Whisky, Wars, Riots and Murder

by Malcolm Archibald

  The story gradually came out. In the spring of that year Angus Macphee, a powerfully built man of twenty-four, had moved back in with his parents in Linecate near the township of Nunton in Benbecula. Linecate was a fairly typical old-style Hebridean house, long and simple with the living quarters at one end and the byre for the cattle at the other. The parents noticed that Angus was acting slightly strangely, but they dismissed the thought and carried on with the routine of the croft. The situation continued for some months, with Angus having bouts of unusual behaviour followed by periods when he was absolutely normal. When it became obvious that Angus could go over the edge at any time, the local people asked the Nunton blacksmith to forge a pair of handcuffs to keep him, and them, safe.

  On the day of the murders, Angus walked to the home of his aunt Mary Macphee, who lived just a few yards away. There must have been some sort of argument and perhaps Mary Macphee tried to put the handcuffs on him. It was known that being confined exasperated him and now he cut her throat, slashed her face to ribbons and pummelled her head with the iron cuffs. With that business completed, he returned home and murdered his mother, Catherine Macinnes, in the same fashion. His father, also Angus, was outside at the time, employed with the potatoes, so Angus stood at the door of his house and shouted for his father to come in and get a pipe of tobacco. When the father walked over, Angus grabbed hold of him and ran his knife across his throat, then smashed his head with the handcuffs until it was a bloody pulp. Satisfied he had done a good job, Angus bundled his father under his bed, closed the door and ran to the hills.

  During the course of the afternoon, he met a pensioner named Munro and invited him home for a smoke. Munro and Angus Macphee had never got on, so the invitation rang false. Munro turned him down, which possibly saved his life, and Angus returned to the hills. Sometime during the night, he came back down, opened the floodgates of the local water mill and ran off again. Unattended, the mill wheel ran unfettered until friction set one of the beams alight and the building caught fire. Luckily, it was extinguished without loss of life or serious damage. Meanwhile, Angus continued his career, tapping on the window of another house in time to the peals of a clock and loitering near a house where Dr McLean from Uist was staying the night.

  That night the good people of Benbecula kept their doors and windows locked and it is unlikely many slept peacefully. Men would keep weapons close to hand. Next morning they searched the island, keeping together for protection. They found Angus sitting on a rock in an island within one of the many lochs that festoon Benbecula. He was holding a sharpened spade and the rumour spread that he intended to murder the blacksmith who had made his handcuffs. A crowd gathered on the shores of the loch and tried to persuade him to give himself up. Angus agreed, and said there was ‘no point in opposing so many’. He threw his spade into the loch and surrendered. Only then did two men wade through the water to secure him.

  The sheriff met the crowd as they escorted Angus across the fords and all the way to the jail in Lochmaddy in North Uist. Once there, the remainder of Angus’s story came out. Months ago he had been working as a farm servant in South Uist but fell out with his master and left that job. It was then that his unstable nature came to the fore, so the local priests stepped in. Their solution to his mental problems was to tie him up and feed him on bread and water, arguably the worst possible thing to do. Naturally, Angus resented this treatment and in the only retaliation he could, he named the priests John Murder and James Kill. Shortly afterwards, Angus returned home to Benbecula.

  At his trial later that year, the influence of the priests again surfaced when Angus said that he was the Christ and he had killed his relatives by Divine Command. Even more ominously, he said he had intended to kill some others. The judge and jury found him insane and confined him to a lunatic asylum.

  The Tinkers

  Love them, romanticise them, fear them or loathe them, tinkers were part of life in the Highlands. Tinkers were wanderers, ‘gaun-aboot-folk’ in vernacular Lowland Scots, or ceardannan – craftsmen – in Gaelic. They were distinct from the Gypsies, who arrived in the late-fifteenth or early-sixteenth century from abroad, and they usually spoke Gaelic or Beialrearich or Buerla Reagaird – a complex language of their own that encompasses elements of Gaelic, Scots and perhaps even Romany. Today the term ‘tinker ‘is more used as abuse, and this group of people are Travelling People.

