Whisky, Wars, Riots and Murder

by Malcolm Archibald

  In the meantime, the Lyons’ next stop was the Braemar Hotel in Braemar, where a lace shawl was the first thing to vanish. Janet Nicol of West Hartlepool was the legal owner, and she had left it in the drawing room on Saturday evening, but realised it was missing on the Sunday morning. She was not the only visitor to have property stolen that weekend. William Marchant of Richmond took his family to the Fife Arms Hotel in Braemar on 12 August. He had brought £200 in Bank of England notes with him and stayed in room number 14. Dowling was in room number 16. On the Sunday night Marchant put his money in his coat pocket and hung the coat on the back of the bedroom door.

  Suspicion fell on the quiet, solitary Joseph Dowling, who had left the hotel shortly after the theft was discovered. Originally Dowling’s wife had been expected to join him at the hotel, but she had not turned up. Dowling had left for the Deeside village of Ballater on the half past ten coach. Inspector George Crae of the Aberdeenshire Police was waiting for him at the railway station at Ballater and arrested him there and then. There was already some doubt about Dowling. Mr Henderson, the Chief Constable of the Edinburgh Police, had seen Dowling acting suspiciously around Register House and discovered that he was a failed businessman who kept bad company in London. When Inspector Crae searched his prisoner he found a pocketbook that fitted the description of that lost by Miller. That gave the police some proof of Dowling’s involvement and further enquiries revealed he had been seen talking to the self-styled Captain Lyon and his lady. The Aberdeen Police telegraphed their colleagues in the capital with their suspicions and when the police checked further they found the Lyons had stayed in the same hotel as Dowling in Edinburgh.

  In Braemar the Lyons had ordered a carriage and pair and had also headed for Ballater, where they had caught the same train to Aberdeen that Dowling had intended to travel on. The Lyons continued to the Palace Hotel in Edinburgh, where they had previously stayed. Although they had intimated their intention of remaining some time, when the proprietor put up a notice warning the guests that there had been a spate of thefts in hotels, the Lyons very quickly said they were going to leave.

  To the police it appeared that the Lyons were about to abscond, so on 16 August 1883 Captain Henderson and Detective Inspector William McEwan came to the Palace Hotel. The police escorted the Lyons to a small room and sat them down. Henderson pointed out that they had been in or near every hotel where there had been a theft and said it was either an ‘unfortunate coincidence’ or they had been directly involved. Henderson said that Lyon should name somebody in Britain who could vouch for his ‘respectability’. At this point Lyon claimed his US citizenship and demanded the right to see the US Consul. Although Lyon produced letters of credit from a bank in Boston, Massachusetts, the Edinburgh Police produced a telegram from the Aberdeen Police that stated that they had a warrant for the arrest of both Lyon and his wife. They were taken separately from the hotel to the police office.

  When they were searched, Captain Lyon had two pairs of small curling tongs, or pincers, which could be used as a picklock, in his pocket. When these were tested, they were found to easily open the doors of the Braemar and Oban hotels. He also had some Bank of England notes. The numbers of the notes corresponded with the numbers Arthur Miller said had been stolen from him in Oban.

  When Thorpe was questioned she admitted she was not Lyon’s wife. The police searched her but she had little money in her possession. However, a man named George Calver claimed he had found a roll of seven Bank of England ten-pound notes lying on the ground in Bank Street at the head of the Mound. The police thought it possible that Thorpe could have disposed of the money on her way between the Palace Hotel and the police office in the High Street. However, Calver was a bit of an opportunist and rather than give the notes to the police, he handed them to a man named Albert, who reset them. Calver gained £35, exactly half the value.

  The Lyons were taken to Oban to be interrogated by the local police about the hotel robbery. When Sergeant Donald Cameron of the Argyll Police searched through Thorpe’s possessions, he found Janet Nicol’s distinctive black shawl in a trunk of her clothing. It seemed that the evidence was mounting.

