Whisky, Wars, Riots and Murder

by Malcolm Archibald

  On that same Sunday morning after the murder, George McCallum was in the shop of Grace McLean, with money which he told her he had not had the previous day.

  Mary McCallum entered Ann Crerar’s house on the Sunday. Mary McCallum told her that a man had been murdered on the back road and ‘his siller and watch were taken off him … I will never forget his cries.’ James Robertson lived in the same house and Mary McCallum, or Reid, told him about the murder and added, ‘God have mercy on my soul, for I can’t get the cries of the murdered man out of my ears. We had a scuffle and followed him on his blood. His last words were, “God have mercy on my soul.”’ John Grant, a criminal officer from Perth, found fragments of a bottle in the shed, while John Thomson, a mason, found a button about ten yards from Roy’s door, beside a line of blood spots.

  Although the evidence was contradictory and confused, the police believed the McCallums were involved. That same Sunday morning constable John McHardy stopped the tinker band and searched through their possessions. He found three knives and arrested two men: George McCallum and his father. He ignored Mary McCallum at that time. When McHardy arrested the men, Mary McCallum said, ‘Just go with the man and let them see you had nothing to do with it.’

  The tinkers were taken to Perth Prison and strip-searched, but James Stewart, the warden who searched them, did not find another knife. However, Stewart said that there was a button missing on George McCallum’s coat and the other buttons matched the one found beside the blood at Roy’s door.

  When the case came to the Perth Circuit Court the police said there was no trace of Sharp’s blood on any of the knives found on McCallum. Andrew McCallum, the son of Mary McCallum and brother of George McCallum, was questioned in court. He did not know how old he was but he said the ‘whole lot of us were in Crieff’ and agreed that George McCallum often had a knife. The gamekeeper Duncan McAra confirmed that he had seen George McCallum with a knife. A very young tinker girl normally named Mary McCallum, although her real name was Ann Neilson, described what she saw happen. She was George McCallum’s step-daughter and mentioned them all being on the Back Road when ‘a strange man that had drink in a kettle came up to us’ and gave George McCallum and Mary McCallum ‘a good drop’ of it. ‘After the man gave my father and my granny the drink, my father stabbed the man and went away with the knife.’ When the man was stabbed he cried, ‘Oh me! What am I tae dae!’

  The young Mary McCallum also said, ‘My granny, after the man was stabbed, took the bottle from him and gave it to my father. I saw my granny take nothing from the man. When the strange man was with us he had a watch and chain. My father took it out of the man’s pocket and went away with it to a garden with stones and made a mark where the watch was put.’ The little girl had already shown Inspector Stevenson the site of the murder and mentioned her stepfather saying, ‘Eh, there’s blood; I’ll be putten in jail and I’ll be killed. Come away up and see the blood.’ Inspector Stevenson could not find the watch or the murder weapon, although he searched the gardens and other places where they might have been hidden.

  In his statement, George McCallum said he was twenty-four years old and they had all been very drunk on the evening of the murder. He said he remembered the police moving them along but denied any quarrel or any murder and claimed to have been mainly in the High Street. He said he returned to Crieff the next day to search for his mother. In a later declaration, George McCallum admitted they had been at the place where the man was killed. He said they met a man who was very drunk. His mother, Mary McCallum senior, took a half-mutchkin of whisky from him and the man ‘bullyragged’ to get it back, at which point his mother stole the man’s watch from his left waistcoat pocket and stabbed the man, saying, ‘You son of a bitch, I’ll make you pay for it.’ George McCallum then claimed that he ran away and spent the night in a shed.

  A little later, George McCallum made yet another statement where he said that when the man and his mother had quarrelled he had tried to split them up but the man had pushed him to the ground and returned to his mother’s company. In this declaration, he said that his mother had got the knife before the fatal argument. In a fourth declaration, he said that all his former words were true, except that his mother had taken threepence from the murdered man’s waistcoat pocket and told him to go and buy whisky. He also said his mother had thrown the knife and watch into the Earn from the bridge at Crieff and had said that if he ever told anybody where she had thrown the knife and watch she would stab him ‘as surely as she had stabbed the man’, and emphasised her words by banging him on the back of the head with a large stone, at the same time calling him a ‘bitch’s son’.

  Mary McCallum junior gave her own version of events. She said she was over seventy years of age and admitted that the whole family was in Crieff on the Saturday night and were drunk, with herself being ‘real drunk’. She spent the night in a close near the east toll. In the morning she walked to the Cross and to the murder site. She asked a police sergeant if he had seen ‘any of her people’ but he just told her to move on, so she left the town. On her way to Gilmoretown, she met her son and her husband, both were under arrest. She denied any knowledge of, or participation in, the murder.

  The evidence left no doubt that Sharp had been on the Back Road and had been stabbed there. The tinkers had been seen there. The button, the sound of heavy footsteps, and the fight over the whisky, all of this pointed to George McCallum, but was all circumstantial.

  George McCallum was found guilty of the murder of Sharp while the jury unanimously found his mother not guilty. The jury also voted fourteen to one to ask the judge for mercy for George McCallum. Lord Ardmillan sentenced him to be fed on bread and water until Saturday, 3 October, and then to be hanged to death.

