Whisky, Wars, Riots and Murder

by Malcolm Archibald

  John Frost, the head gamekeeper of Islay House, stated that on 23 July he was out looking for poachers’ nets at Lochindaal. There was a line of five nets together, which was the formation normally used when poaching salmon. They were not much use, according to Frost, for catching mullet, which were the only other fish in Lochindaal. Not only that, but Frost also produced a letter that Kennedy was alleged to have written. It said:

  I admit to have set two nets within two hundred yards of the head of the loch but never in the channel. If Major Wise will give me a reasonable wage to look after loch and river, I will guarantee you that none of them will set their nets there … as the saying is you can watch a thief but you cannot watch a liar. You will oblige me by consulting Major Wise and if my offer is not reasonable he will do me a favour by buying these two nets. I would rather burn them than sell them to any of the Bowmore loafers.

  There was evidence from other fishermen. Donald McFee and George McDiarmid agreed that the nets were salmon nets, while John McArthur said that nets like that were in common usage all along the west coast. John McNab of Inveraray said that salmon nets had a wider mesh. Sheriff Campion said he believed the nets had been set to catch salmon and fined both men ten shillings, while the nets were forfeit.

  In April 1899 four fishermen from Cromarty appeared at Dingwall Sheriff Court charged with illegally trawling for white fish in the shallow water and with their nets on the seabed. This type of action was presumed to damage the spawning ground of fish. The men – Andrew Finlayson, known as Pinder; Hugh Maclennan, known as Bochan; Don Maclennan, known as Doal; and John Skinner, known as Johnder – objected strongly when the water bailiffs challenged them. They lifted sticks and attacked the bailiffs so that three of them were injured. They were found guilty and fined two guineas with an alternative of seven days in jail.

  The French Connection

  Smuggling was not confined to whisky distilling in the remote glens. There was also smuggling into the country by sea. In 1878 the French lugger Amelia was caught off the coast of Sutherland. On 10 July the crew – five men and a boy – were charged at a Justice of the Peace Court at Thurso. The same captain had been tried at the same court three years previously. The captain was charged with smuggling fifteen and a half casks of spirits, three contained gin and the remainder brandy, with an average of eleven gallons in every cask. Each of the adult crew was fined £100, while the vessel was seized by the coastguard and the crew taken to Thurso Jail.

  French vessels were also sometimes involved in fishing disputes when they strayed inside British territorial waters. In May 1883 the masters of three French fishing boats, Julen, Maillard and Bourgoin, were arrested in Scalloway Bay by revenue officers for illegal fishing, tried in Lerwick and fined between £1 and £3. One of the crew was also fined for smuggling.

  False Registration Numbers

  Fishing disputes were quite common in that period, but different methods of fishing creating anger. At about dawn on Sunday, 21 July 1895, an Aberdeen steam trawler, Commodore, Captain Adam Sutherland, fished near the island of Eunay Beg in East Loch Roag. This was a sea loch of Lewis in the Western Isles and therefore inside the three-mile limit where trawling was banned. Every fishing vessel had to have its name and identification number prominently displayed, but Captain Sutherland tried to hide the identity of his vessel by placing covers over the bow and stern. However, a number of local fishermen were watching him and as he was trawling away their livelihood they kept a close eye on him until about five in the evening.

  When Commodore anchored in the loch, the Lewis fishermen sailed out, clambered on board and spoke to members of her crew. The local fishermen reported that Captain Adam had placed black canvas with the false number ‘A. 77’ over Commodore’s proper identification number. They also saw that the canvas cover on the port side had been taken away and the number ‘GN. 31’ was underneath. The fishermen asked the crew why they concealed their identity and one said they ‘sometimes did that sort of thing’.

  The case came to the sheriff court in Stornoway in October that year and Commodore’s crew denied they had ever trawled in Loch Roag or that their numbers had been concealed. However, they freely admitted that they had been anchored there.

  Sheriff Campbell found the charge of covering the official number not proven but decided they were guilty of trawling. The maximum penalty allowed was a £100 fine. The sheriff fined Sutherland £50 or thirty days. Sutherland chose to go to jail.

