by Rick Wilson
(Note that most of this was happening around the same Old Town area, but in an unexpected geographic change, the next job took place in Leith. This was apparently instigated by Smith, who had been ‘feeling the pinch’ after a pause in their programme caused by a shaken Brodie’s sudden reversal into a period of respectability and only legitimate business.)
August 1787: Grocer John Carnegie of Leith loses a huge quantity of fine black tea and, oddly, some of it is recovered when tea-packed parcels are found along the length of the road from Leith to Edinburgh. It is assumed that the burglars, not being in the prime of fitness, have found the weight of the goods, combined with the distance of the walk back to the city, literally too much to bear.
29 October: The burglars return to their comfort zone in the heart of the city with a raid on a fashionable shoemaker’s shop in Royal Exchange. Losses may have been light as they are not recorded.
30 October: Recovering their taste for the audacious, the Brodie gang is responsible for the disappearance of the college mace – a three-century-old silver masterpiece – from the library in the quad of Edinburgh University. While this much-lamented precious symbol also makes its way to Chesterfield, another appeal goes out to the criminal fraternity: ‘A reward of ten guineas, to be paid by the City Chamberlain, is hereby offered for the discovery of all or any of the persons responsible.’
9 January 1788: The silk shop of Messrs Inglis and Horner loses £500 worth of cambrics, satins and silks. The Procurator Fiscal puts up £100 reward, later increased to £150, and promises a free pardon for any accomplice turning king’s evidence. His offer reads:
Whereas, upon the night of the 8th or morning of the 9th of January instant, the shop of Messrs Inglis Horner & co, Silk Mercers in Edinburgh, was broke into, and articles taken therefrom amounting to upwards of £300 value; and as the persons guilty of this robbery have not as yet been discovered, notwithstanding every exertion that has been made, and the offer of £100 of reward for that purpose, his Majesty’s most gracious pardon is hereby offered to an accomplice, if there was more than one concerned, who shall, within six months from this date, give such information to William Scott, Procurator-Fiscal for the shire of Edinburgh, as shall be the means of apprehending and securing all or any of the persons guilty of or accessory to the said crime.
5 March 1788 is to be a fateful date with destiny, however; the night of the botched final job that starts the downfall of the man who thought he could cheat people, justice and even death. The target is nothing less than Scotland’s General Excise Office …
***
Was it something to sing about? Now things were getting deadly serious. This was the most audacious criminal enterprise tried in Scotland so far, by this gang or any other: an attack on the very revenues of the nation. And a tipsy Brodie came thoroughly equipped – an hour late – to the gang’s rendezvous at Smith’s house. He wore an old-fashioned dark greatcoat, a black cocked hat and a black wig. He carried a dark lantern, a rope to tie up the old watchman who might get in their way, crepe masks for all four of them, a whistle for Ainslie as sentinel to communicate ‘danger’ in codes and a key that would fit the heavy main door.
Where and how did he get his hands on that? Having once visited the Excise Office with a friend from Stirling – a Mr Corbett who wanted to withdraw some money – Brodie had taken note of the layout of the place and was, inevitably, interested in the fact that it held an endless store of good citizens’ cash; so much so that he resolved to know it even better and made several more visits as if doing business there – once with George Smith. That was when he saw the key of the outer door hanging on a nail and had Smith create a diversion while he quickly produced a handful of putty to make an impression of it. The resulting replica was successfully tested on a trial break-in a few nights before the scheduled Big Night.
For that event, apart from the key, the rope, the lantern, the masks and the whistle, several more interesting tools were brought to hand: some smaller keys and a double picklock, a pair of curling irons, an iron crowbar and the stolen coulter of a plough, selected for its heavy-duty leverage strength in challenging circumstances. But of all the items on hand at Smith’s house on that night the most contentious was a number of loaded pistols, some borrowed from Michael Henderson of the Grassmarket stables.
How many were there? Some accounts say ‘a brace’, others ‘two brace’. But one man on the spot had more precise information, dragged from his fevered memory during his erstwhile boss’s subsequent trial. Ainslie said: ‘I had no arms myself, excepting a stick, but Smith had three loaded pistols. Brown two, and Brodie one. At least, I saw Brodie, when he came into Smith’s house, have one in his hand.’
