2
Robbing the Paisley Union Bank
Bank robberies are not common things. Successful bank robberies are even less common. They are the epitome of the cracksman’s art, for if banks are buildings that are virtually guaranteed to contain a great deal of money in a concentrated space, they are also by their very nature difficult to rob. There were two main problems about robbing a bank: the first was getting into the vaults, and the second was getting away with the takings and not getting caught. The robbers of the Paisley Union Bank in 1811 faced both problems and were, to an extent, successful in both, at least for a while.
Most people learned of the robbery when the newspaper, the Caledonian Mercury, printed an indignant advertisement on 18 July 1811. After offering a reward for an astounding five hundred guineas, the proprietors of the bank gave some details of the robbery. They said that the ‘office of the Paisley Union Bank Company at 49–51 Ingram Street Glasgow was this morning discovered to have been broken into since Saturday night’. The advertisement said that ‘bank notes … to a very considerable amount’ were stolen. To gain the reward, which was around ten years’ wages for a skilled man, the informant had to give information that led to conviction of the thief and recovery of the money. If an accomplice of the thief were to convict his companions, then not only would he gain the reward but the bank proprietors would also apply for the royal Pardon. There was no guarantee that His Majesty would assent, however, so Mr John Likely, the cashier, and Mr Andrew Templeton, the chief manager of the bank, waited in vain for informers to queue up. Naturally, people were also requested to watch for the stolen banknotes.
The Paisley Union Bank was situated on the ground floor, with cellars beneath and rooms used as a warehouse above. John Thomson was the porter responsible for locking both the safe and the bank. On the evening of 13 July 1811, the bank had a box from Sir William Forbes and Company, a private banking company based in Edinburgh, who acted as the Paisley Bank’s agents in the capital. The box held around £4,000 in notes, which Thomson counted before he locked the box, and then placed it in the iron safe, which was situated in the inner room of the tworoom office. There were also a large number of banknotes, many of the Paisley Union Bank, together with a considerable amount of gold. After placing the box inside the safe, Thomson locked the safe, closed and secured the office door and took the keys to Mr Templeton in St Enoch Square. The key of the bank was placed in a box, which was also locked, and Thomson placed the box, as always, in a press in the lobby of Templeton’s house.
Around half past seven on Monday morning Thomson returned to the bank; the safe was locked but the box from Forbes was lying on the floor, empty. When he opened the safe he saw the drawers had also been opened and the banknotes extracted. The robbers had not used any violence. They had used a skeleton key – then called a false key – to get into the bank on the Saturday night and had left without causing any fuss, without damaging a single lock or door or alerting anybody. They had lifted at least £20,000, although estimates varied to an astonishing £50,000, which was a sum equivalent to millions in today’s currency, in probably as professional an operation as Glasgow had ever seen. Thomson raised the alarm and within a short time half the police in the city were searching for the bank robbers.
However, it was sheer blind chance that gave the police their first big break and led to a chase that stretched the length of Britain. Early on the Sunday after the bank was robbed, an elderly wright named David Clacher was out walking. He lived nearby and he was heading toward the Stirling road. Dawn comes early in July, so he was well able to distinguish the three men he saw sitting on a wall, but wondered what they were up to at that time of day. He stood still and watched as they opened up a basket and divided up a pile of banknotes and some silver, and saw they had a foot-long bundle lying between them.
With the money divided, the men walked toward Sandy Leith’s George Street coach yard, and were lost to sight. When Clacher heard of the bank robbery the next day he hurried to the bank and reported what he had seen. The bank immediately notified the police and the Glasgow force sprung into action to try and trace the movements of the three suspects.
When Sandy Leith was questioned he frankly admitted the men had hired a post chaise and headed for Airdrie. Two officials from the Paisley Bank hired another post chaise and traced the robbers from Airdrie across Scotland to Edinburgh. The robbers had chosen top-quality accommodation and the best wine on their journey, for which they paid with Paisley Bank notes. The bank officials had good descriptions of the wanted men. Two appeared like gentlemen; the first was about five foot ten, ‘stoutly made and active with a full plump face and ruddy complexion’; he was marked by smallpox and could speak in both a Scots and an English accent. The second was five foot eight and slim, while the third was more like a tradesman, five foot nine, ‘slender and ill made’.