  There were many disputes between trawlers and the authorities. That same October another Aberdeen trawler was captured by HMS Jackal while illegally fishing in Lybster Bay off Caithness. The trawler was taken into Aberdeen and her starboard gear was seized by the authorities.

  The sea was as prone to crime as was the land.

  7

  A Maelstrom of Murder

  Murder is the monarch of crimes. It continues to fascinate many years after the event, and is discussed long after the protagonists have gone. Given their relatively small population, the nineteenth-century Highlands and Islands had more than their share of murders, some of which were soon forgotten, but others which were talking points the length and breadth of the country and still have the ability to intrigue today.

  Death of a Soldier

  The nineteenth century began with war as Britain faced the military muscle of Revolutionary France. Most eighteenth-century wars had been fought by professionals with the only civilians directly involved being seamen, merchants or those unfortunate enough to be on the path of marching armies, but this was different. The vibrant French Republic had put a whole nation in arms and Britain strained to match her. The Royal Navy expanded to protect the trade routes and convoy the army to various trouble spots around the globe. For a while Britain became an armed camp as new regiments were formed for the regular army and men were encouraged to join the militia and yeomanry. Inevitably, with so many armed men trained to violence, there was some friction with the civilian population. Sometimes, however, the soldiers were the victims and not the perpetrators of aggression.

  On 2 June 1812 Captain Charles Munro, late of the 42nd Highlanders, the famous Black Watch, was in George Thomson’s shop and smithy in Chapeltown. A ship’s carpenter named Robert Ferguson was already there, and the two argued. When Ferguson called Munro a ‘damned bugger’ and added more insulting comments, Munro reacted by grabbing Ferguson by the collar and pushing him outside the smithy. The bystanders watched, shrugged and continued with their own lives. It had been a minor incident and they thought it was closed and forgotten.

  Ferguson, however, was not finished yet. To be dismissed with such contempt rankled. He was outside for only a few moments before he returned, reached inside his pocket and produced a knife, with which he attacked Munro. There was no warning and little chance for Munro to defend himself. The officer backed off and cracked the knuckles of Ferguson’s knife hand with his cane. Faced with a man with a knife, Munro could only stand with his back to the wall, but Ferguson got under the swing of his arm and thrust the knife through Munro’s coat and into his side. The wound was small but so deep and dangerous that the intestines seeped out. Munro shouted, ‘I’m gone. Take hold of the man,’ and with one hand trying to hold in his intestines, he followed Ferguson as he retreated back outside.

  Badly hurt, Munro shouted out, ‘Why don’t you seize the murderer?’, which may have been the signal that caused Ferguson to run, but somebody grabbed him, threw him to the ground and grabbed the knife.

  As a neighbour, Mrs Thomson, helped Munro into her house, the wounded man said, ‘I did not think the man would do this to me. God knows I would not do this to him. We had but a few words and I only put my hands to the back of his neck to throw him out for insolent language.’

  When it was realised how badly Munro was hurt, a man hurried to Dr George McDonald in Cromarty. The doctor came over, opened the wound and replaced the intestines inside Munro, who said he ‘wished he had fallen on the field of battle’. Howe
ver, twenty-eight hours after being stabbed, Munro died.

  At his trial, Ferguson claimed self-defence, and a witness named John Home said that Munro was a ‘warm-hearted man, although rather rash when anything vexed him’.

  Lord Hermand was the judge and he sentenced Ferguson to be hanged on 30 October, and his body given to the anatomists. The execution was delayed for two weeks due to an election, but whether this was a kindness or a cruelty to Ferguson is hard to tell. He was hanged instead on 13 November and met his end with considerable bravery.

  Murder or Not Murder: That Is the Question

  Not all cases were cut and dried, with simple solutions. Often there was considerable doubt about the innocence or guilt of the accused parties. Although all the evidence seemed to indicate a murder, there remained just enough doubt for the jury to hesitate to declare somebody guilty. The Caithness murder case of 1830 was a case in point, where initial damning evidence given by witnesses was later thrown into dispute.

