For much of the early nineteenth century, linen was Dundee’s staple industry. There was an extensive trade with the Baltic and Russia for flax, while sailcloth and other linen articles were exported to half a dozen destinations. With a thriving trade with the Mediterranean and northern Europe added to the mix, it is not surprising that there were thousands of seamen based in Dundee and as many again visiting from other ports. It was nearly inevitable that many of these men spent time and money in Dundee’s pubs and some called in at the lodging houses that doubled as brothels. It was also inevitable that some should end up on the wrong side of the law.
Most of the crimes were petty – simple theft or drunken misbehaviour. For example there was the smartly-dressed seaman James Johnstone who was fined five shillings for simply ‘lurking’ in the passage of a house in the Seagate in November 1824, or the three apprentices who in October 1825 stole a warp and ropes from a Perth smack because a seaman on the vessel said it was all right, or the seaman from the Aberdeen schooner Dee who was fined half a guinea for using abusive language to people in the Perth Road in November 1826. None of these crimes would shake the foundations of the city, but when similar incidents took place day after day, night after night, they would be an irritation to the citizens.
Ships moored in harbour were tempting targets for the petty thieves and juvenile vagabonds of the port. One example out of many was the case in January 1826, when two boys were caught robbing the cabin of the whaling ship Estridge. They had four days on bread and water to ponder their actions. Just over a year later four young sailors, together with a woman named Susan Frazer, plundered the brig Scotia. While two of the seamen were handed thirty days each, Frazer, a known thief and troublemaker, got sixty days in jail. By 1839 the penalties had become even stiffer as a man named James Stalker was given a full year in jail for thieving articles from the whaling vessel Fairy.
On other occasions stranger mariners, those who did not belong to Dundee, caused the trouble. In August 1823 an English seaman had participated fully in the hospitality of Dundee’s taverns and was weaving his way about the docks. Drunken seamen were easy prey and a bunch of hooligans attacked the stray Englishman as he searched for his ship. By the time the sailor escaped he had been considerably roughed up and was looking for revenge. Finding a pistol on his ship, he returned to the shore, but rather than hunt for the men who attacked him, he fired at random, shooting at everything and anybody from the bottom of the Seagate all the way to the High Street. The watchmen eventually hustled him to the lock-up house for the night. Luckily the Englishman’s aim was no better than his judgement, for he injured nobody in his shooting spree.
In June 1825 a trio of stranger mariners appeared in Dundee’s Police Court for causing a riot in Jamieson’s pub in the High Street. The sequence of events is probably familiar to most Dundee policemen and publicans today. The three men were drinking quite happily in Jamieson’s most of the afternoon, but they took a glass too many and began to sing. Either they were too raucous or the song was too bawdy, for Jamieson asked them to quieten down. Instead they drank some more, so Jamieson sent for help. The arrival of the police signalled a general melee and when one seaman, James Brown, kicked down a partition wall within the pub, Sergeant Thomas Hardy arrested him. It took four police to carry Brown to the police office, where he was held overnight with his two companions, John Wilson and John Wyllie.
Not only deep watermen but also fishermen could cause trouble. The fishermen of Broughty were famed as pilots and smugglers but could also be as aggressive as any other Scottish seamen. On the first Saturday of November 1849, two rival fisher crews argued in the Dundee fish market. When the police moved in to calm them, both crews moved away with dirty looks and threats, but they knew the situation was unresolved. At four o’clock that afternoon the first crew, Watson Bell, Lawrence ‘Dick’ Gall and George Bell, hauled up their sail and left the harbour, with the second crew of John Lorimer, Thomas Knight and George McCoull following in their oar-powered yawl a few moments later.
The sailing boat arrived at the Hare Craigs first and waited for the yawl. As the oar-powered boat tried to pass, the sailing boat ran alongside and the crew boarded. Watson and George Bell simultaneously attacked McCoull while Lawrence Gall shouted encouragement, but within minutes everybody was involved. The fight lasted for about ten minutes with injuries on both sides, but the eventual victors were the harbour police, who fined George Bell a pound with the option of twenty days in jail, while Watson Bell and Lawrence Gall were fined 10/- or ten days.