  The Crieff murder brought some public attention to the tinkers. The press seemed unanimous in their disapproval of what the Dundee Courier of 16 September 1874 called ‘these miserable outcasts of society’ who lived lives of ‘gross licentiousness and drunkenness’. The Courier suggested that the church should attempt missionary work because ‘nowhere in the wide world is there any gross heathenishness than is lived by these miserable men and women’. In the case of the McCallums, the Courier perhaps had a point.

  The Killing in Grantown-on-Spey

  Grantown-on-Spey is a pretty place in Speyside, a planned village with a broad main street and access to the northern slopes of the Cairngorm Mountains. It is an unlikely setting for serious crime, but in July 1878 the population was agog when a prominent farmer was involved in a murder.

  Andrew Grainger coupled farming Fettes in Easter Ross, with a secondary occupation as a railway contractor. Perhaps it was the pressure of holding down two jobs, but on occasions, Grainger had a tendency to drink too much. In the middle of July he hit the bottle quite seriously and by 17 July he was in an alcoholic haze. That day he left home for Inverness, intending to go to Ballinluig, near Pitlochry, where his wife was visiting her sick mother. When he was in the railway station he shied away from the crowds in case somebody robbed him, and asked a passing acquaintance to buy his ticket for him.

  When the train reached Forres, Grainger slipped off, bought a bottle of whisky and boarded again, entering a compartment already occupied by a Dr Scott. Grainger sat down, took a knife from his pocket and thrust it up the sleeve of his coat. Not surprisingly, Scott was a little alarmed, particularly as Grainger seemed very excited. The alcohol must have been working through Grainger’s system because as the train pulled into the tiny stop at Dunphail, he jumped out of the compartment and ran up the full length of the train until he came to the engine.

  Grantown on Spey

  © Author’s Collection

  The driver knew Grainger so, rather than be alarmed, he welcomed his company as he started the train for the remainder of the journey south. However, Grainger had other ideas, and as soon as the train began to pick up speed he moved to the back of the tender that was immediately behind the engine. As the driver followed a
fter, Grainger tried to jump off. The driver grabbed hold of him in time and Grainger yelled out, ‘Murder!’

  The driver stopped the train; two of the passengers came forward to see what all the fuss was about. They held Grainger secure until they reached Grantown, where he was taken off and locked in the station master’s office. For a while Grainger was quiet, but eventually he asked to see a doctor. The station master sent him to a hotel, but as soon as the doctor took his pulse, Grainger wrenched free and stormed from the room. The doctor was naturally concerned and asked the hotel manager to post somebody to watch him. Grainger booked a room for himself and no doubt everybody sighed with relief, hoping he would sleep off whatever was bothering him.

  They were wrong. About three hours later, the cry of ‘Murder’ resounded through the hotel, and again ‘Murder.’ Rather than go and investigate, the hotel manager called for the police and Constable James Fraser came to investigate. He entered Grainger’s room but before he could do anything Grainger slipped the knife down his sleeve and stabbed him low in the belly, hard and fast. More police arrived and arrested Grainger. Fraser died two days later.

  The police took Grainger to a cell in the police station but he was unable to understand why he was there or what he had done for a number of days afterwards. His case was heard at the Circuit court in Inverness in September and a large crowd waited outside the courtroom to watch him be taken in. He pleaded temporary insanity due to delirium tremens. After a case that lasted nine hours, the jury accepted that and found him not guilty of murder, but guilty of culpable homicide.

  8

  The Land Wars

  Throughout the nineteenth century, the Highlands and Islands seethed with unrest over the question of land, or, as the crofters put it, Landlordism. Put very simply, the indigenous population needed land for crofting, but the landlord class held the land for sheep farming and later for sporting estates. These rival requirements were not compatible in an area where fertile land was in short supply. The result was a steady trickle of forced evictions or alteration of use by the landlords, and bitter resentment by the dispossessed. There was resistance to the Clearances, but it was not until the 1880s that the crofters and cottars really began to fight back in a campaign that brought the military to the glens and caught the attention of the wider British public. There had always been some retaliation, but it was sporadic and usually futile.

  They Must Be Taught Submission

  In the summer of 1854 Major Robertson of Kindeace near Invergordon cleared some tenants from his lands. That was not unusual in the nineteenth century, and neither was the resistance from the tenants and their friends. When the sheriff officers and police arrived to evict the tenants, Peter and Ann Ross were among the people who tried to resist.

  The police arrested the Rosses and in September they appeared before the Lord Justice Clerk at Inverness Circuit Court. His Lordship was very much of the same class as Major Robertson. He had been staying locally for some time, shooting on the Sutherland estate of his son, William Hope. The Rosses were charged with mobbing, rioting and breach of the peace. They pleaded guilty to the latter only.

