For all the hostility of many of the population, Dundee’s early police establishment was not large. In November 1824 there was one superintendant, one lieutenant, six sergeants, six men for the day patrol, six men for the night patrol, thirty-six watchmen, one turnkey to look after those arrested and one office keeper. That was a total of fifty-eight men to look after an expanding industrial city with a population exceeding 34,000. There were also the scavengers who cleared the dung piles and the lamplighters who fought the encroaching dark and who were on the official police establishment, but not involved in upholding the law. At that time the police office was in St Clements Lane and, without a dedicated jail, prisoners were held in the top floors of the Town House.
In those early months attacks on the police seemed to be a hobby amongst certain sections of the community. For example, on Tuesday 16th November 1824 a carter named David Morrison was fined five shillings for insulting the new police. The following week two drunken gentlemen strutted through Dundee bullying everybody in the belief that their genteel birth would protect them from justice. The Dundee police thought differently, despite being threatened with dire vengeance when they arrested the more violent of the two. The Police Court agreed with the officers and fined the drunks two guineas. That same week a man set his mastiff on a policeman walking his beat in the Seagate. In January a policeman was escorting a prisoner to the police office when a youth attacked him hoping to rescue his friend. He ended the night in a cell. Later that week the police had to tie up a man named James Wilson who had attacked them, and a carter was fined five shillings for swearing at Sergeant Thomas Hardy. The following week another gentleman was taken to court and fined for what the Advertiser called ‘abusing the watchmen’ while on Thursday 20th January in Baltic Street a man threw a stone at a watchman named David Leslie, who had to be carried to a surgeon. Also on the 20th a seaman in Seagate attacked the watchman on duty there, breaking some of their lanterns. The following week the police court seemed filled with seamen attacking the police.
And so it continued. Every time the police walked their beats they were liable to receive abuse, insult and assault and when the great Reform Riot of 1831 took place, the police office at St Clements was ransacked by an angry mob. It took a lot of courage to be a policeman on the streets of Dundee in the 1820s and 1830s.
With few men to guard the streets and no military garrison nearer than Perth to call upon, the police were very vulnerable. At the Police Court on 24th March 1825, a number of men were fined for assaulting the police watchmen, including a Chapelshade manufacturer who bit a watchman’s hand. A typical case occurred in December 1829 when Alexander Gall, a man with a long record of violence, was in the company of a prostitute at the back of the Wards at about midnight on a Saturday. When James Matthews, the watchman, shone his lantern on them, Gall immediately swore and threatened to knock out his brains. Naturally Matthews answered back, but Gall grabbed his truncheon and battered him to the ground; when Matthews called for help Gall and his woman fled. Gall was later fined £2 at the Police Court.
In April of that year a man named Alexander Meldrum was accused of assaulting Sergeant Alexander Taws, who was so injured he could not work. Taws was one of the best-known of the early police, whom J.M. Beatts, in his book Reminiscences of an Old Dundonian, described as being ‘portly’. In 1827, while still a constable, Taws was involved in an incident in Union Street when rival gangs of boys from the Grammar School and the English School were throwing stones at each other. Alexander Taws led a body of police straight into the heart of the scramash, arrested the ringleaders and marched them to the St Clements Lane Police Office.
Dismissing the Police
Despite the high hopes of the magistrates, not all the early police proved up to the job. At the beginning of March 1825 a watchman named William Stephen was fined 1/4d and dismissed the service for banging at the door of a pub in his Seagate beat and demanding drink for himself and his two companions. The following month in the Witchknowe a watchman named Raffins helped put down a disturbance by a group of weavers, but in doing so he beat one of the men so severely that Mr Dick, the police surgeon, had to dress the wound. The weaver was still bloody and bruised when he stood in front of the Police Court. In May the superintendent dismissed Raffin but took no further action. Including Raffin, ten policemen were dismissed in the four weeks between 11th April and 11th May 1825. These were David Taylor, Alexander Lesslie and James Shearer for being drunk while on their beat, William Gordon and William Middleton for being drunk and asleep on their beat, Alexander Robertson, Thomas McEvoy and Thomas Abbott for falling asleep on their beat, David Sharp for being in a pub while on duty and finally Alexander Raffin for improper conduct. In August a policeman was jailed for the terrible crime of picking berries from somebody’s garden when he was on duty. In November 1826 there was another case of police brutality when John Sharp, a Nethergate night watchman, used his staff to attack a young man, without apparent reason. With the other police as witnesses, the superintendent warned him that any further examples of violence would mean instant dismissal. The rules for police were plain: abide by every letter of the law or lose the position.
