Whisky, Wars, Riots and Murder

by Malcolm Archibald

  The Governor of the fort was Captain Spalding, and he had left the sergeant to take control of things while he indulged in more pleasant pastimes than his military duties. Once the soldiers had departed for the north he returned to Fort Augustus and invited round a friend. Captain Spalding was known for his hospitality, for he had laid in a supply of fine wines, ale and good quality whisky, all of which he kept in the powder magazine of the fort. It was quite secure there from predators, he believed, as it was under lock and key and, anyway, there was a garrison of soldiers.

  Captain Spalding was pleased when the magazine door was still secure and he selected a number of bottles from the first rack without any problems. He was less pleased when he pulled out the first in the second row and found it had been emptied. So was the second bottle he extracted, and the third. By now Spalding was concerned. He checked his stock of beer: an entire hogshead had been emptied and carefully returned to its position. In a near panic he did a stock check and found he was short of fourteen dozen bottles of port, seven and a half dozen bottles of sherry, four dozen bottles of fifteen-year-old whisky and thirty-two gallons of ale.

  The only people who could have stolen the drink were the garrison. As the sergeant was teetotal, attention shifted to the privates whose quarters had been immediately above the powder magazine. Two men, Privates John Short and George Thomson, were arrested and jailed.

  Shop Theft

  Shop assistants have always been overworked and underpaid. In the nineteenth century they could work twelve- or fourteen-hour days for six days a week. Occasionally one would try to augment his or her wages by removing items of stock without bothering about the tedious process of payment. One such was James Macbean. In 1849 he was employed as a porter in W& A Johnston, drapers of Inverness. Nobody will ever know the exact quantity of his employers’ goods that he appropriated, but the thefts are thought to have started on 1 July 1849 and continued until 4 May 1850.

  He was a prolific thief, but not a particularly clever one, for he went straight to the pawnshop and pledged the stolen items for cash. When the local policeman did his routine checks of the pawns, he found that Macbean was a very regular customer and did some background investigation. The result was inevitable. When the police searched Macbean’s house they found forty-three pawn tickets, and he was sent to Australia for the next ten years.

  Robbery at the Lecht

  Even today the Lecht pass over the Cairngorm Hills from Braemar to Moray can be demanding. At around 2,000 feet above sea level, it is always one of the first to be closed with the winter snow and even in fog and heavy rain the steep, winding road can present difficulties. However, driving in a locked motor car on even the worst of days cannot compare to the rigours of walking the Lecht in the nineteenth century when there were other hazards apart from the weather.

  On the evening of Wednesday, 18 July 1861, a young woman named Isobel Kennedy was walking from Tomintoul to her job as a servant in the hamlet of Bridgend in Strathdon. Her route took her over the steepest and loneliest part of the Lecht. Just as she began the descent from the summit a man emerged from the heather moor at the side and, without saying a word, attacked her.

  Kennedy was a fit and strong woman. She defended herself vigorously but the man was bigger than her and vicious. He knocked her down and tried to rape her but she screamed and fought back, raking him with her nails and kicking furiously. He stepped back. She struggled up. He knocked her down again, kicked or punched her and stole her purse with its contents of a few coins and sundry receipts and bits and pieces. Kennedy continued to struggle even when the man robbed her and eventually he ran off, leaving her battered, bruised and penniless, but still defiant, on the lonely road of the Lecht. She managed to reach the nearest farmhouse, and the farmer took her home and alerted the resident policeman at Corgarff.

  Constable Paterson was not used to serious crime so this was an opportunity to show his skills. He mounted his horse and urged it up the Lecht to search for the attacker. He saw nobody suspicious as he rode, so dropped into Tomintoul to ask the resident policeman for his assistance. The Tomintoul constable put his local knowledge to good use and suggested they call at a quiet mill farmhouse about five miles away, where a stranger was known to be. They stormed open the door and arrested a man who claimed to be searching for work on the railway. He gave his name as James McKenzie. A quick check with the records of the Aberdeenshire Police found out much more about this man. They knew him as Smith, not McKenzie, and told Paterson he had lately been in the Aberdeenshire Militia. More interestingly, just two years before he had been found guilty of a criminal assault on a young girl on Deeside.

