Whisky, Wars, Riots and Murder

by Malcolm Archibald

  Macallum was tried at the circuit court at Inverness Castle on Wednesday, 15 February 1899, in front of a large crowd. As usual, the circuit court opened with a show of ceremony. The Cameron Highlanders provided a guard of honour for Lord Trayner, the Provost, magistrates and the town council as they travelled to the court. The defence tried to claim that Macallum had been temporarily insane but a string of witnesses, including three doctors, testified to his sanity. All said he was of a naturally quiet and sullen disposition. The defence said he had changed since he came back from the Falklands and Patagonia, but the jury decided he was guilty of culpable homicide and the judge sentenced him to fifteen years’ penal servitude. He was sent to Peterhead shortly after.

  Constable King was buried at Abernethy Churchyard and a subscription fund was raised for his widow and family. By 12 February 1899 it had raised £12,000, mostly in small amounts of money, which shows the public interest in the case. The murder of Constable King was big news in the Highlands at the time. The newspapers carried inches of column space and a poet named Arthur Francis Paterson wrote about it:

  While the snow caps the brow of Cairngorm

  And the red deer to Glenmore repair

  A ghost and a legend shall linger

  Round the steadings of Tomachrochair

  For black was the heart of Macallum

  As the breast of the black-cock in air

  But blacker the curse he has muttered

  On the farmstead of Tomachrochair

  Mccallum was obviously an extreme case and most poachers were much more small-scale. However he is an example of how what may seem to be an innocuous or even a victimless crime could escalate into murder deep in the Highlands. Poachers came in all shapes and sizes, and not all were simply countrymen out to bag a single rabbit for the pot.

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  Children and Crime

  It seems common for adults to complain about the younger generation, but there is no doubt that in the nineteenth century, children were involved in a great variety of crimes, and children in the Highlands were no exception. The jail at Inveraray in Argyll holds the records of over 4,300 prisoners, including children, and shows that children such as seven-year-old James McCulloch could be sent to an industrial school for five years, while nine-year-old Charles McHaig was sent to prison for fourteen days for housebreaking.

  However, the penalties when they were caught could be much harsher, particularly at the beginning of the century.

  Transportation and the Birch

  On 2 May 1836, at the circuit court at Inverness, James Gillespie, otherwise known as James Young, was only sixteen when he was charged with theft and forgery. Despite his youth, he was sentenced to be transported for life. Only a month later he was aboard Lady Kennaway with 300 of his fellow sufferers on their way to New South Wales.

  Children also played their part in some crimes of the century

  © Mary Evans / Classic Stock / H. ARMSTRONG ROBERTS

  At the beginning of the century, children were treated much like miniature adults, as far as the courts were concerned. They could be transported for long years, sent to adult prisons and even hanged for what today would be considered relatively minor crimes. By the latter decades of the century the situation had altered; children could be sent to industrial schools if their home life was deemed likely to lead them into greater trouble, they could neither be transported nor hanged. However, there were other punishments that errant boys would not have enjoyed in the slightest.

  On 14 January 1877, at Inverness Police Court, thirteen-year-old John Allan was found guilty of stealing £1 and three shillings from the pocket of a woman who was visiting his mother’s house. It was obviously not Allan’s first offence, for his mother said she could no longer control him and was willing for him to be sent to a reformatory. The Dean of Guild, Mr Falconer, sentenced the boy to ten days in prison, followed by five years in a reformatory. Not surprisingly, young Allan was unhappy at this harsh sentence; he cried and bawled out to his mother to ‘pay the fine’ as he was wrestled away. Other youngsters were given a different type of sentence.

