A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee (3 page)

To live in nineteenth-century Dundee would be to live in a constant barrage of noise and smells. The noise would be from the wheels of carts and coaches across granite cobbles, the clump of horses’ hooves, the shouting of street traders trying to sell their wares and the pleas of a dozen different types of beggars. In the background, and dominating the narrow streets, was the hum and clatter of machinery from the scores of mills and factories. The smells were, if anything, more offensive. Hundreds of horses meant the roads would be covered in horse dung. Houses with no interior plumbing led to cesspits for household waste. These household middens were meant to be emptied every night, but reality did not always match the theory. And there was the smell of rotten fruit and vegetables and at times the sickening stench of boiling whale blubber. In common with every urban centre, Dundee employed scavengers, men whose job it was to remove the ‘nuisances’ (as the piles of human excreta were known), but their numbers were small and the city constantly growing. Over everything, sometimes choking, sometimes drifting, was the all-pervading smell of smoke from scores of factory chimneys and hundreds of household fires. Edinburgh may be known as Auld Reekie, but smoke dominated Dundee as well. To live in industrial Dundee was to wade through smoke, avoid assorted unpleasantness and grow used to the varieties of smells that assailed the nostrils and noise that battered the ears.

So that was Dundee in the opening decades of the nineteenth century: a hard-working, hard-living town rapidly changing into an industrial city. It was a town at the heart of an international trading network. It was a place of startling contrasts, of sickening deprivation close to some of the most luxurious trade-created mansions in Britain, a place of cramped tenement living and of mobs that could attack the police at the skiff of a broken bottle, a place of rattling mills and men often numbed by unemployment. Perhaps it was this terrible contrast that created the criminal element, for Dundee was also home to just about every kind of crime known to the nineteenth-century man and woman. Murder and petty theft, smuggling and Resurrection, child stripping and thimble rigging, rape and prostitution, housebreaking and hen stealing, riot and child exposure – Dundee knew them all.

As the century rolled on, some of the types of crimes became less familiar, while others were as well known to the Bobbies of the late 1890s as they had been to the Charlies of the 1820s. It has often been said that people do not change, only circumstances and technology. That is certainly true of Dundee’s nineteenth-century crime, and the blackguards and footpads of Peter Wallace’s gang in the 1820s would have fit easily into the garrotters of the 1860s or even the teenage thugs of the present age.

This book does not pretend to cover the entire story of Dundee’s nineteenth-century crime. It has been selective, leaving out far more than was included, but it aims to give a flavour of life in Dundee at a time when Scotland was in the forefront of the world of industry and trade. It shows Dundee through a period of major change, when shipping advanced from sail power to steam, when the iron juggernaut of the railway cleaved through the centre of town and life moved at an ever faster pace. It brings the reader to the claustrophobic closes and unhygienic tenements of the city and eases through the smoke-swirled streets. Was Dundee such a sink of atrocity? Enter the gas-lit confusion of the nineteenth century and make a judgement, but be aware: the pitiless eyes of the criminals are watching.

On 9th of February 1825 the
Commercial Traveller
coach rumbled on its usual route through the small towns of Fife. Crammed together, with their feet shuffling in the straw, the passengers would normally have stared at the dismal winter weather outside or spoken to the people within, but not this time. Instead they sat in some discomfort, very aware of the man in their midst. He was young, well-mannered and respectably dressed, but they were still wary of him; he had boarded the coach in Dundee and had behaved perfectly politely, but they were highly suspicious of his luggage.

Rather than the usual selection of bundles and bags, the young man carried a single but extremely large box, which aroused great curiosity in the rocking coach. Naturally, if not exactly politely, the other passengers had asked him what it contained, but the man had been evasive with his replies. By the time the coach stopped at Kinghorn for the ferry across the Forth, the other passengers were restless on their leather seats. Without a word, the young man left the coach, hefted the huge box on his back and fled, but by then the curiosity of the passengers was too strong.