The acquiring of weak playmates – it would soon transpire – represented a big mistake in Brodie’s criminal career. But the acquiring of guns was even more fateful; probably his most reckless mistake ever. For their life-threatening potential could well have had a critical bearing on his own life. Burglary was one thing, the potential to kill quite another, perhaps even enough to justify, in those less-forgiving times, a sentence of death. His shocked colleagues certainly recognised that. But did he? Oblivion tomorrow was the last thing on his unhinged mind tonight, while he felt buzzing with aliveness, even as the others berated him for his lateness and looked askance at the pistols. They were obviously nervous, he thought, so he would try to cheer them up. Wearing one of the masks and brandishing one of the borrowed pistols, the respected dean of wrights and town councillor now looked more like a mad highwayman in a state of high excitement as he started singing to his grumpy colleagues these lines from The Beggar’s Opera:
Let us take the road
Hark! I hear the sound of coaches!
The hour of attack approaches;
To your arms, brave boys, and load.
See the ball I hold;
Let the chymists toil like asses –
Our fire their fire surpasses,
And turns our lead to gold
Cheered up a little they might have been, but they were still nervous, and as their odd little band made their heavily laden way down the Canongate towards Chessel’s Court at about 8 p.m. – minus Ainslie who had gone ahead as the look-out with his whistle – they could not have imagined just how badly wrong this final enterprise was about to go. No fewer than three factors would expose the sheer folly of it. This newspaper report tells the general story:
Excise Office Broke Into and Robbed
On the night betwixt the 5th and 6th of March, it is reported that some persons did feloniously enter the Excise Office by means of false keys and other implements, including the coulter of a plough, which has been discovered on the premises. The loss from the Office is not known for sure at this time but seems slight, the criminals having failed to gain access to secret drawers containing, it is reliably reported, more than eight hundred pounds Sterling. In breaking the front door a false key was used as is evident by the lack of any damage and its being open. The inner doors and the cashiers’ desks however have suffered the most severe abuse under the hands of these criminals so that much expense will be required to repair the Offices and make them safe.
Mr James Bonnar of the Excise Office discovered the criminals in the very act of theft. Indeed, if he had not fortunately returned to his office, disturbing them, they might yet have found the great sum of money no matter how well it had been hid. Mr Bonnar has made a full report of his information regarding this terrible crime to the Sheriff-Clerk’s Office and the Advertisement relating to it is expected daily. This crime seems to be one more in the never-ending attacks on the property and reputation of our city to which we have recently been laid open. The Magistracy has undertaken to discuss the matter and see what further precautions may be undertaken to deter such persons as will consider such a crime as robbing His Gracious Majesty’s Excise.
But the devil was in the detail. The three factors that conspired against them were largely human: the unexpected appearan
ce of bank official Bonnar, the disappointment at their minimal haul (about £16 when they were expecting something like £1,000) and the consequent bitter effect on Brown, their already discontented and disaffected accomplice who had been feeling left out of several jobs and, being on the run from a transportation sentence for a crime committed in England, was becoming ever more ready to take up the Procurator Fiscal’s offer of a free pardon. Not to mention the offered reward, from the earlier silk job, of £150.
But to capture the drama of the Excise Office break-in at the handsome (and still standing) Chessel’s Building, we are grateful for the two imagined scenes conjured up by author Forbes Bramble and his 1975 book The Strange Case of Deacon Brodie. Crepe-masked Smith and Brown, having forced their way in and over to the cashier’s door with the aid of false keys and ‘the splintering efficiency of the coulter and wedges’, lit their lantern and tapers, then produced the toupee tongs to make short work of the desks. But they overlooked a concealed drawer in one of them that contained a good £600.
‘There’s no bloody money!’ Brown was almost frothing at the mouth. ‘That’s your friend the Deacon!
‘There’s no bloody money!’
Drawers were strewn everywhere, and the raw edges of splintered wood shone white in the light of tapers.