Not surprisingly, smuggling was not uncommon in nineteenth-century Dundee. Usually it was small-scale stuff, such as the brandy, tea and tobacco the Customs and Excise officers seized from the vessel Thistle when she arrived from Gothenburg in November 1826, or the tobacco and spirits seized from an unnamed sailor who had just arrived from America in July 1824. On other occasions the amounts seized were much more impressive. For example, in 1821 the vessel New Delight of London put into the Tay to shelter from one of the savage North Sea squalls that blew up out of nothing. When New Delight anchored off Broughty, Customs officers boarded her. Her Master said she was bound for Montrose to load potatoes, but something about her made the Customs men suspicious and they searched her, without success.
Still sure that something was wrong, but not sure what, the Customs men brought a pilot to steer New Delight off the Lights of Tay, those lights that marked the dangerous sandbanks. They searched her again, and again they found nothing. Only when they were reluctantly about to allow her to sail did one of the officers notice the quarterdeck was fairly high, but the accommodation below had little headroom. It was the work of a few moments to find a hidden compartment between the two, and the Customs men delighted over their discovery of nearly six tons of contraband tobacco. The crew were bundled into Dundee’s Town House jail.
However, even Customs officers could be tempted. On Friday 29th October 1841 Vestal of Bo’ness waited off Tayport to enter the Tay with a cargo of Oporto wine. Her master, Captain Meikle, signalled all day for a pilot to guide them to Dundee, but without success. Eventually he tried without a pilot, but the entrance to the Tay is notoriously tricky. Vestal was driven onto the Gaa Sands, a sandbank at the tip of Buddon Ness just north of Dundee and around a third of the cargo was lost. Rather than whisky galore, it was wine galore in the Firth of Tay as the people of Broughty and Tayport and the places all around descended on this bonanza. For days there were scenes of drunkenness around Vestal, with even the Customs officers joining in. Apparently, though, the officials from Dundee did not become involved in the spree.
While most seamen ashore in Dundee headed toward the public houses, a considerable number ended up in the disreputable lodging houses, many of which doubled as brothels and were often dens of thieves. In the early years of the century, the narrow gulley of Couttie’s Wynd was one of the most notorious areas for these establishments. One of the public houses on this street was owned by James Davidson. He was commonly known as Humphie, and his establishment as Humphie’s House. At the end of October 1825 the master of a visiting ship was ill-judged enough to enter Humphie’s House and whatever happened there he also met the ubiquitous Susan Frazer, notorious as a prostitute and thief. When he realised he had somehow lost all his money he complained to the police and both Frazer and Davidson were arrested. While Davidson was set free, Frazer admitted to picking the captain’s pocket and was sent on to a higher court and eventually sentenced with a long spell in the jail.
Couttie’s Wynd was too dark a street to attract many respectable people and for much of the century it remained a place of prostitution and drunkenness. In September 1861 Frederick Leverdowitz, Master of the barque Lavinia of Libau, visited one of the houses and came out minus a gold watch and chain and £90 in cash, which was a huge sum at the time. The police arrested three suspects: Catherine Grant, Catherine Hughes and her husband John Hughes. Catherine Grant, officially a millworker, was sent to jail for sixty days while the husband and wife team were given longer sentences.
There were other areas of Dundee with nearly as interesting a reputation, including Fish Street, square in the heart of the old Maritime Quarter. At one time Fish Street had been the home of some of Dundee’s elite, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century it was a place of mildly dangerous pubs. At the beginning of September 1824 three English seamen were at large in Fish Street when a trio of local ladies took them in hand. With promises of great favours they helped the seamen into one of the low houses and departed with the Englishmen’s money. The ladies were never found.
