Whisky, Wars, Riots and Murder

by Malcolm Archibald

  The Hebrideans called the sequel the Sabhaid Mhor, the Big Fight. According to the Hebridean version, the fighting lasted days and there were stabbings as well as sundry other injuries, with men from both sides being thrown into the harbour. Shopkeepers locked their doors and put up shutters, people crossing the bridge were knocked down and the town was in general fear.

  This bridge, built in 1877, occupies the site over which Hebrideans and east coast fishermen fought in 1859

  © Author’s Collection

  The Hebridean version claims that the police arrested fourteen-year-old Malcolm MacLeod as well as a number of other men from Lewis, but did not arrest anybody from Wick. The Hebrideans were unhappy at this situation and one, Donald Mackenzie, whistled up the crew of his boat, unstopped the mast and used it to batter down the door of the local jail so the prisoners could escape. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Hebridean fishermen, some of them fresh from a Free Church service, mobbed the streets of Wick, hurled stones at the windows of the courthouse and generally caused mayhem.

  The Wick authorities swore in around 150 Special Constables, who attacked the Hebrideans as they clustered around the courthouse. The Specials chased the Hebrideans across Bridge Street to the Pulteneytown side of the river, where the Hebrideans broke down a fence to make weapons. About eleven at night they charged back over the bridge and there was another full-scale fight with the Specials, with injuries on both sides before the Hebrideans returned back to Pulteneytown. Captain Macdonald, master of the revenue cutter Princes Royal, sailed to Wick from Ackergill Bay, armed fifteen of his crew and prepared to intervene on the side of the Specials, but the trouble died down overnight before he was required.

  Some of the Specials used their batons with vicious force on anybody who looked like a Hebridean, including men with Bibles in their hands as they walked to church. In retaliation, the Lewis men targeted anybody who did not speak Gaelic, with the Specials being their favoured victims.

  According to folklore, one man, Robert Macdonald, was celebrated for his strength. He was said to have broken up herring barrels to make staves as weapons for the Lewismen. Hebridean folklore, which is often as accurate as any history book, follows the adventures of this reputed strongman. When Macdonald heard the police were looking for him, he ran from Wick and tried to hitch a lift on a carriage and pair. The driver ignored him, so Macdonald leapt in, threw the driver and passenger out and drove the carriage to Poolewe on the west coast. He caught the ship to Stornoway but had to go into hiding when he heard the Island Police were also searching for him. He eventually went to sea and was drowned in the Thames.

  The less sensational accounts of the riot say that of the thousands of Highlanders and Hebrideans in Wick, only about 150 were involved in the continuation of the riot, but 150 angry islanders would be a formidable foe. There were also rumours at the time that the Hebridean fishermen in Lybster would also cause trouble, but that proved unfounded. Men from Lewis were suspected of being the most prominent of the rioters.

  Not surprisingly, many of the townsfolk locked themselves in their houses and did not venture into the streets while the bands of angry Hebrideans roamed around for the next few days, growling against the Specials. Some Wick men bought or borrowed pistols for their own protection. The sheriff requested military help and 100 men of the York Rifle Regiment sailed from Edinburgh in the steamer Prince Consort, augmented by the bluejackets of HMS Jackal and the crew of Princess Royal, with the Specials doubled to 300 men. It was not until the authorities called in both military and spiritual help in the person of the Reverend George Mackay of Tongue that the riot simmered to a close. Mackay must have been a brave man to venture into the war zone.

  After a few days of seeming quiet, the trouble broke out again the following Saturday, with a nastier – even sadistic – twist. While Wick itself remained quiet, after nine that night a host of east coast fishermen had gone on the rampage in Pulteneytown armed with knives. Eleven of the islanders had been stabbed; one man had three wounds, including two in the scrotum, and others had their faces slashed. Many of the Hebridean boats were sitting in the harbour and crowds of youths and men stoned them as they lay windbound and helpless. The Hebrideans retaliated, of course, and the whole town was a mess of fighting fishermen from the east and west coast.

  When Sheriff Fordyce heard the news, he tried to get across to view events for himself, but battling bodies blocked the bridge. Injured east coast men, often drunk and usually bleeding, came back in a steady stream, and the sheriff knew he had to call for help. The steamer Jackal landed a body of soldiers, backed by bluejackets from Princess Royal, and while the police cleared the stone-throwers, the military restored order, if not tranquillity, to the streets.

  While the original riots had led to indignation against the Hebrideans, the ugly stabbings had turned the sympathy around and now the decent people of Wick sympathised with the Gaels. On the Sunday the police arrested a fisherman named Reid, who they suspected of being involved in the stabbings. After that last vicious flurry the town seemed to be shocked into calmness. There were no more major riots in Wick.

  However, Wick was not the only Highland town that experienced the wrath of rioting fishermen. That same year of 1859 there was trouble in Stornoway when three police – all the force the authorities could muster – had to cope alone. They wrestled a number of fishermen into custody and held them in their own houses until they could be more safely lodged in jail. In 1863 there were 205 arrests in Stornoway, mainly herring fishermen, so they were not a breed renowned for their quiet and orderly habits.

