The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde

by Rick Wilson

  In Luckenbooths, wi’ glouring Eye,

  Their Neighbours sma’est Faults descry:

  If ony Loun should dander there,

  Of aukward Gate, and foreign Air,

  They trace his Steps, till they can tell

  His Pedigree as weel’s himsell.

  Luckenbooths? Built around 1460, these ‘locked booths’ housed Edinburgh’s first permanent shops, sitting in a row of seven tenement buildings connected to the Old Tolbooth Prison and running parallel to St Giles Cathedral. Originally exclusive to goldsmiths and jewellers, they later housed ‘ane chymist and druggist’, a baker, milliner, hairdresser and even a toyshop.

  ***

  With the great looming bulks of St Giles and the Tolbooth centrally dominating all proceedings, and the potential targets of many more side-by-side shops lining the route between the closes, this then was the condensed world of William Brodie. His life, his work, his home, his leisure and his loves – not to mention his crimes – were all concentrated around this mile-long encapsulation of human life and all its failings and foibles. The many layers of its deeply textured society provided an aptly confusing backdrop for the identity crisis from which he obviously suffered. For while he would often avail himself of a sedan chair as a member of the city elite, he also felt something acutely in common with the simple men who carried him there. The feeling was almost mutual, as the customer who was described in some accounts as ‘small and slender’ was easier to carry than most, as well as quite affable and able to show the common touch. But it wasn’t as simple as that, of course.

  He clearly enjoyed his gentleman status too. Obviously well educated – not far from home in James Mundell’s exclusive ‘humanities’ school in West Bow – and a man of considerable wit and charm as well as political influence, property and monetary wealth, with £10,000 (worth £850,000 today) left by his father he should have had no need to dabble in a life of crime and mix with ‘the lower orders’. But he clearly had a fancy to, and a simple need did eventually arise – a serious shortfall in income brought about by his big gambling losses and the costs of keeping two families – which played right into his psyche of considerable complexity. How? The clue was perhaps his love of theatre and the theatrical. In all his ‘below-the-line’ dealings, one major motive force seemed to be romance. Or drama. Or infamy. Or something that made him out of the ordinary, adventurous, even piratical. If he hadn’t needed money, lion-taming might have been up his street.

  This need for an exciting frisson of danger also ran through his recreation, business and love life. His enthusiasm for opera, which saw (or heard) him constantly singing operatic songs at work that irritated his colleagues and sisters, was perhaps the mildest of his passions. If we ignore for a moment the early signs of his crossing the crime line, there was the club life, the cards, the cockfights, the above-mentioned mistresses and their dependent families by him, all of which were expensive. This man of means gave a sharper meaning to the phrase ‘disposable income’: he simply did not seem capable of holding on to his, despite that impressive inheritance, his successful business and his ownership of considerable property other than the family complex in Brodie’s Close. There were at least three other tenements in his name, at the Nether Bow and in World’s End Close. Council records also show that in 1785, two years before he turned to crime in desperation, he was speculating in the building lots of the New Town (see chapter 3). And in 1789, after the game was up and he had swung for it, there was a house in Old Bank Close that was purchased from the trustee for his creditors by William Martin, bookseller and auctioneer in Edinburgh, who then sold it to the Bank of Scotland four years later.

  He could have used all that silver-spoon wealth in a slower enjoyment of the good life, but when it came to nightlife, he was attracted to the bad life like a moth to a candle, and in the same way managed to burn his own wings and destroy himself. Almost inevitably, he was a slave to, and perhaps even a victim of …

  The Club Life

  There was no shortage of taverns and drinking dens in the city where, after work, the social classes mixed a bit more freely than at work. Only fallen women allowed, of course. But for those gentlemen who could afford it there were the tucked-away clubs – with all kinds of unusual names and themes which were mostly, to put it politely, rather naughty. Bawdy songs – some even penned by Robert Burns – were a specialty of the Crochallan. The Dirty Club was not entirely subtle about its interests, and there were others with strange names and rituals: the Poker, the black Wigs, the Spendthrift, the Odd Fellows – where members wrote their names upside-down. Many businessmen were also members of Freemasonry lodges whose rituals were even more esoteric.