Sometimes disputes at sea could be continued on land. The 1830s had been a bad time for the whaling industry with large numbers of ships sunk by the ice and others trapped over the winter. One of the latter was the Dundee vessel Advice, which lost most of her crew to scurvy. So in the summer of 1842 when Captain John Buttars of the whaling ship Fairy gave orders that they head deeper into the ice, it is not surprising the crew were worried. When they thought the ship was short of supplies they refused to go any further.
On a ship there are only two options when faced with the master’s orders: duty and mutiny. Anything the master orders the hands to do is their duty; anything they refuse is mutiny. Accusing the crew of mutiny, the master returned them to Dundee and dumped them on shore with no wages and no access to the possessions they had on board. The situation was bad enough for the local men, but for the seamen from Shetland, the majority of the crew, it was desperate. On the evening of 6th August, the thirty-two Shetlanders arrived at the police office and requested a bed for the night. Rising manfully to the occasion, the Dundee police gave each man access to a cell and a free penny roll. Next day Peter Twatt, one of the Shetlanders, went to court to argue for his pay. In such a seafaring town it is not surprising that the crowd cheered when the Justices, Alexander Balfour and David Milne, found in favour of Twatt. The victory was only the first as the Shetland men all gained their wages.
After mutiny, perhaps one of the worst crimes at sea was scuttling, sailing a vessel to sea and deliberately sinking her for the sake of insurance money. Dundee was not immune, with cases at either end of the century. In 1816, a man by the name of James Murray, alias James Menzies of Lochee, embezzled the cargo of Friends of Glasgow, which was then scuttled off Jutland for insurance.
The 1893 case was far more complicated, with a group of shipbrokers and ship masters alleged to have sunk a number of vessels. The vessels were De Cappo, Gretgelina, Tryst, Barrogill Castle and William and Martha of Wick. The death of any ship is sad, but a deliberate sinking purely for profit must be the worst ending for any vessel. The supposed facts of each sinking are stark.
On 24th August 1891, the tug Earl of Windsor was towing the lighter De Cappo from Aberdeen to the River Tyne. Commanded by Captain Andrew Baillie, De Cappo had a cargo of stones, and as they passed Girdleness, the weather turned foul. De Cappo began to leak and although the crew took to the pumps, the water level inside the lighter gained steadily. When Baillie told the master of Earl of Windsor the lighter was sinking, they decided to head for Montrose but as they changed course the bow was under water and the crew chose to abandon. De Cappo foundered within half an hour.
Gretgelina was a Grangemouth-registered vessel of thirty-five tons commanded by fifty-five-year-old Captain Joseph Severn, who worked for David Mustard Hobbs of 30 Dock Street, Dundee. On 22nd December 1891, sailing from Grangemouth to Invergordon, she sprung a leak off the Redhead, by Montrose. As the water within Gretgelina rose, the crew took to the boats, and within quarter of an hour Gretgelina had sunk. They were then fifteen miles off Bodden, south of Montrose, and rumours soon circulated that Severn had either forced out the bow plates of Gretgelina or bored holes in her to make her sink. Adding to the speculation was the fact that Gretgelina was insured for the fairly large sum of £925, spread over three different companies.
William and Martha was carrying a cargo of potatoes and paving stones from Castlehill in Caithness to West Hartlepool. She sunk in March 1892, just a short time after leaving harbour. Her owner was once again Hobbs, who insured the ship, together with her freight, cargo, captain’s effects, disbursements and outfit stores. He also insured a small fishing boat the ship was meant to have on board, but before the vessel left Castlehill Harbour, three small holes were bored in her hull, then carefully disguised. When they were at sea, the holes were re-opened and the vessel sank.
