Whisky, Wars, Riots and Murder

by Malcolm Archibald

  In that same court on that same day, there was a second case involving a coach accident. That one took place on the mail coach between Inverness and Fochabers on the Nairn to Forres stretch of road. William Evenes was the driver, with George Jenkins the guard, and the prosecution alleged that on 8 November 1819 they drove in such a ‘careless and culpable manner’ that when they were a mile west of the Bridge of Findhorn they did ‘throw down David Laing’ and run over his body so he died of his injuries a short time later. However, once again a brief examination found that there was no case to answer.

  Change for a Shilling

  Some crimes seem so petty that today they might be laughed off, but at a time when poverty stalked many households and even a single penny might mean the difference between mere hunger and utter starvation, small amounts of money meant much more than they do now. In late November 1868 a man in his early twenties entered a shop in Inverness and asked the shopkeeper if he could have change for a shilling. In this case, the man was perfectly innocent, but asking for change was a common method for forgers to rid themselves of false money, and the shopkeeper was instantly suspicious.

  He took the shilling, examined it and thought it appeared a bit spurious, but rather than merely refuse the request and hand it back he decided to make his own test. Accordingly, he fetched a hammer and smashed it on top of the coin, bending it in half so it was unusable. The owner was naturally unhappy at this cavalier treatment of his money and demanded either change or another shilling to replace the ruined one. The shopkeeper refused both requests. The coin owner called the police, who hauled the shopkeeper away, and the coin owner sued him for damages of £5.

  The matter was settled out of court; the owner got his shilling’s worth of change and a small amount to compensate for his trouble.

  Vandalism

  For much of the nineteenth century the cause of progress was deemed much more important than the care of historical artefacts and monuments. City improvements and modernisation to farming practices saw the demise of thousands of irreplaceable ancient buildings, but in 1882 the Ancient Monuments Act gave a measure of protection to some of the thousands of castles, brochs and duns that give silent tongue to the history of Scotland. Naturally, some people continued the work of destruction and fell foul of the law. The first case in Shetland was in April 1888, when a Lerwick flesher named Hugh Mackay decided to build a new stable.

  Unfortunately, he was near to the Broch of Clickinim, which was then thought to be a Pictish castle. The broch seemed to supply a ready-made reservoir of building material for his stable, and Mackay happily quarried away until he was caught. He appeared before Sheriff Mackenzie, who thought his actions were ‘wanton destruction of an ancient monument’ and fined him the maximum of £5 with costs of £4 and ten shillings to pay for the stones being returned.

  Highland crime then was as varied as crime anywhere in the country. Despite the more scattered population and the distances between centres of population, forgery, deception and fraud could be encountered in the north.

  16

  The Arran Murder

  Arran is the holiday island in the middle of the Firth of Clyde. Travelling there has been the highlight of the year to many thousands of city dwellers from the height of the Victorian age until the present time. It is an island for all tastes, with high granite peaks, curved yellow beaches, luxuriant gardens, tropical palms, rolling uplands castles, lonely cottages, herds of deer, fish in the burns and lochs, and ten picturesque villages with a plethora of hotels and bars. However, in 1889 it was also the scene of an alleged murder.

  Edwin Rose was not a typical example of a person who holidayed on Arran. The majority of the holidaymakers were from industrial west central Scotland, hardworking manual workers from the shipyards, mills and factories who took their annual holiday ‘doon the watter’. Rose was a Londoner and a builder’s clerk in an office, a thirty-two-year-old man who planned to stay in the Glenburn Hydro in Rothesay in Bute but also visit the neighbouring island of Arran. Rose was not alone; he travelled with two men from Linlithgow, Francis Mickel and William Thom.

  At the height of the Victorian period, the Clyde was very well served with steamers that crossed and criss-crossed the waters in frantic competition. On 12 July, Rose and his companions from Linlithgow caught the Ivanhoe steamer from Bute to Arran. While on board, Rose met a twenty-five-year-old man from Glasgow, who gave his name as John Annandale. His real name was John Watson Laurie. He had been born in Coatbridge and he had his own reasons for travelling to the Clyde Coast.