  But it was the Cape Club to which the thrill-hungry William Brodie was most attracted. This most famous of the city’s social clubs held its meetings in James Mann’s tavern, also known as The Isle of Man Arms, in Craig’s Close. He liked this club not just because he needed to eat of an evening but also because he was disinclined to break off his convivialities to go home and do so – wherever home might be that night: his own house or either one of his mistresses’. And he liked it not just because of its culinary offerings but because of its central theme of (often sexual) fantasy. Ostensibly a supper club serving meals – such as Welsh rarebit and Loch Fyne herring and London porter – the Cape had many depths and dimensions that clearly intrigued Brodie. There were good (or bad) reasons why it magnetised him: the genuinely artistic and merchants and manufacturers who claimed appreciation of the Arts. Apart from the glovers, bakers, fish-hook makers, lawyers, tanners, surgeons and insurance brokers, it drew touring thespians from the Theatre Royal and some of Scotland’s most celebrated artistic names. Notably on the roll of the Knights Companions of the Cape were the painters John Bonnar, Alexander Runciman and Henry Raeburn, the writer David Herd and Robert Fergusson – who met his premature and untimely death four months before William Brodie was elected to the club in February 1775.

  So what was so exotic about it? Each new member was required, while suggestively holding a poker with his left hand that might then fall to rest on his crotch, to solemnly speak the oath before the president in a red velvet cap:

  I swear devoutly by this light

  To be a true and faithful Knight

  With all my might, both day and night

  So help me Poker!

  The new member then had to assume some fanciful personal title carrying rude innuendo with allusions to his character or misadventures. There was a Sir Stark Naked and a Sir Roger; Mr Raeburn was Sir Discovery long before he was actually knighted by the king, while Mr Fergusson was Sir Precentor, who caught the spirit of the club in his verse and self-sung song. Brodie took the title of Sir Lluyd, and tales were by all, amid loud hilarity, of sexual adventures and conquests.

  But his fellow members did not remain faithful to him to the end. After his last public appearance on the scaffold thirteen years later, the grim scene was recorded by the sketch of a mischievous colleague on the margin of the roll prefixed to the club’s minute-book.

  As William Roughead wrote in his book Trial of Deacon Brodie of 1906, ‘Had the young Brodie been satisfied with the legitimate and very ample convivialities afforded by the Cape Club it would have been better for himself. But …’

  The Cards

  ‘Brodie became a frequenter of a rough tavern kept by the vintner James Clark, at the head of the Fleshmarket Close, where gambling by dice was practised nightly among a band of disreputable twitchers and crook-fingered Jacks.’

  He had doubtless cheated here before, but one night’s work came back to haunt him after a worse-for-wear James Hamilton, the master of the city’s chimney sweeps, edged his way into the Brodie party, who (they said later) had been ‘innocently amusing themselves with a game of dice over a glass of punch’.

  The master sweep was ushered into the amusement – ‘suspecting no fraud or deceit’ – but within a few minutes found himself relieved of ‘five guinea notes
, two half guineas in gold, and six shillings in silver’. So outraged was he that he seized the dice, found them to be loaded – filled with lead at one corner – and, after an altercation that resulted in Brodie thereafter bearing an ugly scar around one eye, decided to take the case to higher authority. He petitioned the town council demanding that the Deacon of Wrights and his gang be arrested and made to pay damages.

  Brodie defended himself with the reply that ‘if false dice were used on that occasion, it was unknown to the defenders as the dice they played with belonged to the house’. And he concluded that ‘the petitioner is a noted adept in the science of gambling, and it was not very credible that he would have allowed himself to be imposed upon in the manner he had alleged’.