The robbers tipped the post boy, the driver of the chaise, so well that he remembered these‘ kind liberal gentlemen’, but once they left him in Princes Street they vanished. The Edinburgh Police checked the smacks from Leith to London, the mail coaches and the stagecoaches, but without success. They picked up the trail again in a small inn in Rose Street, where three supposed Englishmen had paid for a meal with a twentypound note of the Paisley Bank. With that clue, the police found that the suspects had hired a post chaise from Drysdale’s Hotel and had driven on the Haddington road. The police then knocked on the magistrates’ doors and obtained warrants for their arrest, and from there decided what was best to do.
Robert Walkinshaw, a Writer and one of the bank officials, together with John Likely, the cashier, decided not to sit idle and to follow the suspects, while a Glasgow Messenger-at-Arms, James McCrone, returned to Glasgow to search for information there. Picking up professional help in the person of Archibald Campbell, one of the Edinburgh city officers, Walkinshaw and Likely hired a post chaise and set off in pursuit.
Less than twenty miles away, Haddington was a bustling market town with a selection of inns. The suspects had called at the Blue Bell Inn, where they changed a ten-pound note of the Paisley Bank before moving on to the Press Inn, to change a twenty-pound note. Walkinshaw, Likely and Campbell followed the paper chase of notes to Berwick-upon-Tweed and the border with England. From the English frontier onward the suspects were able to swap their two-horse post chaise for a faster fourhorse chaise, a type that was common in England but unusual in Scotland. A four-horse chaise was probably the fastest means of transport for long-distance travel on land, as a single horse would tire, while a post chaise could change horses at regular posting inns throughout the country.
The bankers and Campbell enquired at stables and inns as they traced the suspects further and further south until they left the Queen’s Head in Durham and reached the Talbot Inn in Darlington. Here they met George Johnson, a helpful waiter who said the suspects had been at the inn just over a week before at about three in the afternoon. They had carried a large number of Scots and English notes and had tendered a Scottish twenty-pound note to pay for the hire of a chaise with some sherry and biscuits. Notes of that high a denomination were so rare that the landlord had to visit Hollingsworth’s bank to obtain change and one of the suspects paid him 2/6d for the privilege. Not surprisingly, Johnson examined the men and claimed he would recognise them without difficulty.
The bankers and Campbell recruited this useful waiter and continued the pursuit. Johnson had also told them the suspects were travelling in a chaise and four. They drove southward and ever southward, following the trail of banknotes, hiring post boys who had already driven the suspects and knew exactly where they had been, and inevitably the trail led all the way to London.
Spreading the tale that the pursuers were highwaymen, the three men looked south as each innkeeper added his little bit of advice and help. At the White Hart Inn in Welwyn, Herefordshire, two stages north of London, a waiter named Henry Cumington had witnessed the suspects openly dividing banknotes. He said they had left a portmanteau and a coat to be sent on to a man named John Sculthorp at an address in Tottenham Court Road in London, with a further address in Coventry Street.
When their post chaise rolled into London, Likely, Walkinshaw and Campbell drove straight to the Public Office at Bow Street and enlisted the help of the famous Bow Street Runners, a force of professional thief takers similar to the King’s Messengers in Scotland. Funded by the government, they were attached to the Bow Street Magistrates’Court and could arrest criminals nationwide. It says much for the significance of the crime that three of the best came to help the search: John Vickery, Stephen Lavender and Harry Atkins. Together with Campbell, the Runners raided Sculthorp’s house. Although they did not find the portmanteau, they did find a box with a selection of skeleton keys, pick locks and a number of other tools used in the art of housebreaking. The box had an address on top: Coventry Street.
That same night, Campbell and the Runners visited Sculthorp, a stove grate manufacturer, locksmith and the owner of the Coventry Street house. He lived in St George’s Fields, but when they got there they also found a character by the name of Hufton, Henry or Houghton White. As soon as he saw the Runners, White made a dive for the window but he was held and hauled back inside the room.
There was no hesitation in arresting White. Better known as ‘Huffey’, White was one of the most notorious criminals in England. He had been sentenced to be transported for life but had escaped from the stinking Portsmouth hulks in which he had been penned prior to the long voyage south. The authorities had searched for him with no success, until now.
When the Runners arrested White they found a number of Bank of England notes and sixteen guineas in gold, but nothing from the Paisley Bank. There seemed no direct evidence connecting him with the Glasgow robbery, but White was undoubtedly an escaped convict, so the Runners took him to Bow Street, questioned him closely and locked him up for that instead. When Cumington was brought from Welwyn, he identified White right away, but there was still no concrete evidence. White was held in custody and examined again at the beginning of August, shortly afterward being prosecuted for escaping from transportation before his sentence had expired.
