A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee (25 page)

Each case concealed a tale of harrowing human suffering, with a mother incapable of looking after her child, not knowing how to cope with a baby or suffering a terrible loss. In June 1824 after a woman dropped the dead body of a child in a shop doorway in the Overgate the police arrested her. She was taken to the police office and questioned, when she admitted the child belonged to a relative. It had been stillborn, the mother asked her husband to bury it but he refused and nobody knew what else to do but dump the body and run. The father in this case was not unique. In May 1836 a gaggle of boys were playing beside the building works in Reform Street when they found a small coffin. When the coffin was opened at the Howff, the body of a stillborn child was found. The police made their investigations and discovered that the death had been perfectly natural and the mother had given her husband money to have the child properly buried, but instead he had dumped the body and drunk the money away.

When a mother was found guilty of infanticide, the penalties were widely differing. While Symon’s original death sentence was commuted to transportation for life, in October 1842, Christina Robertson was given three months for exposing her newborn child in Anchor Lane. The child died. In December the same year Margaret Elder of Broughty Ferry was given thirty days in jail for exposing her baby daughter. In April 1853 Ann Smith, a millworker, dumped her seventeen-month-old child on the road between Stobswell and the Churchyard of Mains. This child was lucky as it was rescued, but Smith was given eight months in jail. Two years later Mary Chaplin, also a millworker, deserted her illegitimate child. The child was rescued and taken into the orphanage, or in the words of the time ‘became a burden on the parish’. Chaplin was merely fined.

It was not uncommon for abandoned children to be rescued. At the beginning of January 1821 a gamekeeper at the Lundie estate of Lord Duncan found a tiny baby abandoned among the bare whins in a ditch. Only a small piece of blanket protected the child from the bitter winter cold. Whipping off his coat, the gamekeeper wrapped it around the baby and ran to the nearest house, where the lady kept it warm and fed it as best she could. Lord Duncan ensured baby clothes were provided while an abortive search began for the mother.

There was a similar case in late March 1834 when a watchman at the West Harbour Wall heard a dog whining somewhere nearby. When he searched for the animal he found a baby boy among the stones. Dressed in a blue-and-white cotton frock, the child was very much alive so the watchman carried him to a wet nurse he knew. A similar situation occurred at three o’clock on a July morning in 1837 when the Cowgate watchman found a baby girl in the Sugarhouse Wynd. Once again the watchman rescued the baby and found a wet nurse, while the Kirk session took care of the costs.

Sometimes these cases betrayed both the worst and the best of human behaviour, as happened with Jane McKenna in 1866. McKenna lived at Burnside, Lochee with her two illegitimate children. She worked as a weaver, earning 7/6d a week, and one day she simply upped and left without a word to her children or anyone else. The children might have starved if a kindly neighbour had not realised they had been left alone in the house. She took them to the Liff and Benvie Poorhouse, and the parochial board began a search for the mother.

They found her in Alyth, living with a fellow weaver named John Fitzcharles, and McKenna was charged with child desertion. Even in front of the bench, McKenna was quite blasé, claiming she paid 2/6 for lodgings and could not afford to feed and clothe her family. Giving her the maximum sentence of sixty days, the sheriff also advised her she could claim parish relief, but rather than gratitude, McKenna shouted that the sheriff ‘could keep her children … they would never cross her threshold … never till she died’. Although he was the father of both children, Fitzcharles still pleaded not guilty to child desertion because he had a sore leg. The sheriff was not impressed and added hard labour to his sentence of sixty days.

On other occasions it was an outraged wife who pointed the finger at a supposed child murderer. In February 1863 a ploughman at Pitmannies near Coupar Angus found a dead baby in a field. The boy had been strangled with a cord. The mother was unknown but the police began to suspect a good-looking woman named Isabella Wright who had lived in the Hawkhill. She had vanished shortly after having a baby and rumour said the clothes on the dead child were the same as her son had worn. Although a police search failed to find Wright, she walked on ground too dangerous to escape for long. The father of her child was a married man, and as well as cheating on his wife he argued with his brother, which was a fatal combination. The brother told the wife about her husband’s affair, and pointed out Wright’s house at Lower Crofts in Dundee. The wife told the police, and Inspector Adams knocked on Wright’s door. She was not there, and nor was she at her work in Blackscroft. Not yet defeated, Adams followed the cheating husband instead, and saw a young and excited woman meet him in the Seagate. They spoke for a while and entered a public house, where Inspector Adams arrested Wright for suspected child murder.