Not content with merely claiming insurance for William and Martha, Hobbs also presented a false bill of lading for £28, claiming there had been 120 bags of potatoes on board the vessel, rather than the twenty-five bags that were actually there. As if that was not enough, in June Hobbs also claimed for a gold watch worth £8, a £3 clock and a collection of other nautical equipment that in total amounted to £70. In July he also produced a false receipt and bill of lading for £75, for the fishing yawl that was said to have been on board. This claim was made to Thomas Crosby of Sunderland. Finally, he told Thomas Crosby that he had paid £385 for the vessel rather than the £195 he had parted with. In total, Hobbs claimed £1043 in insurance for this vessel and received £518.
There was also a lighter named Tryst that sank in October 1891. Again the scuttling was an insurance fraud. Tryst was underwritten by Lloyds and insured by the Maritime Insurance Company. The charge was that Hobbs insured the freight, cargo, salvage plant and commission on the sale of the cargo. As a lighter, Tryst was to be towed from Thurso in Caithness to Montrose, but Hobbs was accused of having the ship’s illustrious master, Joseph Severn, bore holes below her watermark so she sank some three miles off Clythness in Caithness. The tug Granite City of Aberdeen was towing her from Thurso to Montrose when she hit a heavy sea. The crew moved to test the pumps and were shocked to find the hold was partially filled with water. Leaping to the pumps, they tried to keep her afloat, but when it became obvious they could not, they signalled to the tug, which took all three of them off a few moments before she sank.
The final vessel was the schooner Barrogill Castle. Hobbs was again the owner and he was accused of ordering Severn to set fire to her in November 1892 so he could claim her insurance of £600 from the West of Scotland Fire Office. Barrogill Castle had been berthed in Inverkeithing as she was unfit to sail. Hobbs brought a shipwright from Dundee to inspect her to see if she could be taken to the Tay, but before that happened she was burned at her moorings.
In July 1893 Hobbs and Severn appeared before Sheriff Campbell Smith. Both pleaded not guilty although Hobbs was said to be very pale; their second appearance was before Lord Kyllachy at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh on 8th August. Both admitted to some of the charges. With 117 witnesses against them and an indictment nine pages long, things looked bleak for the defenders, but although Hobbs was clearly upset when he appeared at the bar, Severn appeared virtually unaffected. They pleaded guilty to scuttling two vessels, William and Martha and Gretgelina.
The defence argued for Hobbs’ previously good character, showing certificates of character given by previous employers and the Reverend Robert Duncan of Montrose. Hobbs also said his father was a sea captain and he had come under the influence of older men who later turned Queen’s Evidence. Severn’s council pleaded he was only an accessory to the crime, that at fifty-five he was quite an old man and there had never been any danger to life. Even so, the judge was not convinced. Lord Kyllachy gave Hobbs seven years’ penal servitude and Severn, as Hobbs’ instrument and a man of less intelligence and education, five years’ penal servitude.
But that was not the end of the case. A fortnight later twenty-nine-year-old machinery merchant William Stewart of Royal Park Terrace in Edinburgh was arrested for his involvement in the scuttling of Tryst. His arrest was followed in October by the arrest of a seaman named William Ellington of Aberdeen, who had been Tryst’s master. The police had been searching for him, but he had been at sea until lately. Hobbs had sold Tryst to Stewart. Buying the engine and boiler of a grounded vessel named SS Speedwell, Stewart loaded them onto Tryst, insured her for a whopping £2390 through the Maritime Insurance Company Limited and got Ellington to bore holes in her so she sank. When the case came to court in January 1894, Hobbs was again accused of being involved in the scuttling of Tryst and the trial was set for 13th February. He came as a witness and gave the following story:
In April 1892 he and Stewart discussed buying the engine and boiler of a wrecked vessel called Speedwell, then lying in the Thurso River. After buying the engine for £200, Hobbs suggested that Stewart have a hull built into which they could put it. Hobbs and Stewart met again at the Tay Bridge Station in Dundee and Stewart bought Tryst for £120. Hobbs had paid just £25 for the lighter. A tug was to tow the boiler to Leith and Hobbs insured it for about £900, on Stewart’s instructions. By that time Hobbs and Stewart had agreed not to build a hull but to lose the boiler and claim insurance. After loading Tryst with stones to ensure a fast sinking, Ellington bored holes in her bottom. Hobbs agreed he knew about the scuttling beforehand, but he claimed he was not involved and got no benefit. As in his previous trial he broke down in tears under cross-examination. In this case Stewart and Ellington were found not guilty. Hobbs was obviously out of his depth dealing with crime, but at least there were no deaths.
