A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee (14 page)

Donald Gordon, one of the masons, hammered at the tollhouse door to get in. As soon as the door opened, he tried to step inside, only to have the door slammed on his leg. When his friend and fellow mason John Syme helped him get free, the door was banged shut in their faces. Suspecting that the tollhouse was already bulging with revellers, Syme and Gordon, probably grumbling but quite peaceable, had returned to join their friends when a dozen yelling men poured out of the tollhouse. They carried a variety of weapons, including a hatchet, and before the masons could either fight or run they were under attack, with another group of youngsters joining in. Somebody in a white coat cracked Syme across the skull and he staggered, holding onto the toll bar to retain his balance as the mob surged past him and attacked the other masons.

A twenty-six-year-old mason called John Allan was hacked to the ground and lay there as a group of men kicked his prone body. Somebody shouted, ‘Dundee Forever!’

Allan’s brother Alexander, another of the masons, ran to help but as he held the obviously dead man he was also felled. He tried to rise but again the attackers barged him down. He heard somebody speaking,‘Don’t strike him any more for he’s dead!’

Leaving the security of the toll bar, Syme moved toward John Allan, but by doing so he again made himself a target.

‘The bugger’s up again. Have at him!’

Still dazed from the previous attack Syme could hardly resist as some of the attackers knocked him to the ground and began kicking him, their boots crunching into his head and face. A mason called John Ross saw the crowd of strangers rushing out; somebody hit him with a stick and he fell, aware that the Allan brothers were under attack but unable to help. Seeing somebody lifting his brother, Alexander again tried to rise, but his attackers returned and once more punched him to the ground. He looked up, pleading for mercy but unable to recognise anyone who was attacking him.

By that time all of the masons were injured, some severely, and the gang, still with the help of a group of younger youths, moved on to assault anyone who crossed their path. Their next target was a man by the name of Sandeman Stewart who was walking back to his home in Douglasfield. Attacked from behind, he was knocked to the ground, but before his assailants finished the job he heard somebody say, ‘Don’t strike that man – he doesn’t belong to the band!’

Stewart saw John Allan battered down and thought he said, ‘Lord I am gone. Don’t strike me again,’ but then, not surprisingly, Stewart ran. A young ploughman was cudgelled to the ground so savagely that it was also feared he would die, and then a man who worked in a bleach field. He also fled, pursued by a mob of youths who whooped as if he was a hunted fox. They caught him in a nearby cornfield, knocked him down and kicked him to pieces. He was left with a cracked skull and a battered and bruised body.

When the dust settled and the predatory gang had moved on, the body of John Allan was carried into the toll house before being loaded on a cart and trundled sorrowfully back to Dundee. As well as being murdered, he had been robbed, although the attackers had failed to find the pay in his vest pocket. The authorities moved as quickly as they could, with the Sheriff substitute holding an enquiry and the few constables, warrants in hand, searching for the suspected attackers.

On 21st July, large crowds of Dundonians gathered for the burial of John Allan. As he was a good worker and a quiet young man about to be married, there was a lot of sympathy for him. Despite his injuries, Alexander Allan followed the coffin, supported on either side by a fellow mason. The others were still too badly hurt to attend the funeral of their friend, but peace officers arrested two men whom they suspected to be involved in the murder, and two days later they captured a third.

The suspects were Thomas Marshall, a mason, George Scott, a seaman and James Whyte, a lath splitter. Marshall was a known troublemaker who was suspected of being involved with the theft of a musket from a servant of Lord Duncan. He was outlawed for failing to appear at the Perth Circuit Court in the autumn of 1823. When the three accused were dragged before the bar, all pleaded not guilty, so were held in the cells while the authorities organised a proper jury trial.

When the accused finally appeared before the Circuit Court at Perth, Sandeman Stewart identified both Marshall and Scott as being with the gang, and thought it was Scott who had felled him and Marshall who stopped him from continuing the attack when he was on the ground. He also thought it had been Marshall and Scott who attacked Alexander Allan, but did not remember Whyte at all. He denied any previous knowledge of any of the men, said the masons seemed sober and, as it was a summer evening, was sure it was light enough for him to identify the men in court.