  By the nineteenth century they did not have a good reputation among the more settled peoples of Scotland, although they may have been in the country for countless generations. The 1859 Book of Rules and Instructions for the Sutherland Police specifically advised the police that:

  There are ‘gangs’ or ‘tribes’ of tinkers who live principally in Caithness-shire, but make periodic tours through different parts of Scotland. A gang of these people, with horses and carts, after passing through Argyle and Perthshire a few months ago, were detected by the police in Forfarshire, where they were carrying on their depredations; in the carts were found some of their plunder from Perthshire and elsewhere; two of them were convicted of various acts of theft; and they are known at Aberdeen and Wick as ‘habit and repute’ common thieves. Another gang from Caithness-shire has lately been passed out of the same county by the police.

  Colonel Kinloch, the man responsible for inspecting the Scottish police forces after the 1857 Police Act, estimated there were 62,278 vagrants, including tinkers, in 1862, with 2,560 police in Scotland to control them. Kinloch believed these vagrants were responsible for most rural crime. In 1865 the Trespass Act put some pressure on these people. They were believed to have helped spread disease such as cattle plague by their habit of sleeping in barns. Some of the Sutherland vagrant families were rumoured to have immigrated to North America.

  There was another side to the story. According to Isabel Grant, arguably the finest of all Highland folklorists, the original Highland tinkers were wandering craftsmen, metalworkers and silversmiths who created much of the beautiful artwork of the Gaelic people. They were noted for their honesty and skill, with some being registered as silversmiths and having their own hallmark. Some also made horn spoons and may also have made the seventeenth-century powder horns that can be admired in museums the length and breadth of the country. Others bought sheets of tin to create the tin wear that gave them their name, or made baskets, drinking beakers, horn tumblers or bagpipes and fished for freshwater pearls. They were nomads, roaming the byways of Scotland, living in large birch-framed tents known as ‘ghiellies’, and some claimed to be descended from clans that had lost their lands. There is also a legend that they were descendants of the Picts, the indigenous peoples of the country even before the Gaels arrived. They moved in family groups of which the best known were the Stewarts, McPhies and MacDonalds.

  Mostly these people were an asset to the Highlands, but as the centuries passed and urbanisation spread, with its plethora of town-based industries, there was less demand for the tinkers’ crafts, and the position of the tinkers was undermined. Rather than welcome them for their news, skills and entertainment, the people came to believe that they were drunkards and thieves. In September one family of travelling tinkers came to the notice of the authorities for the worst possible reason.

  In September 1874 the circuit judges Lord Ardmillan and Lord Neaves stayed the night at the Royal George Hotel in Perth before travelling on to the Circuit court. As always, there was pomp and ceremony at the opening of the court, with a colourful show by the band of First Perthshire Rifle Volunteers, together with a body of police in their smartest uniforms and the sheriffs and magistrates of the district marching or riding alongside the judges. People watched them pass and wondered at their power.

  Although every case that came before the court was of intense interest to the people who were charged, the most intriguing case to the public was a killing in Crieff, which the press imaginatively dubbed the Crieff Murder. There were two accused, George McCallum and Mary McCallum, son and mother. When they first
arrived in court they wore prison dress, to which the Advocate Depute, Mr Muirhead, objected, as it might have made identification difficult by the witnesses. The accused changed and returned in their own clothes, with Mary McCallum, a woman of seventy who looked ten years younger, dressed in what looked like dirty rags with a white mutch and a shawl. George McCallum had long unwashed brown hair, thick eyebrows above deep-set eyes, a long nose and ragged beard, he looked a wild man, but with a surprisingly weak face.

  George and Mary McCallum were both tinkers and as such they were not quite in the mainstream of respectability. They were jointly charged with the murder of a mason named Peter Sharp on the Back Road of Crieff, known as the Duchlage. The prosecution alleged that the McCallums had stabbed him in the abdomen with a knife on the night of Sunday, 7 or the early morning of Monday, 8 March 1874. After the killing, they were accused of robbing the body of a bottle of whisky, a silver watch and a gold Albert chain, and a leather purse with some money inside. There were a great many witnesses to the actions of the McCallums that night, but not all their stories matched.

