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

by Archibald, Malcolm

  Mrs Urquhart was correct: Lizzie, two years old, was dead and naked in her hammock. She lay on her back and her body, face and head were battered, bruised and damaged. There were long scars on her body but little blood; the purpose of the pail of water was now revealed. A later medical examination showed a damaged nose, abrasions around the eyes and on the forehead, bruised lips and ears, a bruised chest, groin, legs, back, buttocks, damaged spine and bruised arms. However the cause of death was a rupture of the liver that had caused a haemorrhage. Lizzie’s father had probably kicked her to death.

  There was a bloody shirt crumpled on the floor, blood spots on the floor and wall, and more on the shakedown on which the other two children lay. They were filthy and nearly naked, and young Alexander had a cut and sore face, but they were alive. The house was one of the poorest the policemen had ever seen. There was no furniture and the household possessions consisted of a couple of plates, a pail, a large bowl half filled with bloody water, and half a slice of bread. Four-year-old Davida said that after her father had beaten her sister he had lain down on the shakedown bed and said, ‘She is dead now.’

  Kindly authorities summoned a cab to take Mrs Urquhart and her remaining children to the poorhouse while the police began the hunt for Urquhart. The photograph taken when he was in Perth Prison was copied and circulated throughout Scotland, together with details of the clothes he was wearing when he left Hilltown. Although many of the police were on court duty, and others busy monitoring the roads for the cattle being driven to market, by noon on Sunday most were actively searching for the murderer. Some patrolled the roads out of the town, a detective took the train to search in Urquhart’s old Arbroath stomping grounds but they found not a trace. People began to murmur he had committed suicide but the police continued their search. It seemed, however, that Urquhart had escaped.

  When Isa had left him on the Saturday night, Urquhart was drunk. According to some of his friends, he was basically a kindly man, but drink altered his character so he became ‘clean dark’. Perhaps he was enraged with Isabella, perhaps he was frustrated at his inability to find steady work, perhaps he saw his children as a burden, but for whatever reason he took out his anger on Lizzie. He kicked her on the face and the chest, he kicked her on the stomach, and he grabbed her and smashed her against the floor until she was dead. It was then that he fetched a bucket of water, washed her and laid her in bed.

  When he woke on Sunday morning, Urquhart realised he had murdered his daughter and ran from the house. Passing through the town, he headed north by the Arbroath Road and hid out in a farm outhouse near Whitehills. When a baker followed him and told the police, they either disbelieved him or had no spare men for they took no action. When darkness fell, Urquhart ventured out, but after a few days without food he returned to Dundee to give himself up.

  Just after ten on the morning of Tuesday 27th February, a man interrupted the sitting of the Police Court with the news that Urquhart was in Bell Street. Inspector Lamb hurried out of the court, arrested Urquhart and brought him into the court, where he sat, head down, until he was escorted the few yards to Dundee Jail. When the trial took place in the Dundee Circuit Court in April, Urquhart barely spoke and the jury found him guilty of culpable homicide. Possibly the most chilling evidence came from Davida, who said Urquhart had made Lizzie walk back and forward carrying a brick while he kicked her. The judge gave him twenty-one years’ penal servitude.

  Urquhart’s case was of simple brutality, but there were different levels of parental cruelty to children. Helen Shaw was a drinking woman with two children, renowned for standing at her door in Polepark Road, swearing, cursing and annoying her neighbours. She had a boy just entering his teenage years and a girl of four, both of whom she treated abominably. She had a habit of locking them in the house while she spent the night drinking, to return in the early hours, hammer at the door and demand entrance.

  One night in February 1865 she came back drunk and swearing, barged into the house and threw her four-year-old daughter, completely naked, into the morning. Luckily the neighbours took her in, looked after her and called the police. Shaw was given thirty days in jail in a case which shows callous unconcern and the kindness of a neighbour, both of which Dundee knew well.

