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

by Archibald, Malcolm

  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.

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  Did the Punishment Fit the Crime?

  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.

  Transportation and the Lash

  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 Woo
lwich 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.

  Other children were not so truculent. In September 1830 two boys, Dugald Wright and William Croll went on a crime spree. First they broke into the garret owned by Alexander Guid and removed a handkerchief. Then they took a variety of articles including two silk gowns from the attic of James Ogilvy. Still not satisfied, they broke into John Scott’s shop on the Shore and removed what they fancied. The pair were caught, held in jail and appeared before the Circuit Court in April 1831. As William Croll was a known thief, the judge sentenced him to fourteen years’ transportation, but he showed mercy to first offender Wright and awarded him only seven years. Perhaps it is not surprising that Wright cried as he stood at the bar; both he and Croll were under ten years old.

  An equally sad case occurred at the Perth Circuit Court of April 1842 when William Cuthbert and Isobel Cuthbert, father and daughter, stood accused of incest. William Cuthbert failed to appear and initially Isobel denied the charge, but when it was proven she had given birth to two children by her own father she pleaded guilty. The older child was nearly three, the younger just eighteen months, and the judge sentenced Isobel to transportation for life. One wonders if she could have denied her father’s attentions, and if she was perhaps better off in Australia than living in obviously sordid conditions in Scotland. Was she a three-times victim, twice by her father and once by the court?

  To give the courts their due, most of the people transported were thieves ‘by habit and repute’ and so were not people who would be pleasant neighbours. Sometimes the people of Dundee would be heartily pleased to see the back of those sent to Australia. In the autumn Circuit Court of September 1856, the judges, Lords Cowan and Ardmillan, presided over eighteen cases, one of which was that of Frederick McDiarmaid. He was a ticket-of-leave convict, which meant he had been released from jail early, but he stood accused of housebreaking. The evidence was against him and he was found guilty of breaking into the draper’s shop of James Spence in Reform Street and stealing various items including thirteen pairs of gloves, four shirts, three parasols, five pairs of stockings and £3 in copper coins. Because of McDiarmid’s previous convictions the judge was not inclined to mercy and sent him to Australia for fifteen years.

  In some ways McDiarmaid was unlucky in his timing. In 1846 transportation was suspended for two years, with those convicted instead being confined in solitary confinement for eighteen months. Possibly disorientated by that experience, they were then used as forced labourers either in Britain or abroad in Gibraltar or Bermuda before being released on licence, ticket-of-leave to any British colony. In 1852 Tasmania, the muchfeared Van Diemen’s Land stopped accepting transportees and Western Australia, where Sir Edward du Cane ruled with an iron fist, became the destination of transport ships. In 1867 transportation ended for good.

  Banished from Dundee

  More simple banishment was quite common, usually accompanied with the threat of imprisonment if the culprit was caught returning to the town. For example, when the Sheriff Court found William Higgins guilty of theft they sentenced him to the severe punishment of three months in solitary confinement, including thirty days on a diet of bread and water, and then banishment from the county for seven years. In October 1825 when the troublemaker James Reid was found drunk in a stable near the harbour when he was already banished, he was taken to the even less comfortable jail. The convict David Scott, banished from Forfarshire in 1825, was caught in Dundee in October 1825 and again at the beginning of February 1826 and both times thrown into the Town House jail.

  Despite the threat of jail, many of those banished returned to Dundee, either because they wanted to come home, or because there were more lucrative opportunities in the town. When William Higgins was banished in early 1825, he moved south but was caught disembarking from the Fife ferry in July. The police court had no sympathy with his story that items in Dundee were cheaper than in Fife, and ordered him to jail. It may just have been coincidence that he had returned at the same time as the Stobs Fair, that happy hunting ground for pickpockets and thieves.

  During the 1820s, many unsavoury people infested Dundee, but few were worse than Janet Cassels. She was a thief, a troublemaker and a known prostitute who haunted the low lodging houses of Couttie’s Wynd, but on 12th September 1827 she excelled herself. Cassels was working in Elizabeth Muat’s brothel run when she took a dislike to a prostitute named Jean Adam. When she saw Adam at the other side of a glass door Cassels lifted a table knife and thrust it right through the glass, stabbing Adam in the arm and the face just below the eye.