Bundling out of the coach, they followed. When the young man tried to run, the weight of the box slowed him down and the other passengers caught him, held him secure and wrenched open the huge box. They peered inside, with some recoiling in horror and others nodding as their suspicions were confirmed. The dead eyes of an old woman stared sightlessly up at them. There was only one reason for anyone to carry a dead body across the country in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and the passengers looked at their captive with mixed horror and disgust: he must be a Resurrectionist.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Edinburgh was one of the leading medical centres of the world. The University’s medical school was famous for teaching and innovation, but human bodies were essential to teach anatomy and the legal supply had just about dried up. In an era when religion was still important, people believed that the dead should be left undefiled so when God called them on Judgement Day they were whole. That notion, however, only applied to God-fearing folk; those who broke God’s word were unimportant, so there was some leeway for doctors of dissection. The law stated that babies who died before they were christened and orphans who died before they signed articles for an apprenticeship could be dissected, although the parents of the former probably raised some objections. In other parts of Europe deceased prostitutes could be legally dissected, and the Terror in France produced a crop of fresh corpses. Sometimes the dead were shipped from Europe and Ireland to Britain for dissection. Nevertheless, throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth the most common corpses in anatomy labs had been those of hanged criminals.

Such a situation was fine and dandy as long as there was a healthy crop of condemned men, but the swinging old days of full gallows were past. By the 1820s there were few crimes for which hanging was prescribed, and unless Scotland was flooded with murderers and rapists, the noose would wait in vain for its victim and the anatomy table for its cadaver.

To rectify this situation, medical students and strong-stomached entrepreneurs became Resurrectionists, scouring the graveyards of the countryside, watching for funerals so they could unearth the grave, remove the recently interred body and carry it to an anatomist. Stealing a body was reprehensible, but carried only a fine. Stealing the clothes in which the body was clad was worse, for clothing was valuable, so the Resurrection men would strip the corpse and run with a naked body. The most unscrupulous would even murder to obtain fresh meat: Burke and Hare were not the first in this trade. That dubious honour goes to a pair of women, Helen Torrence and Jean Waldie, who murdered a young boy as early as 1751 and were duly hanged for their pains. However, the rewards for body snatching, with or without the accompanying murder, were good. A prime body could fetch as much as £10, which was a small fortune at a time when a working man was lucky to earn £1 a week.

The town authorities took what precautions they could to deter the Resurrectionists. Many graveyards had a watchtower in which men stood watch over their silent charges, shivering as cold moonlight cast long shadows on the ranked memorials of the town. Others had a mort house or dead house in which the dead were securely placed until they decayed to a condition unlikely to interest even the most avid of anatomists. Even after burial there were mort safes, heavy cages that could be hired to protect the coffin, but for those without funds, the best defence was to stand guard night after long eerie night, so dim lanterns often lit Dundee’s graveyards as the bereaved huddled over the graves of their departed. The young man who had carried the box on the Fife
Commercial Traveller
had obviously succeeded in circumventing any defences, but until he was questioned, nobody knew who he was or whose grave he had desecrated.

Dragged back to Cupar, the county town of Fife, the Resurrectionist was closely interrogated until he admitted everything. He was a medical student and he had dug up the body from the burial yard of Dundee. There were two graveyards in Dundee: Logie on the Lochee Road, and the Howff beside Barrack Street and the Meadows. When the student finally confessed he had dug up a grave in the Howff, word was sent to the Dundee Procurator Fiscal, who sent men to search the fresh graves.

Sure enough, an elderly lady had been buried on the previous Friday but now the coffin was empty. It is impossible to gauge the feelings of the relatives upon discovering the theft of their bereaved, but some travelled south on the Fife ferry. The Magistrates at Kinghorn greeted them in person and when they confirmed the identity of the body, the old lady was reburied in the graveyard in Kinghorn. Rather than a lonely, sad affair, the funeral was well attended, not only by the relatives but by local people who showed their support and sympathy for the bereaved.

