A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee (32 page)

At one time McGavin had employed and then sacked Craig. The jury must have wondered if Craig had some grudge against his ex-employer, and why he was not in the dock with McPherson and Steel. The jury also learned that McKenna was given two pounds and four shillings from the proceeds of the robbery, while McDonald got three pounds. McDonald agreed he had been in Craig’s house but denied having seen the safe there.

The jury found the accused guilty and Lord MacLaren said it was a very daring act and ‘equalled … anything of the kind he had heard before’. He also said that McPherson had not long been released from penal servitude and the sheriff also knew Steel well. He gave McPherson seven years’ penal servitude and Steel five years’. Perhaps the judge and jury believed they had seen justice done, but McPherson did not agree. He left the court in anger, saying it was Craig who had broken into the shop. After this length of time, the final truth will never be known.

Sometimes the crime was utterly petty, but the criminal still had to be tried, and the public wondered if the expense was worth the end result. Such was definitely the case with Paddy and his clock.

Sitting directly opposite the Tower Block of the University of Dundee, the Queen’s Hotel is a splendidly Gothic creation. It was built in 1878, when the Victorians were at the height of their confidence and Dundee was riding the crest of a jute-financed wave. It is a beautiful building, with a three-storey French attic on top and an ornate oak staircase, while the arched windows gaze confidently down the Nethergate. There is possibly, however, an air of sadness, for the Queen’s was intended to be the main hotel for the Caledonian Station. However, the station was not built in its original intended location at Seabraes, but deeper into Dundee, so the Queen’s was a railway hotel without a railway. As a consequence there was financial ruin for one of its main developers, Andrew Meldrum, who instead of becoming rich became an assistant in a sports shop. Nevertheless, it remains a fine hotel and it was a fitting stop-over for the judges of the Circuit Court when they visited Dundee.

On the last day of March 1885 Lord Craighill presided over the Circuit Court. He arrived in Dundee on Monday 29th March, took up residence in the Queen’s Hotel and held a levee. All the Dundee sheriffs, the Provost and the Magistrates attended, with the splendid display of the pomp and ceremony for which the Victorians were famous. The levee was followed by a fine procession from the hotel to the courthouse. His Lordship and his fellow dignitaries travelled in carriages, with Captain Primrose commanding the military escort, a brass band playing their hearts out and a solid block of blue-clad police.

Just before ten in the morning His Lordship reached the courthouse in West Bell Street, and with the dignified formality of high events, the court opened for business. All the usual suspects were in attendance: Mr Vary Campbell the Advocate-Depute, Mr Horace Skeete the Clerk of Court, and Mr Craigie the sole counsel amidst a bevy of bailies and sheriffs. Sixty-five men had been called up for the jury from all four quarters of Forfarshire and Dundee. Men either left their farms in the care of others, shut up shop or took an unpaid day off from their work. A large crowd waited for the free entertainment and some may have joined in as the Reverend Doctor Grant got the ball rolling with a prayer.

After all the preparations, the gathering, the expenditure and the expectation, there was only one case for the court. Patrick Martin was an old man, a petty thief with a poor track record and a history of failure. As he stood before the array of authority, flanked by immaculately uniformed policemen, he may have wondered what all the fuss was about; all this effort for Paddy and his cheap little clock.

The charge was put to him. On Friday 23rd January 1885 he stole a timepiece from the Nethergate house of Janet Bain. Martin pleaded not guilty, so the case went to trial. There was nothing complex for the jury to understand. The victim was an elderly woman and a millworker. She went to work in the morning, leaving her son in the house. When she returned about six in the evening her clock was gone. Her son had left the house about eleven, leaving the door unlocked.

The first witness was Elizabeth Glennan, an eleven-year-old millworker who lived in the same stair. She saw Patrick Martin leaving Mrs Scott’s house with the clock under his arm. When he reached the street he began to run and within a few moments a gaggle of boys surrounded him, shouting, ‘Come back, thief wi’ the knock.’

Nine-year-old George Leslie also saw Martin running along Tay Street ‘wi’ a knock below his oxter’ and all the local boys shouting after him. Presumably Martin outdistanced his followers, for he sold the clock to Patrick O’Rourke, a firewood merchant from the Hawkhill, claiming he had bought it for ten shillings.