  Hamilton’s sarcastic response was biting:

  Mr Brodie knows nothing of such vile tricks – not he! He never made them his study – not he! Mr Brodie never haunted night houses, where nothing but the blackest and vilest arts were practised to catch a pigeon! He never was accessory, either by himself or others in his combination, to behold the poor young creature plucked alive, and not one feather left upon its wings – not he, indeed! He never was accessory to see or be concerned in fleecing the ignorant, the thoughtless, the young, and the unwary, nor ever made it his study, his anxious study, with unwearied concern, at midnight hours, to haunt the rooms where he thought of meeting with the company from which there was a possibility of fetching from a scurvy sixpence to a hundred guineas – not he, indeed! He is unacquainted altogether either with packing or shuffling a set of cards – he is, indeed!

  It was some kind of a comment on the moral standards of the time that the council stood by its own, even one of whom there were growing doubts, and – perhaps well pierced by such keen comments – nevertheless decided to take the matter no further.

  The Cockfights

  Flying feathers and blood amid the squawking of distressed birds fighting to the death, added to the bawling of excited male spectators, doesn’t sound much like a sport for noble souls. But cockfighting in Brodie’s time was called a ‘gentlemanly vice’ – as a fashionable recreation among the capital’s young bloods – and he developed such a passion for it that he even bred and maintained his own game cocks in a pen in his wood-yard.

  It was not just the cock-fighting blood as such that excited him, of course, as a regular attender at the ‘mains’ held in the cock-pit belonging to his friend Michael Henderson, stabler in the Grassmarket. He is said to have loved betting on the sport – and he was not always a winner, of course.

  He was present, among other ‘eminent cockers’ at the historic match between the counties of Lanark and Haddington, of which an account is given in Kay’s Edinburgh Portraits, published in 1885: ‘This affair was decided in the unfinished kitchen of the Assembly Rooms, in 1785; on which occasion the gentlemen cockfighters of the county of East Lothian were the victors. Among the audience will be recognised likenesses of the principal individuals of this fancy at the time.’ He particularly points out Sir James Baird of Newbyth, William Hamilton of Wishaw (later Lord Belhaven) and ‘the noted Deacon Brodie, and several other eminent cockers’.

  Kay also commented: ‘It cannot but appear surprising that noblemen and gentlemen, who upon any other occasion will hardly show the smallest degree of condescension to their inferiors, will, in the prosecution of this barbarous amusement, demean themselves so far as to associate with the very lowest characters in society.’

  That kind of self-demeaning was another sport that Deacon Brodie was not averse to, enjoying as he did the company of low characters; so ‘the art of cocking’ was right up his street and he maintained his enthusiasm for it until the day he died, even writing to ask for updates on results while he was on the run abroad.

  However, there is no doubt that it caused him to lose a small fortune and little doubt that his nocturnal adventures helped supplement his investments in it. One suspects he might not have worried about a little cheating here and there too … as with the cards.

  The Mistresses

  Brodie was not just a cheat at cards. He was obviously unfaithful to his mistresses, at least with regard to each other. Until the very public last moments of his life, they apparently knew nothing of each other. While officially, and before the eyes of the general public, he had lived respectably with his housekeeper-sister Jean in their house at the foot of the Lawnmarket close, the Deacon’s ‘over-relaxed’ evenings often ended in either of two other beds – one in Cant’s Close belonging to Anne Grant, with whom he had a family of three children, and one in the nearby house of Jean Watt, whose two boys he had fathered, though in one of his frequent poisonous spats with her he had expressed some doubt about the paternity of one of them.

  Nonetheless, possibly for no other reason than the close proximity of Miss Watt’s home – in the no-longer-extant Libberton’s Wynd, only a few score yards from his – he would often make an impulsive diversion in the moonlight and wake up in the sunlight of her bed of a morning.

  Such bedtimes often happened after his criminal forays, and it seems that, while generally being tolerant and welcoming of his unannounced arrivals, she did not ask too many questions. To recount Forbes Bramble’s imagined scenario of one such evening, just after Brodie tried to rob a tobacconist’s shop:

  ‘Are ye sober?’