Nineteenth-century seamen often lived lives different from those men on land. They used a different vocabulary, experienced half the ports of the world and had unique customs and superstitions. It stands to reason that when seamen turned to crime, they could be just as unique. People steal anything, but sensible thieves prefer an item that is small, portable and easy to conceal. Probably the least likely object to be stolen would be eighty feet long, weigh upwards of fifty tons and have to be messily butchered and publicly processed to make it sellable, particularly if the initial theft was carried out in full view of the legal owners and about fifty other witnesses. Nevertheless, that is exactly what happened when George Thoms of Dundee saw an item he deeply desired.
It was 23rd August 1829, deep in the Davis Strait, that treacherous stretch of iced water that separates the western coast of Greenland from the eastern seaboard of Canada. The whaling vessel Traveller’s master, George Simpson from Peterhead, sighted a whale and was in hard pursuit, with a couple of other vessels, Princess of Wales from Aberdeen and a Dundee vessel called Thomas, close by, but everybody was there for the same end.
Traveller sent out her boats and the oarsmen pulled toward the whale, with the boatsteerer ensuring the boat was out of range of the flukes of the whale’s tail. Alexander Buchan stood up in the bows, aimed and threw the harpoon. The barbs stuck in deep and the crew released a mighty shout of triumph. ‘A Fall!’ they cried. ‘A Fall!’
Alex Buchan heaved his foreganger over the boat and took the line a turn around the billet head, securing the whale to the boat. He hoisted a jack, a distinctive flag that announced he had harpooned a whale and the animal was now Traveller’s lawful property. They were the ‘fast boat’, the boat held fast to a whale. All they had to do now was kill the animal and they were guaranteed oil money to supplement their wages.
As was expected, the whale fled, pulling the boat behind it. The whaleboat held a number of lines but one by one they were used up, so although the whale and boat were still attached, the whaling seamen were in danger of losing their capture. Providentially, a boat from Princess of Wales thrust in one of her own harpoons, known in the trade as a ‘friendly harpoon’ to help tire the whale. However, the whale was still full of fight and struggled, dragging lines and boats behind it, until the lines of Princess of Wales were also finished. The whale remained alive, panting on the surface of the sea. Exhausted but triumphant, Alexander Buchan’s crew crept closer, readying their lances for the killing blow, but before they could strike, a boat from Thomas raced past and Alexander Kilgour, a Dundee harpooner, thrust his harpoon deep into the whale.
Giving a jerk that unbalanced one of the men in Traveller’s boat, the whale raced away, hauling Thomas’s boat behind it. It is easy to imagine the scene, with the waves heaving around, possibly dappled with icebergs and speckled with the Arctic birds that knew a kill meant free food. Eventually, and inevitably, the whale tired and lay on the surface, sobbing its exhaustion as the whaleboats circled around like the predators they were. A seaman from Traveller thrust in another harpoon. The whale barely stirred and the killing lances came out, thrusting for the lungs, the heart and the brain. The hunters of Traveller, the Peterhead Greenlandmen, congratulated themselves on a job well done.
But the Dundee men had other ideas. Ignoring the imprecations and complaints from Traveller’s boat, Thomas’s men surged forward to claim the whale as their own. Tying lines to the whale’s tail, they prepared to tow it back to their ship but the Peterhead men objected. Harsh words were exchanged, and no doubt so too were threats, but there were more men from Thomas than from Traveller and weight of numbers told who’d be the victors. The whale was towed to Thomas. It was blatant theft, carried out in the full light of the north in view of a dozen men from Peterhead – or so Traveller’s crew claimed. The men from Dundee had another version of events.
