A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee (2 page)

Dundee was not large; an active man could stroll across it in half an hour, but it had considerable civic pride. The
Dundee Directory
for 1818 states it was a ‘well-built town, consisting of several streets’, while the High Street was a ‘spacious square 360 feet long by 100 feet broad’. In 1847 George McGillivray painted a fine illustration of this High Street, which can be viewed in Dundee’s McManus Gallery. Top-hatted gentlemen and wide-skirted ladies converse in convivial knots while the tight architectural group around the Trades Hall and the bulk of the City Churches speaks of the combination of a continuity of commerce and Christianity that will maintain the status quo and ensure future prosperity. Perhaps it is fitting that the Town House is not included in the picture, for that might tell a different story.

With its frontage of Ionic pilasters and bustling shops, the 1776 Trades Hall was a meeting place for businessmen and trade, but the Town House was the administrative heart of Dundee. Unique in Britain for having two facades, one facing the Tay, the other the High Street, the Town House was a splendid building, created by William Adam in 1734 and would have graced any street in Europe. In a lecture in 2010, Charles McKean, then Professor of Architectural History at Dundee University, described the Town House of 1776 as ‘the finest new public building north of London’. Beneath the 140-foot-high spire and behind the piazzas were the Guild Hall and the town clerk’s office, the town records and the Court House, and rooms in which the Dundee Banking Company attended to its financial affairs. It was perhaps ironic, yet typical of the nature of Dundee, that the upper storey of this most impressive piece of architecture was the town’s prison, so the blackguards and ne’er-do-wells, the thieves and drunkards and swindlers rested their predatory persons only a few feet above one of the largest stores of money in Dundee.

The 1818
Directory
also lauds both the Old Church, with its 156-foot-high tower, and the nearly-as-lofty spire of St Andrews Church. Naturally for a town bred to the sea, the Sailor’s Hall was also mentioned, and the infirmary, lunatic asylum, the schools and colleges. The ‘neatness and elegance’ of the most recent streets is pointed out, as well as the good supply of ‘excellent water conveyed in leaden pipes’. It would not be for many years that the danger of such pipes was known, and it was not until relatively late in the century that Dundee truly had an adequate supply of clean water.

On either fringe of Dundee were pockets of luxury where the wealthy merchants built their houses and lived apart from the common mass of humanity. In the west, the area around Magdalen Green and Perth Road saw a gradual build-up of fine houses, either ornate terraces or individual mansions. However, the preferred relocation area for Dundee’s elite would be to the east, with the jute barons of the 1860s building mansions in West Ferry and Broughty Ferry, so it earned the sobriquet of the ‘richest square-mile in the world’. Other parts of the city were not so fortunate.

As a seaport, it would be expected that Dundee had good connections by water, and most Dundonians were familiar with the regular packet boats to Perth and the ferries to Fife. Travel to Edinburgh was more likely to be by sea than by road, although by the 1820s there was a network of stagecoaches. Merchants Hotel in Castle Street saw the Royal Mail coach arrive from Edinburgh at seven every morning, having crossed the Forth at Queensferry and rattled through Perth with its guard clearing the way with a post horn and the horses lathered with sweat and dust. From Dundee it continued up the coast by Arbroath to Aberdeen, and returned with the northern mail to Merchants at about half past four in the evening. There was also a coach for Forfar too, the
Thane of Fife
, that arrived at Morran’s Hotel in the High Street at nine, and the
Coupar Angus Caravan
that filled the road at the same time. A Caravan was a slower and less luxurious vehicle, with bench seating and more space for luggage. With the
Saxe-Coburg
, the
Commercial
and the
Fife Royal Union
also searching for business and touting for travellers, Dundee was well connected with the rest of the country.

In 1800, Dundee was very much a linen town, with ships bringing raw flax from the Baltic and exporting the finished material. Although linen remained extremely important throughout the century, from mid-century on there was a gradual shift to jute and the number of mills and factories multiplied, bringing their own problems. As early as the 1830s there was concern about the volumes of smoke pumped over and through the town from the tall factory chimneys, but while some voiced concern about the possible effect on people’s health, others said that more smoke meant more employment, which could only benefit the town.