  ‘Of course I’m sober!’

  ‘Well, will ye tak off your clothes and cam tae bed, or am I tae wait a’ nicht! And me needin’ ma sleep!’

  She turned back the bedclothes invitingly. Jean Watt was dark-haired, dark-eyed and attractive. She wordlessly gathered her linen nightdress by the hem and pulled it up to her chin. Will, swearing to himself, tore off his cloak and shoes and scrambled down over her.

  ‘Tak your time, Will Brodie! Dinna wouf a guid thing! Ye smell terrible o’ tabacca!’

  ‘You’re a devil, Jean, you’re a devil!’

  Jean smiled contentedly and knowingly over his shoulder, Men were such excellent plain fools.

  It happened again (or did it?) after his fateful attempt to raid the Excise Office, the crime on which his trial focused. Jean Watt stepped forward as a witness in a bid to give him an alibi and told the court (see chapter 6) that she was well acquainted with the prisoner, ‘having a family of children to him’, and added:

  I remember that on Wednesday the 5th of March last [the night of the raid] Mr Brodie came to my house just at the time the eight o’clock bell was ringing and he remained in it all night, and was not out from the time he came in until a little before nine o’clock next morning. We went to bed early, about ten o’clock, as Mr Brodie complained that night of being much indisposed with a sore throat.

  Much was made of the presence of a 7-year-old son there at the time, who had been happy ‘to see my daddie who has been in the house all night’.

  What on earth would Anne Grant have thought of all this when, like the fascinated general public, she heard – presumably for the first time – about the other woman who had been taking such significant liberties with ‘her’ man?

  Anne’s reaction is not on record but it can be well imagined. Clearly she had not been short of Brodie’s attention either, despite her greater distance from his general habitat, and as their eldest daughter Cecill – named after Brodie’s mother – was 12 at the time of his trial, it is fair to assume that their relationship had been going on for at least that time. Was this without her knowing of the other woman? Perhaps he thought she might not be interested. In any case, young Cecill did manage to visit Brodie in prison just before he went to the gallows, and while final tender thoughts were exchanged between them, one wonders if there was also a message from her mother.

  There is no doubt he loved them all, however, and ample evidence of that is in one of his letters written on the run to the stabler Michel Henderson (see chapter 5), in which he confesses himself ‘very uneasy on account of Mrs Grant and my three children by her; they will miss me more than any other in Scotland’
– and goes on to offer his opinion of who among them should do what with their future working lives.

  He clearly loved them all, both the mistresses and their children by him, but what were the chances that such a wayward man could contain his affections to just two women in a city rampant with temptations? It is not hard to imagine how he would follow the mischievous devil on his left shoulder, when you consider how much the city’s womanhood was admired even by less love-thirsty characters such as Dr Johnson’s biographer James Boswell, who kept a mistress in Borthwick’s Close, and by the aforementioned visitor (and product of Trinity College, Cambridge), Edward Topham.

  ‘Love reconciles me to a Scotch accent which from the mouth of a pretty woman is simply and sweetly melodious’, wrote Boswell, while Topham recorded that ‘their hearts are soft and full of passion’, adding, ‘The younger women have a certain proportion of embonpoint and voluptuousness which makes them highly the objects of luxurious love.’ Another visitor wrote of ‘their noble walk’ along the streets. But their charms, despite good Scottish complexions, were not achieved without some hard work. Here is a humorous writer’s description of a fashionable young Scots lady of 1779:

  Give Betsy a bushel of horsehair and wool,

  Of paste and pomatum a pound;

  Ten yards of gay ribbon to deck her sweet skull,

  And gauze to encompass it round.

  Of all the bright colours the rainbow displays,

  Are these ribbons which hang from her head,

  And her flowers adapted to make the folk gay,

  For round the whole width are they spread.

  Her flaps fly behind for a yard at the least,

  And her curls meet just under her chin;