  In the Inverness Sheriff Court on 7 April 1886, two young boys faced Sheriff Blair. Joseph Robertson was aged thirteen and his companion, John Robertson, was aged fourteen. They were accused of having stolen a pair of boots from Neil Cameron of Ballifary, Inverness. Although they both pleaded not guilty, the evidence was pretty conclusive against John Robertson. The case against Joseph was found not proven. Sheriff Blair ordered John to be given six strokes of the birch. Although the sentence was mild compared to what it might have been, it is unlikely that John felt particularly happy as he lay across the birching bench with his trousers around his ankles.

  At the same court a thirteen-year-old girl named Jessie Stewart pleaded guilty of stealing a half sovereign from the school at Kingussie. Sheriff Blair let her off with an admonition.

  Despite the threat of the reformatory and the birch, in November 1887 the Inverness Police faced a mini crime wave by a group of children. There were break-ins throughout the town and four boys were arrested and sentenced to be birched. However, only a month later the crimes began again, worse than before; the police scoured the town for every young lawbreaker they could find and hauled them before the burgh police court. Eleven boys faced Bailie Macdonald across the bench and heard him pronounce painful sentences on them. John Long, Hugh Munro, Alexander Shaw and Alexander Macpherson were found guilty of stealing two bonnets from a shop in Academy Street, twelve boxes of cigarettes from the railway bookstall, and hatboxes and pheasants from the railway. Bailie Macdonald awarded them nine strokes of the birch each.

  At that same court sitting William McPherson and John McNeill were found guilty of stealing a sheepskin and a fleece from Macdonald, Fraser and Company’s Auction Market. They were only given three strokes each. Angus and Christopher Mair, David Macdonald, John Fraser and Duncan Mackenzie had broken into Inverness Bowling Club and left with a sixty-foot tape measure and forty-eight Chinese lanterns. The bailie thought they deserved five strokes of the birch for their behaviour.

  The birch was not just used in Inverness but all over the area. At the beginning of October 1883 Jeremiah Nicolson, a thirteen-year-old boy in Lerwick, was sentenced to nine strokes for cutting a girl called Christine Hay on the head with a knife. The girl had run up to him to beg ‘a sweetie’ and he claimed he had accidentally cut her. Sheriff Rampini also gave Nicolson twelve hours in jail, possibly to recover from his ordeal.

  A Medieval Landlord

  Children could be victims as well as perpetrators of crime and occasionally cases occurred that showed the landlords to have a mentality that belonged more to the Middle Ages than to the nineteenth century. Such was the situation at Fodderty, between Dingwall and Strathpeffer, in September 1856.

  Finlay Noble was twelve years old and lived in Dingwall. On that day, he had gone up the steep hillside above the farm at Fodderty and cut a quantity of bracken, a plant which was more of a nuisance than a blessing but which Finlay wanted for a pet lamb. As young Finlay was carrying the bracken back to Dingwall, he met Charles Master, the tenant of the shootings of Castle Leod; Master lived at the lodge at Fodderty. The Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford owned the area, but the farm at Fodderty was leased to a third man named James Dudgeon.

  Master was displeased to see Finlay carrying bracken, which he claimed was his property, and he forced the boy to carry it back over half a mile to the lodge house where he lived and place it at the front door. On his journey back to the lodge, Master called at the house of Mackenzie, who was a ghillie in his employ, to give him some support against the twelve-year-old Finlay, and once at the lodge he sent for a whip. By that time Finlay was in tears and promised not to take any more ferns if he was let go. With Finlay suitably frightened, Master shoved him inside one of the compartments of his dog kennel, with dogs confined in the space at his side, and left him there in the dark for an hour or so. After that Master asked Finlay’s n
ame and address before moving him to the larger laundry for two hours before finally setting him free. Finlay only got back to his father’s house at six at night.

  The ordeal affected Finlay so he slept badly for the next few nights. His father, Lieutenant Alexander Noble, brought Master to court and the sheriff-substitute decided that the imprisonment was illegal and ordered Master to pay £10 and costs.