Alexander Kilgour did not deny that Buchan had thrust the first harpoon. On the contrary, he mentioned that he saw Traveller’s harpoon sticking out of the whale. However, he also said that there was no line attaching the whale to the boat; it was a ‘loose whale’ and therefore fair game. The whale was free to whosoever could harpoon it next.
At the time, the men from Traveller could do nothing but protest. They were outnumbered and far from any law save that of tradition and that imposed by a master on his ship. Captain George Simpson of Traveller complained to Captain Thoms of Thomas, but to no avail. When Captain Simpson brought his complaint to the Dundee Union Whale Fishing Company who owned Thomas, the trustees of the company backed their captain’s actions. Eventually, the owners of Traveller took their case to law, and the High Court in Edinburgh had the unusual experience of deciding who owned a captured whale.
The case was heard in Edinburgh on 8th March 1830, with traffic rattling past and the formal, learned judges a world away from the savagery of the Arctic seas. By that time, of course, the whale no longer existed in body. The whole idea of whale hunting was to secure the blubber and the whale-bone or baleen. The blubber would be melted down to oil, which was used for lighting, heating and, increasingly, for softening textiles. The baleen was cut up and used for a hundred different household purposes, from hairbrushes to netting to stays for women’s fashion. So the case was now over the value of the whale, and both parties agreed that £600 was about the correct figure.
After the advocates listened to the evidence they realised the whole case hinged on one fact: Was the whale ‘fast’ or ‘loose’? If it was ‘fast’, or attached, to Alexander Kilgour’s boat by a line, then Traveller had the right to compensation, but if it was what the whaling men termed a ‘loose fish’, a whale with no lines, then the Dundee boats had every right to harpoon and claim it for themselves. The judge made the problem as clear as he could:
A ‘fast fish’ which is entangled by any means, such as the entanglement by the line round it or the like, to the boat of the first striker … any harpoon struck by another person into the fish while so entangled is said to be a ‘friendly harpoon’ and that the fish belongs to the first striker … on the other hand, the instant a fish … gets free … it becomes a ‘loose fish’ and belongs to the person who next succeeds in making it fast.
With this advice as a background, the legal experts listened to the evidence, with Greenlandmen from opposing vessels giving vastly different versions of the events, each of which proved conclusively that their vessel owned the whale, until Henry Cockburn, later to become Lord Cockburn, gave his exasperated opinion: ‘I would confess that in all my experience,’ he said, ‘I never saw any class of men on whose evidence I had less reliance than on the depositions of Sailors. At all times, under all circumstances, they are ever ready to depone that their own ship was indisputably in the right.’
Despite the tangled evidence, the court gave its judgement. It was decided the evidence from Traveller’s crew was more reliable than that of the crew of Thomas. In essence, the judge said Thomas had stolen the whale and he ordered the Dundee Union Whale Fishing Company to pay £600 to the owners of Traveller.
In this incident, only Dundee’s pride and the Whale Fishing Company’s bank balance were injured but there were other occasions when whaling voyages created more tragic results.
Every year whaling ships sailed to brave the ice and vicious storms of the Arctic. They were hunting for whales, seals and anything else they could bring back to make money for the ship owners and shareholders. Whaling was not an easy job. It was hard, dirty, often bloody and frequently dangerous. Many Dundee ships ended their careers crushed by the ice of the Davis Strait. Every voyage could end in injury or death for the Greenlandmen, so it was no wonder that the families crowded to the dockside when the ships sailed, and the farewells were always emotional as wives said goodbye to the men they would not see for many months.
By the same token, the homecoming was joyful as the Greenlandmen erupted into the bars of Dock Street and the Overgate. The men picked up their wages from the whaling company offices in Whale Lane or Seagate, and alone, in groups or with their wives, they relaxed after the tensions of the voyage. In most cases the whaling men were good husbands and fathers, for the museums and archives of Dundee contain many documents showing wages being paid to their wives, or photographs where husband and wife stand united. However, there was always an exception to the rule.