Although it was unusual for a Resurrectionist to be caught actually carrying the body, the people of Dundee had taken precautions to protect their dead. There were two doughty men standing guard over the burial ground at Logie, and for night after dark night they waited with nothing happening, and then in early May 1824 the body snatchers struck. Rather than sneak in to quietly dig up a grave, they jumped the wall of the graveyard and attacked the watchmen. There was a desperate struggle around the tombstones in the dim of the summer night, but the watchmen held their ground and chased the Resurrection men away. There was little time to celebrate their victory, however, for only the following night the body snatchers returned, but once more the guard fought them off, and Logie rested secure, at least for a while.

There were other, more ingenious methods of ensuring the peace of the deceased. Throughout the nineteenth century the death rate among children was shockingly high. A visitor to any old graveyard only has to read the inscriptions on any random selection of gravestones to realise that many were erected for children from a few minutes to a few years old. It was natural that the parents wanted their children to rest in peace, undisturbed by the Resurrectionists, and in July 1823 one Dundee father went further than most. When his child’s coffin was lowered into the grave, the mourners noticed an array of lines and cables criss-crossing the lid. The father explained that the cables were connected to an explosive device, so if any grave robber attempted to steal the body, they would be blown to pieces.

Perhaps there was a bomb in the coffin, or perhaps the bereaved father had merely tacked on cables in the hope of bluffing the body snatchers. Either way, the sexton was fearful as he looked down on the tiny coffin at the foot of the newly dug grave. Scratching nervously as the pile of earth that lay on top of the grass, he dropped the first shovelful, panicked and jumped back, with many of the mourners immediately joining him. He could hardly be blamed: if the coffin was rigged to explode if a Resurrection man grabbed it, what result might a spadeful of earth bring?

Although the anatomists were probably more interested in dissecting adults’ bodies, children were certainly not immune from Resurrectionists’ predatory claws. In October 1824 a child’s body was stolen from the burial ground at the Howff, and the magistrates of Dundee offered a reward of twenty guineas for its recovery or information about the thieves. Twenty guineas was about twice the going rate for a fresh body, but still, there was no follow-up notice of a capture so it seems these particular body snatchers escaped. The theft of a child must have been particularly distressing for the parents, and there were a few incidents in the town that reveal just how high feelings ran and how fearful people were of these ghouls who prowled the graveyards.

The first scare came in April 1826 when George Law, a shoemaker in Baltic Street, a short street between the Wellgate and the Meadows, investigated a thump at the door. Finding his nine-year-old son on the doorstep in a state of near paralysis, he carried the boy inside and rushed for a doctor, who took a brief look and gave his opinion that the boy was merely drunk. However, Law and his wife were not so convinced and when their son was still insensible the next morning they called a second and more sympathetic doctor. The boy told a strange tale: two well-dressed men had forced him to drink something from a bottle, and then tried to drag him to the Meadows. He had objected, saying he was going home, but the two men had accompanied him all the way, only running when George Law heard his son collapse against the door.

As the people of Dundee digested this disturbing event, they heard of a similar attempt to drug and kidnap a young girl named Orchiston near the Water Wynd, again at Baltic Street. Again there were two well-dressed men, and again they forceed the child to drink from a square bottle, with similar results. Already shaken with the actions of the Resurrection men, the good citizens of Dundee reached a predictable conclusion: the two men were obviously body snatchers intent on murdering the children and selling them to the anatomists. Even as the fear and anger surged around Dundee, the truth seeped through. The first doctor had been correct. Young Law had drunk himself into a stupor and made up a colourful story to avoid his parents’ wrath; young Orchiston had probably heard the tale and jumped on the Resurrectionist bandwagon.

However, there was no doubting the truth of the events of a dark night in March 1825. At that time the Howff was surrounded by a high stone wall, pierced with two tall doors. Between the night and the high walls, the interior was dark, with the serried ranks of the gravestones dimly seen in the moonless night. There were two men on watch in the Howff, guarding the grave of a recently buried woman. With their swinging lanterns casting bouncing shadows on the ground and emphasising the darkness beyond, the watch distinctly heard the creak of one of the doors. It was between eleven and twelve on Saturday night, no time for anybody to have lawful business in the Howff. The watchmen moved forward. When they heard the muffled whispers of men through the rustling of the trees, one raised his lantern and shouted a challenge.