Scotland has a different legal system from the rest of Britain and its own national press, which has always found crime a rich source of material. Two of Scotland’s greatest novelists, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, used real crimes as the basis for some of their fiction, so it is no surprise that there is a long history of Scottish crime reporting from the eighteenth century onwards. For his novel Heart of Midlothian, Scott took the real story of Isabelle Walker who, in the 1730s, was sentenced to death in dubious circumstances for killing her child. Her sister, Helen, then made her way to London by foot, carriage and cart to seek a pardon – and was successful.
She appears as Jennie Deans in Scott’s novel. Robert Louis Stevenson’s better-known work, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, is often said to have been based on the story of Deacon Brodie, like Stevenson a native of Edinburgh, whose case provided the early broadside writers with much rich material and led to a flowering of crime writing in Scotland.
Deacon (the title given to the president of a trade guild) William Brodie was an upright cabinet-maker and respectable citizen by day, and a reckless robber by night, often burgling the premises of his own acquaintances to cover his debts, gambling problems and erratic domestic arrangements. He was caught, tried and executed in 1788 and is still commemorated by a pub named after him on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Advertiser, one of the many publications which covered his case, observed that, ‘Mr Brodie’s behaviour during the whole trial was perfectly collected. He was respectful to the court and when anything ludicrous occurred in the evidence he smiled as if he had been an indifferent spectator.’ Brodie was an admirer of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, which was often performed in Edinburgh, and the Advertiser noted that, as he prepared for his end, ‘Brodie seemed to take the character of Macheath as his model and the day before his death was singing one of the songs from the Beggar’s Opera. This is another proof of the dangerous tendency of that play which ought to be prohibited from being performed on the British stage. It is inconceivable how many highwaymen and robbers this opera has given birth to.’ Clearly the Advertiser took an early stern line on the glamorisation of crime by the media.
As for the execution, the paper reported that ‘it is not a little remarkable that Brodie was the planner, a few years since, of the new invented gallows on which he suffered’. Brodie bade his farewell to the world ‘in a handsome suit of black clothes and had his hair powdered and dressed with taste’. The Edinburgh Evening Courant reported on his end and gave an early example of the press’s sneaking admiration for the daring criminal: ‘his crimes appear to be rather the result of infatuation than depravity; and he seemed to be more attracted by the dexterity of thieving than the profit arising from it’. The Courant also reported on the furious battle between the publishers of an original version of the trial, rushed out at speed, and two pirated versions, which mirrored the often angry disputes in London over competing reports in different publications of executions and criminals’ confessions. Again, there are resonances with the rivalry of tabloids nearly two centuries later in their efforts to sign up witnesses, victims and even criminals involved in a notorious case.
Four decades after Deacon Brodie had excited the readers of the Advertiser and the Courant, came the case of Burke and Hare. William Burke and William Hare were the two bodysnatchers who realised there was good money to be made in supplying corpses to the emerging medical school in Edinburgh and duly despatched sixteen unfortunates to the morgue before they were caught.
The description of Burke on trial carried in a contemporary broadside is quite flattering. He was ‘one of the most singular characters ever consigned to the scaffold. He was considerably superior in education to his own class of his countrymen, and was just possessed of so much knowledge as should make the recollections of a series of murders drive him to the borders of despair.’ He was praised for keeping his nerve and the reporter noted that ‘he even laughed and attempted to talk over the murder of his victims with as much indifference as a shopkeeper would over his losses in trade, or the good bargains he has made’.
On the other hand, Hare, who had turned King’s Evidence to save his own skin, was described as having ‘all the outward appearance of a ruffian, drunken, ferocious, and profligate, and appears to have been the more deeply designing of the two’. Burke was credited with being brighter and thus the one ‘that always went out to prowl for victims, and to decoy them to their destruction’. The fact that Hare escaped hanging did not please the crowd, as it was reported that ‘Hare’s wife was set at liberty lately, and in crossing the Bridges, was recognised by some person who had seen her in jail. A crowd soon gathered round her, and pelted her with snow balls and other missiles; and had not the police promptly interfered in her behalf, the ungovernable rabble that beset her would have quickly executed summary justice both on herself and the sickly infant she bore in her arms.’ Here the reporter delivers a moral message that ‘it is to be hoped, that the populace will not allow a commendable detestation of crime to lead to acts of outrage, which the law must punish with the same rigour in her case as in that of any other child of sin and misery that breathes under its protection’. Again, R. L. Stevenson echoed real life in his short story ‘The Body Snatcher’, and the Burke and Hare story has since been turned into a number of films.