Sometimes an area of a city will attract a bad element, and for a period of time will suffer from a notoriety that is unfair to the majority of the inhabitants. The Whitechapel area of London was such an area during the murders of Jack the Ripper and the Grassmarket of Edinburgh when Burke and Hare went on their rampage in the 1820s. Dundee did not quite have such a district, but in the late 1880s and early 1890s the streets around Dudhope Crescent became known for casual acts of violence. Dudhope Crescent no longer exists; a dual carriageway has obliterated the entire area, but in the later years of the nineteenth century it was the scene of possibly the only Dundee murder by a whaling man.
Richard Leggat was a Greenlandman on board the famous Terra Nova, the last whaling ship built in Dundee, but when he returned from the Davis Strait in 1896 he was not a happy man. At thirty years old he was an experienced seaman; he knew the Arctic seas well, and was used to bringing back a fat pay packet after his exploits in the north. The wage system for whaling men was fairly complex: There was a low basic pay augmented by oil money, striking money, fast money and bone money. Oil money was based on the amount of blubber the ship brought home, paid in proportion to the rank of the seaman. Bone money depended on the weight of baleen, or whalebone, brought back, while striking money was paid to the harpooner who actually fixed his harpoon into the whale, and fast money to men who were in the boat, or boats, that got ‘fast’ to a whale. In a good year, the whaling man could at least double his basic wage; in a poor year he would get only the basic, which was perhaps the equivalent of a minimum wage – a poor return for months of stress and effort.
The season of 1896 was not good for Terra Nova or Richard Leggat. The ship captured around 5000 seals but only one whale, so the wages were as low as the spirits of the men. Not that Leggat was a stranger to hard times; in 1888, while he was sailing on Nova Zembla, he took ill with what the doctors called ‘inflammation of the lungs and dropsy’ and had to leave the ship at Holsteinborg in Greenland. Although a Danish ship brought him back to Scotland, his wages would be drastically cut, for a seaman’s wages stopped the moment he left his ship. Perhaps that was one reason for the constant arguing that marked Leggat’s marriage.
At that period many Dundee whaling ships worked out of St John’s in Newfoundland, with the hands spending time and money in the local taverns. However, amongst a breed of men renowned for their heavy drinking, Leggat was noted for his quiet sobriety. In appearance he was thin-featured, almost gaunt, with a straight, prominent nose and a red, drooping moustache. As a line manager he had a position of some responsibility, rowing out in the small whaleboat from which the whale was harpooned and ensuring the line connecting the harpoon to the boat did not kink around the leg or head of any of the seamen. Their lives depended on his skill and concentration.
In her mid-twenties, Elizabeth had been married to Leggat for three years. She worked as a weaver in Mid Wynd Works at the Hawkhill, and that autumn moved from her home at Lawrence Street to a two-roomed attic in a John Street tenement, four floors above the flickering gas of a streetlamp. There was also a fourteen-month-old daughter to care for. John Street was a short street between Dudhope Crescent and Dudhope Crescent Road. Because Leggat’s wages were poor that season, Elizabeth had to work longer hours at the mill to make ends meet. ‘What will become of us? There’s only my wages to keep my man and myself and the bairn,’ she said once, and that single remark reveals so much about the constant work of ordinary people in Victorian Dundee. Neither Richard nor Elizabeth were great conversationalists, so save for the occasional brief greeting, their neighbours did not know much about them, but they did hear their frequent arguments and knew that all was not well in the Leggat household.
It is obvious that such a marriage was subject to stress: A man away for months at a time and a family dependent on wages that could fluctuate wildly from season to season. There was one other factor that was probably hidden from the outside world: Richard Leggat was racked with jealousy.