It was not much later that Detective Edward Tooth arrested Martin, dragged him into the police office and charged him with stealing the clock. It was a petty, nearly pointless theft and would probably have been dealt with by the Police Court and a few weeks in jail if it had not been for Martin’s previous record.

In 1869 Martin had four months in jail, in 1871 he got twelve months and in 1872 eighteen months for robbery, which is theft with violence. Finally, in 1880 he was given another twelve months for theft. His career stretched back fifteen years, peppered with the failures of arrest and nobody will ever know how many successful thefts. This last arrest may well have been for an article of trifling value, but its rightful owner would not agree and she probably had to work many finger-numbing hours to raise the extra cash to pay for it.

After all the fuss to open the court, Lord Craighill may have thought he had to justify his position by imposing a stiff sentence, or perhaps the accumulated crime of Martin spoke against him. His lordship sentenced Martin to five years’ penal servitude.

‘Thank you, My Lord,’ Martin said in response. ‘That will be a steady job for a while.’

With the sentence pronounced, the business of the court was finished. Lord Craighill congratulated Sheriff Comrie Thomson on the absence of crime in Forfarshire and finished his work. In all, the whole expensive day’s business had taken just over an hour, and an elderly man had been sent to prison for five years for stealing a clock worth about two and sixpence. Paddy Martin had the last sardonic laugh, however, for he had hardly begun his five-year sentence before he ended it. He died in the General Prison in Perth in the middle of June that same year, a man remembered only for being the sole prisoner at the spring Circuit Court.

But not all cases of the 1880s were so petty; that decade also saw a crime that might tie Dundee in with one of the most notorious murderers of the nineteenth century.

Carefully checked, labelled and packed away, the lengths of wood and bolts of iron sit quietly within a museum storage facility in Dundee. They are innocuous enough, obviously old, obviously historic, and to a casual observer they would mean nothing, but this collection of battered timber has as gruesome a history as any other artefact in the city. In March 1995 Dr Peter Davis, the curator of Her Majesty’s Prison Service Museum, visited Dundee and inspected the carefully stored object. He declared that if assembled again it was ‘in technical terms operable’ and gave his expert opinion of its age. Dr Davis dated it from at least the 1840s, and perhaps as old as the 1820s, because of its relatively simple mechanism. This relic of old Dundee was the small, individual trap-door gallows that ended the lives of some of Dundee’s most notorious criminals. There is a possibility that it was on this Dundee gallows that Jack the Ripper died.

There is certainly no certainty that the man who was hanged within Dundee Gaol on 25th April 1889 was Jack the Ripper, but there are indications that he might have been. The method of the murder for which he was committed was similar and after his execution, the Whitechapel murders stopped. His name was William Henry Bury, he was an Englishman and his short visit to Dundee was marked by his murder and dismemberment of his wife. The story of Bury reveals a degree of cold-blooded brutality that is still chilling, even when a hundred and a quarter years have passed.

Born in Stourbridge in Worcestershire, Bury hardly knew his father, who was run over by his own cart. Three weeks later, on 7th May 1860, Bury’s mother was taken into the lunatic wing of Worcester Poorhouse. Bury was less than a year old. It was not an inspiring start to his life. His first job was as a factor’s clerk, which shows he was reasonably educated, but he borrowed money, failed to pay his debt and left. He worked for a Wolverhampton lock manufacturer and was sacked for theft; by 1887 he was a petty street hawker in Birmingham, from where he moved to London.

By winter of that year Bury was working for James Martin, a sawdust seller and reputedly a brothel keeper, and here he met his wife, thirty-five-year-old Ellen Elliot, who may have been a prostitute. She was London born and bred, but had worked in a jute factory. The next year was significant, for Martin sacked him and he married Elliot. It is possible he married for money, for Elliot had inherited railway shares, some of which she sold to allow Bury to pay his debts, but if they married for love it was well disguised.

Less than a week after their marriage, Bury argued with his wife, knocked her to the ground and held a knife to her throat. Not surprisingly, the landlord evicted them. By now Bury was rumoured to have venereal disease, which was rife in London at the time, and when Ellen sold the last of her shares, they squandered the money in a drunken binge in Wolverhampton, with Ellen buying some jewellery with her share of her own money. It is possible that Bury’s violence to Ellen continued, but the two stayed together.