The broadside report of the execution of Burke in January 1829 was given in fastidious detail: ‘At an early hour, the spacious street where the scaffold was erected, was crowded to excess; and all the windows which could command a view, were previously bespoken, and high prices given for them.’ Burke was brought overnight by coach from the Calton Hill jail to the scaffold and the account makes clear that the authorities did not want him to linger there too long: ‘when he presented himself on the Scaffold, the crowd, to their shame . . . gave three triumphant cheers, which were heard at a great distance’.
Prior to the trial, broadsides containing their supposed confessions were widely on sale and the press whipped up excitement, with the Caledonian Mercury of 5 January 1829 carrying a supposed statement from Burke in which he confessed his crimes and described how he had killed his victims by getting them drunk and then suffocating them. Owen Dudley Edwards, in his book Burke and Hare, commented on the coverage of the period: ‘The press in 1828–29 gave better value for less money, since they had only line drawings and better caricatures to fill a small part of pages nowadays smeared by tabloids with visual images as nauseating as possible. They were much more literate and their condescension was much less offensive that the illiteracy which the modern pressman likes to hang round the necks of his wretched readers.’ Dudley Edwards suggested that the journalists ‘raced in and out of the West Port to scribble down facts, half-facts, rumours, alcoholic ramblings, vague recollections and straightforward invention from anyone they could find’. The reports from Scotland were eagerly regurgitated by a fascinated English press.
As Thomas Ireland suggested in The West Port Murders, published in 1829, ‘blame has sometimes been cast upon the periodical press for raising popular excitement by exaggerated statements’. He noted that ‘the offices of the newspapers published on that day were beset by eager purchasers and the presses kept constantly at work could scarcely supply the unceasing demand’. An extra 8,000 copies of Edinburgh newspapers alone in addition to the normal run were sold during the week of the trial, although ‘the citizens of Edinburgh are by no means bloodthirsty’.
Scotland’s most notorious crimes had no more diligent recorder than William Roughead, who had trained as a lawyer but was to find his metier as the reporter of the major murder trials of his native land from the end of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. Amongst his criminal mementoes was a portion of the skin of Burke, which he kept in a snuff-box, and a mahogany cupboard made by Deacon Brodie.
Roughead, born in 1870, was known as ‘the murderer’s albatross’ because anyone charged with unlawful killing, if they glanced around the court and saw his familiar, bald, rotund figure sitting, pen poised, would know that the gallows might well be awaiting them and the details of their life and crimes would eventually become one of the collected reports of this prolific writer. As a seventeen-year-old, he was first attracted to murder cases by reading a volume entitled The Book of Remarkable Trials and Notorious Characters by Captain L. Benson, which he found in his uncle’s bookshelves. He was then, as he put it later in his essay ‘Enjoyment of Murder’, ‘taken captive by the Captain, I sat absorbed in his entrancing pages, so admirably and aptly illustrated by the grisly humour of Phiz, until I was chased to bed’.
He was soon seduced away from legal practice by the trial of Jessie King, a baby-farmer from Stockbridge in Edinburgh who was convicted of killing three infants whom she had been paid to adopt. He followed the case while surreptitiously nibbling on digestive biscuits when he should have been in his dull solicitor’s office. From 1889 onwards, he was a familiar figure in court for almost every major murder trial. Although he occasionally ventured south, he was happiest covering cases in Edinburgh or Glasgow, despite the fact that he often felt that there was a shortage of decent murders in his native land compared to its southern neighbour: ‘We have in Scotland a really good murder about once in five years . . . [England] more favoured in matters criminal, boasts one a week.’ And he made a distinction between the two countries: ‘no mere English malefactor is, to my mind at least, a patch upon the kindly Scot, whose crimes in common with the national products, whisky and haggis, have about them a distinctive flavour . . . English Sunday papers have a brand new murder in well nigh every column.’
