitory words to the people. At last he took his station, prayed a few minutes more, gave the signal and `was launched into eternity’.

`He was decently dressed in black. The crowd assembled on this occasion was immense. Everyone present appeared to be deeply impressed with the awful exhibition. The people stood uncovered the whole time.’ With these words The Scotsman ended its report of proceedings.

It had all gone off very well. David had played his part admirably with wholly decorous complaisance, and the authorities could reflect with satisfaction that the majesty of the law had been proclaimed, and an awful warning offered to evil-doers. After all the justification of public executions was just that: Voltaire, referring admittedly to a higher social sphere, had summed it up after the execution of Admiral Byng:

`In England they shoot an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others.’

The publication of the autobiography a few days later caused some to have second thoughts. `The publication is likely to do more harm than good’, said The Scotsman pontifically. `Despite the end he had come to (and despite its dignified and co-operative manner, they might have added) we fear it will rather stimulate the bad to greater exertion in crime than awaken their minds to repentance.’ No doubt there was something in the complaint. Certainly the autobiography went some way to correct the impression of penitence that the execution had produced. No one could read Davy’s account of his exploits without being aware of the fun and excitement he had experienced in those few years, and it is of course possible that some readers might conclude that with a little bit more luck and prudence there was no reason why so entertaining a career should be cut thus abruptly short. At the same time such admonitions as the book contained rang feebly in comparison. As The Scotsman put it, `those who have done wrong frequently, and still more, those who do wrong habitually, are averse from reflection. They know it to be painful.’ Accordingly the conclusion was that they were likely to let the moral of David’s end pass them by, while receiving stimulation from the headlong gallop of his course.

Probably however the newspaper’s fears amounted to little more than the pompous conventional platitudes in which respectability loves to garb itself. Dr Johnson provided an. answer before long. In his Life of John Gay, he wrote of The Beggar’s Opera:

`Dr Herring, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, censured it as giving encouragement not only to vice but to crimes by making a highwayman the hero, and dismissing him at last unpunished. It has even been said that after the exhibition of The Beggar’s Opera the gangs of robbers were evidently multiplied. The play … cannot be conceived, without more speculation than life requires or admits, to be productive of much evil. Highwaymen and housebreakers seldom frequent the theatre, or mingle in any elegant diversion; nor is it possible for anyone to imagine that he may rob with safety because he sees Macheath reprieved upon the stage.’

Such robust common sense is always preferable to cant, and it is equally unlikely - whatever The Scotsman’s apprehensions - that anyone turned to crime as a result of reading David Haggart’s little book. Such productions may influence the style of criminal activity by offering the criminal a model or ideal, but the roots of crime lie deeper and are more complex. They rest in character and circumstance, and in the working of one upon the other. They are always hard to identify, and any identification can only be tentative. One thing is sure however: they are inaccessible to such glib and facile explanation.

William Bennison

Or the Other Dear Charmer

Leith Walk begins, or used to begin, in some splendour, flanked by Robert Adam’s Register House on one side, and the Calton Hill on the other. Nowadays the first is deformed by the monstrous St James’ Centre and the broad street is made desolate by demolition, and ridiculous by a vulgar footbridge, which could scarcely be less pleasing to the eye, and hardly even has the excuse of function.

Yet this deformity is not out of keeping with the history of the street, which has always promised more than it achieved, and this failure tells us something of the development of the city.

The street follows the line of an earthworks hurriedly thrown up in the summer of 1650 by the Covenanting Army of David Leslie to check Cromwell’s advance after his victory at Dunbar. For the next century or more the earthworks stood, and were used as a walk or as a playground by children, while the road to Leith from Edinburgh continued to follow its age-old route from the Cowgate, skirting the east side of the Calton Hill and running down to the port along the lines of the present Easter Road. A curious late seventeenthcentury experiment of running horse-drawn buses along Leslie’s earthworks was unsuccessful, and it was not until 1774 that the decision was taken to widen and pave what became the Walk. Indeed the need to improve communications with the port was used as the common sense justification for what many considered to be the ridiculously ambitious plan to build the North Bridge over the chasm below the Old Town. ,

There was, it seemed, reason enough for improvement.