  A local labourer named Donald McGregor thought he was first to discover the body. He was walking through Cornton Place just before seven on the Monday morning when he saw a man sitting with his back against the wall near the door of a weaver named Thomas Roy. The man looked very still. McGregor looked closer and saw the man was sitting in a spreading pool of blood. He was sure the man was dead, but he did not recognise him.

  He knocked on Roy’s door and cried out, ‘Are you sleeping?’

  ‘No,’ Roy shouted from inside.

  ‘There’s a man at your door,’ McGregor said, ‘and there’s something wrong with him.’

  Roy came to the door. After a brief look, Roy said the dead man was named Peter Sharp. McGregor noticed that Sharp had neither watch nor watch chain, and there was a lower button missing from his waistcoat, while his hat was lying about ten yards away. McGregor also noticed he had blood on his own boots and trousers, as well as on the step at Roy’s front door.

  Roy and McGregor borrowed a wheelbarrow from a plasterer named William Forbes. They bundled Sharp inside and immediately noticed a gash in his trousers around the groin, and saw a line of blood spots that terminated at Roy’s door. Roy and his daughter Janet hurried to tell Inspector Stevenson, the local policeman. Roy asked Stevenson if he should fetch a doctor but the Inspector said Sharp was past help.

  Thomas Roy had not slept well the previous night. When he had arrived home from work he had to knock on his door to gain entrance, which was unusual, as his wife never locked the door. However when she explained there were tinkers about he understood, because tinkers had a bad reputation, earned or otherwise, for petty thefts from houses. Shortly afterward, Roy went to bed but sometime during the night he heard a thump, which he took to be somebody banging against his front door. He lay for a few moments until he heard voices outside his house. When he got up to investigate he heard somebody groaning and then a heavy tread on the ground outside. He heard a voice say either ‘I know you, Peter’ or ‘Do you know me, Peter.’ There was silence for a while, and then Roy heard light footsteps and the murmur of two voices and maybe the name ‘Mike’.

  Roy’s wife was also listening to the noise outside, but when it faded away Janet said he had better get to bed. It was only a few hours afterward that McGregor hammered on his door.

  With the police alerted and Sharp trundled away on a barrow, Roy sent his son to tell Sharp’s family the news.

  Janet Roy remembered events slightly differently. She had gone to bed about half past eleven the previous night and shortly afterward she heard somebody run past the house and thought someone gave the front door a shake. She put her candle away from the window and heard a very weak voice call, ‘Are you in? Are you sleeping?’

  When her mother asked her what was happening, Janet Roy looked cautiously out of the window. She thought she heard a woman say, ‘Bell’ and she heard somebody moaning softly.

  There was another voice. ‘I ken you fine. Come awa’ hame.’

  Janet Roy looked out the window and saw two policemen walk past the house. She went back to bed until McGregor woke them up next morning.

  The police traced the background and movements of Peter Sharp. He was an unmarried, good-natured man approaching his twenty-seventh birthday. On the evening of 7 March he had dressed a little less smartly than usual and had gone out. He wore his soft ‘Fenian’ hat and silver watch with a gold Albert chain and carried perhaps sixteen shillings in change. His parents bid him goodbye and next morning they were informed he had taken an ill turn. Shortly afterward their son’s body was wheeled in to their house.

  Sharp had been seen in the town at about eleven when he had a quiet drink at Mrs Sinclair’s pub at the Cross with a scavenger named John Tracey. Sharp bought a half mutchkin – small bottle – of whisky at Mrs Sinclair’s and parted from Tracey. Peter McGregor, a joiner, saw him lying outside Roy’s door at about half past eleven at night, thought he was drunk and propped him against Roy’s door. He asked, ‘Do you know me, Peter?’ There was no response.