  Laurie was slender but with a good set of shoulders. He walked with a confident roll and, like many Glaswegians, was fashion conscious, wearing knickerbockers when he walked the roads and hills. Laurie was a pattern maker – a mould maker – for Springburn’s Atlas Iron Works in Glasgow and had been happily engaged, so life seemed pretty rosy for him. But apparently in 1889 things started to go wrong. He allegedly stole some money from his work, which caused a scandal, and although his family repaid the cash, his girl had broken off their engagement. Laurie believed the girl had gone to Rothesay in the Isle of Bute with a Coatbridge schoolteacher. He caught the ferry over and began to search for her. He did not find her and his money ran out, and then along came Rose.

  As often happens on holiday, the two formed a friendship. While the Linlithgow men had no time for Laurie, he and Rose travelled together to Arran, and Laurie booked them both for a week with a Mrs Walker at Invercloy in Brodick, staying in an outhouse. While here, Laurie also met a friend of his called James Aitken, who must have wondered why Laurie used the name Annandale. However, he did not ask too many awkward questions, and Laurie and Rose continued on their holiday. After a day in Arran, they returned to Rothesay for the night.

  The next day all four men sailed back to Arran, but while Rose shared Laurie’s lodgings in Invercloy, the other two stayed at a yacht that was moored offshore. Morning saw Laurie and Rose wandering in Glen Rosa, and for much of the next day the four men were together, but the pair from Linlithgow left by the half past three ferry. So far they had walked the hills and generally behaved just like any other holidaymakers in the island.

  However, the Linlithgow two were not quite as enamoured with Laurie as Rose was. Before they left Arran, they warned Rose to be careful of his new companion. Despite the warning, when Laurie suggested to Rose that they climb Goatfell on Monday, 15 July, he agreed. So that day they set off up Arran’s highest mountain. They left with some secrecy. They did not tell Mrs Walker where they were going, and she thought they had fled without paying their bill. When Laurie came down he was alone, and Rose was never seen alive again.

  It was some time before his disappearance was noted. By 18 July it was known that Rose was overdue, but he was a grown man and may well have decided to stay longer in the Scottish Highlands. On 22 July some of the Rose family travelled north to Rothesay, and on 27 July, twelve days after his climb, Rose’s brother Benjamin came over to Brodick to look for him. He made enquiries and found out about the Goatfell climb, so helped organise a search.

  Around 200 men gathered at the kennels of Brodick Castle, divided into three groups and scoured the granite slopes of the mountain. Their search was made harder by a mist that swept over Goatfell, but when the sky cleared after an hour or so the searchers took out binoculars and telescopes and peered into every crack and cranny. The searchers were thorough, inspecting overhangs, probing scree slopes, putting their lives at risk in the search for Edwin Rose.

  They found Rose’s cap, walking stick and various other knick-knacks in a long line in a corrie that led to the top of the hill. They continued to search and eventually found a body hidden in a makeshift howff, a rough rock shelter in Coire nan Fuaran above Glen Sannox on the lower slopes. His skull was splintered, his spine broken, ribs smashed, buttock ripped, and he had been robbed. Although the body was decayed and partly eaten by insects or birds, the clothing was enough to identify the body as that of Rose.

&
nbsp; Goatfell from Brodick Bay

  © Stephen Finn/Shutterstock

  Police enquiries continued. A number of witnesses had seen Rose and Laurie on the summit of Goatfell about twenty past six in the evening, but none knew exactly what happened after that. A shepherd remembered seeing a weary-looking man coming down the hill alone after nine o’clock that same evening, although others thought he was mistaken in thinking that was Laurie. Others were convinced Laurie had been seen drinking at the Corrie Hotel about ten that night, and somebody else remembered seeing Laurie leaving on the seven o’clock ferry the next day, after which he caught a train to Greenock. He had been wearing a striped jacket – Rose’s jacket. Laurie’s liking for fancy clothes had worked against him.