A fourteen-year-old boy named James MacKiddie also pointed out Marshall, and said he had knocked a mason down with a bludgeon. MacKiddie claimed the mason had fallen in a potato field and Marshall had walked across to look down on him. He knew both Marshall and Scott by sight, but had only seen Scott attack a man at the toll. MacKiddie’s friend, Alexander Whyte, was slightly older, and he had seen Marshall and James Whyte involved in the fighting, and had heard some of the others call Marshall by name.

James Ewing had been in the tollhouse at the same time as the gang and could identify all the prisoners. He claimed to have seen Marshall and Scott knock a man down, and said the man, John Allan, was lying dead on the ground just before Marshall shouted, ‘Although we are but boys we’ll do for them!’ He estimated there were perhaps ten ‘Dundee chaps’ fighting twice that number of masons, and thought the fighting was less one-sided than the others claimed. He said he had seen masons strike both Scott and Marshall.

Fifteen-year-old William Moncur was unsure how the fight began, but he saw the body of Allan on the ground with Whyte nearby. He saw Marshall with a stick and heard him say, ‘Damn it for the last whup at him,’ before he joined Scott and Whyte in fighting the masons.

The last witnesses for the prosecution were Mr John Crighton, the Dundee surgeon, and Mr Greig, his assistant. They had examined the body of John Allan and said that he had probably been killed by a blow from a stick to the right temple.

There were few witnesses for the defence, but Whyte’s master said he was a ‘decent, steady lad’ while the advocates for Whyte, Marshall and Scott spoke in their favour without in the least denting the case of the Crown.

When the Lord Justice Clerk summed up the case, he did not seem to have any doubt that Marshall, Whyte and Scott had killed John Allan. In a speech that lasted over an hour and a half, he dwelled on the difference between murder, which was a capital offence, and culpable homicide, which was not. The jury deliberated for only half an hour before reaching their verdict. They thought none of the accused was a murderer, but Marshall was guilty of assault and rioting, aggravated by his carrying a stick; Scott was guilty of assault and rioting and Whyte merely of rioting. However, the Lord Justice Clerk was unhappy with this verdict. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I cannot admit of the aggravation expressed in your verdict … of the principal carrying a stick in his hand. You might as well have stated that he carried a hat on his head …’

Only when the fact of Marshall carrying a stick was stricken from the verdict did the judge, Lord Pitmully, pronounce sentence. Marshall was to be transported to Australia for fourteen years and Scott for seven years, while Whyte was sent to jail for a year and ordered to keep the peace for five more, with the threat of a stiff financial penalty if he failed to do so. It was obvious that Lord Pitmully believed the jury was too lenient, but Marshall at least would not have agreed; he was reported as being sulky and ill-tempered while the others were also downcast.

One glaring question remains: Why did the mob attack the masons, who were ordinary working men with apparently no history of animosity to anybody? The only clue lies in the single slogan ‘Dundee Forever’ shouted out by Marshall. Perhaps he was announcing a campaign by the young men of Dundee against people he considered ‘country jocks’ and, in this case, he chose the wrong group. Presumably there had been an earlier confrontation between men from Dundee and those of the neighbouring countryside and John Allan was the unfortunate victim.

At the beginning of October, Marshall and Scott, together with a man named MacQuire from Cupar in Fife, left Dundee on the London smack. They would spend some time in the hulks off Chatham before being stuffed onto a ship that would transport them to the other side of the world. The affair still had some echoes, however, for about six weeks later a man named William Smith, who was suspected of being involved in the riot, was arrested for causing trouble in Fish Street, with a dire warning that the sheriff had an eye on him.

By the following year, Dundee had a professional police force and Mr Home, the superintendent, marched a strong body of men to the Stobsmuir Fair. There was a short attempt at rioting, but the police stamped hard on it. Although the reputation remained, there were no more murders at the Fair.

If the gang at Stobsmuir had been murderous at least the trouble was localised and short-lived. There was another gang in the 1820s that caused mayhem for years, thieving and rioting and spreading their own brand of violence around the western suburbs of the town. That was the Peter Wallace gang, once labelled as ‘the pest and terror of all’.