Despite these blips, the police force became established. By the middle of May 1825 there were six sergeants, four night patrols, six day patrols, thirty-six watchmen and a man who was paid the princely sum of five shillings a week to trim the watchman’s lanterns. Even more significantly, the presence of uniformed police in Dundee seemed to have pushed at least some of the criminal element out of the town. In April the people of Lochee met to discuss forming their own police force as the number of undesirables coming to the village had increased. The people decided to create twenty-four constables from local men, with a six-month term of office.
Thomas Abbott, who had been dismissed from the police for falling asleep, became a weaver but was soon accused of stealing twenty spindles of yarn. He claimed he bought it from Mr Peat, the foreman of the bleach field of Turnbull and Company. Peat had conveniently disappeared but Messenger-at-Arms Patrick Mackay arrested William Stewart for buying the yarn.
In the meantime, the new force and its associates tried to prove their worth. On 12th June 1825 the Scouringburn watchman, helped by the day patrol, put out a lodging house fire. When they forced their way into the two-roomed house they found forty people inside, with piles of straw the only beds on the earth floors. It was a reminder of the conditions in which some people in Dundee had to live. In September that same year Constable John Chaplain chased and arrested a notorious bad character named Scott, who had returned to Dundee after being banished. The uniformed men were beginning to show their teeth.
Dogs, Handcuffs and a Chewed Letter
The police were not well paid. In June Superintendent Home had suggested that the most efficient of the day patrol had earned a pay rise from 11/1d to 14/- a week. That was still not great money for men who were in the firing line the moment they stepped out the door and whose every move was watched by a critical and suspicious public. Even so, they were still allowed their idiosyncrasies. As late as August 1828, four years after the establishment of a professional, uniformed force, the Castle Street watchman took his collie dog with him as he walked his beat. It was still the watchman’s job to shout the hour, and the dog helped, barking along with his master. The people of Castle Street must have wondered if it was worth the money to have a dog yapping every hour from ten at night until four in the morning.
However, the Dundee sheriff officers were equally fallible. In August, Thomas Anderson and Thomas Marshall were sent to bring in a woman who had illegally left her position in service. It was a routine task, but they took a pair of handcuffs, and fortified themselves with a few refreshments before rapping at the woman’s door. Quicker witted than both the Sheriff ’s men, she dodged Anderson, grabbed the handcuffs and locked them around Marshall’s wrists before running way, holding the keys in triumph. Two policemen carried the discomfited Marshall to the cells
and left him there, still handcuffed. Presumably he was released when he sobered up.
Even so, by 1828 the Dundee police were more professional. At the beginning of December three furtive-looking men were drifting around the shops in the town centre, probing and looking but not actually buying. When they walked into Provost Brown’s shop in Castle Street, he sent a message to Superintendent Home. The superintendent ordered Sergeants Hardy and Strachan to bring them in. The provost’s instincts were correct, for when the sergeants dragged the men to the police office they found nine India silk handkerchiefs and a fur cap hidden in their clothes, all stolen from shops in Castle Street. As the men were searched, one, an Edinburgh cabinetmaker named John Smith, stuffed something in his mouth and tried to swallow it. Seizing Smith by the throat, Sergeant Hardy recovered a half-chewed letter.