‘He saw it come in. It’s here somewhere. Stow your lumber and keep looking.’
They started to re-search the desks, hunting for secret drawers. An exclamation from Brown brought Smith over.
‘Here’s something anyway!’ He pulled out a purse and they counted its contents. ‘Sixteen pounds! God Almighty, is that what we’ve risked a cropping for!’
And the witness? At first, Mr Bonnar – having returned to collect papers he needed for the morning – did not apparently appreciate what he had seen, assuming that it was a cheeky clerk barging past him.
Pushing open the door and beating the snow from his boots, he was startled by the door suddenly hurtling back in his face, to be immediately thrust open while a figure in black hurtled out into the night, knocking him against the wall. These young clerks had been told about their behaviour.
‘You!’ he shouted. ‘How dare you! Have you no manners, man? In this building you walk. It’s as well I can’t see you, I’d have you dismissed!’ His yells were lost to the Close for the figure [Brodie] had already gone.
It all happened before Ainslie could blow his whistle, but he joined the escapee, and so did Smith and Brown, who had cocked their pistols as they followed Bonnar’s footsteps but made their getaway whenever they sensed the coast to be relatively clear. The evening had not ended well and it was going to get worse. Not that Brodie was around to be confronted. While the others had gathered at Fraser’s tavern in the New Town, where recriminations flew like wildfire flames, Brodie had slunk over to Jean Watt’s house, not only for some comfort but also to give himself an alibi.
It was only after what happened next that Mr Bonnar put two and two together to realise just what (and perhaps who) he had literally bumped into at the office that night.
***
The next day they gathered at Smith’s house-cum-grocery shop in the Cowgate, where his wife was presumably so uninterested she left the room. For he was to claim she had always been ignorant of his criminal way of life. The others were equally uninterested – and unimpressed – by Brodie’s excuses and desperate promises of better projects in the pipeline, and Brown waited only to collect his £4 share of the Excise Office loot before he made his way to the Sheriff-Clerk’s office. All he needed to convince William Middleton he was telling the truth was to take him – and a recruited Procurator Fiscal – up to the foot of Salisbury Crags in the dead of night and show them, under a lifted stone, the gang’s stash of false keys. He also revealed the names of his fellow-accomplices, so that the fiscal ordered the sheriff-clerk to ‘make the necessary arrangements to apprehend our friend’s companions, Ainslie and Smith’.
For reasons known only to himself – was he contemplating blackmail? – Brown kept his powder dry on the naming and shaming of Deacon Brodie. If such a thought could be communicated to Ainslie and Smith and they also agreed to hold their tongues before being swept off to the Tolbooth prison, it would be, would it not, the perfect revenge against Brodie and his hopeless adventures? Meal tickets for life, assuming there would be an ongoing life.
It was when Brodie himself attempted to visit them in jail, no doubt to wheedle out a hint on whether or not his name had been mentioned, that he began to sense that it had. Despite his do-you-know-who-I-am entreaties to the two guards on duty, he was firmly told that no visitors, however important, were being allowed in. He sensed an unusual disrespect there and it was becoming rapidly clear to him that the game was almost up.
What he didn’t yet know was that, as well as Brown and Ainslie, Smith had come clean and in his declarations had confessed to the robbery of the college mace, of Tapp’s home, of a tea shop in Leith and also of the shop of Inglis and Horner. Smith also disclosed the extensive robbery committed on the shop of the Bruces and revealed that Brodie had been a participant in almost all the aforementioned thefts. Reported by the authorities thus:
Brodie told the declarant that the shop at the head of Bridge Street, belonging to Messrs Bruce, would be a proper shop for breaking into, as it contained valuable goods; and he knew the lock would be easily opened, as it was a plain lock, his men having lately altered that shop door at the lowering of the street: that the plan of breaking into the shop was accordingly concerted betwixt them …
(While in prison, Smith and Ainslie made a desperate bid to escape on the night of 4–5 May by converting the iron handle of a bucket into a pick-lock and one of the iron hoops into a saw. Smith took one door off the hinges and opened the other, which led to Ainslie’s cell upstairs. Both prisoners then cut a hole in the ceiling and another in the roof, ready to descend with the aid of sixteen fathoms of rope made out of bedsheets. They were foiled, however, by falling slates on the street attracting a sentinel, who raised the alarm.)
