A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee

by Archibald, Malcolm

  It was the work of only a few moments to remove the pieces, stuff some in his pockets and others in a bag, and then climb back out of the window and escape into the silent street. Experienced in his profession, MacMillan must have guessed the value of about £150, about two years’ wages for a skilled artisan, and he would know that no normal Dundee fence could handle so much stolen property, particularly as it was all clearly marked with the letter ‘C’. Accordingly, he selected a piece of beach above the high tide mark, stored it in his memory and buried most of the bulkier items. It would be safe there until he came to dig it up once more. Keeping some of the smaller items to prove the value of his haul, he returned home.

  There was pandemonium in the Crichton household when the theft was discovered. Despite the Broughty disinclination to pay extra rates for their own police force, Archibald Crichton had no scruples about calling the Dundee police. Constable MacGregor left his normal beat to travel to the Ferry. He noticed the open window, reasoned there might be two people involved, and set about catching the thief. First he notified the police offices in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and then printed notices describing the missing silverware and forwarded them to police superintendents around the country. After that the police began asking questions and seeking out their informants.

  The Victorian police depended on informants. Many of their successes were due to their maintaining a network of people who lived on the fringe of the underworld, who knew what was happening and who were quite prepared to welsh on their comrades. This case was no exception. It was a colleague of MacMillan who gave the police his name, and told them exactly where he would be found.

  In the meantime the good folk of the Ferry were rocked by another burglary. This time the station house of the Edinburgh and Perth Railway had been hit. The thief, or thieves, had struck early on Sunday morning, smashing a pane of glass, opening a window and removing the cash box, with about £1 3/- inside. As the Ferry folk pondered the price of a police force, MacMillan and the constables played out their own personal drama.

  MacMillan had decided to take a small sample of the silver to Glasgow to find a fence, but when he entered the railway station the police were waiting for him. Snapping on the handcuffs, the officers hustled him down to the police office to be searched. When they found several small pieces of Mr Crichton’s silverware, some of it hammered flat for easy storage, MacMillan could not deny the theft. He admitted who he was and did not struggle when the police took him to the Procurator Fiscal’s office and stripped him naked in case they had missed anything the first time. Indeed they had; between his underwear and his skin they found an impressive collection of silk handkerchiefs, stolen from a shop in Montrose the previous month. It was Wednesday 7th June, less than a week since MacMillan had gloated over his silver future.

  When the police asked MacMillan where the rest of the silver was, he told them nothing. He remained cool, even when he was called to the bar of the Circuit Court, and when the judge sent him back to jail he still gave nothing away. He listened when people spoke of the police searching for the silverware, but said only that it was hidden in a place it would never be found. The thought of a small fortune in silver waiting for him must have sweetened the long, lonely, drab days in confinement, and he might well have been released to dig up his hoard like a latter-day Treasure Island, had it not been for a wandering seaman and his inquisitive sister.

  Others were more typical thieves, petty criminals after petty gain and caught out by their own mistakes. In one case a thief was caught out simply because he changed his drawers.

  Captured by his Drawers

  It would have seemed like any other Friday morning to Peter Reid. He had left his work the previous evening as normal, and was now returning to open up, as he always did. Unlocking the door, he stepped inside the shop and stopped in shock. Where he had left everything neat and tidy, ready to start business, now the place was a mess, with all the drawers hanging out and their contents strewn across the floor. He looked for a second, and then ran further inside, seeing the shambles and the wide-open back window and realised he had been robbed. It took only moments to send for his boss, John Earl Robertson, and before long the police were present, working out exactly what had happened.

  There had been at least two burglars: John Norrie, a millworker of Blackness Road and James Gormally of Hawkhill, and perhaps they were helped by James’s brother Owen. All were between thirteen and sixteen years old and they had already had a busy time. On Tuesday 16th January 1866 they had broken into a shop in Yeaman Shore and stolen £1 from David Clark, pork curer. The following Tuesday they broke into the Overgate premises of Grandy and Scott, ironmongers, and found 12/-. Next was the night of Thursday 1st February when they broke into Durham and Sons, the High Street stationers, where they stole a handy pair of scissors, printer’s types and the quite sizeable sum of £3 in cash – more than many working men earned in three weeks.