  The case came to trial in the High Court in Edinburgh in November 1883. The suspects’ stories did not quite match. Lyon claimed that Thorpe was his wife and he had given her any money she had. Lyon also said a bank in Piccadilly in London had issued the banknotes to him. Eliza Thorpe made no claim to marriage with Lyon, but said the two of them had been travelling together through Britain and the Continent for the past three years. Dowling merely said he was in no way connected to any hotel theft.

  On summing up, the judge, Lord Young, pointed out that the charge of stealing the diamond ring had been withdrawn, and that although the pincers could be used as a picklock, the police had never tested them on Marchant’s, Beith’s or Thomson’s doors. Lord Young also said that there was no physical evidence to say that Thorpe had been involved in any theft: the evidence that the shawl was found in her trunk he conveniently brushed aside. As far as Dowling was concerned, Lord Young agreed he had been in the Fife Arms Hotel, but there was no evidence at all to connect him to the robbery. The fact that he knew Lyon and Thorpe was not in dispute, but neither was it a criminal offence. Lyon and Thorpe had been guests in quite another hotel and there was no evidence to say they had ever entered the Fife Arms.

  With the judge clearly advising in favour of Thorpe, the jury took only ten minutes to find her not guilty. She kissed Lyon soundly before she walked clear of the court. Lyon was found guilty of stealing £45 from the hotel in Oban and was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude, with the judge saying he ‘had gone into the hotel as a thief, and a thief was about the meanest character that existed.’ Dowling was found guilty of reset and given one year in jail, with hard labour. Lord Young regretted that he could not sentence him to more.

  Robbing a Vagrant

  Some robberies caught the public attention. Such a robbery occurred in February 1886 when a group of men and women stole £200 from the house of Charles Fraser at Ballifeary. The factor that made this robbery interesting was that Fraser was a vagrant. He had spent much of his life just wandering around the country begging. People had given him a penny here and there, and sometimes they had handed him a small packet of meal, which he had sold. He had kept the money he made, storing it as he wandered, and then putting it in the Royal Bank of Scotland. In 1885 he rented a house at Ballifeary from a carpenter named Neil Cameron.

  Fraser was careful to keep the money in the bank, but one day he drank too much and the police were called. Cameron and a woman named Margaret Macrae told him that if he was arrested again the police might take all the money he had in his bank, so Fraser withdrew over £200. He counted it out on the night of 25 February and then retired to bed. After a few moments the bedroom door opened and Margaret Macrae, heavily disguised, entered. She persuaded Fraser to hand over his money. The woman subsequently vanished.

  However, the police made enquiries and discovered there had been a conspiracy to rob Fraser: Cameron, Farquhar Macrae, Margaret Macrae and a husband and wife team of William and Christina Macrae.

  As Margaret Macrae was an aged widow she was given two months in jail while the others got three months.

  Sweeping Up the Loot

  William Daly was a chimney sweep with a secondary occupation: he was also a thief, which netted him the resources to live the high life. On the night of 18 August 1888 he noticed that the back window of the Royal Ordnance Hotel in Inverness was open. The temptation was too much and he slipped in to see what he could find. Within a few moments he had pocketed five shillings and a bottle of brandy. He left undetected and happy. Two nights later he again saw the window was unlocked so slid it open and slipped inside. This time he found another unattended bottle of brandy and a box of biscuits, as well as a small bundle of documents he thought he may be able to sell at a later date. However, his propensity for food and drink proved his undoing on this occasio
n.

  He found a table, spread a selection of cold meat and biscuits on it, opened a bottle of whisky to help wash things down and settled himself happily for a midnight feast. And that was how the police found him. He was given thirty days in jail to cure him of his delights in free hotel fare.

  Housebreaking

  Sometimes the thief just saw his opportunity and snatched at it, but at other times there were people who got into a habit of robbery. In November 1899 John Long was a labourer in Inverness but he had a second occupation of housebreaking. He was selective in his targets and concentrated on Falcon Square, where the Eastgate Shopping Centre now stands. Long was a fast worker, with eight robberies in the space of a few days. He preferred to rob offices and got away with a little over £10 in cash, as well as an eclectic selection of shoes, screwdrivers, keys, a pistol, a silver pocket flask and a number of old coins.