  Laurie returned briefly to his lodgings in North Frederick Street in Glasgow and then travelled back to Bute. From there he shipped to Glasgow, where James Aitken challenged him in the street.

  So far the police were looking for the non-existent Annandale, but James Aitken knew both names and informed the police. Laurie promptly sold his work tools, told his colleagues he was off to Leith and then he disappeared.

  As the hunt for Annandale ended and that for Laurie began, Rose was buried at the lonely graveyard at Sannox, near where his body was found. For a while it became a popular destination for the curious visitor, and the credulous believed his ghost walked the hills.

  Details and rumours of Laurie began to emerge. Laurie was a good singer, he earned twelve shillings a week, and his father had kicked him out of the family home in 1886. Laurie was a womaniser; he was reported as having been seen at Rothesay and Dunoon, both times in the company of women. Around the same time there were a number of men in the West of Scotland who claimed that their daughters had been romantically attached to Laurie, which, if true, would have made him a very busy man indeed. The police made a number of arrests in the Glasgow area but released them all. There was a momentary stir when they found the body of a suicide on the shores of Loch Lomond, but it was another unfortunate and, according to the Glasgow Herald of 9 August, ‘a religious maniac’ and not Laurie. An abandoned pit shaft near Coatbridge was inspected when somebody found a scrap of paper with the words ‘I am the murderer’ scrawled on it lying nearby, but Laurie was not inside.

  In August a letter was written to the North British Daily Mail with a Liverpool postmark and purporting to come from Laurie. It said, ‘I rather smile when I read that my arrest is hourly expected. If things go on as I designed then I will soon have arrived in that country from whose bourne no traveller ever returns.’ The letter gave details of Laurie’s past, with detailed references of his abortive love affair with a teacher who cheated on him by ‘encouraging the attention of another man’, who was also a teacher and who spoke ill of Laurie at every opportunity. Laurie, if indeed he wrote the letter, claimed that he travelled to Rothesay ‘to watch her audacious behaviour’ but in so doing he met ‘another young lady’. More significantly, Laurie also said, ‘As regards Mr Rose, poor fellow, no one who knows me will believe for one moment that I had any complicity in his death.’

  Witnesses saw Laurie sail from Glasgow to Liverpool on the steamer Owl, and while on board he was very charming and sang ‘The March of the Cameron Men’. There were also rumours of a man of ‘wild and reckless appearance’ who caught a train to London, was followed by a gentleman but disappeared into the crowd. He was also reported at Longniddry, Shotts and Kilmarnock.

  In reality, the Glasgow Police were soon on Laurie’s trail, but he slipped out of the city and south to Liverpool. The police moved in on his lodgings but he was gone; all they found were a number of shirts that belonged to Rose. The police continued to hunt, having railway stations and shipping ports throughout the country watched.

  On 3 September the painstaking scrutiny proved its worth, as Laurie was seen boarding a train at Ferniegair, south of Hamilton. The local policeman proved tenacious and followed Laurie, chasing him into a patch of dense woodland. Laurie rolled under a bush, tried to commit suicide here by slashing his throat with an open razor, but he failed and was arrested, bleeding from a shallow cut.

  With the Victorian love of the macabre, local entrepreneurs made the most of the occasion. They cut sprigs from ‘Laurie’s bush’ and sold them at a penny an inch, and even made a number of walking sticks from the wood, which sold for stupidly inflated prices.

  The trial was held in the High Court in Edinburgh on 8 November, with people queuing outside to hear the details. The Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Kingsburgh, was the presiding judge. Laurie’s trial was unique in that it was the only accusation of murder between two hillwalkers, which, given the opportunities for murder in these lonely places, is quite significant. Murder trials were a great public entertainment before the advent of radio and television, and this one seemed to have some fine gory details. He appeared before the bar looking fairly well dressed and with a silk scarf concealing the cut on his neck where he had tried to kill himself. He had a new short beard and stared steadfastly at anybody who looked at him.