  Rioting seemed to have died down as the nineteenth century wore on, but there were other crimes in the Highlands, and the law-abiding majority needed some force to protect them.

  5

  The Highland Police

  As of 1 April 2013, Police Scotland is the national police force of Scotland. It consists of a number of divisions, including the Highlands and Islands, Argyll and West Dunbartonshire, and Tayside. All of these areas include parts of the old Highlands. This chapter will attempt to examine the growth of the police forces that covered the areas of the Highlands and Islands.

  Police in the nineteenth-century Highlands had a difficult time. For a start, the terrain was against them, with tiny communities scattered across hundreds of square miles of wild country, so one officer had a huge area to police. Secondly, there was the nature of the crime, with whisky distilling and poaching occurring in some of the most remote areas, where a solitary bobby was unlikely to tread. Thirdly, there was the nature of the policeman’s lot in supporting sheriff officers in evicting tenants across the land. Such actions did not make the police popular, and nineteenth-century policing depended on information and support provided by the public.

  Assaulting the Police

  The early police were often subject to assaults by disgruntled members of the public, but the authorities were aware of the problem. In October 1832 Hugh Lumsden of Pitcaple, Sheriff of Sutherland, held a criminal court at Dornoch. During the trial of a number of people for various assaults, Lumsden commented that the most serious had been an attack on ‘officers of the law in Assynt’. He mentioned in melodramatic language that if there was any area where officers deserved protection it was Assynt, as there had recently been a nasty murder there of a peddler named Murdoch Grant. Lumsden continued saying that if it was not for the officers of the law ‘the blood of the innocents might have been still streaming in the mountains of Assynt, calling aloud but in vain for vengeance’. Despite the poetic rhetoric, the message was clear.

  A typical example of an attack on the law was in September 1833, when Colin Macgregor of Little Green, Inverness, was found guilty of assaulting a watchman in Inverness and sentenced to nine months at the Circuit court.

  Even later in the century the police were often in danger from assault. For example, on Monday, 17 October 1878, the Inverness Police were escorting a prisoner from the police court to the prison when two men, D
uncan Macdonald and James Bain, rushed them and tried to rescue the prisoner. The police resisted and there was a stern struggle. The two escorting policemen eventually won and took the prisoner to the jail in front of an excited crowd, then pursued Bain and Macdonald through the streets of Inverness. The two would-be rescuers ended up before Bailie Macdonald, who gave them three months with hard labour.

  Early Forces

  While the major cities and towns of Scotland formed their police forces early in the century, the forces of the rural Highlands were decades later. In the early nineteenth century each local authority was permitted but not required to create its own police force. The first official police force in the Highlands was that of Inverness-shire, which began patrolling on Hogmany 1840. Given the propensity for excessive drinking on that night they presumably experienced quite a baptism of fire. The force of nineteen men did not cover the town of Inverness itself until 1841, when it merged with the town police, only to split again in 1847 and finally reunite in 1968.

  Ross-shire had two police forces, one for the west and one for the east side of a county that stretched from coast to stormy coast. The Wester Ross force was formed in 1850 and based at Dingwall, the old Viking capital only twelve miles from Inverness but some forty miles from the west coast, while the Easter Ross force was created a few years later, with its base at Tain. The Ross-shire Police was also responsible for the island of Lewis, with its strong and sometimes turbulent fishing population, while Inverness-shire had to try and police Skye, Harris and the other Outer Hebrides.

  Sutherland, the old Southland of the Norse, was always a place with a mind of its own. In common with all other areas of the Highlands, at the beginning of the century there was no overall police force to care for this county of huge hills, vast distances and isolated communities, but many of the villages had a limited local force to watch for thieving and the occasional verbal or physical dispute.

  Dornoch was one such independent-minded burgh with its own police force. By 1828 a man named James Stewart was the resident police officer, with a salary of £25 a year; he lasted until 1841, when Philip Mackay took his place. In 1844 John Sutherland, the Helmsdale sheriff officer, became police officer, with the princely wage of £15 a year. Two years later Golspie got its own policeman at £10 a year and in 1847 Philip Mackay at Dornoch was promoted, or at least titled as Superintendent, which was the normal rank for the chief constable.

  In 1845 Sheriff Lumsden put forward a proposal for a police force for the whole of Sutherland, but there was no movement in this direction yet. The piecemeal, village-by-village policing continued. Bonar Bridge was next to have a constable in December 1846. In 1853 Scourie was given a police constable, making the Sutherland force five men under a superintendent. Their primary tasks were chasing vagrants out of their area, arresting drunks and stopping casual brawls, as well as transporting their prisoners to the jail at Dornoch. The parish of Tongue joined the policed areas in 1854 with a policeman at Farr, and in May 1857 a new superintendent, Peter Ewan, took over.

  It was not until the 1840s that the Perthshire County Police was formed, with its headquarters at Marshall Place in Perth. The force of thirty-three men had to cover all of northern Perthshire, preventing poaching and illicit whisky making, as well as the common crimes of theft and assault. As seems common with all early Victorian police forces, many of the officers were heavy drinkers so there was a steady stream of dismissals over the first few months of the force’s existence.