Leith was a busy and prosperous port. In 1791 there were five master shipbuilders there, employing one hundred and fifty two carpenters and building ships up to three hundred tons. Trade, principally with the Baltic, but also with the north German and Dutch ports, was busy. A noble street was justified.

And noble, Leith Walk certainly is - in conception at least. Wide and gently curving, it runs for a mile and a quarter down to the sea. It could have been one of the great streets of Europe, comparable for example to the Ramblas in Barcelona. Yet it is nothing of the sort, despite fine buildings still surviving at the Edinburgh end; and it never has been.

The explanation is simple and instructive. Edinburgh turned away from its port. It never developed into a great trading or industrial city. Leith has never been a focus, but at best an annexe.

This failure of development, is not immediately easy to account for. The nineteenth century saw a general turning away from the narrow seas that give on the Continent in favour of the West, the Atlantic and the Cape routes. The result was the growth of Glasgow and Liverpool, cities that grew out of their river and waterfront. Only London among eastern ports grew comparably. That was not the only reason of course: Edinburgh’s industrial hinterland did not compare with Lanarkshire. There was simply nothing of the same magnitude to pass through the port. Leith’s trade continued to be in timber and grain, and there was a steady East Coast carrying trade, but it was all small stuff.

As a result Leith always remained to some degrees detached from the city it served, while Edinburgh itself developed as a legal, banking and professional city. The dominance exercised by the professions has no parallel elsewhere in the United Kingdom and probably nowhere in Europe either. The 1841 Census for example recorded 7,463 Bankers, Professional Men and Capitalists out of a population of 163,726. It is safe to say that the Capitalists contributed only a small share of the total. If we give each of these four dependents - a reasonable figure considering the size of Victorian families we find a total of almost 40,000, or something between a fifth and a quarter of the entire population of the city. And this estimate of course neglects the number of domestic servants dependent on them.

So Leith Walk never achieved the splendour implicit in its conception. The whole trend of development led away from it, as the failure of Playfair’s eastern extension of the New Town also demonstrated. The proliferating middle class were rather to be found in the New Town’s western extension between Charlotte Square and the Haymarket, or in the Victorian suburbs soon to be built south of the Meadows Bruntsfield or Morningside - or to the west of Leith Walk in Inverleith and Trinity. Leith Walk itself began to decline soon after being built. By the late eighteen-sixties, when Robert Louis Stevenson was a student, its Edinburgh end was known for its taverns and brothels; it was a place you could go `to see life’.

But the whole area became what it has never ceased to be, one favoured by immigrants. Today they are Pakistanis. Earlier this century they were Italian; before that, the Irish. The east end football club, Hibernian, with its ground at Easter Road, has an Irish name and Catholic associations; even today, though the bigotry has never reached Glaswegian proportions, supporters of the quintessentially Edinburgh Heart of Midlothian have been heard to address the Hibs as `Fenian bastards’.

Not all Irish immigrants were Catholic however. That flood began after the Great Famine of the 1840s. Earlier arrivals were likely to be Ulster Protestants. William Bennison, bigamist and murderer, and keen member of a Wesleyan chapel, was one of those. The degree of religious enthusiasm he displayed is in fact one of the elements that makes his case and career interesting, for his crime was clumsy and mean, and his conduct crass. Yet the gap between preaching and practice, which strangely mirrors Leith Walk’s failure to achieve what it promised, the existence of incompatibilities in the one character and the revelations of working-class culture which the case offers, combine to make even this story profoundly interesting.

We know nothing of Bennison’s life in Ireland beyond the fact that he married a girl called Mary Mullen. The wedding took place in Portadown in November 1838 and was celebrated in a Presbyterian kirk. There was later to be much tedious argument as to the validity of the marriage, for Bennison had been baptised a member of the Church of Ireland, which was, of course the Established Church and an Anglican community. It is hard now to feel much interest in this rather technical debate, especially since the charge of bigamy seems unimportant compared to murder. It was thought to be important in his trial, for reasons which will emerge later. Moreover the wedding suggests something of his character. Bennison combined strong sexual impulses with moral principles, or, if that is putting it rather strongly, with a powerful sense of respectability. He couldn’t seduce a girl; he had to marry her.