  The case came before the Perth Circuit Court in September. This time the attacker gave his name as Alexander Dodds and claimed to be eighteen years old. He was charged with assault with intent, and also with robbery. Dressed in a white moleskin jacket and standing at the bar with a glower on his face, Dodds pleaded guilty only to the robbery charge. Lord Neaves, the judge, told him that if he had pleaded guilty to both he would have a very long sentence. As it was, he was given six years’ penal servitude.

  Robbing the Post Office

  Although the nineteenth-century Highlands were largely a rural area, there were pockets of urban areas where crime followed the same pattern as in towns in other parts of Scotland. As well as the usual backstreet assaults, drunken brawls and sneak thefts, there was a quota of white-collar crime. In September 1881 the post office in Inverness was the target of a robbery when a registered letter containing £900 was stolen, a colossal amount of money for the time.

  Provost Fraser was the local agent for the Commercial Bank. On 21 September 1881 the agent of the Balmacarra branch of the bank asked him to forward £900, with £500 of it in five-pound notes and the remainder in one-pound notes. Fraser was not surprised as it was quite usual for him to send such amounts. He ordered his bank clerk to send the money and told the Balmacarra branch that the money was on its way. It was not long after that Alexander Falconer, the accountant of the Balmacarra branch, sent a telegram to Fraser, informing him that the money had not arrived. Naturally, there was consternation and William Allan, the bank’s accountant, sent the details to the Procurator Fiscal.

  Allan had ordered the bank teller, James Huntly Macdonald, to take the money from the secure box and make up the correct amount. Macdonald did so, putting the five-pound notes and the one-pound notes into separate bundles, and then William Middleton, an apprentice teller, bundled them into a single packet, sealed the packet and handed it to Allan to tie with a string. Middleton carried the packet to the post office and had it registered at about quarter to five.

  There were two men on duty at the post office at the time, Robert Sim and John Proudfoot. Sim marked the packet with a blue pencil and placed it at the bottom of the window, which was the normal routine for registered letters. When questioned later he could not remember seeing any string or twine around the packet.

  Sometime before seven that evening a clerk named John Gibson took the registered letters away to John Proudfoot in the sorting department. Proudfoot worked on the other side of a barrier behind the counter. Any registered packets not delivered that day should have been securely locked away in a glass-fronted locker at about half past nine at night. That night the key was left in the lock. The man who locked up had custody of the key. Roderick Reid, the chief clerk, had seen Proudfoot still working after eight at night, and wondered why, as Proudfoot had been looking forward to attending a concert by Sims Reeves, a popular operatic singer, after work. Proudfoot laughed and said, ‘The charge is too heavy. I can’t afford it.’

  The Balmacarra packet should have been sent with the Skye mail on the train at nine in the morning. When Alexander Mackay opened the office next morning he noticed the registered locker was open and the key in the lock. Mackay was the sorting clerk who placed the registered letters on the train, but he swore blind he saw no registered packet for Balmacarra.

  It seemed obvi
ous that the registered packet had been stolen at some time in the post office in Inverness. The police arrested Proudfoot and he appeared at the Circuit court in Inverness in late March 1882, looking very smart and apparently unconcerned at the seriousness of the charges against him. He pleaded not guilty as his defence tried to show that there was virtually no security at Inverness Post Office. Mackay admitted openly that ‘grave irregularities were frequently committed’ at the post office. However, the evidence pointed to Proudfoot as the guilty party, and he ended up with seven years’ penal servitude.

  Squaddies on the Rampage

  The Highlanders are justifiably proud of their soldiers. The Highland regiments of the British Army have earned a reputation for bravery and toughness second to none. However, sometimes there was an obverse side to the military. Highland regiments often contained a few bad apples whose behaviour could be less than angelic. For example, the Sutherland Highlanders who formed the famous Thin Red Line at Balaclava had rioted in Liverpool a few years beforehand and had the reputation of a troublesome and violent regiment.