The nineteenth century was a time of change and movement like no other. Scotland altered from a country whose inhabitants were largely based in rural areas to one in which the majority of the population lived in urban centres. As a growing population was unable to find full employment in the countryside, they moved to the towns, a continual shuffle of people that was seldom met by adequate house building. The result was an ever-worsening congestion in a finite number of houses, with inevitable tension. Many of these new Dundonians originated from Ireland, bringing with them a strong religious attachment that was not always present in Scotland. The Irish influence altered the character of Dundee, and the clash between Scots and Irish, Orange and Green, added to the confusion of rapid urban expansion.

Between 1788 and 1801 Dundee’s population rose from just over 19,000 to 26,000. In the next twenty years it rose by nearly fifty per cent to 34,000 and in the next twenty to over 59,000. The depressed decade of the hungry forties saw up to 20,000 more souls arrive, a nearly twenty-five per cent increase in a mere ten years. It was no wonder that many of the people cramming into the already overcrowded town turned to crime. For some it might well have been a lifestyle choice, for others there was simply no other option.

Yet while the city expanded and altered, its main reason for being remained constant: it was a town of trade. In 1818 there were 150 vessels registered in Dundee, from the sixteen-ton coaster
Elizabeth
to the 364-ton
Tay
that braved the Arctic seas in search of whale. As the century progressed, steam gradually ousted sail and the larger and more numerous vessels necessitated constant improvement and enlargement of Dundee’s docks. More shipbuilding yards brought skilled and relatively well-paid jobs as Dundee looked beyond Europe to an increasingly global market.

As in every major trading port, where there were docks there were prostitutes and pubs. Dundee had its share of both. Public houses from unlicensed shebeens to extremely ornate drinking palaces were scattered thickly around the town. There were also a number of streets and alleys with a reputation for houses of ill repute or brothels. The narrow Couttie’s Wynd that cut like the slash of a seaman’s knife from Nethergate to Yeaman’s Shore was notorious for brothels and low lodging houses, while the Broad Close in the Overgate was another area best avoided by those of more refined susceptibilities, but such streets were part of the price Dundee had to pay for its international trade.

Finishing the transport trilogy was the railway, which came to Dundee in the early 1830s, altering the geography of the town as it rattled northward toward the new village of Newtyle and the fertile fields of Strathmore. Much more disruptive than the steam ship, in many ways the railway was the epitome of the century just as much as was industrialisation. By bringing inexpensive transport to the people it shrank the country, but the sidings and embankments were a divisive influence, and the gangs of labourers, the railway navvies, who built the initial lines, could bring mayhem in their wake. Dundee was fortunate to avoid that particular form of crime, but criminals certainly did use Dundee’s railways and one of the most mysterious of Dundee’s robberies took place on a steam train.

Industrialisation brought many changes. It brought factories and pollution, fixed and long working hours and streets of bleak basic tenements, but it also supplied regular work so that when the Industrial Revolution matured, the people of Dundee no longer had the great periods of dearth that marred their rural ancestors. With factory-based employment backed by the Christian charities of the mid- and latter-century, and with the parish workhouse, the dreadful Union, as a last resort, it is unlikely that people actually starved to death by the 1880s and 1890s. That, however, was not the case earlier in the century.

In the depression years of the 1820s, and especially in the terrible hungry 1840s, death by starvation was not unknown even in the most densely populated areas of Dundee. For example, there was the case of Ann Wilson, a single woman who lived in Jessman’s Court, Seagate. One evening in February 1829, she begged for a potato to eat, and spent the entire night at her spinning wheel, desperate to earn some money. In the morning a neighbour found her dead with her work unfinished and no food in the house. There was a similar case in the middle of January 1844 when a widow named Mrs Cameron was found dead in her garret. Mrs Cameron had lived in Argyll Close in the Overgate, but ended her life lying on the pile of rags that was the only furniture in her house. She had died of starvation, still holding her seven-year-old son in her arms.