  Before the advent of the Welfare State the unemployed or unemployable would experience hunger and deprivation. The margin between security and the gutter could hinge on a single unguarded remark to an employer, and the difference between death by exposure and the comparative comfort of a night’s shelter was only a few pennies. In these circumstances, the desperate and the unscrupulous would do anything for money. One of the most heartless crimes was child stripping.

  Child Stripping

  On Sunday 6th August 1852 a four-year-old child and her older brother were on the Lochee Road on their way to church in Dundee, with their parents walking a few moments behind. When a woman beckoned and held out a sweetie, the little girl followed her into a close, whereupon the woman, a factory worker named Isabella Shaw, robbed her of her valuable silk overcoat. The parents only found out when they reached Dundee, but the police were quick to trace and arrest Shaw, who was rewarded with sixty days in jail. Shaw’s theft may have been a one-off, but Catherine Kidd seemed to have made a habit of child stripping. In the summer of 1856 she haunted the streets of Dundee, enticing young girls into dark closes, where she stripped them of all their clothes to leave them naked and upset. When the police caught up with her she was sent to the Circuit Court in Perth, to be handed a hefty eighteen months in jail.

  The Saddest Crime of All

  If there was one crime above all that typified the nineteenth century, it was infanticide, the killing by a mother of her own child, often accompanied by the concealment of pregnancy.

  In April 1841 Catherine Symon of Dundee, a worker at John Brown’s Mill, was taken to the Circuit Court at Perth, charged with murder. According to the prosecution, she had carried her infant child to the water dam between the Tay Foundry and the Arbroath Railway near the foot of the Trades Lane and thrown it in, either alive or after she had strangled or suffocated it. The evidence was overwhelming: Janet Low of Windymill in the parish of Murroes was present when Symon gave birth to a child at the house of her friend, Mrs Nicoll, and gave the baby a pinafore. Low saw Symon place the baby in a cart for the short journey to Dundee and a few weeks later identified the pinafore on a child’s body taken from the water. Helen Nicoll, who had known Symon for eight months, agreed on all points.

  The story was sordid but not atypical for the period. Catherine Symon was not a pretty young teenager but a stout, plain-looking woman of twenty-eight. She belonged to Errol in Perthshire but lived most of her life in Dundee. Symon was not particularly bright and was already the mother of a six-year-old child. In January 1841 she gave birth to another baby, a girl who she chose not to name. The baby was born on the Monday, and on the Thursday Symon bundled her, a pile of clothing, eight shillings in cash and two pecks of meal into a cart for the journey from Windyhill back to Dundee.

  Finding lodgings in a house in the Scouringburn with a Mrs Balbirnie and her mother, Symon stagnated, doing nothing. After a month Mrs Balbirnie offered to look after the baby to allow Symon to find work, but Symon refused the offer. Knowing Symon was ‘a bit dumpish’ about being short of money, Mrs Balbirnie applied to the Kirk for help and Mr Sydie, a Kirk Elder, stumped up 1/6d. There was another lodger, Agnes Cowan, who constantly nagged at Symon to get the child’s father to provide money, but Symon said the father refused to accept responsibility. She claimed the father was a mill foreman named David Anderson but when he was asked, he neither denied nor accepted the fact.

  Two weeks later, Symon left the lodgings, carrying her daughter with her. The girl was reported to be plump, well cared for and healthy, but was still known only as Symon’s child: she still had no name. Moving to the house of Euphemia Wannan in the Hawkhill, Symon remained there for a few days before she left, saying she was taking her daugh
ter to the house of her friend Mrs Anderson in Temple Lane. When she returned alone, Wannan was uneasy and went to check on the baby, but Symon had given her the wrong address. Later, Mrs Anderson told Wannan she had not seen Symon or the child but by that time it was too late.

  A seaman named John Robertson and James Gilchrist of the Harbour Police found Symon’s daughter in a pool of water near the foot of Trade’s Lane. The child was wearing a night dress with two caps on her head and was quite dead. Euphemia Wannan identified her, with Mrs Balbirnie and Agnes Cowan identifying the clothing while Sergeant James Low of the Dundee police found other articles of the child’s clothing among the straw in Symon’s bed.