Later, while awaiting execution in the Tollbooth and wishing to make his peace with his maker, Smith revealed too that, had they not been stopped where they were, the Brodie gang would have gone on even more audaciously to cause much more damage and alarm. With his own hand, he drew up a list of targets – some of them quite major – that had been earmarked for future robberies. Plans in place for the remainder of 1788 had included the plundering of the Stirling stagecoach for the £1,000 workers’ pay it would be carrying, the burglary of watchmakers Dalgleish and Dickie, lottery office-keepers White and Mitchell, a linen draper’s in the Lawnmarket, ‘a rich baker’ near Brodie’s Close and – demonstrating Brodie’s imagination as well as his fearlessness – the Bank of Scotland. But even more daring was their intention to raid the Town Council Chamber for the mace below which the Deacon had sat for many a council meeting.
In any event, Brodie was now a hunted man, and he knew it. Staying in town was not an option. There was nothing for it but to make his getaway: to pack up fast and go as far away as possible. He would grab the first southbound coach, lose himself in London for a while, then perhaps head for the Continent; from there, on finding a suitable ship, he would head for America and anonymity. What an escape! An entirely new life would be awaiting him there – where no one, hopefully, would ever see the notices circulated by the Sheriff Clerk’s Office that made all Edinburgh gasp with astonishment:
TWO HUNDRED POUNDS OF REWARD
Whereas WILLIAM BRODIE, a considerable house carpenter and burgess of the city of Edinburgh, has been charged with being concerned in breaking into the General Excise Office for Scotland, and stealing from the Cashier’s office there a sum of money – and as the said William Brodie has either made his escape from Edinburgh, or is still concealed about that place – a REWARD of ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY POUNDS STERLING is hereby offered to any person who will produce him alive at the Sheriff Clerk’s Office, Edinburgh, or will secure him,
so that he may be brought there within a month from this date; and FIFTY POUNDS STERLING MORE payable upon his conviction, by William Scott, procurator fiscal for the shire of Edinburgh.
James Bonnar was now pretty sure of just who had bustled past him at the Excise Office that fateful night.
4
ESCAPE – AND CAPTURE
Relief and regret, relief and regret. The clattering rhythm of the bouncing post chaise taking him further and further away from his shocked home town on that fateful Sunday – 9 March 1788 – must have driven like hammer blows into William Brodie’s scrambled brain of mixed feelings. As John Gibson reported in his admirable account of Brodie’s life, ‘while Edinburgh was at its stint of Sunday morning devotion within the walls of St Giles, under the Dutch steeple of the Tron Kirk and in the Kirk of the Greyfriars, the Deacon was off down the Canongate, past the pleasure garden of Comely Green, and whirling through East Lothian’.
He was hoping to reach London and a new life within sixty hours for a fare-and-accommodation outlay of about five guineas; he couldn’t deny that he had left a seriously damaged old life behind, and – a good reason for relief – had apparently escaped the consequences by the skin of his teeth. Immediately before this psychological turmoil there had been an equally intense perfect storm of preparation. In an age without telephonic communication, one can only wonder at how he got through it all in the few hours after making his decision to leave. There were allies to convince of his innocence, to brief and get help from: his cousin Milton, who would prime and pay a London lawyer to receive him there, and the Revd Nairn, who would likewise set up an American clergyman to help him on arrival in New York; not to mention the hiding of any evidence of his misdeeds, the organisation of clothes, money, books and introduction letters inside his big black travelling trunk, and the fond, ‘forever’ farewells to his two illegitimate families. There were many personal reasons for his regrets, but the last was surely the most poignant. And by the Monday, though he had barely left Newcastle, he was already haunted by a feeling of being alone, branded and hounded. What was now happening back home? He could only imagine with dread. And it was quite a lot …