  Of course, not all soldiers were in love with their profession. In June 1877 three privates, Robert Fleming, John Cunningham and John Macalpine, all based at Fort George, decided they would be better in a different job. However, it would be impossible to desert while wearing the red tunic of a soldier, so the men decided to obtain some civilian clothing. A soldier’s pay was so meagre that buying clothes was out of the question, which left theft as the only option. They left Fort George in the late afternoon of Saturday, 16 June and made their way to the manse at Petty. They noticed that a window was left open but waited until dark before they entered.

  They pushed the window open as far as it could go and climbed into the house. There was a slight scare when one of the servants called out, ‘Who’s there?’ but then there was silence and the three men had peace to search the house. They concentrated on the ground floor, as the inhabitants slept upstairs, but still managed to find a fine supply of clothes, three walking sticks and enough food to keep them going for some time. However, they were pursued by the police and caught a few days later. At the sheriff court on 11 August they were each given three months’ hard labour.

  Other squaddies were equally prone to break the law. In 1882 the Cameron Highlanders fought in the Egyptian campaign where the Highland brigade earned new laurels at the battle of Tel el-Kebir, but the conduct of some of the regiment at home led to trouble on the streets of Inverness. In November of that year a draft of reinforcements for the Camerons was stationed at Fort George.

  On Saturday, 10 November 1882, a number of soldiers were given leave before going out east and they descended en masse to Inverness. Naturally, some decided to visit the public houses and accept the hospitality of the local civilians. When two of these men, Privates Murray and Lawson, left one particular pub, one of their drinking companions realised his watch and chain had been stolen and told the police. With so many soldiers roaming the town, the police were hard pressed to find the culprits but eventually arrested both men, who had separated. One of the soldiers came at once but the second fought back, so a third Cameron Highlander, Private Henderson, rushed to help his comrade, knocked a policeman to the ground, grabbed his baton and ran off with it.

  All three men were eventually arrested, with Henderson picked up at Culloden, a few miles to the east of the town. He was fined £5 for his regimental loyalty while the other two were jailed.

  Theft of a Shovel

  Sometimes the authorities got it wrong and used the full power of the law to hammer down a very petty theft. Such a case occurred in November 1882 when Sheriff-Substitute Simpson faced John Mackintosh across the Inverness courtroom floor. Mackintosh was a labourer from Portree in Skye and he was charged with the theft of an old shovel on 27 July. The police accused first offender Mackintosh, arrested him and immediately thrust him into a cell in Portree Police Station. The case of the battered shovel was duly recorded, written down and the documents sent to Edinburgh. The Edinburgh authorities ordered a full jury trial at the Circuit court in Inverness.

  After six weeks in the cells at Portree, Mackintosh was sent to Inverness to face the sheriff and fifteen good men and true of the jury. He had no sooner arrived than the Procurator Fiscal dropped the charge. Mackintosh was sent back to Portree, where he was again charged with the theft of the shovel. Together, Mackintosh’s fares and upkeep in the cells had cost many times more than the value of the shovel.

  Robbing the Tourists

  It was all Sir Walter Scott’s fault, of course, helped by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Where once the Highlands had been seen as a dismal place full of dark mountains and populated by cannon fodder for French and Imperial wars, by the time Sir Walter and Queen Victoria had finished with them they were a Mecca for tourists and a splendid place for sportsmen to decimate the local wildlife.

  At the turn of the century books such as Sarah Murray’s A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland and Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland were master-pieces of travel writing, but the reader still saw Highland Scotland as a wild and distant place. By the latter half of the century, transport improvements had ensured that spending a season in the Highlands was an accepted norm for the upper part of society, while many of the middle classes had also become interested in travelling north. A plethora of tourist hotels had sprung up for those with money to spend and time to spare. Money equates with temptation, and that often drags crime in its wake.