Already drunk and looking for trouble, they erupted from the brothel in the Scouringburn, cursing any who crossed their path and shouting obscene defiance to the June Sabbath morning. The streets emptied before them as they careened onward, pushing aside anybody bold or stupid enough to remain in their path, and battered at the door of a Hawkhill public house, demanding entrance and whisky for half a dozen thirsty throats.

They swallowed their fill of whisky, but when the landlord insisted payment they laughed in his face and displayed pockets empty of everything save holes. A man who feared neither God nor the devil, the landlord refused to back down, snatching the hat of one as partial payment, and ordered them all outside. Howling their rage, the youths lifted stones from the unpaved street and subjected the pub to a barrage that had the customers cowering for cover and reduced the windows to useless shards of glass. By that time the forenoon was advanced and the respectable or God-fearing of Dundee were hurrying to Church, turning their eyes from as disgraceful a scene of blackguardism as had ever sullied a Dundee Sabbath.

Even the godly would know who these young savages were, for in a close-knit community the size of Dundee everybody knew each other. These were the Shaw brothers, James and John, accompanied by a small knot of their followers, and all were part of the gang of the even more notorious Peter Wallace, the worst young thug (although that term had not yet been coined in Scotland) to infest the streets of the rapidly-expanding town. Wallace himself was not present, for only the previous week he had been arrested and carried to gaol for attacking Lord Duncan’s servant in the Hawkhill and stealing his musket. So now he lay sullenly in a cell above the Town House, listening to the vermin rustling in the straw and the moans of his fellow sufferers.

In the meantime, the Shaws and their companions played merry hell with Dundee. Swaggering to Tay Street, one produced a knife and taunted the passers-by. When a man protested they kicked him to the ground and continued their progress. The people of the Scouringburn would breathe a collective sigh of relief as the gang headed back into the centre of town, where they spent most of the day steadily drinking and becoming more quarrelsome. As the day wore on some dropped away and it was a depleted bunch that returned to the Hawkhill in the evening. Too drunk to have any caution, they continued where they had left off, shouting and blaspheming and breaking the peace of Sunday until one man, exasperated beyond caution, grabbed a club and left his house.

With their numbers thinned and their reactions slowed by alcohol, the members of the gang either fought or scattered, depending on their nature, but the sober citizen smashed one to the ground, faced off the rest and dragged his prisoner to the lock-up house to be secured for the night. The respectable watched and wondered. They knew that capturing one of the Peter Wallace gang was a start, but it was not enough. There were at least another nine of them, all equally desperate, and they knew the area better than just about anybody else.

As the Hawkhill and the Scouringburn were outside the town boundaries they were not patrolled by any watchman. There were no constables, so blackguards such as Wallace and the Shaws could run riot without fear of arrest or retribution. Having no peacekeepers was not unusual in many Scottish communities, for in the days before an organised police force, watchmen had to be paid for, and the people of the Scouringburn and the Hawkhill did not like the idea of wasting their money. Besides, who would pay, how much would it cost, and was the price worth the end result? In many ways, the youths who made up the Peter Wallace gang were products of their environment: they lived the only way they understood. It is unlikely that anyone knew from where they came, and even less likely that anyone cared. They grew up on the streets; either the unwanted product of a few moments of lust in a life controlled by deprivation, or the unfortunate children of early-deceased, or perhaps tragically transported parents. It is unlikely the truth will ever be known.

How they survived their infancy is also a mystery, but when they were very young boys they banded together for support and security, gathering horse droppings from the street and selling them as fertiliser to raise coppers for food. When that method of subsistence failed they turned to petty crime. Spending the nights in a smithy in the Witchknowe, they raided the local gardens, digging up potatoes, stealing apples and pears from trees and boiling the two in a pot, their only possession save for a spade. In more fortunate times they might steal one of the hens that many of the people of Dundee kept, or a pigeon from a doocot, and occasionally they washed the mess down with whisky, which they obtained by bartering with anything they sneaked through an open window or lifted from any unfortunate drunk whose pockets they rifled. They had already developed a taste for whisky, or a desire to experience the numbness of alcoholic oblivion. If they felt like bread, well, the local baker was not security conscious. On one occasion they swarmed down his chimney and lifted an entire batch of newly baked biscuits. Fagin would have been proud of them.