  Laurie agreed he had begun the ascent of Goatfell with Rose and admitted he had robbed the body, but denied murder, claiming that Rose had met two other men on the ascent and had fallen down the mountain. The prosecution claimed that Laurie had murdered Rose with a rock, but the nature of the wounds negated that. There was no blood on Laurie’s clothes, which was interesting, as to murder Rose in such a brutal fashion as the prosecution claimed would have meant great quantities of blood being spattered around. It seemed more likely that Rose had fallen while negotiating the col between North Goatfell and Mullach Buidhe, two of the peaks on the summit ridge. The position of Rose’s possessions may strengthen this argument, although the fact that Rose’s cap was neatly folded is curious, unless one considers that Laurie may have been mentally unbalanced and deliberately folded and placed the cap.

  ‘I robbed the man but I did not murder him,’ Laurie claimed. The evidence may suggest that his statement was correct.

  There was one further strange piece in this course. The Arran Police buried Rose’s boots in the sand in the belief this would prevent his ghost from walking. Even in 1889, and in an island only an hour’s sail from the Scottish mainland, old superstitions remained with even such a respectable man as a police officer.

  Despite the fact that all the evidence was circumstantial, the prosecution used Laurie’s subsequent behaviour and the robbery as the basis of their case. The judge insisted that the case be decided on the Saturday, one day after it started, so pushed and harassed the jury to reach a quick verdict. The jury agreed with the prosecution, but only just: they spent a mere forty-five minutes in debate and decided by eight men to seven that Laurie was guilty. The judge sentenced him to death, but the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. He was held in Peterhead for a while but escaped and was transferred to Perth and died in Perth Criminal Asylum in 1930, after nearly foty-one years in jail, making him Scotland’s longest-ever serving prisoner.

  The case provoked quite a lot of reaction, and there was even a doggerel song composed and sung in Glasgow:

  I do believe and shall believe

  That Laurie killed poor Rose

  And on Goatfell he shed his blood

  And stole away his clothes

  The mystery of the Goatfell murder, or accident, remains unanswered. Did Rose fall, or was he pushed? After this length of time it is unlikely that the truth will ever be known.

  17

  The Ardlamont Mystery

  ‘Not proven’ is a uniquely Scottish verdict that means exactly what it says: the jury could not decide whether the accused man or woman was guilty or not. They thought there was insufficient evidence to convict the accused of the crime, but enough doubt remained that they were not entirely convinced of their innocence either. Arguably the most high-profile ‘not proven’ case in the Highlands was the Ardlamont Mystery. It may have been murder, it may have been a tragic accident; the facts and fiction of the case
were argued all over Great Britain. However, after being presented with all the available evidence, a jury of fifteen reasonable people could not decide, yet public opinion, fuelled by newspaper speculation, seemed to believe it was murder.

  The Ardlamont estate is in the Cowal Peninsula in Argyll. In 1893 it was an 11,000-acre sporting estate, catering for shooting parties that walked the hills and fished or hunted the local wildlife. Most of these sportsmen came from outside Scotland; mainly English from the middle and upper classes indulging in a spot of outdoor living amidst the truly spectacular scenery, while the house staff, gamekeepers and ghillies were usually locals. The estate centred on classical Ardlamont House, with roots back to the seventeenth century.

  That year Alfred George Monson had hired Ardlamont with the supposed prospect of teaming up with a young man named Windsor Hambrough to buy the property. Monson was not a particularly prepossessing figure, being under average height and slightly built, with a shock of fair hair and a large nose, but he also looked intelligent. He was a man with a history, having been on the verge of financial trouble for much of the past decade. He had been born in May 1860, the third son of the Reverend Thomas Monson of Kirkby-under-Dale in Yorkshire, and was distantly related to the Viscount Oxenbridge. His grandmother was married to the 5th Viscount Galway and the family was closely related to Baron Monson, so Monson would certainly be considered a gentleman, but there were dark shadows in his life, despite his family background and being married with three children. He had rented a house once, had watched it burn and claimed a considerable amount of insurance money as a consequence. Nevertheless, in 1891 he had managed to find a job as a military tutor to a young gentleman named Windsor Dudley Cecil Hambrough. The two would be together until Hambrough’s death in 1893.