There is no knowing how Elizabeth Leggat acted when her husband was at sea, but when he was home she seemed hardly to have a life. Leggat controlled everything she did, and beat her if she did not obey. On one occasion she told her sister, Jessie Crichton, that Leggat had beaten her so badly she could barely walk. At times he had threatened to murder her, but nobody believed he would. The neighbours knew the marriage was not perfect – the internal walls of a Dundee tenement were too thin for secrecy – but there were many quarrelling couples in the city and few thought twice about it. Marriage, like life, was never easy in an industrial city and people preferred to close their ears, mind their own business and hope other people minded theirs.
Late on the morning of 7th December the couple fell out, and their raised voices echoed around the close. Mrs Kendall, in the house immediately below, had heard such things before, but at one in the afternoon there was something that momentarily startled her. It was a sound, she thought, ‘like the breaking of a bed’, but save for a brief, semi-humorous comment to a friend, ‘Is that somebody being killed?’, she pushed the incident to the back of her mind.
When Mrs Kendall heard somebody running down the common staircase she peeped outside her door and saw Leggat hurrying past. On a lower floor, Mrs Smith greeted Leggat with a cheery ‘Hello,’ but met with no response as he rushed outside into the dark winter street. Presumably both women gave a metaphorical shrug of their shoulders and returned to their homes. The police arrived a couple of hours later.
Until then only Richard Leggat knew what had happened. During the long months he was at sea, he was intensely aware that his young, attractive wife was alone. Leggat was a quiet man who did not join in the revelries of his comrades, and perhaps this solitariness enhanced his jealousy until it became an obsession. By the time he returned from the Arctic he was convinced that Elizabeth had been cheating on him, and he gave her dog’s abuse. Combined with the lack of money, Leggat’s suspicions must have unhinged his mind. Up in the ice, the Greenlandmen would hunt anything, from birds to polar bears to whales, so perhaps that is why Leggat owned a large, central fire revolver. He produced it as Elizabeth stood in front of him, taking a pinch of snuff. He shot five times, hitting her twice, with one shot going into her thigh and another straight through her heart.
There does not seem to have been any build-up to the murder, no more arguments than usual, but the neighbours beneath did hear loud noises. Afterwards Leggat placed the revolver on the dresser in the kitchen and left the house. His daughter lay in her bed, half naked and apparently undisturbed by the violence and the death of her mother.
Running down the stairs, Leggat walked straight to the harbour, climbed onto the West Protection Wall and jumped into the Tidal Basin in an attempt to commit suicide, but his instincts for life were stronger than either guilt or grief and he remained afloat. Some time before three in the afternoon he swam back ashore, walked to the Central Police Station in Bell Street and gave himself up. At first the police did not believe him. It was not common for a soaking wet man to arrive and confess to a murder, but they searched him, found a handful of revolver cartridges, and decided to act.
The arrival of Deputy Chief Constable Carmichael and Inspector Davidson with a gaggle of uniformed police alerted half the neighbourhood that something was amiss. People emerged from their homes and bustled to John Street, some hoping for scandal, others perhaps genuinely shocked. Searching the house, the police found the corpse of Elizabeth Leggat and her still unaware daughter. The police doctor, Charles Templeman, announced that Mrs Leggat was dead and her body was quickly taken to the Constitution Road Mortuary.
Leggat was as quiet and unassuming in custody as he had been on board a ship, but when he appeared at the Police Court he denied murder, claiming he remembered nothing until he came to his senses in the Tay. As he waited for his trial, his daughter was taken to the Children’s Shelter in Constitution Road. Possibly because of his plea of temporary insanity, Leggat was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude.
Murder, however, was uncommon among Dundee seamen. Assault, drunkenness and theft were much more likely. In one case in February 1824 three sailors arrived at an Overgate lodging house. They paid for a night’s board but when the owner slipped out for a few moments, one of the seamen began to search through all the drawers. The owner returned before anything was stolen but the man ran too quickly to be caught. The police found him later and dragged him to the police office, where he was strip-searched. Only then did they realise that he was actually a woman. When dealing with Dundee mariners, anything was possible!