  Children and Education

  In the nineteenth century Scotland was proud of an education system that ensured that the vast majority of children were able to at least read and write. However, sometimes there were flaws and, as usual, it was the most vulnerable, the children themselves, who paid the highest price. In 1872 the Education Act ordered that all children had to attend school, by law. This act intended to install universal education for all, but there were a few parents who attempted to avoid the compulsion.

  One such was George Frances, the factor for Mr Baillie of Dochfour. In June 1877 he appeared before the sheriff court at Inverness, accused of refusing to send his thirteen-year-old son Benjamin to school. Frances pleaded not guilty and gave documentary proof that he was educating his son at home. The same document also claimed that Donald Fraser, the local schoolteacher, had an immoral character and was therefore not suitable to teach the young. The teacher was due to stand trial at Inverness Sheriff Court on a charge of adultery. He was suspected of living with the wife of a shoemaker named Donald Mackinnon.

  At the court Fraser was called as witness. He had been the school-teacher at Glenelg for fifteen and a half years and said young Benjamin had not attended school there for some three and a half years. The defence based their case entirely on Fraser’s supposed adultery, but the sheriff did not think that was relevant and found Frances guilty of neglect and fined him £1, with a pound expenses as well.

  Cruel and Unusual Punishment

  In the past, Scottish schoolteachers had the power of the tawse over their pupils. Sometimes they were known as ‘skelp-doups’, and there had been a well-known, if possibly apocryphal, statement in Scotland when a parent handed over her son to the care of the school: ‘Here’s our Jamie; be sure you lick him weel.’ By the nineteenth century this image was beginning to be challenged, as some schools became more humane and the process of education by repression eased a little. There was even the occasional case where teachers were brought to court accused of cruel practices. Such an accusation was only part of a case that came before the sheriff court at Inveraray in March 1894.

  The schoolmaster accused was William Smith, who was the teacher at Lochgoilhead in Argyll. He had been a schoolteacher since 1855 and the board appointed him to Lochgoilhead in 1891, but after some time there were doubts about his efficiency. A number of matters came to the attention of the school board of Lochgoilhead and Kilmorich, mainly concerning Smith’s failure to keep proper registers and records of his classes.

  On 26 January 1892 William Adams and James Blair, two members of the board, arrived for an inspection to see if the reports were correct. They had notified Smith in advance that they were coming, but as soon as they entered the school and reminded him of their purpose, Smith became very agitated. He first grabbed hold of Adams and threw him out of the building, and then advanced angrily on Blair, who was counting the number of pupils present. Smith grabbed hold of Blair and ordered him out of the school. Rather than be assaulted, Blair obeyed at once, and the board members fled, leaving the school and the pupils in Smith’s tender care.

  The board checked up their records and accused Smith of falsifying the school records. They claimed that although thirteen pupils had left the school in March 1891, Smith had retained the names on the register. This seems a small matter, but the amount of grant the government paid depended on the number of pupils. Smith denied the allegation. The board also accused Smith of assaulting Blair and Adams to prevent them from inspecting the old registers and comparing the present registers with the actual attendance of pupils. Smith denied that allegation as well. Finally, the board accused him of immoral conduct by assaulting board members in the presence of his pupils and of fraud by adding false names to the school register. The immorality came about because it was Smith’s duty to teach morals to the young, and acting as he did, he was bringing the children up the wrong way; there was no question of lewdness. Not surprisingly, Smith denied any such immorality.

  In response, Smith said there were some members of the board who were disappointed with the examination results of 1891 and who refused to fill in the official forms for the education and probate duty grants. As a result, Smith’s wages were dramatically reduced. Smith also claimed that some of the board members made false statements to the education department about him and that they planned to remove him from his position without giving him the retiral grant to which he was entitled.