  The Inverness Police knew Long of old as a thief and a robber, and were soon knocking at his door. He appeared before the sheriff court in early February 1899 and Sheriff Scott Moncrieff sentenced him to nine months with hard labour.

  Highway Robbery in Shetland

  On the evening of Saturday, 7 January 1899, William Laurensen, a member of the Royal Naval Reserve, was walking home to Delting. He was returning from a drill evening at Fort Charlotte and was pretty pleased, as he had just drawn his pay. He reached Girlata, about ten miles from Lerwick, and was on a lonely stretch of the road when three men loomed through the gloom. When he asked what they wanted, two of them attacked him.

  Laurensen fought back. He smacked one of them over the head with his walking stick so hard that the stick broke and punched another, but the odds were too great against him. The man he hit with the stick pulled a knife and ripped open Laurensen’s coat, then plunged his hand inside his pocket and stole £14. Once they had the money, all three men fled.

  Once Laurensen recovered, he returned to Lerwick and reported the attack to the police.

  Robbery and theft was as much part of life in the Highlands as anywhere else in the country.

  4

  Riots

  Before the twentieth century, riots were common throughout the country. There were a multitude of reasons to riot, from protests about bread shortages to expressions of political dissatisfaction. In the Highlands many of the riots occurred when people objected to the landlord attempting to remove them from their homes. The century opened with a targeted riot.

  At the extreme south-west of the Highlands, Kintyre points its green finger toward Ireland. This peninsula has experienced more than its share of battle, famine and disease, and the opening of the nineteenth century saw it once again on the cusp of a disaster. In February 1801 there was hunger in the hinterland, so when ships carried grain away from the main town of Campbeltown, the locals decided to intervene. It was not so much a riot to destroy property, but a gathering of very concerned and hungry people trying to gain the means of subsistence by the only method they could. A number of people were arrested and ordered to appear before the Circuit court at Inveraray. When one of those involved, Duncan Sellers, failed to arrive he was outlawed, John Beith was given two months in Inveraray Tolbooth, Hugh Lamont six weeks and Mary Darroch one month in the same place.

  That was not the only riot to take place in Campbeltown. In March 1813, when Britain was heavily involved in her life and death struggle with Bonaparte’s Empire as well as sparring with the pugnacious Republic of the United States, the Royal Navy sent Midshipman James Hendry from Glasgow to Campbeltown to press as many seamen as he could. The Impress service was never popular and when they grabbed a number of seamen, the local population rose in protest. The mob gathered piles of stones and started a barrage against the gang, who retaliated with a volley of musketry. A fourteen-year-old girl named McLean was shot and killed, and Hendry had to stand trial at the High Court.

  Soldiers on the Rampage

  Throughout the nineteenth century the British Army had a large Irish contingent, partly because of the number of regiments based in and recruiting in Ireland, and partly because of the lack of employment in that country. The Irish made excellent soldiers but, in common with all other redcoats in the British Army, they had a tendency to alcoholic overindulgence. There were occasions when this heavy drinking resulted in trouble for the town in which they were stationed. One of the expected days for Irish soldiers to seek alcoholic solace was St Patrick’s Day, 17 March, and in 1809 the town of Perth, at the southern fringe of the Highlands, was rocked by a sudden explosion of Irish soldiery.

  There were two troops of Dragoons stationed in the town and the English and Scots soldiers joined the Irish trying to drain the pubs dry. Fighting drunk, they armed themselves with cudgels and roared into the streets, attacking anybody who happened to get in their way. Men, women, young or old, the Dragoons were not particular who they knocked down. They chased people into their houses, assaulted shopkeepers who were in the act of closing up for the night and generally made a nuisance of themselves.

  However, the military were not the only people who rioted in the Highlands, often with genuine reason.