  When the case appeared before the sheriff later in the year, Cassels was as respectable looking as possible and declared, ‘I am not guilty, please, your lordship.’

  Although the sheriff took the unusual course of being judge and defender, he still found Cassel guilty and told her she was lucky she was not at a higher court on a much more serious charge. Immediately Cassel’s politeness ended and she reverted to type, ‘Go to hell, you bugger. I hope to God I’ll be tried before the Lords next time and not before yon old damned sheriff.’

  Those words were only the beginning of a tirade that continued as the sheriff sentenced her to two years’ banishment from Forfarshire, with the warning that if she returned she would be put in prison and sustained only on bread and water for two months. Patrick Mackay, the Messenger-at-Arms, was given the unenviable task of taking her by post chaise out of the county and into Perthshire.

  The very next day at twelve o’clock the watchman at the Witchknowe hauled her into custody again. Rather than show remorse, she declared she preferred to be in prison in Dundee than exist outside the county. She was released in January 1828 but a week later was once more arrested and returned to her former lodging. The same thing happened again, and again, she held true to her promise not to leave the town.

  The policy of near starvation, when a convicted offender would be sentenced to a period on bread and water, was sometimes imposed as an extra punishment or for a repeated offence. For example in July 1825 a rootless, shiftless man by the name of David Wilson stood before the Police Court. As it was his ninth appearance he was given thirty days on bread and water. Cassels, on the other hand, was given a longer period for her more serious crime.

  The Living Hell of Penal Servitude

  Penal servitude took the place of transportation. Perhaps the prospect of remaining within the British Isles was preferable to being sent thousands of miles away, but the new punishment was no sinecure. The initial 1853 Penal Servitude Act was for a four-year period only, but with no colonies willing or able to take convicted, ticket-of-leave criminals, a second Act in 1857 ordered that the period of servitude should be exactly the same as it had been for transportation: seven years or more. Penal servitude started off with a tough regime, but co-operation by the prisoner could earn better conditions in what was termed the Progressive Stage System. There were four stages of servitude and once sentenced the prisoner was thrown straight into a nightmare of work and hardship from which he or she had to labour to crawl up the ladder. The first stage was a daily regime of ten hours of muscle-tearing, back-breaking, and mind-numbing class one hard labour. Much of that time was spent at either the crank, shot drill, or the treadmill. The crank entailed turning a handle to rotate a box filled wit
h gravel, hour after agonising hour, 14,400 times a day. The treadmill was an ingeniously revolting contraption where a convict was forced to walk on a never-ending series of steps, rather like a hamster on a wheel. Those who used it knew it as the shin-scraper or cock-chafer, which vividly demonstrated the secondary effects the procedure could have. To engage in shot drill was to stand in a line, endlessly lifting and carrying heavy cannonballs.

  Even when the prisoner returned to his cell there was no real rest. Night after night he or she slept on bare wooden planks, alone and silent. No communication with either prisoner or warden was permitted, so there was no means of redress and nobody to whom the prisoner could complain or even vent steam. Protests led to cramped days handcuffed in an unlit punishment cell, frustrated violence could end in a whipping, either by the birch or the cat. The longer the sentence continued the more chance of breaking the spirit of the prisoner. It was not surprising that some descended into insanity.

  If the prisoner behaved and attained enough marks, he or she could rise to the second stage, with slightly easier labour and a mattress to sleep on five nights a week. He or she could also earn a few pennies and had the privilege of exercise and education on the Sabbath. The third stage saw the lighter labour continue, while the convict enjoyed a mattress six days a week; wages rose and library books were allowed. The fourth and final stage must have seemed like paradise, with wages of perhaps two shillings a week, a mattress every night, the luxury of letters home and the incredible joy of a twenty-minute visit. To a man or woman living in utter solitary silence, a letter or a visit would be a reminder they were not alone; they were part of the human race, they mattered. But the road to such salvation broke many.