When he died, Roughead left his books, letters and papers to the Signet Library in Edinburgh, where they are faithfully kept in the Commissioners’ Room and provide a veritable treasure trove of material. One case that he wrote about in great detail was the so-called Arran murder, in which a young Englishman called Edwin Rose was found dead, buried under a pile of boulders on Goatfell, on the isle of Arran, in 1889. He had last been seen in the company of a man who called himself John Annandale, although his real name was John Laurie, a pattern-maker from Glasgow, who was soon identified and fled his home. The Glasgow newspapers were full of ‘The Arran Murder’ as it became known and The North British Daily Mail even published a letter from the wanted man in which he denied responsibility for the murder and blamed it on ‘two men’ they had supposedly met at the top of Goatfell. ‘If things go as I have designed them,’ he added enigmatically in his letter, ‘I will soon have arrived at that country from whose bourne no traveller returns.’
Laurie wrote again, still on the run three weeks after the body had been found, to the Glasgow Herald, proclaiming his innocence but saying that because he was a ‘ruined man’ he had no intention of giving himself up. The papers at the time were spoiled for choice in terms of murder coverage as Jack the Ripper was being hunted in London and an American woman, Florence Maybrick, was on trial in Liverpool for poisoning her husband with arsenic extracted from fly-paper. Laurie was eventually spotted by a police constable and caught hiding under a bush, having given himself a superficial throat wound with a razor. He now admitted robbing Rose but denied killing him.
When Laurie stood trial in Edinburgh, the Scotsman estimated that some two thousand people tried to enter the court. He was convicted by a majority, with eight voting for guilty and seven for not proven, a verdict which is not available in English courts and is referred to, with some cynicism, as ‘we know you did it but we can’t prove it’ or ‘not guilty, but don’t do it again’. The Scotsman of 27 November carried an interview with Laurie’s father – an early example of relatives of murderers being pursued by the press – who told their reporter that ‘he knew that his son had some little peculiarities but he had never shown any sign of vice and the thought that he could possibly be a murderer altogether unmanned him’. Laurie died in Perth prison in 1930.
Roughead enjoyed mixing with the big literary names of the time. Arthur Conan Doyle, originally from Edinburgh himself, was an admirer and dined with Roughead at the North British Hotel. Conan Doyle was in Edinburgh because both men were much involved in the case of Oscar Slater, who had been wrongly convicted for murder and was eventually freed partly through their work. In 1925, Roughead entertained himself in London with a group known as the Crimes Club and heard a talk on the Oscar Wilde case at which one of the other guests was Conan Doyle. He also lunched with John Buchan and dedicated one of his books to him; showed J. B. Priestley round Edinburgh; and was friends with Scottish writers like Sir Compton Mackenzie, author of Whisky Galore, and Eric Linklater. Ludovic Kennedy recalled being introduced to him as a boy: ‘it was like meeting God’.
Roughead was proud of being told by Henry James that ‘you write so well’. The latter signed off a letter to him: ‘I rest my telescope on your shoulder and am yours, all gratefully, Henry James.’ But he was modest about his gifts in comparison to some of his contemporaries: ‘Unlike Edgar Wallace and other men of real genius I boast but a piddling talent,’ he wrote to his friend in the United States, the writer Edmund Pearson.
In his fine biography of Roughead, Richard Whittington-Egan explores the transatlantic friendship – almost a mutual admiration society – between Roughead and Pearson, who had written the definitive work on the American woman, Lizzie Borden, puzzlingly acquitted in 1893 of the axe murders of her parents. The letters act as a revealing diary of his thoughts on the business of crime writing. Pearson wrote jokingly on 16 September 1924, from New York, that ‘it is a matter of great regret that you feel yourself unable to come to Fall River and pursue your plan as to a suit for her [Lizzie Borden’s] affections. That was further than I thought of going: I did see some of her petticoats, waving in the wind, but lost the courage to go nearer.’ Pearson signed himself as ‘friend, admirer and assistant toiler in the same vineyard.’