For many people, even late in the century, poverty and hunger were dark shadows waiting. The middle-aged would remember the pangs of childhood; the elderly would recall the daily struggle to survive, so for them the rattling din of a mill would signify the sound of wages, however poor. Yet although the nineteenth century lacked the famines that had created meal riots in the 1770s, the alternative also had dangers. Scarcely a week passed when there was not a death or injury at work.

Accidents could happen in a hundred different ways. Seamen could fall from a ship in Dundee harbour nearly as easily as they could in a Baltic squall or in the blinding ice of the Arctic; carriers and coachmen risked death on winter roads, quarrymen worked with gunpowder and terrible weights, but the workplaces in the city were equally deadly. Sometimes accidents resulted in horrific injuries, such as the case in April 1836 when an unnamed boy lost his arm in a carding machine at Balfour and Meldrum’s mill in Chapelshade. He survived to be taken to hospital, but others were not so fortunate. The following year an eight-year-old boy named James Templeman was also victim of a carding machine into which he fell backward. He sustained appalling injuries, so it was probably merciful that he died before he reached the infirmary. Another man who died was Archibald Menzies. In 1844 he was working at the Dron distillery when he fell into boiling copper. He was hauled out but died of his burns.

Sometimes people were so terribly injured they might have wished they were dead, such as the fourteen-year-old Robert Thoms who worked at Midmills Bleachfield on the Dichty Burn. He got himself trapped between two of the great wheels and his left leg was literally rolled together to form a single mass of bone, muscle and sinew, while according to the
Dundee Advertiser
, ‘the integuments of the lower part of the belly and fork were torn off.’ The surgeons at the infirmary immediately amputated the mess that had been his leg, but could do little about his other injuries. On 19th June 1828 another unfortunate fell into a tub of not-quite-boiling lees at Taylor’s Soapworks. He dragged himself out and lingered for two agonising days before he died.

Even home life had its dangers. With houses heated by open fires and children often unsupervised while their parents were at work, death by burning was common. To give one example of many, on 27th December 1826 a three-year-old girl living in the Long Wynd died when her dress caught fire. The ballooning clothes worn by women were terribly susceptible to catching fire, and every so often some unfortunate creature would run screaming into the street enveloped in flames.

Augmenting the dreadful poverty and frequent accidents was the constant worry of childbirth and disease. Childbirth was a major killer of women well into the century, but unless there was something unusual in the circumstances, it hardly merited a comment. In July 1824 there was a double tragedy when two women died in childbirth the same day. The incident was worse because both women were married to whaling seamen. In common with every other urban centre, Dundee had areas where disease was rarely absent, and such horrors as smallpox, typhus and cholera made periodical ravages. The cholera year of 1832 alone claimed 511 lives in the town, but it was the slow dribble of childhood deaths that would suck joy from people’s lives. Infant mortality was as bad in Dundee as anywhere else, as a single visit to the Howff graveyard can prove. It is sobering to read the names and ages on many of the gravestones, and one can only bless the medical pioneers who have alleviated much of that monstrosity.

A final, and sad, cause of death was suicide. Every week seemed to bring another instance of man or woman who terminated their own life by hanging, drowning, jumping or wrist slashing. Each death was a family tragedy and a failure by the community to recognise that one of their own was in trouble. Suicide seems to have been prolific in the nineteenth century, and Dundee was no exception.

Yet the Dundonians struggled on. Seamen mutinied against inefficient ship masters, workers fought for something approaching a liveable wage and working hours that would give them some life with their families, and charities, usually Christian, combated the worst effects of poverty. Sometimes, perhaps more often than was recorded, quick anger banded people together to combat crime. The sudden cry of ‘Murder!’ or ‘Stop, thief!’ invariably invoked a response in old Dundee as people co-operated in chasing a housebreaker, wife beater or pickpocket.

If there was often a deep sense of justice in the hard-used Dundonians, there was also a fierce independence that resented any authority considered overbearing. The old nightwatchmen – the Charlies – and the early police force were often given a rough time by the people they set out to protect. Sometimes a whole street would rise against the peacekeepers, and on a Saturday night when the drink flowed free the police seem to have been regarded as legitimate targets by many of the less respectable inhabitants of the burgh.