The cases mentioned are only samples; there were so many more they beg the question: Why were so many women desperate to get rid of their own children? The case of twenty-eight-year-old Euphemia McGrigor may give one answer. In June 1841 McGrigor lived with her mother in St Mary’s Close, Nethergate. She had no husband but two children, which made her a fine target for some supposedly religious people. Eventually the constant harping of these moralists had their effect on McGrigor, and she took a knife and cut her throat. Luckily somebody saved her life, but her attempted suicide shows just how bad the pressure was for unmarried mothers in the respectable nineteenth century.

There is no doubt that infanticide is a terrible thing, but the moralists were certainly not blameless. Children will always be at risk from stressed, deranged or unscrupulous adults, but luckily in Dundee there was also a strong streak of kindness behind the poverty, and people who wanted to help.

When considering prisons and punishments of the nineteenth century, one is apt to think of Dartmoor, transportation to Australia or a convict in striped uniform languishing in solitary confinement. All these preconceptions are correct, but they only make up part of the picture. The nineteenth century was a period of penal reform, when people seriously considered how to best solve the problem of crime.

In the early decades of the century the erratic nature of sentencing was noticeable. While some hardened criminals were let off with relatively mild sentences, first offenders were often treated with utter severity. For example, in the Circuit Court in Perth in September 1834 the judges Lords Moncrieff and Medwyn sent James Bell to Australia for seven years for stealing a pewter teapot and a few bottles from a house in Perth Road and an urn, a jug and a handful of coppers from a shop. The judge marked Bell as a thief by habit and repute: he was also just ten years old.

Yet on Friday 14th January 1825 the mature James Douglas had to undergo a much shorter sentence. He had to parade through the main streets of Dundee with placards on his back and breast informing the world he was a resetter of stolen goods and the town drummer announcing his presence to the entire world. A crowd watched as he walked, with a lugubrious face but a steady gait. Less than a fortnight later he had reason to celebrate, for his name was announced again, this time on banns of marriage as his engagement to a woman of considerable wealth was proclaimed.

In the early decades of the century punishment could be visibly corporal. At twelve noon on Friday 4th October 1822 around 10,000 people crowded the High Street to watch a double public flogging. Dead on noon a cart stopped at the piazza of the Town House, as two prisoners were brought down from the cells. Both John Miller and William Storrier were shirtless but with broad hats tilted to conceal their faces, they were fastened to the cart with a rope around their waists and then the public executioner flourished the official cat o’ nine tails.

As the crowd jeered, the cart trundled on a slow traverse of the town, stopping thirteen times for the executioner to lay three stripes across the back of each man, so they received thirty-nine lashes, the Biblical forty less one, and were then dragged back to the Town House cells. But their ordeal had only just begun, for like young James Bell they were also transported to Australia. In their cases, however, the punishment was more justified, for they were accused of assaulting fourteen-year-old Mary Miller on the road between Dundee and Glamis. The original accusation had included rape, but as this was a hanging offence, a benevolent prosecutor, John Hope, struck that part and pushed only the assault. In a trial held behind closed doors, both men were sentenced to thirty-nine lashes and fourteen years’ transportation.

There was another whipping in Dundee on Friday 14th May 1824. The culprit was a hardened and unpleasant man named Webster. He had appeared before the Perth Circuit Court in 1821, charged with assault and intent to rob. The judge awarded him a year in jail and five years’ banishment from Scotland, together with the promise of a public whipping if he returned before his time. But in May 1824, Webster was back in Dundee. Together with a comrade, he burst out of a public house and began kicking passers-by. He resisted arrest, and was sentenced to be flogged.