  The Lord Justice Clerk said he saw little distinction between the two charges and continued with his opinion of the Rosses’ attempt to retain their homes. He spoke of their lawlessness: ‘The course of the law must have its effect with all in order to protect all persons, high and low, and all must submit whatever their feelings or rank or perverted feelings of right and wrong. What is it that these parties can propose to themselves? Do they think that they are above the law? Is the feeling of the respectable and well-educated peasantry of Scotland not to be served upon them? It is quite essential that such a spirit as that which these panels expressed is to be repressed. They must be taught submission in the very first instance and that the slightest resistance must lead to exemplary punishment.’ Peter Ross was given eighteen months with hard labour, and Ann was given twelve months.

  In that same court, the Lord Justice Clerk sentenced James Sutherland, waiter at the Commercial Hotel Inverness, to eight months. He had fired a gun in Invergordon and killed a woman. The charge was culpable homicide.

  Human life was less important than submission to the laws of landed property. A generation later, attitudes had hardened and altered.

  Battle of the Braes

  One of the areas where the crofters fought back was the Braes, about nine miles south of Portree in the Island of Skye. There were three small townships here: Gedintailor, Balmeanach and Peinchorran. All had Loch Sligachan to the south, a sliding range of low brown-green hills on the west, and the sound of Raasay on the east. Basically, the Braes was an isolated peninsula, a unique community with a single narrow road for entrance and exit.

  Crofting was a precarious way of life that usually depended on a secondary income for the crofters to make ends meet. A croft is a small parcel of land that is rented from a landowner. It usually has a few acres of arable land for crops, and the crofter also has the traditional right to graze animals on communal land, usually also owned by the same landowner. There were seldom any written rights to this grazing land, and often the crofters depended on tradition that stretched back into the unknown past.

  Until around 1815 the crofters, particularly of the Outer Hebrides, augmented their money by kelp – seaweed – farming, although the landowners soaked up most of the profits. The kelp was burned and the ash used in glass and soap production. The gathering was pure hard labour, but a few years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the bottom fell out of that industry when deposits of sulphate of potash were found in Germany. A decade later the industry was only a memory and the bad times returned with a vengeance; MacLean of Coll cleared the entire population of the island of Coll to America in 1828 in the first of a new wave of forced evictions, and two years later the shoals of herring deserted the Hebrides. Men looked for alternative work. Many turned to the east coast fishing, others looked for agricultural work in the Lowlands, but if either of these failed, then the crofters faced destitution. Crofting was the backbone of much of the Hebridean economy and every scrap of land was needed.

  The crofters of the Braes were in a longstanding dispute with their landlord, Lord MacDonald, over grazing rights. The crofters had used the slopes of Ben Lee, one hill of the range that stretched between the Braes and Glenvarrigil, as common pasture for grazing their livestock, but in 1865 MacDonald gave the lease to a sheep farmer. In late 1881, the crofters drew up a petition requesting the return of their traditional land. The timing was crucial; the lease to the sheep farmer was about to expire and there was a new spirit of defiance among the Hebridean and Highland crofting communities. In part, that was due to desperation, as times were hard, but there was a new political edge as well. There was great agitation over land rights in Ireland, and some of the Braes crofters had been employed in Irish fishing boats, where they no doubt learned of the successful tactics employed there, such as boycotting and withholding of rents. Many crofters were also part-time fishermen and when a storm sank many fishing boats the men were forced to rely only on their crofts, so the availability of land became even more crucial.

  The crofters took the petition to Portree and handed it to Alexander MacDonald, the factor. As so often, the landowner’s man refused to compromise and resorted to the old methods and excuses. Alexander MacDonald agreed that the crofters had used the hill pasture prior to 1865, but said it was ‘on sufferance’ and they had no legal claim to the grazings. The crofters claimed long centuries of usage as their right and disputed the factor’s words. Rather than surrender, the crofters marched in a body to the factor’s office, again demanded access to the grazing on Ben Lee, adding that unless their rights were returned, ‘Their rents would not be paid.’

  Alexander MacDonald was every bit as determined to win as the crofters were, and searched for methods of retaliation. His first was to accuse the crofters of intimidation to raise support for their protests, but when that failed he turn
ed to the traditional method of landlord control. On 7 April 1882 a sheriff officer named Angus Martin arrived with a notice of ejection for a dozen of the crofting families. However, the crofters were not in the mood to back down. Two boys were on watch; they saw Martin coming and waved flags to gather support. Soon around 150 crofters surrounded Martin. Some of the men grabbed hold of him and either burned the eviction document themselves or forced Martin to burn it. There was a song written about the incident:

  A Sheriff from the factor came

  and he came down our way,

  From Lord MacDonald he was sent

  to clear us out from Skye.

  By attacking the sheriff officer and removing the writs of eviction, the crofters had committed the crime of ‘deforcement’. Until that time they had merely been in dispute with their landlord. Now they had broken the law and were criminals. The crofters knew that matters would not end there, so they prepared for the factor’s next move. They set sentries to watch the single road into their community, lit their pipes, tended their land, and waited.

  Martin reported to his headquarters in Inverness and Sheriff William Ivory requested help from the police. The Inverness force was too small to spare any men to cope with what seemed a major disturbance, so Ivory asked the Superintendent of Police in Glasgow if some men could be sent to Skye. The Superintendent agreed and sent fifty police officers.