‘All I claim to do is to tell a tale of crime well and truly,’ was how Roughead described his role. He described his style as ‘plain simple food’ with ‘no psychological sauce to whet the appetite’. And he confessed himself fascinated by his subject: ‘murder has a magic of its own, its peculiar alchemy’. He professed that ‘they say that even of a good thing you can have too much. But I doubt it. True, such good things as sunbathing, beer, and tobacco may be intemperately pursued to the detriment of their devotees; yet, to my mind, one cannot have too much of a good murder.’
Roughead defended the genre of reporting murder cases against that of crime fiction. Writing in his introduction to the non-fiction book Twelve Scots Trials in 1913, he said that ‘the fact that they were real men and women, who sinned and suffered in their day, and whose stories are unfortunately true, is alone enough to alienate the fiction-loving public . . . although the fitness of my rascals to adorn a tale may be questioned, their ability to point a moral is beyond dispute.’
Although Roughead lived through the notorious period of Glasgow’s gang wars in the 1920s and 1930s, it was not a world to which he seems to have been attracted. Gang warfare, although violent, did not often result in Roughead’s speciality – the murder trial. But as early as 1916, the People’s Journal was warning its readers of the ‘hooligan menace’ on the streets of Glasgow and naming the leading gangs as the Beehive Boys, the Death Valley Boys, the Ging Gong and the Bell On Boys. The Glasgow Herald reported that one gang shouted ‘we are the Redskins’ as they went into battle and added the names of the Billy Boys, the Cowboys and the Baltic Fleet (from Baltic Street) as the active outfits, along with the Ping Pong, the Hi-Hi and the San Toy. These gangs always had much more imaginative names than their English counterparts. By 1935, the Sunday Express was suggesting that Glasgow was on its way to becoming another Chicago: ‘The gangsters have come to Britain. Glasgow, second city of Empire, frankly acknowledges their reign of terror. A thousand young men – not forty are more than thirty-five – rule the poorer class districts.’ As we shall see, English papers would follow suit with the Chicago analogy in the 1950s.
In his book City of Gangs, Andrew Davies noted that there was no shortage of advice from the press on how to deal with the issue. In the Sunday Post in June 1930, under the headline ‘How I Would Deal with the Glasgow Gangsters’, an anonymous professor of psychology suggests forming a Foreign Legion like the French so that ‘on the frontiers of India or among the sands of Mespot the hooligan would soon get all the discipline he needs’. At the same time, a ‘special investigator’ for the Evening Citizen was telling its readers that, as far as the police are concerned, the problem was solved, suggesting that the police knew the names and addresses of all the gangsters: ‘how it is done is a secret that must not be given away’. This indicated that the relationship between police and crime reporters at the time was close.
But in 1936 Billy Fullerton, leader of the Billy Boys, decided to give his side of the story to Thomson’s Weekly News (later the Weekly News), albeit writing under the pseudonym of ‘Bill Fulton’. He was introduced to readers as ‘powerful a personality in his own sphere as the Al Capones and Spike O’Donnells of the USA’. This was quite a step for a newspaper to undertake in the 1930s and eventually, in 2009, it would become an offence to pay criminals for their stories; in the meantime, crime reporters on both sides of the border would act as ghosts for both criminals and detectives.
Fullerton used the serialisation to paint himself and his gang in a more flattering light. Dealing with the allegations that they essentially ran a protection racket, he explained to readers: ‘Shopkeepers give willingly each week. Don’t think of it as a form of blackmail. The money they pay is for protection against other gangs.’ He suggested that there were still, despite the best efforts of the police, around 1,500 active gang members in Glasgow and recounted a recent battle in which 300 had taken part using razors, broken bottles, hatchets and knives: ‘although there were many casualties, none of the injured went into the infirmary. Past experience has taught the gangster that to land in the infirmary is to risk landing in jail. So, unless he is very seriously injured indeed, he just goes home and patches himself up with sticking plaster.’ The world was captured in No Mean City, the classic 1935 Glasgow gang novel by H. Kingsley Long (himself a journalist with the People) and Alexander McArthur.