There had been a public whipping in Arbroath recently and the authorities retained the Edinburgh executioner who had performed the punishment. They also recruited scores of special constables to help control the crowd, but their presence did nothing to stop the pickpockets to whom such gatherings were a bonanza. Although the gathered crowd would not realise it, they were witnessing history, for the Police Act, passed that year, marked the end of public whipping. Transportation, however, was to continue.

Transportation was no light punishment, but the ultimate step of banishment. In Scotland, offenders could be banished from the town, the county or the country for various periods of time, depending on the seriousness of the offence. Banishment was not a new punishment but had been common for centuries. Even banishment to a colony was not new; in the early seventeenth century many outlawed Borderers were banished to Ireland. Cromwell sent captured Scottish prisoners of war to the American colonies and Caribbean islands as slave labour, and many Americans could trace their ancestors to a convict, military, religious or political prisoner of the seventeenth or early eighteenth century. Other equally unfortunate convicts could be forcibly recruited into the army, to fight the wars the Stuart kings waged for their English kingdom.

When the American Revolution and the emergence of the United States closed that particular destination, the British government looked for other lands to contaminate with their undesirables. The re-discovery of Australia by James Cook proved a godsend. To the British authorities, here was a huge, virtually empty land a long way off and in need of cheap labour.

There is a myth that those transported to Australia were innocent poachers and articulate political radicals. There is a counter myth that only the truly hardened offenders were transported; the truth is somewhere between the two extremes, but probably slanted more toward the latter. Scottish courts were reluctant to send first offenders to New South Wales or Van Diemen’s Land and even the notoriously hard-hearted English courts did not automatically banish wrongdoers on a whim. According to Robert Hughes’ book
The Fatal Shore
,
over half the English convicts were repeat offenders, with around eighty per cent being thieves.

Being separated from home, friends and family was surely a terrible punishment, but there were some who seized the opportunity of a fresh start in a new land to make a name for themselves. Others, of course, survived their time and merged with the population of Australia, or returned to Britain, while there were some who were too truculent to knuckle down and joined the ranks of the bushrangers who infested the bush and highways. These ‘demons’ as they were known – the word was a shortening of Van Diemen and had nothing to do with supernatural evil – often earned a reputation for savagery.

As early as 1837 a government select committee met to discuss the whole question of transportation, and recommended the alternative of keeping the culprits occupied with hard labour in British prisons. As there were not enough prisons to hold all the convicts, the government compromised, ending the transportation to relatively mild New South Wales, but continuing to the hell hole of Van Diemen’s Land, Tasmania. Sometimes the convicts did not even reach Australia. In September 1833 the convict transport
Amphitrite
was wrecked on the passage from Britain. Among the dead were Mary Stirling, Janet Kennedy, Mary Dakers and Mary Clark from Dundee. They had left the Tay on 9th August.

Transportation was used with surprising frequency, and most Circuit Courts sentenced some Scots to lengthy periods of exile. For example, the Perth court of September 1824 ordered the thief Janet Angus to Australia for life, and the spring court of 1825 sentenced Margaret Macdonald to seven years’ transportation for passing forged bank notes. Both women waited in Dundee jail until July 1825 before being shuffled in chains to the docks to begin the long voyage to Woolwich and then to the other side of the world. As well as petty thieves and forgers there were killers. In March 1836 a carpenter named John MacIntyre was transported for seven years for murdering his wife. He punched her, kicked her and threw her against a wall and then to the ground.

And age was no bar to transportation either. James Bell was only one of many Dundee children sent to Australia. In May 1835 Circuit Court Lords Mackenzie and Medwyn looked across the bar at fourteen-year-old James Morris. He had stolen around 4/6 from Mungo Shepherd’s shop in the Overgate, but because he had twice before been convicted of theft, he was given seven years in Australia. Despite his youth, Morris was not overawed by the sentence but faced the judge squarely. ‘Damnation to you!’ he responded.