The wheels of justice ground on, slow, sure and inexorably ruthless. The perpetrators knew they could expect no mercy if they were caught. With property being the god of the authoritarian classes, the punishment for stealing such a sum would only be execution – but perhaps bribery would help. The thieves tried to ease White back into favour by anonymously handing back most of the money in the hope of reducing his inevitable death sentence. There appear to be two versions of what happened next. According to one, White was condemned once more, but escaped again that December, sliding off the Retribution hulk as she lay moored in the Thames off Woolwich. He did not go alone, but took three other convicts with him, and added the guard for good measure. The second account claims that when the sum of £11,000 was paid back to the bank, White, his wife and Sculthorp were all quietly released under a free pardon. Either way, by mid-December White was back at large, bitter after his incarceration and thirsting for success.
By that time the authorities knew the names of the other two robbers and sent placards around the country hunting for them. One was an English lock picker named Harry French, and the other was a Scotsman named James Moffat, alias McCoul. Neither Sculthorp nor White was literate, but Moffat was an educated man and so very useful in the thieving trade.
While the bankers had been busy in London, McCrone, the Messengerat-Arms, and the Glasgow Police had not been idle. They had been making their own enquiries, which came out in a later trial. A man named James McCoul was arrested in London, and Archibald Campbell brought him to Glasgow by the mail coach, handcuffed by wrist and ankle. Moffat/McCoul remained in Glasgow jail for some time but was released due to lack of evidence and returned to London, thumbing his nose at authority.
Then in October 1812 Huffey White turned up again like a crooked penny. After his escape from the hulks, he had adopted the name Wallis and had roamed through Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire causing mayhem before he decided to become a highwayman. On the 26 he robbed the Leeds mail coach between Kettering and Higham Ferrers. The General Post Office immediately offered a £200 reward for his capture. They also issued a full description, saying he was a native Londoner, a cabinetmaker by trade in his mid-thirties, about five foot eight, upright and stoutish, with brown hair above a full forehead and a pale face with light grey eyes. This handsome, mild-mannered man was marred by the pockmarks of smallpox, he had a turned up nose and perhaps surprisingly, was described as having a ‘squeaking voice’, not quite what may be imagined in an expert thief, jail breaker and highwayman.
However, White’s luck ran out as this time he was caught and after a trial that lasted over fourteen hours, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. This time there was no escape, and in October 1814 he was hanged at Northampton.
Moffat was more professional than White. He was a man of many aliases, but most commonly travelled under the name of McCoul or Moffat, and was well known to the criminal fraternity and police of Edinburgh. He returned to Scotland in 1815 and lived in high style in Portobello with a woman he claimed was his wife. When he tried to pass over £1,800 in Paisley Bank notes in exchange for a banker’s draft, the police were called. Moffat affected surprise that he should possess any stolen notes and promised to return home to Portobello and collect them. He left police custody and, not surprisingly, vanished.
However, Moffat was a bold man. He returned to London and legally demanded the return of ‘his’ £1,800, plus compensation for his time spent in Glasgow jail. The bank issued a counter claim for theft against him and the wheels of the law ground slowly on until they decided in the bank’s favour. By that time the robbery of the Paisley Bank and the recovery of the remaining £8,000 slipped from the front of public thought, as other events became more important. There was war in India, the Navy was making heavy weather against the French in the Indian Ocean and Wellington was winning plaudits in the Peninsula; the robbery of a Glasgow bank was stale news.
The years rolled on. There was a war with the United States; Wellington defeated Bonaparte at Waterloo; there was trade depression in the Lowlands and the horror of the Clearances in the Highlands; the robbery of the Paisley Union Bank faded from public memory. One of the two remaining suspects, Harry or Henry French, was tried for murder, acquitted and then in 1818 tried for robbery at Middlesex and transported to Australia for seven years on the ship Speke, which sailed in December 1820. After that, French fades from history.