  In early 1883 hotels in the Highlands were rocked by a succession of thefts and for a while it was believed that a gang of professional thieves were on the tourist trail. The first hotel to be hit was the Alexandra in Oban, where £35 was stolen at the end of July. The second was the Great Western Hotel in the same town, where £27 was stolen on 3 August. The thieves were then believed to have decamped to the Loch Awe Hotel, where they left with a diamond ring, and then moved to Braemar. At the Fife Arms in that royal place, a gentleman lost the huge sum of £200 on the night of 12 August, while a black lace shawl was also reported missing from the nearby Invercauld Hotel.

  Three suspects were charged. There was forty-nine-year-old James Edward Lyon, who had fought as a Union Army lieutenant in the American Civil War. He claimed United States citizenship and demanded that the US Consul be informed when he was arrested. There was Eliza Thorpe, a twenty-year-old woman who acted as his wife, and there was forty-one-year-old unmarried and enigmatic Joseph Dowling, who claimed to be a club manager and travelled for the sake of his health. Although all three were charged with the theft in the Alexandra Hotel and the Fife Arms Hotel, only Thorpe and Lyon were accused of the other three offences.

  Lyon and Thorpe had come to Edinburgh first, masquerading as husband and wife. They stayed at the Balmoral Hotel for a while, and caught the train for Oban in Argyll. Their first victim was Arthur Miller, an oil and lamp merchant from London who stayed at the Alexandra Hotel in July that year. He claimed to have left his wallet with £45 in Bank of England notes in his coat pocket overnight. Being a cautious man, he had kept a record of the numbers on his banknotes and could identify them. At that time Lyon and Thorpe were guests at the same hotel under the pseudonym of Captain and Mrs Lyon.

  The second victim was Donald Beith, a Writer to the Signet. He had arrived at the Great Western Hotel in Oban on 31 July, coincidentally the same time as Lyon and Thorpe had booked in, again as Captain and Mrs Lyon. On the night of Friday, 3 August, Mr and Mrs Beith locked their bedroom door, and Beith left his trousers over the back of a chair with some money in the pocket. During the night Mrs Beith thought she heard somebody tapping on the door, and called out, ‘Come in,’ but nobody entered. A little while later Beith also heard a noise. When he lit a candle he saw their bedroom door was wide open. Mrs Beith woke and thought she heard somebody moving and talking in the room next door, but at that time there was nobody in their room. Beith closed the door but it was not until next mo
rning that he discovered that the money he had in his pocket, around £27, was missing. Lyon and Thorpe stayed in the room next door. Dowling was also suspected of being in Oban at this time.

  At this stage Lyon and Thorpe seemed scot-free, but they had already aroused suspicion. Mr McArthur, the proprietor of the Alexandra Hotel, had been in the business long enough to recognise a guest who was not genuine, and he contacted Inspector Campbell of the Oban Police. The inspector telegraphed the police in Edinburgh and Glasgow with a description of the supposed Captain and Mrs Lyon and a request that a detective be sent up to Oban, but at that time the city police took no action. However, Campbell was not a man to give up and he ordered one of his own men to follow the Lyons so he knew exactly what they were up to.

  From Oban, Thorpe and Lyon moved to the Lochawe Hotel at Dalmally, another small tourist town in Argyll. They stayed there from Saturday, 4 August to Monday, 6 August. While they were there, a fellow guest, Mrs Thomson from Cheltenham, realised her diamond ring had disappeared. She claimed she had put the five-diamond ring on the dressing table on the Sunday evening but the next morning it was not there. She heard a noise during the night but saw nothing, and her door was still locked the next morning.

  Duncan Fraser, who owned both the Lochawe and the Dalmally Hotels, saw Thorpe and Lyon in company with Dowling that weekend, and all three had left the same day, but not together. The Lyons were in so great a hurry that they left behind their luggage at the station, but later sent a wire asking that it be sent to Edinburgh’s Waverley Station. Campbell again contacted the Edinburgh Police and asked that they look out for the couple.