Speaking openly about emigrating to Australia, Bury ordered two large wooden crates, presumably in which to store his effects. However, he also forged a letter from Dundee, purporting to be an offer from a jute factory offering Ellen a job. Prior to reading the letter, Ellen had no intention of moving to Scotland, but perhaps she thought regular employment would calm Bury’s vicious temper so they could settle into a decent, ordinary life.

Disembarking from the Dundee, Perth and London steamer
Cambria
on 20th January 1889, the couple lived in Union Street for a week, and then moved to a basement at 113 Princes Street. When the jute mill job failed to materialise, Ellen worked for a day as a cleaner, while Bury met a painter and decorator named David Walker and returned to his old drinking habits. At this time Ellen was described by her neighbours as good-looking and tolerably well-dressed, while a newspaper picture of Bury shows a slender, sharp-nosed man, well-dressed and with a neatly-trimmed beard and moustache.

However, Bury did a little more than just drink. Over the next week he visited the courthouse, listened to the cases, and bought a length of rope from a local shop. He also borrowed a newspaper from his drinking buddy Walker, read an article about a woman committing suicide, but dropped it when asked to look up anything about Jack the Ripper. At about seven in the evening of Sunday 10th February 1889, he walked into the Central Police Office at West Bell Street and asked to see the lieutenant on duty.

It was now that the first connection between Bury and Jack the Ripper was made. Bury told Lieutenant James Parr that he had been drinking the previous night and when he woke in the morning he found his wife dead with a rope around her neck. So far there was nothing unusual: drunkards were ten a penny and Victorian Britain was used to suicides. What Bury said next was more disturbing, even to an experienced policeman. He claimed he had cut up Ellen’s body and stuffed it in a box in their house in Princes Street. His mention of ‘Jack the Ripper’ appears to have been incoherent, but it seems Bury was afraid he might be arrested on suspicion of being the Whitechapel murderer. Bury was incomprehensible at first, but he eventually calmed down and made a statement, giving his background and some details of the death of his wife. Lieutenant Parr listened intently, arrested Bury and sent Lieutenant Lamb, who headed the detective department in Dundee, to find out exactly what had happened at 113 Princes Street.

Lamb and Detective Campbell found a scene of horror. Number 113 was a two-room basement flat, with the front room completely empty of furniture and the back having only one bed and a large whitewashed packing box, presumably one Bury had made in London. Naturally the detectives examined the box. Two boards in the top were loose, so Lamb removed both of them and a bed-sheet that concealed the contents: he possibly wished he had not.

A glance inside revealed the legs and feet of a dead woman, and Lieutenant Lamb immediately stopped operations. Only when the police surgeon arrived was the packing case fully emptied. As well as what was probably the household property of the Burys, the case held the body of Ellen. She lay on her back at the bottom of the case with her left leg twisted over her right shoulder, her right equally contorted and the shin broken. Ellen’s stomach had been slashed with a sharp blade and her bowels had spilled out. More investigation found rope weals around Ellen’s throat, and graffiti around the flat saying ‘Jack Ripper is at the back of this door’ and ‘Jack Ripper is in this seller [sic]’. The police also found a knife soiled with human blood and the rope Bury had so recently bought, with twists of Ellen’s hair among the fibres.

The next step was probably inevitable. Bury was taken to the Police Court, where he was reported as being agitated, charged with murdering his wife and dragged back to the cells. As he waited there, Mr Dewar, Chief Constable and Procurator Fiscal, telegraphed the Metropolitan Police with details of the crime, with its similarities to the Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel in London. The Metropolitan Police made a few local enquiries in London, and there is a legend that two London detectives travelled to Dundee, but if so, nothing further was done.

It was the 18th March 1889 before Bury appeared before the High Court. Rather than wear prison clothes, he appeared in ordinary dress, with a white collar, a spotted tie and a dark tweed suit beneath a brown coat with a velvet collar. He also looked calm and composed. Despite all the evidence against him, he pleaded not guilty, claiming that Ellen had strangled herself and he had only packed her body in the box. He did not give a reason. The doctors proved that Ellen had been strangled from behind, which was impossible for a suicide, and after a trial of thirteen hours, the jury took only twenty-five minutes to find Bury guilty. Strangely, they recommended mercy, which seemed to surprise the judge, Lord Young. He was not so kind, and sentenced Bury to death.