  The board now turned the screw. They said that for twelve years before the passing of the 1872 Education Act the people of Lochgoilhead had refused to send their children to the local school because of Smith’s poor reputation. Only Smith’s own children and a few paupers attended his school, while the local people hired another teacher for their children. Equally worrying, the board also spoke of excessive and unusual punishments, with Smith issuing regular doses of castor oil to the children in his care. One of the children who were so punished was the son of Duncan Blair. On 16 November 1883 he was also excessively caned on the hands and the face, with ‘numerous strokes’ being inflicted. Not surprisingly, Blair had withdrawn his children from the school after that.

  The court did not agree that the punishments were excessive as ‘no serious results to the children had followed’, so there were no damages due to be paid to the parents, but they also agreed that Blair had the right to withdraw his children and no fees should be paid to Smith after that date.

  Child Cruelty

  Every area of the world has its quota of people who bully those weaker than themselves, and the nineteenth-century Highlands were no different. Child cruelty is arguably the worst kind of abuse, as the victim is completely unable to defend him or herself, while any complaints are likely to be ignored.

  Sometimes cruelty took on a sexual nature. On 1 August 1878 Sheriff Thoms presided over a court at Wick. The man in the dock was a druggist named James McCann, who was accused of indecently assaulting an eleven-year-old girl. The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to nine months in prison. At other times the offence was more drawn out.

  In 1850 David Greig was ten years old, the son of Alexander Greig, the schoolteacher at Inchberry in Rothes, on the northern fringe of the Moray Highlands. His father had remarried, and his stepmother, Elizabeth Moir, was not happy to have to care for her new son. The Greigs, man and new wife, did not want young David to sleep in the same house but forced him to spend his nights in a makeshift crib in the schoolhouse, with loose straw for a mattress and a rug for covering. He was fed on potato peelings, when he was fed at all, and lacked either a shirt or shoes. The only time his trousers were removed were when his stepmother found an excuse to whip him with a rope. To add to his sufferings, David was unwashed, so lice and other vermin tormented him by night and day.

  He weighed less than 30lb when he was rescued from his tormentors, and the adult Greigs were hustled into cells. They pleaded guilty to ‘culpable and cruel neglect of a child’ and were each sentenced to fifteen months in prison.

  The Unwanted

  Some crimes involving children showed the best side of human nature, as well as the worst. Such a case involved the bachelor James Grant. On 30 August 1882 James Grant lived a solitary life. He farmed a parcel of land near Fort George, a few miles to the east of Inverness, and he had no inkling that he was about to become a new father. He may have seen the train steam into Fort George Station from the east that evening, but it is unlikely he would pay much attention. Perhaps he should have, for a mysterious lady disembarked from the train and handed a metal biscuit box to the station porter, asked him to deliver the box to Farmer G
rant and paid him six pence for his trouble. Then the lady boarded the Inverness-bound train and vanished from history.

  True to his occupation, the porter duly handed the metal box to James Grant. If Grant was surprised to receive an unexpected gift, he was even more surprised when he opened the box and found a newborn baby girl. The story became a bit garbled as it travelled, and there were ugly rumours of child murder, but in reality Grant cared well for the girl. The identity of the mother was never ascertained, but possibly Grant had met her some nine months previously and the relationship had terminated in an unwanted pregnancy. In this instance, the story had a happy ending as Grant took easily to fatherhood.

  Cruelty to children is one of the worst possible crimes as the victim is nearly always too young to retaliate or perhaps even to understand what is happening. In some ways, the Highlands may have been less prone to such things, as the communities were small and often close-knit, so there was less opportunity for hidden abuse. Unfortunately that did not preclude every case, and no doubt there were many instances of hidden cruelty. Perhaps someday the world will grow beyond such monstrosity.

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  Women and Crime

  Although the majority of crime was committed by men, Highland women were eminently capable of breaking the law. They were heavily involved in the anti-Clearance riots, sheep stealing and illicit distilling, but could also take part in more mundane crimes. For example, in May 1802, Janet Catnach, a widow who lived at Braemar, was banished from Scotland for seven years for housebreaking and theft.