  The killing had taken place years earlier, on 2 December 1825 in Wick. James Small was mate of the vessel Rose, which was then berthed at Pulteneytown, a fishing village that was then separate from Wick. On the morning of 3 December he was found dead, lying on his back on the ground behind the quay. His face was black, as if he had been strangled, there was a deep gash on his forehead and his hands were clenched into fists.

  As the police pondered the dead body, a man by the name of Farquharson approached them and claimed to know what had happened. He said that he had been with Small and three men, William Durrand, George Jamieson and George Henderson. All had come to Durrand’s house about five in the Saturday evening. They had been drinking and were quite convivial for most of the night, until around midnight when the drink took control. All the men began to argue and then to fight. The crucial point came when Durrand leaped on Small and gripped him by the neck. They had struggled for a while, and then Durrand grabbed hold of a bottle and smacked Small over the forehead. Small had slumped to the ground, already dead.

  The police took notes, and then a woman named Emily Sutherland also claimed to have seen what happened that night. She said she was Durrand’s servant and agreed with Farquhar’s account of the death of Small. Indeed, she agreed in the smallest details.

  The authorities thought they had enough evidence to prosecute and took Durrand, Henderson and Jamieson to the Circuit court in September 1830. Farquharson and Sutherland both gave evidence and for a short while the case seemed proved, but then the defence set to work. The defence brought forward a string of witnesses who stated categorically that Emily Sutherland had not been a maid in the Durrand’s house at the time Small’s body was discovered, while Farquharson was himself a criminal whose word could not be trusted. Furthermore, the two witnesses had spoken together at length to create a similar story of what happened, as Sutherland had been over a mile from the house on the night in question.

  The jury found the accused not guilty. The murder was not solved.

  The Man with Two Names

  Domestic disputes are as common to the Highlands as to any other part of the world, and in the nineteenth century they all too often ended in violence or even murder. Sometimes there was doubt about the facts of the case, but few murders seemed as confused as the killing of Jean Brechin in 1835. She was married to John Adam, but their relationship was not the most conventional and the marriage did not last long.

  John Adam was a man with a shady past, which he recorded for posterity. It is unlikely to be entirely accurate, but the gist reveals exactly what sort of man he was. Adam was born in 1804, the son of a kirk elder, and at the age of fourteen he fell heir to the tenancy of the twenty-acre farm of Craigieloch, near Forfar. He was not a good farmer, fell into difficulties and soon found himself labouring on the farms of others instead. He had other talents, though: he had a smooth tongue and a consuming interest in women. Indeed, he apparently seduced two women in his local parish. That was bad enough, but he had recently joined the Kirk, which made things worse, and both girls were the daughters of kirk elders, which was a terrible breach of trust. Worst of all, one girl was deaf and dumb and was Adam’s own cousin.

  Not surprisingly, Adam was hauled before the Kirk Session, severely censured and kicked out of the congregation. He moved from the parish and found a job as a farm labourer at a place called Carrisbank Farm. It was here he first met Jean Brechin. He was immediately attracted to her, but she sensed he was a bad man and turned him down flat. Either as a direct result or because of unrelated matters, Adam left the area and moved to Aberdeen.

  Adam became involved with Deism, which was an anti-Christian group who believed in nature and reason. He bought Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and turned completely away from the Kirk but continued his alternative religion of womanising. Before long, even the horizons of Aberdeen were too small for him and he moved to Lanarkshire, where he met yet another woman and this time proposed marriage. That idea fell through and eventually he enlisted in the 2nd Dragoon Guards, then based in Glasgow.

  He went south with the regiment and met an eighteen-year-old girl named Dorothy Elliot, with whom he eloped. They did not marry but lived together as man and wife. Adam was back in Scotland by 1834, having deserted from the army. They moved north to Dingwall, posing as Mr and Mrs Anderson, with their supposed marriage funded by money that may have been stolen, and Adam found work in a quarry. In the natural course of events, Dorothy became pregnant and Adam realised their money would not stretch to properly caring for their child. He decided on raising cash and at the same time paying off an old score. His rejection by Jean Brechin still rankled and now she had money and was still unmarried. Spinning a yarn to his supposed wife, Adam travelled south to her home in Montrose. He wooed Jean Brechin with his old charm and married her on 11 March 1835 and the couple moved north. Adam neglected to mention his other wife in Dingwall.