  Now they were busy again. James Gormally and John Norrie were in the High Street, and they knew exactly what they were doing. The houses were quite low there, so they entered Mint Close that led northward behind Reform Street, climbed up a lamppost, and stretched onto the roof of a house. Their target was the shop opposite; it was the work of a few moments to remove a pane of glass from the cupola, but either the rope they had brought was too short or they thought it too dangerous to attempt entry that way so looked for something easier. They found a back window, forced it open, clambered down the rope and entered Spence and Company in Reform Street, one of Dundee’s leading drapers, hoping for rich pickings.

  Despite their youth they were experienced burglars and had come prepared with matches. By their light they saw a desk opposite. Forcing the drawer open, they looked at the pile of money for only a second before scooping it into a bag. It was mainly copper but with a sprinkling of silver. In total there was about £3 15/- in value, the change ready for the following day’s trade, which made quite a bulky package. With the cash bundled up, they ransacked the remainder of the shop, hauling open all the drawers, peering in presses, and generally ensuring they had missed nothing. With money being their only object, they did not really concern themselves with the stock, but stole a few small items that they could use themselves.

  As well as a coat and a vest they found in a small room, they took a pair of men’s drawers each and Gormally, no doubt to the accompaniment of ribald comments, dragged off his own threadbare, tattered and much-used drawers, dropped them on the floor and pulled on the new pair in exchange. Norrie slid on the other pair of drawers but did not leave his own: perhaps he had none to leave. Placing the money into three handkerchiefs they dragged a drawer to the back window, put a pair of ladders on top, slipped outside and escaped down the outside wall. Perhaps because they would look conspicuous wandering through Dundee with clinking copper coins, they hid the bags on top of a chimney high on the roof and returned home, with Gormally keeping the coat and vest.

  Next day Peter Reid discovered the robbery and the police were called. Immediately discarding the missing pane of glass in the cupola, they found the forced back window and the scuff marks of feet on the wall down which the intruders had climbed. They knew by the size of the footprints that at least one of the intruders had been a boy, and they conjectured that he had entered the shop first and had then opened the door for an older accomplice. They also commented on the way the place had been searched for money, with little else taken.

  Armed with the clue of the discarded drawers, the police began a systematic search for the burglars. Moving through the streets, wynds and closes of Dundee, they questioned all the most obvious suspects and searched those who could not give an account of their actions on the nights of the break-ins. Usually when shops or houses were robbed, the police would check the pawn shops for the stolen articles and often found the thief by reading the name on the pawn ticket, but that was not possible when only money was taken. Their best chance of success was to trace the few items of
clothing that had been stolen.

  While the police were searching, James Gormally was busily recovering the money. Teaming up with Norrie again and roping in a shoemaker named Robert Williamson, he returned with them to the Mint Close. Gormally climbed up a water spout – drain pipe – and recovered the bags of money. They divided it between them, with Williamson clutching about five shillings in copper and Gormally seemingly keeping all the silver, about 12/6. Norrie returned to his lodgings, where there was a man named William More. With no privacy in such places, More remarked on Norrie’s new drawers and said he might have been better to buy himself a shirt.

  ‘I’ve plenty of money,’ Norrie said, then he told More about the theft and passed over some loose change. With More for company he bought a shirt from a pawnbroker.

  On 5th February the police made a breakthrough. Detective officers Stirling and Ferguson were walking down the Vault when they saw Williamson, who they already suspected of being a fence. As they arrested him, John Norrie appeared. He stared at the detectives for a second and then turned and ran. While Stirling held Williamson, Ferguson chased, caught and arrested Norrie. Taking both men back to Bell Street, the police questioned and searched them. When they saw Norrie’s brand new drawers, they knew they had their man. They also knew Norrie’s associates so waited outside the Gormallys’ house until they returned and snatched them up.