The letter was from Smith’s father, and spoke of the ‘infernal police’, but the name may have been an alias, as the man who chewed letters also called himself John Brown. One of his companions, known as Charles MacDonald, had an alias of Peter Jack. MacDonald was a notorious man. His father was long dead but his mother had moved in with one of the more unsavoury characters who wandered the northern counties of Scotland, living by his wits, his fists and his light fingers. Termed the ‘Cock of the North’, this man was well known to the authorities. The relationship between MacDonald’s mother and the Cock of the North ended when he murdered her, and the Glasgow Circuit Court sentenced the Cock to be hanged. Their son continued the family tradition of lawlessness. The third man was William Cammuince and he seemed to be out of his depth among such characters.
This incident, perhaps minor in itself, demonstrates not only the sort of people the Dundee police had to deal with, but their efficiency in arresting them, and some of their methods. Perhaps they were crude by twenty-first century standards, but they were also relatively efficient. As they notched up successes, the police might have become more acceptable to the Dundee public.
The Adventures of Sergeant Jack
The Dundee Directory of 1829 records the names of some of these early police. It states that John Home was Superintendent of Police and the Procurator Fiscal of Court; William Dick was Surgeon and the sergeants included Alexander Dow, Thomas Hardy, John Low and William McRoberts; Alexander Donaldson was the Harbour Sergeant and James McDougal was the keeper of the magazine. Sometimes a name reaches through the murk of time to afford brief illumination to a period. One such name was Sergeant Jack, who looms out of obscurity in a few cases in the late 1820s and early 1830s, only to fade back into the murk of history.
In January 1829 Sergeant Jack arrested a man named Alexander MacDonald, a flax dresser in Monifieth, who had stolen a silver watch. Jack also retrieved the watch. Nearly exactly a year later he arrested an Aberdeen man who had come to try his luck in Dundee, and in February 1830 he searched through the Overgate for a well-known law breaker called George Keith who had already been banished from Forfarshire. Although no details have survived, Sergeant Jack found Keith hidden in a house in Rodger’s Close, Overgate, so there was either a tip-off or a thorough house-to-house search of that warren of narrow lanes and crowded houses. Either way, Sergeant Jack was doing his job in preserving the respectable of Dundee from the underworld.
Only a few months later Jack was again making the news when on one Friday in May he arrested three people under sentence of banishment. Jean Mitchell and Francis Wright were well-known as petty thieves, but Christina Scott had made her name as a hen stealer, a crime that would perhaps go unnoticed today. With nineteenth-century Dundonians far closer to their rural ancestors and rural roots than is often credited, hen keeping was quite common, both as a source of income and a dietary supplement, so hen stealing was a fairly widespread crime.
Trials and Triumphs of the Early Police Force
Even with such men, the early Dundee police could occasionally slip back to their old wayward ways. In early January 1830 an unnamed young flesher was working in Greenmarket Square when two sheriff officers and a posse of police officers grabbed him. Considering he was innocent of any crime, the flesher made a determined resistance, and the arrival of some burly shore porters to assist the forces of law and order did not make things any better. The flesher punched and wrestled and raked his boots down the shins of the porters, but eventually they dragged him to St Clements Lane and shoved him in a cell.
It was not until later that the prisoner was informed he had been arrested for being the father of an illegitimate child, a charge he denied. When the flesher’s father arrived and gave his name, the police realised they had the wrong man and released him, but it was a reminder that the police were still not perfect.
Sometimes it was either inexperience or naivety that let the police down. About two o’clock on a Sunday morning in February 1831, the constable on the West Port beat came across a makeshift ladder leaning against a wall in Young’s Close. The wall was one side of a small cul-de-sac with a single-storey house at the other side and no exit at the top, while the ladder consisted of a six-foot-long plank of wood with a rope attached in place of rungs. There was nothing in the close but a single water cask that stood in a corner. Realising that there was something wrong, the policeman returned to the West Port and summoned help, but re-entered Young’s Close before anybody arrived. Climbing the ladder, he saw a man in the close below and called out to him.