  Mrs Anderson said that Symon had certainly been in her house that January, but had not left her child there. There was never any doubt about what had happened: Symon had already told her sister she had drowned the baby and when Sergeant Low asked her what had happened to her child she told him quite candidly she had ‘put it into the water’. When the case came to trial a majority of the jury found Symon guilty, but, as was usual in Dundee, they asked for mercy. The Victorian Dundonians had a strong streak of compassion, even for child murderers, and although the term post-natal depression had not yet been coined, the city was family orientated enough for people to understand the concept. Nevertheless, Lord Mackenzie donned his black cap and pronounced the death sentence. Symon was to be hanged at Dundee on the morning of Wednesday 26th May.

  Hanging was not popular in Dundee and three separate petitions for clemency were sent to the Queen. On 21st May, five days before the proposed execution, Lord Normanby announced that the hanging was suspended until the Queen’s pleasure was known. As it happened Her Majesty was pleased to grant a reprieve and Symon was transported for life instead.

  Symon’s case was unusual because the details are known, but infanticide was frighteningly common in Victorian Dundee and often the mother was not found. Such an action was euphemistically known as ‘child exposure’. However, Dundee was no worse than other cities of the period. In September 1886 there was a Parliamentary Return of women held on commuted capital sentences for infanticide. There were twenty-seven in jail, with five sentenced in 1884 and four in 1885; others had been languishing in jail for years, with one unfortunate women held since July 1865.

  There were many instances of infanticide in Dundee, such as the box found near Magdalen Yard in April 1824, with the body of a week-old baby inside, or the body of a newborn girl found in Park Place in January 1862 and taken to the Dead House at the graveyard. At the beginning of October 1840 the body of a two-month-old boy, described in the Advertiser as ‘a fine male child’ was found wrapped in rags in a close in Dudhope Crescent. In April 1859 a decomposed baby was found, again at Magdalen Green, but as usual there was no indication who the parents might be.

  Sometimes it was obvious that the child had been killed before it was abandoned, such as the girl found in Doig’s Court in February 1841. This unfortunate baby had never been washed in her young life and had been strangled to death. Sometimes there was a strange logic with the mothers, and they left their dead babies in the Howff graveyard so it was at least in the proper place. Such a case happened in March 1830 when the watchman at the Howff finished his time searching for Resurrection men and found instead the body of a young girl, tossed over the railing at the north-east corner of the ground. The doctors who examined the baby said it had been violently killed. Just as bad was the case of the newborn boy who was found beside a path in the Howff in November 1834. The baby was wrapped in worn cotton and had been battered to death but again the mother was never found. On 20th January 1842 another newly-born boy was found in a common stair at Anderson’s Buildings, Meadowside. Once again an investigation discovered that the child had been beaten to death before the body was dumped.

  There were also occasions when a mother must have been so desperate she would do anything to rid herself of her child, or possibly rid her child of the terrible burden of life. About seven in the evening of 1st April 1849 the superintendent of the Victoria Lodging House answered a knock at the door. There was an Irishwoman there, with a six-week-old child in her arms. Nearly dropping with tiredness, she stated her husband would join her shortly. Inviting her in, the superintendent suggested she sit by the kitchen fire. The woman accepted, but after a few moments she asked another woman to hold her baby while she left to buy something for her husband’s supper. Just before she left she gave her child something to drink from a small bottle.

  When a couple of hours passed and the woman did not return, the superintendent called the police. They launched a painstaking trawl through all the lodging houses and places of refuge in Dundee but failed to find the missing mother. In the meantime the child became sick, altering colour, and gradually wasted away. Despite everything the lodging house matron could do, the baby only lived until one o’clock in the morning. The Irishwoman was not traced.

  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.

  Burdens on the Parish

  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.