  The Durness Riot

  In 1841 the women of the Ceannabeinne area of Durness in the far north-west of Sutherland defied the sheriff officers who tried to issue eviction notices. The township had fourteen houses containing fifty people and was a thriving community, but the landlord, James Anderson, wanted the people off his land. As so often during the Clearances, the sheriff officer came with the writ of eviction when all the men were absent, possibly cutting bent grass – marram grass – for thatching.

  A woman climbed the hill Cnoc nan Uamhag and shouted a warning that James Campbell the sheriff officer was coming. The writ he carried ordered the people out of their homes within forty-eight hours. The women had other ideas. They grabbed hold of him, kindled a fire beside the road and made Campbell burn the writ, with one woman named McPherson allegedly holding his wrist so that he had no choice but to burn it himself.

  The people knew that the authorities would not let matters rest there so a number took to the hills and lived rough in a cave for months. Superintendent Philip McKay of the Dornoch Police was the next man to visit the township, and it is possible that he wanted to persuade them to submit peacefully. Instead the men and women greeted him with a shower of stones and abuse that chased him back. To help him on his way, a piper played ‘Caberfeidh’ as a reminder that the men of this area had played more than their part in national and international wars.

  McKay tried to whistle up support. He got a Messenger-at-Arms and three ancient veteran soldiers. The soldiers were sent ahead to reconnoitre, but when they reached Hope Ferry they realised the level of opposition and soon hurried back to Tongue and advised McKay not to go into the Durness area.

  McKay was nothing if not persistent, and he signed up fourteen special police to back him. The whole attacking force gathered at Durine Inn at Durness on 17 September, all prepared to serve the eviction writs on the inhabitants. About 300 people from the scattered townships of the far north-west gathered in opposition. They formed up near the inn but did nothing aggressive at first. About forty-eight men tried to reason with Campbell the sheriff officer first, asking that the evictions not be carried out on the Sabbath, but Campbell was having none of it.

  By that year the Highlanders knew that resistance was usually countered by the landlords calling up police or military reinforcements and ultimately failed. Even so, the Durness people were not prepared to do nothing and slink quietly away. At about ten at night a gathering of men attacked, burst into the inn, disarmed the police and sent them away.

  Campbell, the sheriff officer happy to evict women and children from their homes, was not so happy when faced with men. He fled and hid amidst the rocks. McKay and the Procurator Fiscal tried to remain and tough it out, but the locals did not want such people in their neighbourhood and escorted them away from Durness. As so often before, an initial victory over an evicting landlord
only postponed the inevitable. Sheriff Lumsden threatened to bring the 53rd Regiment from Edinburgh to force the evictions, but this did not happen. There was an official investigation, and some of the press backed the people of the threatened township, but in May 1842 Ceannabeinne was cleared of its people. However, the tenants at nearby Durine and Songomore were allowed to remain.

  Today there is a trail and some interpretation boards at Ceannabeinne, telling something of the story of the Durness Riot, and the lonely wind soughs softly through the ruins of what was once a place filled with love and laughter.

  There were many such justified riots as the people of the Highlands resisted mass evictions, but in other places in the Highlands rioting seemed to be a way of life.

  Rioting Troubles

  Beauly, February 1847. During the destitution years of the Hungry Forties there was a ship loaded to carry grain away from the town. Fearing starvation, the local people objected. When a number of carts arrived to carry away the grain, the people grabbed control of them and threw one over the edge of the quay. The drivers backed away quickly and called for help.

  The authorities reacted by calling in the army, and seventy men of the 76th Foot marched over from Fort George. Faced with the massed muskets and glittering bayonets of the redcoats, any resistance faded away and five men and one woman were arrested and taken to Inverness Jail. The rest of the town could only look on in hungry despair as the grain ship sailed away.

  There were also grain riots in Burghead and Elgin in February 1847. In early March the crowd at Fowlis prevented a shipment of grain leaving, for the famine struck the West Highlands. That same year in Invergordon a grain ship was ready to leave but a mob swarmed aboard during the night, unloaded the grain and hauled the carts from the pier to discourage any further attempts. As usual, the authorities called in the army. Other ports along the coast of Ross were similarly affected.