  Peter McGregor returned home, passing two couples, neither of whom he knew. He told his wife that he should go back and put Sharp into a more comfortable position, but his wife said that there would be plenty people passing by on a Saturday evening who would take care of him. It was the next morning before Peter McGregor realised there was blood on his trousers and his shoes.

  The police who Janet Roy had seen were Inspector Stevenson and Constable McHardy. They saw Peter Sharp propped against the wall but thought he was drunk and passed on. That was at about five past twelve.

  There were four suspects for the murder. Two were the tinkers, George and Mary McCallum, the third was a local photographer named Kidd and the fourth a hairdresser named John Hardy. Kidd had recently left the woman with whom he had been living, and the police scooped him up, mainly because his house was on the route that Sharp would have taken. He and Hardy were soon released and all the attention turned to the tinker McCallums.

  Inspector Stevenson had seen the McCallums near the murder scene that fatal night. He ordered them and another pair of tinkers out of the town and thought no more about it, as they were well known around Crieff. After the murder Stevenson began to collect evidence about their behaviour that night. They had been drinking at the Star Hotel in East High Street, where the landlady, Jane McCulloch, served a number of tinkers, including George McCallum, who had a damaged hand and said he was going to see a doctor about it. Ann Gordon also saw George McCallum with a sore hand as she bought half a tartan shawl from a female tinker. There was quite a large family of McCallums, with John McCallum, the father; a wife; two sons; and two daughters.

  James Morrison, a Crieff plumber, was also out on the Saturday night. He was with one of his friends when they bumped into a band of tinkers on Commissioner Street; there was a man, a boy and two females. The woman begged tobacco from them and asked for money, which they refused, and walked away quickly before the tinkers ‘annoyed them’. The woman took the tobacco but rather than light her pipe, she began to dance and sing. Morrison thought she had had too much to drink but was not yet drunk. One of the tinkers shouted, ‘Are you away that way,’ as Morrison and his friend left.

  Thomas Thomson also saw the band of tinkers that night. He was a mason who doubled up as the local lamplighter, but that Saturday night he was later than normal in putting on the lights. He saw the tinkers in Manse Road and then again in Commissioner Street, one man with three women.

  Duncan Reid and his girl, Mary McRory, had a more dramatic tale to tell. They were walking along Manse Road when they heard a shout of ‘Murder’ and then again ‘Murder,’ with the second call much fainter than the first. They thought the cries came from Duchlage Road. A few moments later they saw a man in a dark coat and light trousers running across a piece of ground that was known as the Pecks. Reid knew and had worked with George McCallum and thought he was
a peaceful man.

  James Stobie lived near Thomas Roy in Duchlage Road. Mary McCallum came to his house at about ten on the Saturday night to get a light for her pipe; she was not sober. He heard heavier footsteps pass. Alexander Roy of Commissioner Street heard somebody moaning that night and when he investigated he found the elderly woman McCallum lying on the ground; Janet Roy, Alexander’s wife, made her a cup of tea and the woman remained lying on the ground all night. Janet Roy said the woman mentioned she had a fright the previous night and when she heard about the murder she said, ‘It would be my good daughter that stabbed the man.’

  Mary Gorrie of Commissioner Street heard a slightly different tale from the tinker. According to Gorrie, when she heard about the murder she threw her hands up and said, ‘It’s my husband that’s murdered and my good daughter that has done it. She has long threatened to do it and she’s done it now.’

  The house of Peter Stewart overlooked the Pecks. About twenty to seven on Sunday morning he saw a man that looked like George McCallum crossing the Pecks. He went into the shed in the Pecks later that day and found the door unlocked and a broken gin bottle on the floor. He thought there had been a man sleeping on the floor there as well.

  The Honourable Elenora Gordon Cumming was staying in Glenearn House in Crieff; she saw a bunch of tinkers, including a man with a bandaged hand who she thought was looking at a watch with his left hand. A young farmer’s boy named William Wedderspoon saw the tinkers as he took milk to Glenearn House and thought he saw a watch chain from the trouser pocket of a tinker with a bandaged hand. In common with most people in Crieff, young Wedderspoon did not want to pass the tinkers and altered his route to avoid them.