  On 6th February Norrie and the Gormally brothers were questioned and remitted to the Procurator Fiscal, but before the case came to trial Owen was released for not being involved. Norrie confessed everything and was sentenced to five years in a Reformatory; James Gormally appeared before Sheriff Ogilvy and a jury on 14th April. Although he pleaded not guilty, both Norrie and Williamson identified him as being the principal in the robbery.

  Gormally’s father tried to defend him, saying he wanted his son to learn a trade. He claimed James was working at a mill and attending night school. He also said his son was a quiet lad and had never been out all night before. Sheriff Ogilvy, however, did not agree. He already knew the Gormally clan, having had others of that name standing before him, so ignoring the father’s appeals, he sent James Gormally to gaol for fourteen days, and then ordered him to Rossie Reformatory for the next five years.

  That should have been the end of the Reform Street robbery case. However, James Gormally was not a youth to submit to authority so easily. A Reformatory was intended to be exactly what the name suggested; a place where wild young men were reformed, a place they entered as thieves and blackguards and emerged with better characters, ready to take their places in the ranks of the respectable. Five years of such training did not appeal to Gormally, and on 27th May, he escaped and once again appeared before the sheriff. Three months in jail and he was free to prowl the streets again, while John Norrie remained behind the walls of Rossie Reformatory.

  An Unsuccessful Career Thief

  While it is possible to feel sympathy for criminals whose circumstances have left them with little choice but to steal to survive, others deliberately choose theft and violence as a way of life. David Crockatt was one of the latter. He was a career thief who led others astray and did not hesitate to use violence when it suited him. Probably worse, by Victorian standards, he also denied his own mother. Crockatt was not one of the shifting unemployed who lived by their wits; he seems to have avoided crime, or at least avoided being caught in criminal activity until a relatively late age. He had a respectable job in a mill and lived in Temple Lane, which was a decent address in a hard-working quarter of the town. It seems his lifestyle was of his own choosing. In his own way he was an example of the pointless, profitless, utterly shiftless criminal class which infested Victorian cities and which still exists in the sordid underbelly of society.

  It was in February of 1868 that the then sixteen-year-old Crockatt first came to the attention of the police. Along with fifteen-year-old John Hutcheson, he appeared at the Dundee Sheriff Criminal Court on a charge of housebreaking. On 28th January the two youths had climbed onto the roof of Mr Anthony Carrick’s farrier business in Gellatly Street, removed a few slates and lowered themselves inside to see what they could steal. Both pleaded guilty but Crockatt claimed that they had not originally planned to steal anything. He said they had been chasing a pigeon and when the bird fluttered inside the building they had taken off the tiles to follow it. According to Mr Douglas, who defended them, they were good boys really; he apologised profusely for their poor behaviour.

  Not quite so sure about their innocence but obviously willing to afford them the benefit of the doubt, the sheriff gave them a further fortnight in jail to augment the two weeks they had already spent waiting for trial. Crockatt was hardly released when he was back in trouble, and again pigeons figured.

  On 17th March a millworker named Alexander Bennet appeared before Provost Hay at the Police Court. Bennet claimed to be twelve-and-a-half, although his father said he was fourteen. He was charged with stealing five pigeons from Mr C. Kerr’s dovecot in Broughty Ferry Road two days previously. Co-accused was David Crockatt, who Bennett’s father said was the instigator who had led his son astray. Unfortunately, Crockatt failed to appear, so the police searched him out and dragged him to court. When he pleaded guilty the judge ordered him fifteen stripes of the birch.

  The weals must have still been throbbing when Crockatt next appeared before Provost Hay, this time charged with stealing a fourteen-pound tin of strawberry jam from the confectionery workshop of John Low and Sons in New Inn Entry. Once more it was a low-level crime and once again he had acted with another boy. This time Neil Stevenson of Blackness Road was his companion, but like Crockatt, Stevenson had already been twice convicted of theft. Provost Hay remitted both to the Procurator Fiscal, and Crockatt was sent to prison.