A perceptive observer of the media’s fascination with crime was James Cameron, one of the outstanding journalists of the last century, who recalled the early days of his career with the Sunday Post in Scotland in the 1930s. ‘I acted as journalistic amanuensis to an eerie creep who was contributing a series called “Secrets of the Mayfair Vice Rings”, who conscientiously established his bona-fides by attempting to seduce me on the top deck of a green tram,’ he wrote in his memoir, Point of Departure. One of his tasks was, at the conclusion of a gruesome murder trial, ‘to call on some distracted or avaricious mother up a close in Lanark or Motherwell and guide her hand through an article entitled “Why My Boy Should Not Be Hanged”.’
One of Cameron’s colleagues had a very close relationship with the duty sergeants in Glasgow police stations and was thus able to track down every serious attack in the city. ‘He was by the far the busiest of our little crew. Throughout the night, his voice provided a running obligato . . . “Aye, Jock boy, good, good; to the effusion of blood, eh; that’s no bad at all . . . do your best lad; try and get me a wee slashing in the Gorbals; it’s a thin night for the town edition.”’
Another criminal who cast dark of clouds over Scotland in the 1950s was the American-born serial killer Peter Manuel, who shot and bludgeoned at least seven people to death, and probably another two, before he was caught, tried and hanged in Barlinnie prison in 1958. Before it was known who was responsible, the killer appeared in the press as ‘the Beast of Birkenshaw’ and Manuel appears to have taken some satisfaction from the coverage he received and his ensuing notoriety.
It was not until 2009 that his fascination with his own image in the press was fully revealed. That year, a poem he had written while in prison during the trial was finally released from the papers of his former prison governor. The Daily Record, which covered the story, noted that ‘with the ability of a headline writer he [Manuel] tries to write his own epitaph in his poetic confession as he variously calls himself “The foulest beast on earth” . . . “A reptile in disguise” and the “rat of Birkenshaw”.’
The Manuel case reminded newspapers that there remained a big market for crime.
The late Paul Foot, who started his career on the Record in Glasgow in the 1960s, recalled being initiated into what he was told was a regular feature of Scottish journalism: the court brawl. In an article many years later, in The Journalist’s Handbook, Foot recounted how he had been told that a deal had been made with the lawyer of a man who was about to be released from a murder charge, the case having been found ‘not proven’. He was surprised to see that five other reporters in three cars had been designated to meet the man as he left court. ‘The surprise vanished in the street outside the court,’ recalled Foot. ‘The Scottish Daily Mail and the Scottish Daily Express also had three cars there. Their reporters were also under the illusion that the defendant’s lawyers had done a deal with them.’
What transpired was a mighty battle between the rival papers followed by a car chase through Glasgow, with the bewildered ex-defendant being grabbed from one car at a traffic lights and hauled into another. The Record did not get their man. The following day there was inquest at the paper to see what had gone wrong. Not enough cars? Had the lawyer been underpaid? Should they have fought harder?
Later at a meeting of the local branch of the National Union of Journalists there was an eventual agreement between the warring parties that such an event should not happen again. Such a battle is unthinkable today although this may have more to do with the decline of tabloid sales and the consequent deep cuts in the staffing of newsrooms.
Crime reporters in Scotland faced other problems. In the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of Arthur Thompson, often described as ‘the Godfather’ and head of the ‘Tartan Mafia’, was followed diligently in the press in Glasgow but reporters had to be wary because Scottish criminals had learned that there were other ways to intimidate than with a razor or a gun. ‘In my days as a writer we always referred to Arthur Thompson as a businessman,’ veteran crime reporter Stuart ‘the Bullet’ McCartney told the Scotsman in 2002. ‘We couldn’t call him anything else. His criminal record was minor and he would almost certainly have sued if we had libelled him. Yet everyone knew what he did.’
Thompson died in 1993 and by then bodysnatching, in all its forms, had come to an end. But the pioneering way in which Roughead covered murder cases and the basis of real crime for memorable fiction, exemplified by Scott and Stevenson and modern authors like Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, meant that the Scottish contribution to crime writing (in both fiction and non-fiction) was both major and enduring.