Then in June 1820, nearly nine years after the robbery, Moffat (alias McCoul, Martin or Wilson) came to trial in the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh. The charge was read out and Moffat pleaded not guilty. This time the prosecution had built up a formidable case against him. John Thomson, the porter, was the first witness and after detailing how he locked the safe and the office on the Friday and reopened on the Monday, he mentioned there was a note from the Renfrewshire Bank that had been torn and was fastened with a pin. That had also been stolen. The prosecution mentioned that John Likely had travelled to London to try and trace the missing money and when he returned a month later the torn Renfrew note was among the £600 or so he brought back.
Gradually the witnesses built up a story and the evidence against Moffat mounted. One significant lady was Margaret Macauley, who had lived in the Broomielaw in 1811. She spoke of Moffat and another two men who called themselves Downs and Stone lodging with her, initially for three weeks but staying much longer. The men had a trunk, a portmanteau and two greatcoats. When Macauley moved house, the men came as well, but they frequently remained out late, with Moffat claiming he was going to Liverpool or Bristol. Macauley said that the other two men had clothes marked with initials that did not match their names and they were marked with smallpox; they also spoke with English accents.
Both Macauley and another witness, John Stewart, said that Moffat was waiting for a small parcel from the London mail coach. The three men also lodged with Stewart but left on 9 July, taking a large portmanteau with them. David Clacher, who had witnessed the three men dividing money beside the Stirling road, identified Moffat as one of the men. James Stirling had been the guard of the Telegraph Coach and porter of the George Street Coach Work in Glasgow; he recognised Moffat as one of three men who hired a chaise on 13 July. Moffat had carried a bundle under his arm and claimed to have a sick brother in Edinburgh. James Muir drove them to Airdrie, where they hired another chaise, paid for with silver. John McAusland, tavern keeper in Edinburgh’s Rose Street, also recognised Moffat as having come to his house on 14 July in company with two others; they ate quickly and travelled to the east.
And so it continued; a succession of post chaise drivers, innkeepers and waiters all identified Moffat. Possibly the most significant single comment came from Alexander Livingston, a Leith merchant who knew Moffat personally. When he saw him in Leith Livingston remarked, ‘Some storm is brewing as Moffat has come back to the country.’
Lavender and John Vickery of the Runners also recognised Moffat, and knew him as a thief with connections to Sculthorp, the stove grate manufacturer. Atkins, the third Runner, also knew Moffat’s wife by the name of Mrs McCoul, while Mary, Huffey White’s wife, confirmed that Moffat knew her husband. It was Mrs McCoul who bargained for White’s life by handing back most of the proceeds of the robbery. There was talk of the remains of the money being buried in St Pancras Churchyard, or stored in the vault of a bank; talk of a man named Gibbons, a hackney coach master and bull baiter who acted as go-between with the banks, the Runners and White; but most of these conversations were speculative and none gave definite proof that Moffat was involved in the robbery, or that he was innocent.
William Gibbons hammered home the final nails in Moffat’s coffin. He said he knew Moffat and knew he was in London in 1811. He detailed their meetings at the Black Horse and he detailed the amount of money Moffat had, including the denominations of the notes. He knew that Mrs McCoul kept the money stored at arm’s length up the chimney in a back room and brought out around £14,000 for Mr Likely of the Paisley Bank.
Sculthorp was equally damning. He freely admitted that he made skeleton keys for White and Moffat; he spoke of letters ordering specific keys and signed by White, but as White was illiterate, Sculthorp thought Moffat had written the letters. The keys were sent to Glasgow, so presumably they were used to break into the Paisley Union Bank. The first keys he sent did not fit, so Moffat sent him a wooden model to work from; the second or third key was accepted. Sculthorp also mentioned that Moffat had promised him £5, but despite the money he had stolen, he was chary of actually paying anything out.
The jury did not have to deliberate long before they found Moffat guilty, and he was sentenced to be hanged in Edinburgh on 26 July 1820. Strangely, he seemed surprised and thoughtful at the sentence, as if he had expected to walk away.
There are many questions remaining in this case. Was the money paid by Mrs McCoul a bribe to the Runners or a sweetener to persuade the bank not to prosecute Huffey White? The figure of £14,000 counted out by Mrs McCoul did not correspond with the £11,000 brought back to Glasgow. Did that payment have anything to do with White’s providential escape from the hulks? And what happened to the remaining £8,000? Is it still stashed in a chimney somewhere in London, or perhaps sitting in a bank vault waiting to be claimed, with interest, or even more intriguing, could it possibly be buried in St Pancras Graveyard, waiting for some hopeful adventurer with a shovel and a dark misty night?