  Perhaps the experience sobered him, but Crockatt was quiet for a while. Then, in August 1868 he was suspected of being involved in a break-in at David Colville’s grocer shop in South Union Street. Rather than a few pigeons or a jar of jam, this time there were eleven shillings in cash and a dozen postage stamps. It was still small-scale stuff, but these persistent robberies were what spoiled a decent community. The police knew there were at least three young men involved; they caught William Mackay and John Lindsay and after a jury found them guilty they were sentenced to eighteen months in jail.

  Whether Crockatt was guilty or not, he slipped out of Dundee to live in Edinburgh for a few months, and when he came back in November he probably thought the dust had settled. Nearly as soon as he set foot back in his native streets he was arrested again. However when they began to question him, the police found themselves in difficulties. The youth they had arrested claimed he was not David Crockatt, but somebody called Miller. There was a cure for that, though, and the police knocked on the door of Crockatt’s mother, dragged the poor woman to the police office and presented her with their suspect.

  But there was still confusion. Although Mrs Crockatt agreed that she was looking at her son David, the young man refused to acknowledge her, and continued to say he was Miller. Even when Mrs Crockatt collapsed into tears and embraced him, the man denied her. It was only when he realised that the police would not believe him that he also began to cry and admitted he was indeed her son.

  For the next year or two, Crockatt was a frequent visitor to the courts and nearly a resident in Dundee jail. Shop breaking was his speciality, and as the records only speak of the crimes for which he was officially accused or tried, it is difficult to judge how successful, or otherwise, he was. He was in the Police Court in August and before the bar of the Sheriff Criminal Court in December, both times on charges of housebreaking or shop breaking. The Sheriff Court found him guilty of the break-in at David Colville’s South Union Street grocer’s shop and awarded him twelve months. For that year Dundee was free of him, but he was released in December 1869. Within the month he was back in trouble again, accused of breaking into O’Farrell’s pawnbroker’s in North Tay Street on the Tuesday night or Wed
nesday morning and stealing £3 in silver and copper coins. By now Crockatt was living at Dudhope Crescent, a handy hundred yards or so from the prison where Provost Yeaman ordered him detained until the judges of the Spring Circuit Court could decide what best to do with him.

  For the best part of four months Crockatt remained confined in Dundee Jail, but at the beginning of May the Circuit judges rolled into town. While the prisoners remained in their bleak cells the Lords Deas and Jerviswoode held a lavish levee in the Royal Hotel before driving to the Sheriff Court Buildings in a horse and four with a military escort and all the pomp and ceremony that the Victorians did so well. To assist the learned judges, Mr H. Moncrieff acted as Advocate Depute, while a Mr Smith would defend Crockatt. It was a splendid array of wigs and gowns that surveyed the ragged accused with their prison pallor and knowledge that these well-fed, well-bred men had the power to imprison them for a terrifyingly long period because of a relatively minor crime.

  The charge was simple: theft by housebreaking. The method was also simple: Crockatt was accused of bending the iron stanchions that protected the back window of O’Farrell’s pawnshop, forcing open the inside wooden shutter and entering to steal £2 7/- in silver and fifteen shillings in copper. He pleaded not guilty and probably hoped the jury would ignore his four previous convictions for theft.

  George O’Farrell, the pawnbroker, was first to give his evidence. He said he left the shop at about nine o’clock on the night of 18th January and next morning he had been robbed. His money had been removed from the cash drawer and the central bar of the back window had been drawn apart, and with the Victorian love of detailed statistics he added that rather than their normal five and a half inches apart they were seven and a half inches apart. The window had been raised and the front door was locked. So far there was nothing new; all Mr O’Farrell had done was confirm he had been robbed by somebody coming through the back window. Now he gave his only evidence to implicate Crockatt. He said he had seen Crockatt looking in the window on the 17th, just as he was putting money in a box. With the window being four feet tall, Mr O’Farrell claimed that a boy could have got in. At that point at last some of the jury must have looked at Crockatt. He was a short, slight man and after months on prison fare it is unlikely he was carrying any excess fat.