  Argyllshire was another area of tiny communities with single officers, divided by wild hills and lochs. For instance, Hugh Livingstone policed Ballachulish in the 1840s, while Colin Campbell looked after Duror and John McGregor was based in Port Appin. He was the first of a line of dedicated family men who lived and worked in that area.

  General Police Act

  In 1857 the General Police Act made it law that each burgh and county should either have its own force or combine with a neighbour to create a unitary force. To organise and control the police, the position of Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary was established with the authority and power to hold an annual inspection of each force and issue a report to the government. If the force was efficient then the government would pay for a quarter of the uniforms and wages, so there was pressure for good quality policing. This Act took effect from March 1858. The Act suggested that the county should provide uniforms and each officer should be paid a wage fitting to their responsibilities and rank in society and also that they should be decently housed. They were to be ‘respectable’, which was the buzzword of the nineteenth century.

  Nineteenth-century society was multilayered but with one fundamental split between respectable and non-respectable. This split did not depend on money – a working man could be respectable – but on lifestyle. A respectable person would be hardworking, conscientious and sober and would preferably attend church. A policeman with all these qualities would not only be considered reliable, but he would also be seen as displaying the values of the Establishment to the people in his area.

  Public support was invaluable in the policeman’s job, for he depended on people giving him information about happenings when he was not present. However, in many parts of the Highlands it was years before the police were accepted. The policeman was often seen as a uniformed representative of the landlord class rather than a guardian against crime. That feeling was particularly strong in the crofting areas where it was part of the police duties to escort sheriff officers and other officials when they served eviction notices. Such a feeling was detrimental to police efficiency.

  The Black Isle, that peninsula just north of Inverness, had no efficient police until the Cromartyshire Constabulary was founded in 1869. The independent-minded people of the Black Isle chose to ignore the demands of the 1857 Police Act. Twenty years after its foundation the Cromarty Police merged with the Ross Police to form the Ross and Cromarty Constabulary. The town of Dornoch, with its tiny population, did not have its own police force.

  At the time of the 1857 Act, the Sutherland Police comprised the chief constable, with wages of £150 a year including house and horse, one sergeant and seven constables who were paid about £39 a year, plus uniform and footwear allowance. The county of Sutherland was divided into eight police districts, with one policeman for each. This miniscule force had to police a landmass of well over a million acres, with each man supplied with a uniform, a baton, a lantern, handcuffs, tape measure and a pair of compasses. They were banned from entering pubs when on duty, as would be expected.

  Sheep Stealing

  Sheep stealing was obviously a major worry as the 1859 Rules and Instructions were particular that the Sutherland Police watched for that crime. Sheep farms were not popular, particularly where they competed with crofting for land, and sheep were sometimes mutilated as well as stolen. In the 1830s there were threats against sheep farms on Skye posted on church doors. In 1841 the Reverend Norman MacLeod said that the hungry people of Skye stole sheep for food and mentioned the possibility of ‘establishing a rural police throughout the island’.

  Cases of sheep stealing occurred right through the century, with wildly varying sentences for those found guilty. For instance, in the Inverness Spring Circuit in 1852 there were two cases of sheep stealing, with one man sentenced to seven and one to fifteen years’ transportation. At the Dingwall Sheriff Court of May 1883 Alexander Matheson, a Moray shepherd, was found guilty of stealing sheep from the hills above Lochcarron on the west coast. He was given only six months in jail, yet in September 1878 Alexander Clark was found guilty at the Inverness Circuit Court of stealing forty-eight sheep and lambs from a farm at Easter Duthie in Inverness-shire and was given seven years’ penal servitude.

  The police were also to watch for tinkers and ‘thimblers, cardsharpers, and gamblers of all kinds, and do all in their power to prevent such parties from imposing upon or defrauding the public by unlawful games or deceptive procedure or acting’. Clearly, the police were ex
pected to do a great deal of work with very limited resources.

  Caithness, at the northern tip of the country, had the problem of a host of fishermen descending on the coastal towns during the herring season, with the clash of cultures between the Hebrideans and the Lowlanders sometimes leading to bloody confrontations. The force at Pulteneytown, beside Wick, was not always the most efficient in the country. Wick itself decided to have a separate force of two men, including a drummer, but that experiment did not work and after limping along for ten years in 1873 it merged with the Caithness force.

  Having so many small forces spread over a huge area begs a simple question: how efficient were the men? One incident will serve to show the mettle of at least one of these Highland policemen.

  Constable Roderick McKenzie

  Although theft and robbery were much more prevalent in the larger towns and cities, the smaller communities of the Highlands also experienced their share of dishonesty. In the winter of 1862 and 1863 the northernmost counties were haunted by a wandering burglar. On 17 February this man struck the farm of Balinleod in Westerdale, a few miles south of Halkirk in Caithness. He broke open the door and stole a number of shirts and a silver watch.