  Before she married Adam, Brechin had run a shop in Montrose, but now she gave it up, sold most of her furniture and put all her trust in her charming new husband. The remnant of her possessions she put in a wagon and Adam sent it ahead, but to Dorothy Elliot. The newlyweds caught the coach to Aberdeen and then to Inverness. The couple had taken up lodgings with Hector and Janet Mackintosh of Chapel Street, Inverness, but rather than use their own name, they claimed to be Mr and Mrs Anderson. They had told Jean Mackintosh that their furniture was following them by carrier. Adam had not informed Elizabeth of his plan but had invented an elderly aunt who had died and left him around £100 in money and all her furniture.

  After three weeks and three days in lodgings, Adam and Brechin told the Mackintoshes that they were going to their new house between Beauly and Dingwall. Hector Mackintosh thought that was slightly strange, as Adam had previously claimed their house was at Brahan, between Dingwall and Strathpeffer. Whatever their destination, they left after five in the evening of Friday, 3 April, saying they would cross the Beauly Firth by the ferry, travel a few miles and find somewhere to stay the night. The supposed Mr Anderson carried an umbrella but left his stick behind, while his wife carried a basket that contained a partly completed pair of stocking she was knitting.

  Roderick McGregor was the Kessock ferryman when Adam and Brechin crossed by the ferry to the north bank of the firth at about six in the evening. He remembered them. Robert Thomson also recalled Adam. Thomson was a carrier and Adam had hired him to take a load of furniture to his house in Dingwall. However, the strange thing was that Adam had claimed to be John Anderson at the time, and said that his wife was already living in Dingwall. The furniture, apparently, had been left to Anderson by a deceased aunt. Thomson met Anderson’s wife in Dingwall; she was around twenty years old, and the couple did not act as if they were newlyweds. John Urquhart would have confirmed that. He was a sawyer in Dingwall and said that Adam rented a house from him for a year. Adam lived with his wife, who was named Dorothy Elliot, and was certainly not Jean Brechin.

  Adam travelled south around Martinmas for three
weeks or so, apparently to visit a relative in Montrose. He returned to Montrose in the spring as well, again for about twenty days. Shortly after that, a cartload of furniture arrived. Sharper-eyed than her husband, or perhaps more interested, Christian Urquhart noticed that there was more than furniture that arrived. She saw a woman’s silk shawl and gown, as well as two women’s caps and a basket that contained one knitted stocking and one that was still being knitted.

  Robert Gordon was another man who knew Adam. Gordon was the teller of the National Bank in Dingwall and on 13 March 1835 he saw that Adam had deposited £100 in British Linen Company notes in the bank. He had again used the name of John Anderson. He drew the money back out on 13 April.

  A few days after Adam and Brechin crossed the Kessock Ferry, a girl named Jane Stewart was working alongside her aunts, Peggy Stewart and Betty Gray, and a man named John Campbell. They were employed in a plantation amidst moorland at Millbuie, opposite Inverness. Young Jane entered a ruined cottage and saw a glove lying on the ground. She lifted it and noticed a piece of gauze ‘coming out of the ground’. Within a few moments she also saw a shoe. She thought this was strange so told Peggy Stewart, who lifted the shoe and realised it still contained the foot. The two women ran to William Forbes, a cottar who worked at nearby Merkenich of Kilcoy, for help. He dug up around the shoe and found the feet and head of a woman, with a large, blood-stained rock over her face. Forbes sent for the authorities, and John Jones, a Dingwall surgeon, together with the Procurator Fiscal, were present as the rest of the body was dug up. The woman was lying on her back in the corner of the building, and had been buried under sand and turf. Jones inspected the remains and found that there had been at least two savage blows to the head, which had fractured the skull, while both sides of the jawbone were smashed. There were also a number of other injuries. He thought a large stone had been the murder weapon, probably the one weighing around 28lb that was found with the body. That corner section of the wall had also collapsed around her.