‘I’m coming up,’ the man said at once, but as the policeman waited, the man jumped onto the water cask, scrambled onto the roof of the house on the opposite side of the close and vanished. Rather than arrest a burglar, the policeman found only a set of housebreaking tools, but within a day or so he had been sacked for inefficiency.
At other times, the police were very successful. In the beginning of December 1830 the watchman at the Wards found a cattle drover sleeping in an outhouse and took him to the police office. When he was questioned, the drover claimed he had spent the night with a girl who had subsequently robbed him. Drovers were good targets for thieves, for they would take a drove of cattle to market, sell them and carry the money back to their employer. They were a hardy bunch, sleeping outside beside their cattle whatever the weather, but in common with many people from the country, they were not always wise to the tricks of the town.
Making a few enquiries, the police superintendent learned that three suspicious-looking people had caught the mail coach for Aberdeen. They had given false names and sat on the roof, the cheapest, most exposed and coldest seats. The superintendent knew the mother of one of the suspects lived in Arbroath, twenty miles up the coast. Accordingly he sent the redoubtable Sergeant Dow along with the drover on the next coach. Arbroath was a small place and strangers were easily seen, so it did not take Dow long to track down the three people who had recently arrived in the town. Arresting Gersham Elder, Barbara Elder and the local bad character Alison Watt, Sergeant Dow found £2 9/- in a drawer in the Elders’ house and another 20/- in Watt’s. Only ten shillings had been spent, and that on women’s clothing. What Watt learned next makes one wish for a time machine, or a nineteenth-century tape recorder as Gersham Elder said he had been the woman with whom the drover spent the evening. He had a very feminine voice and looks, dressed in women’s clothing and confessed he was in the habit of prowling Dundee in women’s clothing and performing acts that were well beyond decency. We will never know the full story.
Taking the Law into Their Own Hands
Even with the police on the streets, there were times when the Dundee public took the law into their own hands, often in indignation at some act of cruelty to a vulnerable person. As in every period, crowds of idle youths tended to congregate at certain places, and in Dundee during the early 1830s they chose the piazzas of the Town House. As this building was where much of the official business of the town was conducted, many people would feel uncomfortable passing so many youths. In February 1832 the jailer, Colin MacEwan, took matters upon himself and whipped a fourteen-year-old boy who refused to leave.
Not surprisingly, people objected to a child being attacked and gathered against the jailer. For a while the situation looked ugly for MacEwan, but some police commissioners rescued him, although he was taken to court and fined £2 2/-.
While older youths congregated at street corners and outside the Town House, gangs of younger children tended to annoy the street porters. They liked to jump on the handcarts the porters trundled around the streets and get a free lift, depending on the porter’s good nature and mighty muscles. However, not every porter was inclined to act as a free taxi service and in August Duncan Barland lost his temper with a girl who had jumped on his cart when he pushed it along the Murraygate. Grabbing the girl, he pulled her over his knee, lifted her skirt and spanked her soundly. When he released her, the girl ran away, howling. An indignant crowd complained and the case reached the court, where witnesses spoke of Barland’s quiet character and said the girl got no more than she deserved, but the porter was fined 5/- nonetheless.
Better Equipment
In January 1835, eleven years after they were formed, the Dundee police were given better uniforms and equipment. A lot of thought had gone into the improvements, and the experiences of the watchmen were taken into account. Off came the long tails of the night watchmen’s greatcoat, to be replaced by a shorter coat that was less cumbersome when they had to chase a law breaker. The hand-held lantern was also discarded in favour of one that was strapped to the body and equipped with a shutter, so enabling the watchman to approach a culprit without announcing his presence in a blaze of light.
The watchmen’s hat was also improved, so it was stronger and more waterproof, with a strap that fastened under the chin. Until these alterations there had been a set pattern to attacking the watchmen. First the attacker would break his lantern or knock it out of his hand, and when the watchmen tried to pick it up, the attacker would throw the long tails of his coat over his head and thump him on the back of the head or any other vulnerable part. Now, with more efficient lanterns and stouter hats, the watchmen were slightly better protected. It was a start.
A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee Page 14
